Masquerade (11 page)

"Are you suggesting that that's wrong?" The coffee arrived, the matchless New Orleans-style coffee, a blend of dark roasted coffee beans and chicory, brewed strong and black, with the option always provided to dilute it with hot milk.

Cole drank his straight, and he noticed that Remy Jardin did too. "I'm suggesting . . . that you find yourself another escort—one suitable for a Newcomb girl."

She looked at him in surprise. "How did you know I went to Newcomb College?"

"Considering it's a tradition in the Uptown set, it was an educated guess. No doubt your mother went there, and your mother's mother—right on down the line."

"Where did you go to college?"

"I can assure you it wasn't Tulane," he replied, trying not to think about the scholarship he'd almost gotten to that university, a scholarship that was ultimately given to someone else whose family had the "right" background and a depleted bank account. "Your brother went there, didn't he? And obtained the mandatory law degree to go with the rest of his impeccable family credentials."

She propped an elbow on the table and rested her chin on the heel of her hand. "Your logic escapes me completely. What does all this have to do with refusing to go see Lou Rawls with me?"

"Some relationships between certain people are deadends from the start. This is one of them, Miss Jardin. And I don't see any reason to start something that will never go anywhere."

"How can you be sure of that?"

"It's simple, Miss Jardin. People—like water —seek their own level." It was a truth he'd learned the hard way, on more than one occasion.

She arched an eyebrow at that. "And you accept that?"

"It isn't a question of accepting it. It's reality."
 

"If women had that attitude, we'd still be in the kitchen."

"Somehow I doubt you have ever seen the inside of a kitchen—except maybe to complain to the cook."

"I think you'd be surprised at how well I know my way around a kitchen, but that's not the point." She shrugged idly, her eyes never leaving him. "You disappoint me, Mr. Buchanan. I thought you were more of a gambler."

"I don't play longshots, if that's what you mean."

She laughed, and the throaty sound of it worked on his senses. "I've been called many things, but never a longshot." She reached into her lap for her purse. He heard the snapping click of the clasp opening. She took something out of it, then presented it to him in a flourish, with a twist of her wrist. "Here's a sure thing, Mr. Buchanan.
One
ticket to this evening's show . . . and look." She wiggled it. "No strings attached."

He took it from her, then hesitated warily. "What's the catch, Miss Jardin? What's behind this?"

"No catch. And if it was prompted by anything, then it's probably something Nattie once told me."

"What's that?"

"A little sugar never hurt a lemon."

He smiled in spite of himself and slipped the ticket inside the breast pocket of his suit coat.

A half-dozen times that afternoon, back in his office, he took it out and looked at it. Each time, the sight of it gave him pause. And a hundred times he debated with himself whether or not he should go.

In the end, he showered and changed at his apartment, then went to the Fairmont Hotel, which, like most New Orleans natives, he continued to think of as the Roosevelt. He was shown to a table for two in the hotel's supper club, the Blue Room. The emptiness of the chair opposite him stared accusingly back. One word from him at lunch, and Remy Jardin would have been sitting there. He wondered if he could stand to stare at it all night. Finally he decided he couldn't, and he started to get up.

That was when she walked in, dramatically feminine in a high-necked two-piece dress of silk jacquard, inset with embroidered lace at the throat and with another wide swathe accenting the hem. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a crown of soft curls, a style that was both sophisticated and sexy.

"Sorry I'm late. I hope I haven't kept you waiting long," she said, as if he'd been expecting her to come all along. Had he?

"Remy." It was out. He'd said her name.

"Yes, Cole," she replied softly.

"Nothing," Ripping his gaze from her, he moved briskly to pull out the other chair at the table.

"Nothing," she mocked playfully, following after him to take her seat. Her dress was a pale shade of ivory, but the effect of it was anything but virginal, as Cole discovered when he saw the back of it. It plunged all the way down, giving him a glimpse of the tantalizing hollow at the base of her spine. "Your longshot comes in, and all you can say is 'nothing.'"

