DESPITE ACQUIRING an unexpected husband and lover, Harley’s week was off to a much better start than the previous one. While her own wheels weren’t back on the road yet, she’d sealed the deal with All Parishes Pest Control. Work would begin on her house just as soon as she dropped off her key.
The movers had unloaded Gerard’s things over the weekend so they’d finally spent their first night in their new home. She’d set up a consultation appointment with Nice and Neat just this morning, and had been running background checks on the employees ever since.
She and Gerard had divvied up the list of the top-tiered employees who serviced the Garden District homes. These particular staff members had means and opportunity, which left them searching for potential motive through various public, civil and criminal databases. Any convictions or indictments were of interest, along with payment delinquencies, bankruptcies and records of substance abuse.
By lunchtime, Harley had acquired a lot of information and even a couple of red flags.
Mercedes Del Torres had signed up with a credit counseling service to intervene with the financial institutions she owed significant totals.
Charlotte Bouvier had had recent dealings with a local bail bondsman to spring her deadbeat boyfriend from jail.
Allie Kimble had just completed community service hours for a traffic infraction that had cost her driving privileges for a year.
While these leads were all starting points, they were nothing to get excited about. Harley was in the preliminary stages of her research and it took time to piece together a clear view of a person’s life. Each database search peeled away another layer and, combined with the way the rest of Gerard’s trap was neatly shaping up, they were making progress.
Josh had arrived in the office this morning to announce that he was also pleased with how they were establishing their cover. News of their marriage had been spreading through their circles of friends and acquaintances. This lent their marriage credibility, even if it did come with an unexpected side effect—wedding acknowledgments and gifts had started arriving.
Harley had told Melissa to store them in the file room. Miss Manners online gave them a full month to reply with a thank-you, and by then this case should be over. Gerard could ship every one of the gifts back and make explanations. She had no idea what excuse he would give, but she supposed his impromptu marriage and quickie divorce would support what most people already suspected—the man was losing his mind.
Here was a positive to not swing with blue bloods.
Harley would just tell Cajun Joe she’d grown tired of her new husband and dumped him. He’d laugh and tell her she’d been a fool to get married in the first place. While she might not rack up goodies from her friends like Gerard did, life seemed a whole lot simpler without having to write all those thank-you notes.
“Change of plans.” Gerard materialized in the doorway of her office and she glanced up from her computer screen to find his arms filled with takeout from her favorite Chinese restaurant and a thick manila envelope.
He’d strolled into her office nearly every day of the past five months since coming to work for Josh, but somehow he looked different now. Somehow the handsome that she’d been trying to ignore had taken on a whole new level of virile. Her stomach did such a ridiculous flip-flop that she almost growled out her greeting.
“I think I might be on to something,” he said, handing her a bag. “I need to make some calls. Mind if we eat here?”
“No shopping for jewelry on our lunch hour?” She tried to sound heartbroken. Peeking inside her bag, she found an order of egg rolls, hot mustard and a small carton of roast pork fried rice. One of her standard in-house luncheons, which meant Gerard had asked Melissa to order. “So what have you found?”
Dropping the envelope in front of her, he half-sat on the edge of her desk and dug through his own bag for a big carton and a fork. “Evangeline Wilson, the maid who serviced my grandfather’s apartment on Friday. Given the Rolex’s disappearance, I looked into her employment history. She’s been with Nice and Neat for the past two years and services my grandfather’s apartment at least once a month. She has had a lot of hits through the credit bureaus recently, so I want to look into her money trouble as a potential motive for the thefts.”
“Good for you. I’ve got a few leads of my own here to follow up on. But since we’re not jewelry shopping, I think I’ll take a break first and head over to the pest control office to drop off my house key—”
“Not so fast,” he said. “We still have to jewelry shop.”
Okay, so he’d figured out she wasn’t heartbroken. Bully for him. “I thought you said you didn’t want to leave the office.”
“Reina sent some brochures from her private collection.”
Harley leaned back in her chair to put distance between them and dragged an egg roll from the bag. “Her private collection, hmm, sounds so…highbrow.”
“She’s a jewelry artist.”
“Is this jewelry artist a friend?”
Had she been focusing her attention where it should have been—on her egg roll—she’d have been too busy chewing to have asked the question. It had just sort of popped out. She wasn’t exactly sure why, because she didn’t want to know about Gerard’s love life. Especially while being momentarily trapped in it.
But the damage was done. He chewed his…chow mein with a smile that made her stomach do that crazy swooping thing again, which meant he’d interpreted her question to mean she was interested.
