Bourbon Street Blues (3 page)

“Yes, ma’am,” Holly said, and pulled the colander full of plump fresh peas closer to her. “I met Parker James at the hotel today.”

“Tommy told me.” Shana’s tone was noncommittal, and Holly couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“He did?”

Shana nodded. “Said the two of you were looking mighty cozy.”

“Oh.” Holly swallowed hard. Funny, but she felt like a teenager being interrogated by her mother. Not so strange, she supposed, since Shana was as close to a real mother as Holly had ever known. “Well.”

“He wasn’t happy about it.”

Holly laughed shortly. “
He’s
the one who told me to go over and say hello.”

“Yes,” Shana said quietly. “But he changed his mind right quick once he realized who the man was.”

“So he wanted me to say hello, he just didn’t want me to enjoy myself.”

“He’s a man, honey, they don’t often make much sense.”

“But he really doesn’t have anything to worry
about. Honest.” Why would it bother Tommy that she’d had a drink with Parker? And if he had been so all-out concerned, why hadn’t he said something to
her?

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Holly said, filling the strained silence quickly. “We just talked for a while, that’s all.”

“Is that right?”

Cocking her head to one side, she looked at the older woman. “Aren’t you the one who’s been telling me to get out? To mingle? To start dating again?”

“Mingle, yes. Date, yes. But, honey, Parker James is the deep end of the pool. You sure you’re ready to jump in?”

“I’m not in
anybody’s
pool just yet.”

“Not how Tommy tells it.”

Apparently, Tommy had had plenty to say. Holly took a breath and blew it out in a rush. “You know, he’s even more handsome in person than he is in the papers.”

“Is he now?” She turned on the faucet and ran a stream of hot water into the sink.

“He seems…lonely, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

Holly frowned, popped open a pea pod and
scooped the tiny round peas into a blue ceramic bowl. “He says his wife is trying to ruin his business.”

“That right?” Shana squirted dishwashing liquid into the water and bubbles erupted.

“He likes my singing.”

Shana laughed at that. “Well, why wouldn’t he, honey?”

Holly grinned. “You’re prejudiced. You love me.”

“That I do,” Shana said, turning around to lean back against the counter. Folding her arms across her chest, she crossed her feet at the ankles, tipped her head to one side and said, “You seem awful taken with this man.”

“I didn’t say that,” Holly hedged, though heaven knew she had been thinking about him nonstop since leaving the hotel that afternoon. “Besides, I just met him.”

Shana shook her head. “Doesn’t take long sometimes. One look at my Tommy and I knew down to the bone that he was the one for me.”

“This wasn’t like that,” Holly said firmly. Taken with Parker? What would be the point? No, this was more like flipping through a magazine, spotting a handsome celebrity and imagining yourself as part of his life.

Parker James was just as far removed from her
world as any of those celebrities were. The James family was
royalty
in New Orleans. And Holly Carlyle was just another nobody.

She didn’t even know who her parents had been. She was only two when she’d entered the foster system, and when she’d gotten older, she had tried to learn something about her parents and had come up against a brick wall. All she’d learned was that someone had left her sitting on the steps of a police station and then just walked away.

Holly had spent the next fourteen years bouncing around from one foster-care facility to another. Once, she’d even had a foster family. When she was six, for nearly a year, she’d been part of a family. She’d belonged. But then the couple and their
real
children had moved to Florida and Holly had once again been left behind.

After that, she’d learned not to get her hopes up. By seven, she had come to count only on herself. Most of the people in the system meant well, but they had too many kids to worry about. Too many demands and too little time. Holly had run off as soon as she was old enough to risk being on her own.

Wryly, she grabbed another pea pod and broke it open. No, she wasn’t anything like the kind of crowd Parker James moved in. But then, he hadn’t
found happiness, had he? A more lonely, miserable-looking man she’d never run across.

“I didn’t say I was interested in him,” she finally murmured.

“You didn’t have to, honey,” Shana said. “It’s written clear across your face for anyone to see.”

“Great.” She ducked her head, pulled another pod out of the colander and concentrated on shucking the peas.

She heard rather than saw Shana cross the kitchen. She pulled out the chair beside Holly and plopped down onto it, then took one of Holly’s hands in hers and gave it a pat. “Honey, you know I love you like you were one of my own.”

“I know,” Holly said, smiling into Shana’s worried eyes.

Tommy and his wife and kids were the only real family Holly had ever known. At one of her first professional gigs, she’d been hired to sing at a college graduation party. The piano player had been Tommy Hayes. They’d worked together seamlessly, as if they’d been destined to perform together. That day was the luckiest of her life. Scared and alone at sixteen, she’d tried to pretend that she had everything under control. But Tommy hadn’t been fooled. When the gig was over, he’d taken her home for a good meal.

She’d never really left.

