Be My Baby (16 page)

She made a protesting sound in her throat, increasing the suction of everything that held him
captive, and he closed his eyes for a second, so tempted. Then he pulled harder on her hair.

“You gotta stop, dawlin’,” he panted. Then, “Oh, Christ, Juliet, that feels so—” He forced his hips back on the bed. “You gotta stop now, before you get a whole lot more than you bargained for. Come up here and kiss me.”

She released him and sat back between his legs. Her little breasts rose and fell as she stared at him. Then, falling forward onto her hands, she began to pick her way over him on all fours like some sleek, overgrown cat. Her tongue came out and licked the corner of her mouth. “I enjoyed that, Beauregard.”

“Yeah. I could tell.” His laugh was a little short on breath, but he was probably lucky to be breathing at all. “Me, too.” He reached for the back of her neck and hauled her forward.

If his kiss was a little out of control, well, a guy could only be so strong. He reached between them to cup her breast, and the deep sound of arousal she made caused his hips to surge up off the bed in primal search of the wet heat between her legs. He’d nearly gotten the two parts aligned when the bedside phone rang.

Juliet whimpered in distress. The phone rang again and he looked up at her. “You want to get that?”

“No.” The denial sounded instinctive and definite, but then she blinked at him in indecision. “It’s the middle of the night, though, and I’ve got a grandmother who’s getting up there in years.”

“Yeah. And I’ve got sisters.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “It might be an emergency.”

“Shit.” He reached out and ripped the receiver off its hook, passing it to Juliet.

“Hello?” She sounded so cool and efficient, she might have been in her office in the middle of the afternoon. Then her brows drew together. “Yes, he is. Please hold a moment.” She handed the phone to him and reached for the sheet, wrapping it around herself as she climbed not only off of him, but off the bed as well.

Beau brought it to his ear. “Yeah. Dupree. This had better be good.”

“Sorry, Beau,” Luke said. “I tried your beeper first—the battery must be dead.”

Or it could be that the beeper was still on the belt of his discarded pants, which he’d left in the other room. “What’s up?”

“I just thought you’d wanna know—Bettencourt beeped me. He caught a new case, and from all indications, the Panty Snatcher’s struck again. Looks like we’ve got us a new victim.”

T
he pounding on Roxanne’s door awakened her. Focusing bleary eyes on her bedside clock, she saw that the red numbers read 4:15. She pushed her hair from her eyes, stumbled out of bed, and reached for her robe. Who on earth came calling at this hour of the morning?

She recognized Beau’s voice on the other side of the door before she even reached for the knob. “Yeah, well, humor me,” he growled. “It’s either this or leaving you to the tender mercies of Celeste Haynes. Those are your choices, Rosebud—live with ’em.”

He thrust Juliet into the suite the moment Roxanne opened the door. “Hey, Miz Roxanne—gotta favor to ask.”

“I’m sorry, Roxanne,” Juliet murmured. “I tried to talk him out of disturbing you, but I think ‘Bullheaded’ is his middle name.”

“Close,” Beau agreed. “It’s ‘Prudence.’”

Snorts that were long on disbelief escaped both
women, and he treated them to a flash of his killer smile. Roxanne blinked to be on the receiving end of it. “Nice threads,” he commented with a nod at her mustard satin robe and partially revealed fire-engine-red nightie. “I do admire a woman who’s not afraid of a little color.”

Then he wrapped his hand around the nape of Juliet’s neck and hauled her up on her toes. Roxanne half expected him to kiss her, but he didn’t—he just thrust his face aggressively close. “Stay put,” he commanded roughly and set her free. Fingers flexing at his side, he stared at her, momentary indecision crossing his face. Then he stepped out into the hallway. He dragged his gaze from Juliet and gave Roxanne a fierce look. “Lock this door, and don’t let anyone in. She stays here until I get back. We clear on that, Roxanne?”

“No problem.”

“Good. There’s an officer outside, and I’ll be back as soon as I can, but it’ll probably be a few hours.” With a last glance at Juliet, he closed the door between them.

Roxanne locked it as she’d been instructed and turned to Juliet, looking at her closely for the first time. “Holy catfish,” she murmured. “You’ve really gotta get that man to shave more often.”

She half expected Juliet to politely freeze her out, but instead her boss touched careful fingertips to the skin around her mouth and said, “I’m not convinced it would help. You can practically see his beard grow.” A soft smile curled her lips. “Rumor has it he had a five o’clock shadow way back in
the sixth grade. Or so some woman in a bar told me.”

“Then perhaps you oughtta start keeping a supply of skim milk on hand to bathe the inflammation.”

Juliet raised an inquiring eyebrow, and Roxanne grinned at her. “Trust me, not only is it good for the waistline, it does wonders at soothing whisker rash. Unfortunately, I’m fresh out at the moment, but come into the bathroom with me—I do have some cortisone cream you can put on it. Where’s the sergeant off to in such an all-fired hurry, anyway?”