"I see you changed for the occasion." He took his own seat, rigid, tense, every instinct telling him to walk out now.

"You like my dress?"

"That
isn't a dress. It's a weapon."

"Mmmm, a lethal one, I hope." She smiled, deliberately provocative.

"Just why have you set your sights on me?" He leaned back in his chair, trying to put more distance between them and negate the effect she was having on him. But he heard the whisper of silk over silk as she crossed her legs under the table.

"Frankly?" Unexpectedly, her expression turned serious, her look soberly contemplative. "Initially—as I told you before—I came to see you out of sheer curiosity. I wanted to meet the man who wanted no part of one of the most elite krewes in New Orleans. When I did, you were— at least at first—almost exactly what I expected. Then I saw the way you looked at that print. You weren't calculating its worth, as I've seen
many
collectors do, or even imagining how much it would impress others, as some do. No, it was the print itself that appealed to you—the style, the technique, the use of colors, the feelings it evoked. I suppose I recognized that look because so often that's the way I feel when I come across a Sevres figurine I've never seen before." Pausing, she continued to look at him, seeing him, studying him. Then she seemed to realize how serious she'd become, and she quickly smiled, picking up the water glass in front of her, a faintly mocking gleam in her eyes. "Something tells me you aren't as hard, as cold, or as cynical as you may seem—not a man who's sensitive enough to understand cats."

Cole leaned forward, uncomfortable with the things she was saying. "Is the analysis over, or should I see if the management can provide us with a couch?"

"Now there's an intriguing thought."

"What? Analyzing me?"

"No—having you all to myself on a couch for an hour."

He didn't remember much of the show. He was more conscious of the play of light and shadow across her face with the changing of the stage lighting, and of the absence of any rings on her fingers when she clapped enthusiastically at the conclusion of each song. Her vitality, her zest—her passion—that was what he recalled when the show was over.

In the lobby of the lavishly decorated turn-of-the-century hotel, Cole guided her through the milling throng of show-goers, slow to disperse. "I wonder how lucky I'll be getting a taxi," Remy remarked.

"You didn't drive your car tonight?" He'd taken it for granted that she had.

"No. I had Gabe drop me off on his way back to the office to tussle with his weighty legal brief," she replied, then sent him a challenging sidelong glance. "You wouldn't happen to be going my way, would you?"

Another imaginary handkerchief had been dropped. Cole had the feeling he'd been following a trail of them all day. Each time he picked one up and returned it to her, he discovered that he'd gone a little further than he'd planned. The hell of it was that he
wanted
to be led like this.

"I could arrange to go that way," he heard himself say.

"I know you
could,
but will you?"

He answered that a few minutes later when he helped her into his car. During the short ride to the Jardin family home in the Garden district, the fragrance of her drifted through the car, accompanied by the whisper of silk that came with her slightest movement. The intermittent glow from the street lamps along St. Charles Avenue, their light broken by the heavy branches of the old oaks on either side of the esplanade, kept her constantly in his side vision, occasionally highlighting a refined cheekbone or shadowing the delicate cut of her jaw. He had the feeling that from now on the ghost of her would always ride with him.

Following her directions, he turned off St. Charles onto a side street, then turned again and parked the car in front of one of the many old mansions that graced the district. He got out and walked around to open her door. His mother was old-fashioned in many ways, and she'd raised him to always walk a girl to her door, not to let her out at the curb and drive off. It was too deeply ingrained in him to be ignored, even though he knew it would be a mistake to walk Remy to her front door.

Beyond the delicate lacework of the iron fence and the dark shadows of the lush foliage, the white Doric columns of the mansion's pillared front gleamed wanly in the moonlight. He lightly kept a hand on her elbow as they walked up the banquette to the yard's black iron gate. She pushed it open. The hinges were too well oiled to creak —like the family that owned the property, Cole reminded himself.

The lights inside the main foyer spilled softly through the leaded glass windows that flanked the big oak door, forming pools on the hard cypress flooring of the front gallery. When they reached the door, with its gleaming brass knocker, she turned to him and held out a key. He stared at it, aware that if he reached for it, he was picking up another lace hankie.

