Bedroom Eyes (2 page)

Ironic as it was, Hinson’s steady girlfriend, a redheaded court reporter with cleavage that made her a favorite of local judges, had hired the very recently established Olano Investigations to check just why her guy wasn’t spending as much time with her as she liked.

Performing his duty to that client, he positioned the camera and began to focus the lens.

The woman on the balcony with Hinson didn’t seem his usual fare. Tony had thought that when he’d first studied her in the elevator at the Oil Building, almost believing the girlfriend had her facts confused. No one that pristine should be dating David Hinson, king of the heavy fist.

Even at fifty minutes past midnight, she looked as fresh and perfectly put together as if she’d showered only an hour earlier.

But then, maybe she had, tête-à-tête with Hinson. The other guests had left by cab thirty minutes ago. This woman had been seen now more than a dozen times with Hinson, according to Tony’s sniffling client. And Hinson wasn’t the kind of guy to keep company merely for stimulating conversation. Any woman hanging around with Hinson had to be putting out. Tony frowned and put his finger on the shutter.

She didn’t look the type. Not in that prissy skirt. With her blouse buttoned all the way to the neck. No way to dress for summertime in New Orleans. New in town, or just plain dumb?

Hinson reached for her hand and Tony snapped his first shot. Dumb or not, she was definitely beautiful, he confirmed as he studied her through his lens. The blouse might be fastened as tight as Fort Knox, but the way it clung to her body, rising above a waist he could easily close within his hands, outlining breasts whose fullness was anything but prissy, stirred his interest, exactly the way she’d managed to do earlier when she’d stepped into the Oil Building elevator.

She’d looked just as frosty as she did at this moment, but during that brief contact there’d been moments when her armor had slipped. He’d noticed, all right; but then, he got paid to pay attention.

And he wouldn’t have minded paying more attention to the curve of her cheeks. Tony replayed the feel of her under his hand when she’d stumbled into him. Despite her protest, he’d caught a flicker of interest, a hint of passion under that touch-me-not exterior.

Tony shifted in his seat. “You’ve been alone way too long,” he said to himself. To be reacting to a woman who no doubt was as approachable as a mummy in a business suit indicated a serious void in his life.

He needed a woman, a woman as eager to embrace life as he’d once been. But his current situation didn’t give him much taste for looking for love.

Sticking to business, Tony took a few more shots. In the few months he’d been running Olano Investigations as a front for his undercover activities, he’d yet to meet one client who didn’t claim to want to know the truth.

The adultery business was fairly profitable in Louisiana, where a spouse caught in adultery could be denied alimony. That law accounted for the two wealthy businessmen who’d generously paid him to discover what their wives did to occupy themselves between charity luncheons and visits to beauty salons.

So he gave them what they paid for, but usually he had a feeling they already knew in their guts the truth his pictures would reflect. And it never ceased to amaze him that once faced with that reality, most of them shunted straight into denial.

All in all, not a savory business, and one he’d be glad to be free of.

Hinson, still holding the woman’s hand, led her to the edge of the balcony, aiding Tony’s view by delivering her into the pool of light cast by a street lamp.

For a woman enjoying a midnight tryst, she looked damn nervous. She smiled, but her eyes remained wary. She laughed softly, but Tony couldn’t hear any humor in the sound. He frowned and his frown grew as Hinson pulled her to him, a little roughly for Tony’s taste.

Hinson tipped her head back, covered her mouth with his. That ought to rumple her just-pressed look, quiet the phony laughter. For a moment there, he’d felt a link, an instant of empathy and concern, a feeling he’d do well to suppress.

With a shake of his head, Tony lowered his camera and lifted his microphone. This was no time to discover a sentimental streak. He ran a thumb over the cool metal of the supersensitive listening device cradled in his hand. The equipment could pick up moans of passion at well over the distance he’d parked from Hinson’s balcony. He held it out his window and hit the record button.