“Reina is a friend’s wife.”
“Great.” She dunked her egg roll into the mustard container and tried not to scowl. “Do you mind my asking why we need custom-designed jewelry?”
“We’re killing two birds with one stone here. Now that we’ve successfully set ourselves up as a decoy, we need to plant something attractive to steal. I don’t want to wait forever for our thief to take the bait. Every day that passes lessens our chances of recovering my grandmother’s rings. Reina’s jewelry is high-ticket and different. It’ll draw more attention and be easier to track down if it’s fenced.”
She would have asked exactly why Reina’s jewelry was different but figured she’d find out soon enough. And Gerard had clearly given a great deal of thought about how to run his case so she didn’t want to second-guess him. He was covering all the bases. She had the urge to tell him so, but managed to resist the impulse in favor of a bland, “Makes sense.”
She couldn’t recall ever paying the man a compliment, and she wouldn’t start now. He might think she was mellowing out because of the sex.
Or worse yet—the marriage.
She took a big bite of her egg roll to keep her mouth too busy to ask any more personal questions or give in to any wild impulses to pay compliments.
Of course, she almost wound up choking on said bite when Gerard spread out the full-color glossy brochures and Harley got her first look at the private collection.
“Whoa, Gerard. You said jewelry. Those are sex toys.”
“Reina is an erotic jewelry artist.” She didn’t miss a flash of dimple that told her he was amusing himself at her expense. Stabbing his fork into the carton, he set it aside and picked up one of the brochures.
“Oh, yeah. I like this one.” He pointed to a piece displayed artfully across a mannequin’s bare breasts. “I’ll fantasize about you wearing this.”
Harley surveyed what looked like a long tennis bracelet dangling between two shiny gold nipple clamps. “You better enjoy that fantasy because you won’t be seeing the show live.” Dropping her gaze to the blurb listing the details of the piece, she blinked. “Correction—really expensive sex toys.”
“It’s the pink diamonds,” he said.
Harley had no idea what the significance of a pink diamond might be and wasn’t going to ask. Besides, Gerard wasn’t paying any attention anyway. He was too busy perusing the brochures.
“Would you like to make a selection?” he asked.
“You’re the boss.”
“Well then, I like this one…” He pointed to the pink-diamond nipple clamps then flipped the page to show her a beautifully crafted cloisonné bracelet. “And this.”
There had to be a catch. The piece was too innocuous with its tiers of bright cloisonné, so she scanned the history to discover the double bracelet flipped apart to create handcuffs.
“I can make love to you without worrying about getting shot,” he said, his husky tone conveying that he was remembering the last time she’d drawn her gun on him.
“I haven’t put a bullet hole in you yet,” she said dryly. “I have handcuffs if you’re that worried.”
“You keep them in the trunk of your car. You can wear this bracelet all the time and await my pleasure.” He shot her a look of pure sex. His clear eyes lasered through her, promising her that he’d make awaiting his pleasure very worth her while. Harley felt heat pump into her cheeks.
She was in so much trouble here.
“If I wear the bracelet, how is our thief going to steal it?”
Gerard trailed a finger along her temple, brushing aside wisps of hair. She refused to pull away, refused to give him the upper hand, although her hot cheeks made any bravado a lie.
“That’s why I’m buying two pieces,” he said.
Damn, but she’d walked right into that one.
“No objections?”
“What’s to object? It’s not like I’ll be wearing the stuff to await your pleasure. If you want me, Gerard, you can have me—at Cajun Joe’s.”
“I find it interesting that you’ll only make love to me in a controlled environment. How should I interpret that?”
“I don’t care how you interpret it. This is a job. You want to screw, then we screw in the sex dungeon where it counts.”
A beat of silence passed. Harley forced herself to stand her ground, but what she saw in his clear eyes only fueled the heat in her cheeks.
Gerard wasn’t buying anything she said. “I thought you said Cajun Joe’s was a private social club.”
“Whatever.” She dropped her egg roll back onto the wrapper. Appetite gone.
He reached for the phone. “Then the nipple clamps and the bracelet restraints it is.”
“Have at it, Gerard. It’s your money.”
She focused back on running Mercedes Del Torres’s immigration records, but concentrating was a lost cause when she sat six inches from Gerard’s thigh and could overhear his half of the conversation with the erotic jewelry artist.
The brochures hadn’t listed all of the prices, which should have been her first clue that if one had to ask the price of a piece, one couldn’t afford it.
But five figures for nipple clamps?