As she listened to Juliet’s explanation, Roxanne noticed that the whisker burn wasn’t strictly confined to her boss’s face, but she forbore mentioning it…or Juliet’s wild, unbound hair or swollen mouth. And, walking a few paces behind her as she herded Juliet toward the bathroom, she noticed the languorousness of Juliet’s normally faultless posture. Her lips curled up in a tiny smile of satisfaction.

Beau wasn’t thrilled to hear the Panty Snatcher had racked up yet another tally on his growing list of victims…but he had to give the pervert credit for a superb sense of timing, at least.

Dammit, he’d gone to sleep swearing to put his relationship with Juliet back on a professional footing, but what had he done instead? Awakened with a raging hard-on and come
this close
to trying his hand at the Let’s-Populate-the-World-with-Little-Duprees Lotto. Again. Shit. Why not just play
Russian roulette with his service pistol?

He was leaving Juliet Rose alone from this moment forward, and that’s all there was to it. The GTO’s engine roared as Beau slammed down through the gears in response to a red light that loomed up ahead. He’d do his damn job, see to it that she remained safe, and then send her the hell on her way.

And his life could get back to normal.

The new victim lived above a gay bar in a second-floor apartment whose only touch of elegance was one of the ubiquitous narrow, lacy-looking, iron-trimmed galleries. It overlooked one of the Quarter’s busier streets.

Beau walked around to the courtyard and climbed the stairs. It didn’t take any detective work to determine which apartment was hers: the door stood wide open, light poured out onto the landing, and several voices within seemed to all be talking at once.

It turned out there were fewer people inside than the noise level indicated. There was a forensics cop Beau assumed must be new, since he had never met him, Bettencourt from his district, a bleached blonde with tits out to here and a royally pissed-off expression, and an elderly gray-haired black woman. The latter sat next to the blonde on a shabby couch, patting her hand consolingly. The recipient of her tender ministrations looked as if she could chew nails.

The forensics cop paused in his attempt to lift prints off the doorknob and raised green eyes to give Beau one of those suspicious who-the-hell-are-
you narrow-eyed once-overs that cops were so good at. The minute his gaze reached the badge Beau had hung around his neck, however, he went back to the business at hand. Beau approached the remaining three.

Bettencourt looked up. “Hey, Beau,” he said.

“Hey. You mind if I sit in on your interview?”

“Not at all. Let me introduce you. This is Shirl Jahncke and her neighbor Ernestine Betts. Miz Jahncke, this here’s Sergeant Dupree—he’s worked a number of these cases.”

The blonde glared up at him. “So you the one responsible for the sonzabitch what did this still bein’ on the street? You better hope you catch him before I do, hawt, cuz I’m telling ya, I ever get my hands on the little asshole, I’ll rip his friggin’ head off and scream down his throat.”

“Now, Shirl,” soothed the black woman at her side. “You gotta calm down, girl.”

“Calm down, my ass. I don’t give a damn he made me take my clothes off—hell, I do that for a livin’ anyway. But he took my brand-new Frederick’s of Hollywood crotchless panties! I just got the damn things from the cat’log Monday, and they don’t exactly give ’em away, I’ll tell you what.” She divided her displeasure impartially between Beau and Bettencourt. “From my lips to Satan’s ear, I ever run into that prissy-voice sonzabitch again, you can forget playin’ by the book. I won’t bother callin’ y’all—I’ll drag that boy’s sorry butt out to the bayou and let the gators have ’im.”

“What do you mean by prissy-voiced?” Beau hunkered down on his heels in front of the couch.

“I mean, it was Miss this and Miss that, and would I ‘kindly’ hand over my panties, fer chrissake, like we was at some fuckin’ tea party.” She blew out an exasperated breath and glared at him. “Cap wasn’t from my neighborhood, you can bet yer ass. Come to think of it, he dressed pretty damn dapper, too. Bet if he hadn’t a had that fancy old gun I coulda took him easy.”

“What color hair did he have?”

“Don’ ax me—how the hell I know what color hair he’s got? He was wearing one a those Carnival masks that covers the whole head, ya know what I’m sayin? That one with the big, hooked nose that looks like some sorta bird beak or sumpin’. And he stood in the shadows over there”—she indicated a spot to the left of the window, behind a freestanding lamp—“so I couldn’t really see his eyes, neither. Freakin’ pervert.”

Beau spent another hour and a half interviewing the victim with his fellow detective and collecting information. Bettencourt introduced him to the new forensics cop as the man was closing up his case and preparing to go. His name was Chris Andersen, and although he had lifted several prints, his preliminary assessment was that they probably belonged to the victim or her friends. The theory would be proved or disproved back at the lab.