Not the noisy type, Tony decided, watching the woman pull free of the grope. Probably not a screamer. Though you never could tell with those prim and proper females. Her hair, captured in some sort of schoolteacher bun on the back of her head, tumbled free and Tony debated the camera over the microphone. But his client wanted audio. Pictures, she’d said, sniffing and blotting her eyes, wouldn’t be enough to convince her.

Even in the darkness, across the distance that separated them, Tony could sense the silky weight of her hair as it slipped over her shoulders. Something about the way it flowed free, shifting all at once, floating down over her shoulders and softening her serious face, told Tony she wore it up because she was afraid of the way the change would affect her image.

He didn’t know why he knew that, but he did.

Hinson took her face in his hands, then plunged his fingers into her hair. “Bastard,” Tony whispered. A man like Hinson didn’t deserve a woman that pure.

Then Tony laughed.

At himself, for thinking such thoughts. What did he know about this chick? His client had hired him for the same reason most of his clients did—to find out whether her man was cheating on her.

Yep. That was the way of the private eye business. Another few weeks hiding in the dark and soon there’d be no way he’d trust a woman. Any woman.

Tony ran one hand through his hair, thinking of his own marriage. Neither one of them had been unfaithful, but he and Kathy hadn’t lasted. They’d simply married before either one knew what the hell they wanted out of life.

They’d played house during their senior year in college and for three years after. When he wanted to enroll in the Police Academy, she suggested he owed it to his parents to join the family business. His parents stood behind his decision completely, and Kathy’s desire for the path of safety and security rankled Tony.

So he’d thrown himself into being a policeman. His wife had pursued her MBA. Then they’d divorced, as quietly and uneventfully as they’d begun.

At least they hadn’t had children.

If any man had been meant to be a cop, it was Tony Olano. Kathy hadn’t understood that, but then, neither had the stuffed shirts in the department who wanted him to follow procedure and quit taking so many risks, even though his style, as his superiors called it, had earned him three commendations in as many years. But no guts, no glory, Tony had reasoned.

This attitude got him branded a troublemaker, a reputation that worked against him when he’d been caught accepting an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills from a strip joint operator.

No one stood beside him. No one stopped to question his guilt or innocence, reactions that played straight into the hands of the forces that had engineered the frame-up.

Hinson now had his arm around the woman, speaking to her with an earnest look that made Tony gag. He whistled through his teeth, imagining what sweet nothings he’d pick up on the playback of the recorder. Better to think about that than the holding pattern of his own life.

Still with an arm around her shoulders, Hinson guided the woman back inside. Tony captured the shot and put away the microphone.

He’d done the job his client had asked him to do. Time to stop for a beer, go home and try to sleep.

As he stowed his equipment and pulled the car away from the curb, the image of the woman’s hair spilling over her shoulders echoed in his mind. He might be finished with the assignment, but he didn’t feel ready to let go.

He told himself, as he stopped by Parasols in the Irish Channel, that his interest in Hinson’s latest was purely professional. When a sleaze-ball like David Hinson spent time with a woman who looked like a schoolmarm, something had to be up.

Tony didn’t spot anyone he knew in the bar, so he sat alone, sipping his Budweiser, idly peeling the label free with one thumb and wondering if Hinson too had detected a hint of fire in the woman’s deep blue eyes, a hint that promised some lucky man more pleasure than he’d ever known.

Tony shook his head, wondering at his flight of fancy. The woman would no doubt turn out to be your typical suspect, a lawyer tired of the daily grind who’d decided it was easier to chase after Hinson’s money and set up housekeeping in his fancy place in the Garden District. Well, if this prim one was after marriage with a guy like Hinson, she’d soon discover she’d be trading her soul for any diamond that man slipped on her finger.

He smoothed the label onto the surface of the bar. Rather than the red, white, and blue of the label, he saw only the deep blue of the woman’s eyes.

Fingering one of the quarters lying on the bar with the rest of his change, Tony knew he was once again about to break the rules. He had no business dabbling with one of Hinson’s women. Any day now, the undercover operation could gel and Tony would find himself on the inside of Hinson’s unsavory operations.

