24. Chapter 24
“You ever been to New Orleans in your…travels?” Graham asked.
Bourbon, dancing, sweat, scantily clad women…drinking bourbon, dancing, and sweating with scantily clad women. Music. Heat. Sex. The city promised to show him things he’d never see anywhere else, the old buildings practically humming with secrets not fit for well-mannered ears—which his were not.
Jase loved this fucking city.
“A couple times,” he said.
In today’s envelope, there was enough cash to enjoy the Big Easy properly and standing reservations at the hotel.
After dinner at an oyster bar on a quiet offshoot of Bourbon Street, they were lured into a crowded, high-ceilinged joint by a live jazz band.
Almost as soon as they found a small table, a stooped Black man with tight curls creeping like gray Spanish moss from beneath a weathered fedora asked Lindsey to join him on the dance floor.
More surprising than her eagerly accepting was the way he swept her across the room in a series of dips and twirls that would’ve challenged a much younger man.
“Looks good, doesn’t she?” Graham said.
Scouting a woman with long black braids and a white butterfly tattoo practically glowing against the dark brown skin of her lower back, Jase said, “Yep.”
“I didn’t know she could move like that.”
“Oh.” Jase followed his brother’s eyes to the dance floor, catching a peek of Lindsey’s black lace panties as she spun around the room. “Huh.”
“What?”
“She looks happy.”
“Well, she ought to, after the railing I just gave her.”
Jase choked on his drink and set it on the table.
He had already heard it; he didn’t want to talk about it too.
Jase had been on his balcony watching throngs of women ripening in the street below when it came through the wall.
Thumping. Rhythmic and aggressive. The kind of sex after a fight when there’s still piss and anger coursing through the veins but enough forgiveness to part an otherwise closed pair of legs.
There weren’t any rooms available when he tried getting a new one, so he’d waited for Graham and Lindsey at the bar across the street from the hotel. He should’ve just gone out on his own. There was no rule against enjoying himself.
“You know, the more I think about it, the more I can’t figure why Dad sent her with us,” Graham said.
“Sure sounded like you wanted her here,” Jase murmured.
“No, of course I do. It’s something he said last winter.”
“Do I want to know?”
Graham turned his bourbon tumbler in circles on the sticky wood tabletop. “He said he didn’t think we were good together.”
Butterfly. Tattoo. Searching through the heaps of people between their table and the bar, Jase spotted the woman whose ink he very much wanted to get acquainted with—if her tongue wasn’t already in someone else’s mouth.
Shit.
“Did you hear what I said?” Graham asked. “Dad didn’t think we were good together.”
“I thought he liked her.”
“He did.”
“Then you heard wrong.”
“No.” Graham paused. “He thinks I should be with Helen.”
Jase stared at his brother. He wasn’t drunk enough for this conversation with only one of Graham’s scruffy, tight-lipped faces staring back at him.
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not.” Graham downed the rest of his drink in one swig. “It’s messed up, but it’s true.”
He put up a hand to stifle further questions as Lindsey fell, sweaty and winded, into the empty chair between him and Jase.
“Thank you, young lady,” her partner said. “I will be back for another turn after I catch my breath, you hear?”
“I’ll be ready,” Lindsey said. Her mouth closed around the straw of a mint julep she drank down to the muddled leaves at the bottom.
“You looked hot out there,” Graham—who had been talking about his ex-girlfriend twenty seconds ago—said.
“It was all him,” Lindsey breathed, nudging Jase’s arm. “You dance?”
“Nah, not really.”
“Neither does Graham. How about that? Finally, something you two have in common.”
“That and alcohol,” Graham said, standing. “Another round?”
“Yes, definitely.” Lindsey slid her glass across the table.
“Get me a hurricane this time,” Jase said.
Graham collected the empties and worked his way through the crowd to the bar, and Lindsey searched the room, probably looking for another dance partner.
“I see the lovebirds made up,” Jase said to Lindsey. He shouldn’t care, but a headache knocked into his temples in rhythm to the headboard hitting the wall as Graham fucked his way back into Lindsey’s good graces. “How the hell did a woman like you end up with Graham?”
“A woman like me?” She turned to him with an amused smile. “What do you know about me?”
“Well, you seem smart, but how smart are you really if you’ve been with my brother for a year?”
The smile left her lips, not her eyes. It hardly ever left them, Jase noticed. “You really want to know?”
“I asked.”
“Dance with me,” she challenged. “And I’ll tell you.”
Jase shook his head. “I don’t think so, babe.”
“What’s your problem? I bet your dad was good a dancer.”
“My dad? I doubt it,” Jase said. “And I don’t need to know that bad.”
She shrugged. “Your loss.”
Lindsey turned and the curve from her neck to her collarbone glistened with a fine sheen of sweat Jase wanted to lean over and lick off—
The fuck?
He sat back before he did something stupid. What was he thinking? Jase would not be licking anything off of Lindsey for any reason.
He couldn’t even blame it on a dry spell. Must’ve been the bourbon. And Bourbon Street. And the music and the yellow and orange lights behind the band and the sticky summer heat. It wasn’t her. She could’ve been any other woman.
Jase adjusted his pants and started trolling the bar for another one.
Any other one.