She didn’t care if they were pink diamonds. Just the thought of that kind of money made her head swim. Especially when he added another five figures for the bracelet.
With that kind of money, she could have paid off the exterminator, every cent of her student loans and still have enough left over to buy a new transmission.
Unable to resist the urge, she glanced up at him, sitting casually on her desk, rattling off his credit card number by heart. His custom slacks and Egyptian cotton shirt screamed money but how much money seemed to be the next logical question.
Harley didn’t have a clue. She was so out of her league here. The only thing she could be sure of was that Gerard’s family—excluding Stuart, Aunt Camille and perhaps Courtney—was right about him. This man had definitely lost his mind.
He hung up the phone and reached for his lunch. “Reina knocked off another twenty percent as a wedding gift.”
“I’ll add her name to the thank-you list.” To Harley’s amazement, she actually delivered that with a straight face.
Scooping up the half-eaten egg roll, she stuffed it into the bag. “I’ll finish lunch later. I’ve got to swing by the exterminator’s.”
She was out the door before he could say another word.
MAC LEFT THE OFFICE after placing phone calls to Josh’s contacts in the national credit bureaus that purchased records from banks and retailers detailing financial activities. He’d waited until lunchtime, because contacts talked more freely when upper management was out to lunch. Harley had taught him that.
She’d also taught him to keep digging until he’d answered all his questions. And it just so happened he had a lot of questions about a woman with VIP status at a sex dungeon, who volunteered enough time to a domestic-abuse shelter to earn the United Way Volunteer of the Year award.
So he’d added investigating Harley to his to-do list and headed into the Quarter to visit Love Cajun Style. Employees also talked more freely when their bosses weren’t around. He suspected Cajun Joe wouldn’t be around this time of day.
The club lost a good deal of its luster in the daylight. The building was like so many others in the Quarter, historic and architecturally attractive but weathered and in need of constant maintenance.
He found the front doors unlocked and walked inside, ringing a bell on the registration desk. Within minutes a middle-aged woman with waist-length graying blond hair appeared from the room behind the bar, a kitchen, Mac assumed.
“What can I do for you, doll?” she called out as she circled the bar and crossed the dance floor. She might have looked like a throwback from the seventies with her long hair and flowy clothes, but as she approached, Mac realized she was still a very attractive woman in her hippie sort of way.
“I want to book a room for tomorrow night.”
“Fetish night.” She eyed him closely. “I don’t remember seeing you here before. Are you a member?”
“I came last week as Harley Price’s guest.”
The woman did a little hop-skip to get behind the desk, then stood back to survey him. “So you’re Cha Cha’s new hubby. I heard all about you, and let me say that you are living up to the press. I’m Delilah.” She thrust a hand toward him and he took it within his own, then brought it to his lips.
“Mac Gerard. A pleasure.”
She actually giggled and Mac returned her smile, glad he’d made a good first impression.
“So what’s your fetish? Not many choices left, but I’ve still got a couple of rooms available.”
“What room did Harley like best when she worked here?”
Always appear to have more information than you need. Another of Harley’s lessons.
Delilah glanced up from the computer, surprised. “I don’t know that she had a favorite, doll. She was too young to care what the guests were paying to do around here. Cha Cha was usually so wiped out by the time she got to Joe that she was just happy for a hot meal and a place to crash.”
The image of a too young Harley wiped out and needing a hot meal and a place to crash wasn’t what Mac had expected. He shot her what he hoped was a puzzled look. “I must have misunderstood what she told me. I assumed she was older when she worked here.”
Delilah shook her head.
“What did my beautiful bride do here when she was young?”
“Cha Cha helped her dad do the electrical work when Joe bought the place back in eighty-two.” Now it was Delilah’s turn to frown. “What’d you think she did here?”
Mac did the math and realized Harley would have been only seven or eight, which invited more questions, but he didn’t want this woman to suspect he was interrogating her. Reaching into his grab bag of Harley investigative tricks, he played stupid.
“You know, Delilah.” He shook his head and gave her a lame smile. “I never even thought to ask until right now.”
Her chuckle told him she bought it. “Well, now you know. Cha Cha used to help her dad do the wiring whenever Joe decided the place needed a face-lift. A smart little thing.”
“I knew her dad had owned an electronics business. I just didn’t realize she worked with him.”
Delilah gave a sad smile. “She worked for him sometimes. Joe would’ve cut the unreliable bastard loose a long time before he died if not for Harley.”