She had her own place now, a second-story apartment in the Garden District. But this old house off Fontainebleau Drive would always be
home
to her. Her heart was here. With her family.

Shana’s dark eyes met and held Holly’s. “I’m just going to ask you to be careful around that man.”

“Shana, I’m not—”

“Hush.” Her full lips thinned into a stern line and Holly was treated to the same kind of warning glare Shana gave her fifteen-year-old daughter Kendra when she stayed out too late. “You don’t want to go getting mixed up with a man in the middle of a divorce, honey. There’s no happiness there for you.”

Heat rushed through Holly and she was willing to bet she was blushing like a ten-year-old. “Nobody said anything about getting mixed up with him.”

“Honey, it’s in your eyes. You’re smitten with him.”

Holly laughed and squeezed Shana’s hand. “
Smitten?
God, I didn’t think anyone used that word anymore.”

“I do.” Shana wasn’t smiling. “That man’s got problems of his own and you don’t need to get yourself into the middle of ’em.”

“I know. I only said he was handsome.”

“Uh-huh. I
know
that’s all you said. But it’s not all you’re thinking.” The front door slammed and Shana looked up and shouted, “T.J.? That you?”

Reprieve, Holly thought, grateful for the interruption.

“It’s me, Mama.” A twenty-year-old female version of her father, Tommie Hayes Junior—T.J.—popped her head around the corner of the kitchen door and grinned. Her shoulder-length hair, woven into dozens of tiny, bead-bedecked braids, swung out in a thick curtain. “Hey, Holly!” Then she asked her mother, “Supper almost ready?”

“Fifteen minutes. Go up and tell your sisters.”

“I will. Daddy home?”

“No, but he should be anytime.” Standing, Shana laid one hand on Holly’s shoulder. “Go get cleaned up,” she said to her eldest daughter.

When they were alone again, Shana looked down at Holly. “You mind what I said.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Holly whispered, then shifted her concentration back to her work. One by one, she went through the pods, scooping peas out, filling the ceramic bowl. And as she worked, her mind drifted back to everything Shana had said.

There was no reason for Shana to worry, Holly realized. Nothing would ever happen between her
and Parker James. But once in a while, it was nice to daydream.

Nothing wrong with that, was there?

B
Y THE NEXT AFTERNOON
,
Holly had been giving herself a stern talking-to for nearly twenty-four hours. So far, it hadn’t helped.

She stepped off the streetcar at Canal and then headed down Bourbon Street for the long walk to the Hotel Marchand. It probably would have been faster to take a cab, but she enjoyed the St. Charles electric streetcars. They cruised every day through the Garden District and the French Quarter, taking visitors to the city on lovely tours of antebellum mansions and delivering the locals to work in the business districts.

The sun was pleasantly warm on her back. Soon enough, the summer would be here with a heat and humidity unlike anywhere else. But for now, the weather was perfect. And the sounds of her own heels clicking against the pavement kept her company while her brain raced.

Despite knowing better, despite the talking-to Shana had given her the night before—despite
everything—
she just couldn’t seem to get him out of her mind.

It wasn’t only that he was about the best-looking man she’d ever seen. Handsome men were easy enough to find. No, it was more the painful shadows she’d noted in his eyes that called to her.

“The problem is,” she murmured, ducking between two people taking pictures of themselves in front of a voodoo store, “you know too much about him.”

Well, she knew why his marriage had failed, anyway. She’d often wondered over the years if she’d done the right thing in keeping quiet. Maybe she should have gone to Parker before the ceremony and told him about what she’d seen. But how in heaven did you tell something like that to a perfect stranger?

“No, no,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “It wasn’t your business then and it’s not your business
now
.”

A kid on a skateboard whizzed past her and Holly automatically tightened her grip on the straps of her shoulder bag. During Mardi Gras season, there were more purse snatchers out than usual, hoping to score big on tourists.

But even that stray thought couldn’t distract her
for long from thoughts of Parker. A curl of something warm and delicious tightened in the pit of her stomach and she enjoyed the feeling. It had been a long time since
any
man had had such an effect.

Lengthening her stride, she smiled to herself and hurried just a bit. If she was late for rehearsal, Tommy would never let her hear the end of it. And besides, she thought slyly, maybe…just maybe…Parker would turn up again.

By the time she reached the hotel, Holly felt like a kid counting down to Christmas. Silly and she knew it. She’d only seen Parker once at the hotel and she had no reason to believe she’d be running into him again anytime soon, but still…

“Afternoon, Miss Holly.”

“Hi, Sam.” She nodded to the Hotel Marchand’s bell captain, who stood talking to one of the younger bellmen. At six foot four, Sam Malloy had silver hair, pale blue eyes and broad shoulders, and stood like a soldier at attention in his red-and-gold uniform. The doorman was busy helping a woman step out of an elegant black town car, so Sam hurried over to Holly.