He willed his expression to remain bland as he took the key from her outstretched hand and inserted it in the lock, silently cursing his mother for the first time in his life. He gave the key a quick turn, telling himself all the while that this was not a date. He didn't have to kiss her goodnight. He didn't have to kiss her at all. Hearing the slide of the bolt, he turned the doorknob and pushed the door inward. As he swung back to give her back the key, she held out her hand, palm up. He hesitated, then dropped the key in the center of it.

Her fingers immediately closed around it, the polished sheen of her nails flashing in the foyer light. "I enjoyed the show—and your company tonight, Cole." The golden gleam in her eyes challenged him, dared him. "Thanks for the ride."

"You're welcome," he replied automatically.

"Good-night," she said, then—to his surprise —she stepped past him into the foyer and made a graceful turn to shut the door on him. When it was half closed, she paused and said, as if only then remembering, "By the way, I met your mother this afternoon. I liked her."

Stunned, he shot out a hand, blocking the door from swinging the rest of the way shut. As he shoved it back open, she calmly turned and advanced into the foyer. He charged after her.

"You saw my mother? Where?"

"I went by her shop on Magazine after I left you at Galatoire's," she said without so much as a backward glance, and she gave her evening bag a toss onto a side table, then crossed to a set of French doors that led onto an expansive courtyard.

"Why did you go there?" He demanded to know the reason, pushed by a half-formed annoyance that rippled through him at this invasion of his private life.

She looked over her shoulder, her dimpled smile faintly mocking. "Can't you guess?" she said, and she pulled both doors open wide, then walked through them into the night-darkened courtyard.

"I don't want to guess, Remy. I want an answer." He followed her outside and immediately felt the liquid heat of the summer night wash over him.

"Very well." She stopped on a wisteria-covered walkway flanked by white columns, and turned, leaning her shoulders against one of them. "I wanted to meet the woman who gave birth to a man like you."

Facing her, he couldn't hold on to his anger. He still felt heat, but now it was part of the voluptuous ease of the night. "Why? What difference could it make?"

"Because I gambled that you'd come when I gave you that ticket this afternoon. I hoped that by seeing your mother I might get some sense of whether or not you'd show up." She paused for a fraction of a second. "When I gave you that ticket, I never once said I wasn't going. You had to know, in the back of your mind, that there was a good chance I'd be there. So ... if you came tonight, I knew it had to mean you were interested in me, despite what you said."

"And if I hadn't come?"

There was a tiny lift of her shoulders in a shrug. "Then I would have had to accept that you meant exactly what you said. Not that it matters. You came."

"Yes—I did." And he was regretting it, too— especially now, alone with her, with this sultriness in the air.

"I know what I want, Cole. And I want to know you better." She tilted her head to one side. "Am I too aggressive for you? In a man, I know that's a trait to be admired. But some men find it off-putting in a woman. Do you?"

"No." There was a tightening in his chest—in his whole body. He couldn't get his legs to move, not backward or forward. "What exactly do you want from me? Have you become bored with your proper world and decided to find someone
improper
to liven things up for you?"

"Could you liven things up, Cole?" In a single, fluidly graceful move, she straightened up from the column, and he discovered how close to each other they were standing. She lifted her face to him. "Can you liven me up?"

She was waiting for his kiss, and he knew it. Just as he knew he was going to kiss even before he framed her upturned face in his hands, his thumbs stroking the slender curve of her throat and feeling the heavy thud of her pulse. She looked small and delicate to him, like a porcelain figurine in a glass cabinet at his mother's shop—so very fragile, despite the directness of her eyes. Slowly he lowered his mouth onto her lips. They were soft and incredibly warm. He rubbed his mouth over them, holding himself in tight restraint. But it wasn't easy—it wasn't easy when what he really wanted was to plunder their softness, taste their heat, and make them part with his name. A second later that desire became action.