Chapter 2 #2
“I think we can assume that Evelyn Morgan wanted us to meet each other,” he said. “The question is why.”
She shrugged one shoulder.
“What if she came to New Orleans specifically to hook us up?” he asked.
“Why would she?”
“You have no idea?”
“No.”
“Even after doing a reading?”
“No.”
“And you never saw her before she walked into your shop?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s stop playing twenty questions. I think there’s a way to get some more information,” he said.
When he moved toward her, she tried to scoot back, but he was too quick.
He reached for her shoulder and pulled her into his arms, then brought his mouth down to hers for a kiss that he wanted to be gentle. But gentleness was impossible as he folded her close.
He had seduced many women. He was good at making love and all the preliminaries. The sweet words. The touches. The kisses.
This time, he thought the woman might pull away.
When she stayed where she was, he felt a surge of elation. This wasn’t simply seduction. It was a lot more important than a roll in the hay had ever been to him.
He liked sex as much as any man, but it had never held the kind of magic that people wrote songs about. It was physical sensation, nothing more.
He might have stopped to examine that idea, but he was too caught up in the pleasure of the moment as he increased the pressure, moving his mouth against hers with an urgency that shocked him.
He wanted her with a startling intensity, but a physical joining was only part of it. Sensuality leaped between them, carrying him deeper into unknown territory.
He had pulled thoughts from her mind. Maybe he’d been afraid it wouldn’t happen again. But it did. Only this time there was more depth and clarity.
She had told him her parents were dead. He saw her as a woman in her early twenties standing in a small crowd at a cemetery, watching a coffin being lowered into a grave, and knew that her mother had died of a longtime heart condition.
And Rachel had felt guilty because maybe her mom shouldn’t have had children at all.
Her decision, he whispered into her mind
He saw her as a young girl, picking up a deck of Tarot cards for the first time and feeling excitement surge inside her as she inspected the pictures and grasped the implications of the deck. This was what she was meant to do!
And at the same time, he heard her gasp and knew that she was pulling the same level of information from him. Things he had never told anybody. Things he had pushed down so deep that he’d thought they were buried for good.
He saw himself as a fifteen-year-old scrounging through dumpsters at night for food, whacking at rats with a length of two by four.
Saw himself bedding down in an abandoned house, with the same two by four beside him as a defensive weapon.
Saw himself taking a discarded lamp to an antique dealer and haggling over the price–getting less than it was worth but enough to keep him alive for a few more days.
“That’s so sad,” she whispered against his mouth.
“It’s not true now.”
“It made you tough, and cautious. And determined to stay on top.”
He didn’t want to talk about his sordid past or her analysis of the man he’d grown into. He wanted to focus on what was happening now. In this room. With this woman who called out to him as no other human being ever had.
His head was pounding again, but he ignored the pain.
Wordlessly, he urged her to open for him. After a moment’s hesitation, she did, so that his tongue could slip into her mouth to play with the soft skin inside her lips and sweep along the serrated line of her teeth, tasting the wine she’d just sipped.
She made a small, needy sound of approval as he deepened the contact.
While he stroked one hand down her body, he slid his mouth to her cheek, then found the tender coil of her ear with his tongue.
When she snuggled closer, he wrapped his arms around her and leaned back on the sofa, changing their positions so that she was sprawled on top of him, loving the weight of her small body and the way she fit against him.
He wrapped her closer, increasing the pressure of her breasts against his chest, then sliding his hand down her back to her bottom so that he could wedge the cleft at the juncture of her legs more tightly against his erection.
When he did, she moved her hips against him, and he couldn’t hold back a groan.
Her breath had turned ragged. So had his.
With any other woman, he would have been lost in the physical sensations.
Tonight the building sensuality couldn’t stop the other part of it–the shocking part where her mind and his opened to each other in a way that should be impossible.
When a startling piece of knowledge leaped toward him, he stiffened, then sat up so abruptly that she had to steady herself with a hand against the sofa cushion.
In the heat of the encounter, he had forgotten all about Evelyn Morgan. The reason Rachel had come to the Bourbon Street Arms. The reason she was here now.
They were supposed to be figuring stuff out, but it had gone far beyond that. Very quickly.
He heard the accusation in his voice when he said, “You knew she was going to die!”
Only a few blocks away, Carter Frederick sat in the back booth of a bar. Dressed in a tee shirt and jeans, with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, he fit in with the casually dressed evening crowd. The Jazz Authority wasn’t the most private spot in the world, but he needed a drink.
When the waitress brought him a double shot of bourbon, he chased it with a NOLA ale. He liked the local brew well enough.
He might have asked for more bourbon, but he wasn’t finished working for the night, and he had to keep a clear head. In his mind, he was planning what he was going to say to the Badger, spinning it the best he knew how.
Evelyn Morgan had been a tough old broad. She had narrowed her eyes and refused to tell him why she was in New Orleans. Then she’d come up with some surprising moves.
He’d thought he could handle any woman. Not this one.
She’d attacked, and they’d fought. When he’d pushed her away, the back of her skull had come down hard against the edge of the radiator.
Too hard. One look at the blood pooling around her head, and he’d known that she was done for, and that he had to get out of there before anyone figured out that he’d been in her room.
Even so, he’d taken precious minutes to go through her stuff and make it look like robbery was the motive. While he was ransacking her luggage, he’d found a day book with the names of two locals. Rachel Gregory and Jake Harper.
At least he had that much. Not enough to satisfy the Badger, but he’d already put off his report as long as possible. Anticipating a nasty few minutes, he signaled for the waitress and paid for his drinks.
When he was outside on the street, he lit up a cigarette and took several deep drags before tossing it away. Finally knowing he couldn’t delay any longer, he pulled out his cell phone and speed- dialed a number in Portland.
The Badger answered, and he started talking before Carter could get any of his carefully planned words out.
“Unfortunately for you, I’m listening to CNN. A woman visitor to New Orleans was killed this evening. I guess you made an effing mess of the assignment,” he said as soon as he heard Carter’s voice.
“Not my fault. Why didn’t you tell me she had martial arts training?”
“News to me.”
The man might or might not be lying. In Carter’s experience, the Badger said whatever was most effective at the time. And he might change his tune if another story was more convenient.
“Nobody can connect you with the incident?”
“I’m clean. I didn’t talk to anyone at the desk. I paid a delivery boy to ask for her room.”
“Okay.”
“Afterwards, I went down the backstairs.”
“So you got away, but we’re at a dead end.”
“Not exactly. I got the names of two contacts that she visited in the city.”
They talked for a few more minutes with the Badger pressing him for results and Carter wishing he’d never accepted the freaking assignment.
Not that he had a choice. Once you got on the Badger’s Christmas Card list, you stayed on it.
After hanging up, he clamped his fingers around the phone as he automatically studied the evening crowd to make sure nobody was taking not of him.
Then he started planning his next moves.