“Let me get that for you.” He reached out to open the front door for Holly and she gave him another smile as she stepped into the cool, dimly lit interior.
The lobby of the Hotel Marchand was immediately welcoming, despite its air of Old World elegance.

As she headed toward the bar, Holly glanced briefly at the elegant, curved staircase leading to the second floor. Just beyond it, a set of French doors led onto a flower-bedecked courtyard that was also accessible from both the restaurant and the bar.

“You’re running a little late, aren’t you?”

Holly shot a guilty look at the man standing behind the concierge’s desk. Luc Carter was grinning at her. Tall, with sandy-blond hair, pale blue eyes and a warm smile, Luc was the perfect hotel concierge, as charming as he was handsome.

Over the past few months Holly had seen him talk crabby guests into smiling and calm a flustered elderly woman who was sure someone had stolen a diamond pendant from her room. It turned out, of course, that the woman had dropped her prized possession behind the dresser…but Luc had managed to forestall her when she’d come sweeping into the lobby demanding a police presence up to and including the FBI.

“I am late, aren’t I?” she said with a wince, pausing briefly at the desk. “I guess Tommy’s already here?”

Luc grinned and winked. “Started warming up about twenty minutes ago.”

Holly sighed. “He’s never going to let me hear the end of it. The man is
always
on time. It’s like a religion or something to him.”

“Funny,” Luc said, straightening a stack of maps of New Orleans as he spoke, “he said the same thing about you and being late.”

“Now, who’re you going to believe,” she asked, smiling. “Me? Or Tommy?”

“I always take the word of a beautiful woman,” Luc said gallantly.

“You’re smooth, I give you that,” Holly answered, laughing. She tapped her fingers on the desk, tipped her head to one side and studied him for a moment. “You okay? You seem a little…down.”

“Me?” Luc’s grin grew wider, as if he were trying to convince her that he was just fine. “No, I’m good.”

“Okay,” Holly said, “if you say so.”

“Honest.” He held up one hand in a three-fingered salute, as if swearing to it.

She nodded, said, “See you later,” and headed off to start the afternoon’s work.

L
UC SOBERED
as he watched Holly walk away. He’d have to be more careful. Though he and Holly had become friends over the past few months, he’d begun pulling back. Trying to protect himself. Holly was
too intuitive. Too adept at reading people. And he couldn’t afford to have her read him.

He and Holly had a lot in common. They’d both overcome unfavorable odds to make something of themselves. Of course, Holly’s situation had been worse. At least he’d had his mother’s love and support.

What would his life have been like if his father had stayed around instead of leaving when Luc was just a little boy? Maybe Pierre would have come back here to New Orleans and claimed what was rightfully his—a part of his family’s fortune.

Luc glanced wistfully around the elegant lobby, but found he could no longer feel the resentment and burning desire for revenge that had gotten him into this mess. After working with the Marchands—his father’s sister Anne, and his four cousins—he was finding it hard to believe they were the villains he’d expected them to be. And that made what he had to do so much harder.

“Good afternoon,” he said, handing a guest his messages from the cubbyhole of an antique armoire behind him. When the man walked away again, Luc was left to his own thoughts once more.

And he wasn’t enjoying them.

It had all seemed so simple a few months ago, when Richard and Daniel Corbin approached him
about their scheme to force Anne Marchand to sell the hotel. Luc had leaped at the chance to get back at his father’s family for kicking Pierre out when he was eighteen. Though it shamed him some to admit it to himself, he’d believed that Anne Marchand had deliberately cut her brother, Pierre, out of her life, even though his father had told him otherwise—that Anne had in fact supported Pierre. It was their mother, Celeste Robichaux, who had destroyed her son’s sense of self, his confidence, practically forcing him into a life of drifting and gambling.

Even as Luc thought it through, a voice in the back of his mind argued that Pierre had made his own choices. He’d disappeared from Luc’s life when he could have stayed. He could have
tried
to make a good life for his wife and son.

Damn it, he shouldn’t be having these doubts or regret becoming involved with Richard and Dan, two less-than-sterling hoteliers he’d worked for in Thailand. He was supposed to be enjoying the thrill of getting even with his father’s family, but the only villain in the family was his grandmother, and she had nothing to do with the hotel.

It had been built with the hard work and dreams of Anne and her late husband, Remy.

But Luc was trapped now. Which put him squarely behind the eight ball. He was trapped. He’d made a bargain with the devil and didn’t have a clue how to get out of it—or even if he should try.

If he confessed to his aunt Anne that he’d been behind recent mishaps at the hotel, everything from a damaged generator to botched deliveries—mishaps that threatened to affect bookings and place the hotel in grave financial danger—she’d fire him and maybe even have him arrested. And if he backed out of his deal with Daniel and Richard, he knew they would do even worse.