Still rolling the quarter in his hand, Tony made a deal with himself. Heads, he’d find out for himself what lay beneath her silky surface; tails, he’d leave her alone.

He spun the coin in the air and slapped it down on the beer label.

George Washington winked at him.

Tony grinned and pushed away the beer he’d barely touched.

Time to go home and get ready for tomorrow.

Chapter 2

The crowd of shoppers in Pottery DeLite had thinned during the time Penelope had been mulling over the choice of placemats and napkins offered by the gourmet cookware store. In her left hand she held the dark blue jacquard weave, in her right a more festive plaid.

Dinner once a week with David Hinson for the past six weeks had been at his invitation each time; that she herself prepare a meal this Saturday had been her suggestion, an idea sparked by the dinner he’d hosted at his home earlier that week. David was an articulate, bright attorney who spoke her language, and the only person she’d seen socially since moving to New Orleans earlier that year.

Besides, Penelope loved to cook. If her mother hadn’t railroaded her into law school, she might at this very moment be presiding over the kitchen of a top restaurant.

She fingered the jacquard weave and smiled as she thought of the irascible chef who’d sneaked lessons to her behind her mother’s back. Henry—or Henri, as he styled himself—ruled the kitchen of the restaurant where Penelope’s mother Margery worked as a waitress, then later as a hostess when her legs swelled and the arthritis in her hands betrayed her.

Over my dead body, her mother had exclaimed, when Penelope had asked to study with Henri. So obedient straight-A student Penelope had sneaked her lessons throughout her high school years.

Yet she’d gone to college, then law school, and on to NYU for a master’s in taxation, exactly as her mother had planned. Now her mother was dead and Penelope should have been free.

But freedom, she had been discovering, was an elusive state. With her mother no longer there to shriek in horror, Penelope could have walked out on her life as a lawyer, but a funny thing had happened along the way.

She’d become very good at what she did.

At least she’d had the courage to trade in her childhood home of Chicago for New Orleans. And she’d resurrected her long-ago-envisioned cookbook idea, a project she kept secret from her legal colleagues. No doubt she’d have to publish it under another name.

As she stared at the rich blue cloth, the design wavered and she saw instead the image of an elegant room filled with the movers and shakers of the culinary world. After entering the ballroom, she made her way slowly to the tables reserved for nominees, graciously acknowledging the smiles and waves of well-wishers and hoping against hope she’d finish the night a winner.

When the time came for the master of ceremonies to announce the Best New Chef of the Year, she waited, one hand clasped against the plunging neckline of her slinky black evening gown. And then she heard the magic words—her name!

She accepted the platinum knife and fork statuette, smiling at the adoring crowd. She thanked Henri; she even thanked her mother. Then she paused. Surely there was someone else to name, someone who’d helped her achieve the pinnacle of her dreams?

Well, hush puppies and hash browns, as long as her imagination was running free, she might as well finish the picture to her complete satisfaction.

She swept her hand to her side. She pictured the sexy stranger from the elevator almost a week ago.

His image danced in her mind. Mysterious, strong, and, strangely enough, also gentle. She inclined her head toward the invisible microphone. The curtains behind her on the stage parted. “For making me what I am today, I’d like to thank. . .”

He moved toward her, as light on his feet as any meringue she’d ever concocted. This time he looked only at her, consuming her with the adoration and admiration shining in his dark eyes.

“. . . the man with the bedroom eyes.”

She drew him toward her and the audience went wild. Together, a beautiful and glamorous couple, they swept from the stage. Their limo awaited.

“Looks like you dropped this.”

Penelope jerked back to reality. Bunnies and bumpkins! She’d done it again, totally lost touch with her surroundings.

She blinked and cleared the heady dreams from her mind. She glanced at the jacquard weave placemat extended toward her, allowing her gaze to travel up a masculine forearm, covered with a generous dusting of black hair. As she registered the familiar voice, the pulse in her throat raced.

Without continuing her visual journey, Penelope tried to snatch the placemat from the man’s hands.

It didn’t budge.

“Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”