Mac realized two things. Delilah’s open hostility meant that the man’s character must be common knowledge. This woman clearly cared for Harley and wouldn’t speak so freely if she’d have been worried he’d repeat their conversation. Which led to realization number two—Harley must have shared a similar opinion of her father.
Following up on a suspicion, Mac said, “She doesn’t talk much about her dad. He must have died a while ago.”
Delilah nodded, appeared to think hard. “Yeah, Cha Cha was what…about eleven, I guess. A long time ago.”
Mac smiled. “I can’t wait to tell her we met, but, Delilah, before I go I have to ask—why do you call her Cha Cha?”
She considered him thoughtfully for a moment and Mac got the impression that she felt sorry for him, as if he didn’t know something so simple about his own wife.
“Okay, doll, first you gotta picture Cha Cha as a little girl,” she said. “A teeny tiny thing with all this red hair. She was gorgeous. This place was a strip joint for years and the strippers used to tease her that she’d grow up and put them all out of business. Whenever she was here, they’d try to teach her how to dance, but she’d run out that door, saying she wouldn’t cha-cha for anyone. Joe thought it was a hoot and started calling her that. The name just stuck.”
Mac laughed, but it was a laugh that came straight from his mouth because there was nothing about him amused.
Delilah smiled. “She was a cute kid, doll. We all love her. Especially Joe. Speaking of…” She glanced at the computer screen. “He doesn’t have his penthouse booked for tomorrow. I know he’d gladly give it to Cha Cha. Otherwise, I’ve only got the waterplay, the waxworks and the bondage rooms left.”
“Put us down for the bondage room.” Restraints might help him get some answers.
After saying goodbye, he crossed the street to his car, but didn’t drive away. Mac sat there staring into the sun-washed afternoon. While most of the clubs catered to night crowds, the French Quarter stayed on twenty-four/seven. People milled around busily during the day, sightseeing or heading to the many eateries for lunch.
He couldn’t shake the image of a too young Harley covering for her father on the job.
“What brings you to my love hole in the dark? Hungry?” Mac remembered Cajun Joe asking on their first visit to the club.
“I need a room, Joe. Got anything for me?”
“You always got a room here, Cha Cha. You know that.”
Why had Harley needed a place to crash? Why hadn’t her father been working and caring for his daughter?
“He died. A long-term illness,” she’d told his great-aunt.
“And your mother?”
“She died when I was young. An unfortunate accident.”
Her father had apparently died when she’d been young, too. What had happened to her after his death?
It wasn’t much of a leap to put Judge Bancroft and her pro bono work together.
She’d somehow been involved with the state’s social services.
Mac leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, as if that might block out the view of a too young Harley running down this street to get away from a bunch of strippers.
“I do not dance,” she’d told him at the wedding.
He’d never thought to ask why and now it came crashing in on him how much he didn’t know about her. So much that he didn’t even stand a chance at figuring out how to win her heart.
Or earn her trust. He was beginning to think that trust was the key issue here. Harley trusted Anthony DiLeo. She trusted Cajun Joe. She trusted Josh.
She didn’t trust him.
Had he ever done anything to earn her trust?
No.
Amazing how fast that answer came. How much the truth hurt. No, he’d never done a thing worthy of her trust.
He’d challenged her instead. When they were at work, or in the dojo or even during the teamwork training session. After he’d realized they were attracted to each other, he’d challenged her with their attraction, too. He’d wanted a fling so he’d cornered her into marriage for a chance to seduce her without Anthony DiLeo’s interference.
He’d only thought about what he wanted. He hadn’t once stopped to consider what Harley might want, or need.
It hadn’t been hard to figure out that she couldn’t foot the bill for the termite extermination—not after overhearing her conversation with Anthony. He’d put two and two together, made some calls to local pest control companies and found out she was ten grand shy of exterminating her pests.
But it hadn’t occurred to him to look any deeper to understand why she was so shy on cash. Instead he’d used her need as leverage to force her into marriage to help his grandfather and get a shot at a fling.
Mac had been so concerned with what he’d wanted, it had never occurred to him to ask why she was fighting him so hard. He knew she wanted him and that was all he’d cared about.
Now he realized she’d most likely seen his challenges as threats, his actions as self-serving. She didn’t trust him, so she’d fought him and bumped up her efforts the closer he got.
And he’d kept pushing, believing she’d ultimately give in. And she had—she’d made love to him with a gun in her hand and without letting him touch her. Then she’d refused to make love again unless she was in the safety of Cajun Joe’s dungeon.
Harley had accused him of being arrogant.
Mac was guilty of a lot more.