The telephone on his desk rang and jolted him out of his thoughts. He was grateful for the reprieve, however brief it might turn out to be. Snatching up the receiver, he schooled his voice and said, “Concierge, how may I assist you?”

I
SHOULDN’T HAVE
come back, Parker told himself. He had plenty of things he should be doing instead.

But that afternoon, as he walked into the bar and took a seat at the table he’d claimed the day before, Parker couldn’t think of anywhere he’d rather be. Holly’s voice reached out to him, sliding inside him, easing away the rough edges, pushing everything else from his mind.

She swayed on stage, her long, auburn hair swinging in a soft arc behind her head. Her voice caressed each note, heartbreaking in its clarity, its ability to sneak into a man and leave him defenseless. Her eyes shone beneath the single spotlight and she seemed to be staring directly at him.

He felt the connection between them across the empty room and a solid punch of desire crashed into him. His body tightened, his mind went blank. All he could see, all he could hear and feel, was the woman on that stage. Her body moved with the rhythm of the song and her voice called to him.

His heartbeat thundering in his chest, Parker fought to find the control that had long been his mainstay. He wasn’t a man to jump into anything without careful thought. Without looking at every option from every possible direction. But now…all he wanted was to stalk across the room, sweep her into his arms and carry her off. He wanted…

The song ended, the last note quavering in the stillness as if it had a life of its own. He watched her as she turned to the pianist and whispered something that Parker had no hope of overhearing. The older man frowned slightly, shot a quick look at Parker, then glanced again at Holly. Whatever he said to her wasn’t welcome, because she stiffened slightly. But
an instant later she was kissing the man’s cheek, then stepping off the stage to walk toward Parker.

He stood as she approached and hoped to hell the light in the room was dim enough that she couldn’t see for herself just what kind of effect she had on him.

“You came back,” she said unnecessarily.

“Couldn’t stay away,” he said, though he hadn’t planned to admit that.

“I’m glad.”

He looked past her to the stage. “I don’t think your friend’s real happy about it.”

Holly sighed, glanced back over her shoulder briefly, then turned to Parker again. “He’s…worried.”

“About me?”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “About
me.
Tommy thinks I should keep my distance from you.”

That stung. “And what do you think?”

“I’m standing right here, aren’t I?”

“So you are,” Parker said, avoiding looking at her friend again. “You were great, by the way.”

“Thank you, but singing those songs, it’s easy to be great.”

Parker shook his head. “No, it’s not. Jazz needs heart. And your voice is filled with it.”

Her eyes widened and a small smile curved her mouth. “I think that may be the nicest compliment
I’ve ever been given.” She waved a hand at the table beside them. “Would you like to sit? Have a drink?”

“Actually…” Parker chanced a quick look at the man still sitting at the piano. If looks could kill, he figured his body would already be cold by now. “I would. But not here.”

She nodded, clearly understanding. “Okay, where’d you have in mind?”

“Willing to take a walk with me?”

Tipping her head to one side, she considered him for a couple of heartbeats. “I guess you look trustworthy enough.”

“Thanks—even though you did have to think about it for a minute.”

“A girl can’t be too careful.”

“What happened to the ‘follow your instincts’ approach to life?”

“That still holds. I’m going on the walk, my instincts are only insisting that I step a little cautiously.”

His smile slipped away. “You’ll be safe with me,” he said, then nodded in the direction of Holly’s accompanist. “Trust me, I don’t want to do anything that would make your friend over there come after me.”

“Good plan,” she acknowledged. “You should see what he puts his daughters’ potential boyfriends through.”

Parker held out one hand toward her, and when she took it, he felt a slow burn start within him. Maybe it was a good thing for both of them that she had such a fierce guardian angel.

Outside the hotel, she pulled him to a stop. “So where are we headed?”

“I want to show you something,” he said, and realized that this was what he’d had in mind all along. He wanted to show her his café. Wanted to talk her into singing for him at his place.

Now that the notion was front and center in his brain, he loved the idea. He could already see her on the small stage, hear her voice soaring over the crowd. And he could see more, too. Could see himself, leaning over her, kissing her, tasting her…

“That gleam in your eyes interests me,” Holly said, interrupting his fantasy as she hooked her arm through his. “So let’s go. Show me something.”

They took their time, acting like tourists, mingling with the crowds of pedestrians jamming up the sidewalks. A tour group strolled by, led by a thin, pale man dressed all in black and looking like an extra in an Anne Rice movie. Holly and Parker trailed behind, listening to the well-rehearsed patter about a powerful voodoo queen, Marie Laveau, who’d lived in New Orleans a century ago. Most of the tourists were
so busy taking pictures and chatting with each other, they missed the tour guide’s story, but Holly was listening.