In the end, Beau was left with the same statistics he already knew—the Panty Snatcher’s height and approximate weight and his preferred style of mask. It was damn little. The fact that the man was cultured was a new tidbit to throw into the mix, but then again, given the victim’s place on the New
Orleans social scale and all things being relative, who was to say how cultured that actually made the guy? He’d have to question Josie Lee about that particular aspect.

The smell of the river wrapped around him when he stepped out into the pre-dawn air a while later. Hands in his pockets, he rocked back on his heels for a few minutes while he ran all the events of the night through his mind and tried to figure out what to do next.

Then he fished his keys from his pocket and headed for the car.

Josie Lee sauntered up behind Luke in the kitchen and wrapped her arms around his waist, flattening her breasts against the hard wall of his bare back as she snuggled up to him spoon-fashion. “Hey, Big Boy,” she murmured, and then yawned lustily.

He craned his head around to grin at her over his shoulder. “You sound like a woman who didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

“I know.” She dug her chin into his shoulder and smiled at him, feeling wonderful. “Don’t you just hate it when things get in the way of your beauty rest?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he agreed. “Beauty rest is right up there, toppin’ my priorities.” He boogied his muscular butt into her stomach, and then turned back around to peer into the pan on the stove. He turned off the burner. “Hush puppies are done. Grab yourself a plate.”

“I’ll just have some coffee.”

“The hell you say.” He turned to face her. “What bogus kinda way is that to start the day?” But the indignation faded and his eyes went heavy-lidded when he got his first full look at her. “God Almighty, you look good,” he said hoarsely and reached for her.

He’d lifted her onto the countertop and had his face buried in the skimpy ribbed-cotton tank top that covered her breasts when Beau walked in.

It was a toss-up who was most surprised. All three of them froze for an instant, Josie Lee on the counter, Luke hunched over her with his chin turned to look over his shoulder, and Beau in the doorway. Then Josie Lee’s heartbeat began to pound. With a wordless roar, Beau charged across the room, and Luke straightened, turning to face him.

“I know what this looks like,” he said, hands spread wide of his body, “but—”

Beau’s fist smashed into his mouth.

Josie Lee screamed and scrambled down from the counter as her lover lurched back several steps. Luke touched the back of his hand to his mouth, and saw a smear of blood on it when he lifted it away. “Well, fuck,” he murmured. Then he took a step toward Beau with the express purpose of returning the favor.

Luke drew up short as he saw Josie Lee grab the frying pan off the burner and dump the contents on the counter in one motion, then swing its bottom at her brother’s butt. It connected soundly.

“Sonovabitch, Jose!” Grabbing at his buttock, Beau pivoted to face his sister, and Josie Lee re
versed her swing and brought the flat of the pan crashing into his gut with enough force to knock the wind out of him.

“
You hit him!
” she snarled. “You keep your filthy hands off him, Beauregard Butler Dupree, or I’ll make you rue the day you were born!” Clearly beside herself with fury, her arm came up over her head, and Luke, fearing for Beau’s head, waded in and plucked her up, swinging her out of striking range. Her lush breasts lifted and fell against his constraining arm as she panted for breath, and she knuckled a black curl out of her eyes, glowering at her brother.

“Jesus, Josie Lee, the freakin’ pan was
hot
.” Beau lifted his shirt and stared down at the large, slightly reddened blotch on his stomach.

“Good! How
dare
you punch Luke and treat me like I’m twelve years old! When are you going to get a
clue
, Beauregard?” She thrust out an arm, pointing an imperious finger at the door. “You’re not welcome here. I want you to leave.”

Beau opened his mouth, but then shut it again. He narrowed his eyes at Luke and said, “Don’t even think this is the end of it, Bud. You and I’ll talk again when she’s not armed.”

Then he turned and stalked out of the room, and Luke set Josie Lee back on her feet. He gently pried the frying pan from her fingers and set it on the stove next to their discarded breakfast. “That was some defense, Baby Girl,” he said and reached out to touch her hot cheek. “Remind me never to piss you off in the kitchen.”

Beau felt like kicking down Roxanne’s door, but he contented himself with one brisk knock before he stuffed his hands in his pockets and stepped back out of temptation’s range.

It had taken him a while to drive from the Bywater to the Garden District; then he’d spent a good fifteen minutes grilling the rookie who’d kept an eye on the front entrance while he was gone, to determine that no one had tried to get in and that the other two entrances were still securely locked with no signs of tampering. Finally, he’d stopped by his hotel room long enough to shower, shave, and change into clean clothes.

And yet none of that had provided nearly enough time to quell the frustration that filled him, the livid anger and sense of betrayal he was forced to swallow whole. He didn’t have time to worry about his personal problems now, though; he still had a job to do. Taking a deep breath, he hunched his shoulders, stretched out the tense muscles in his neck, and vowed that he would, by God, do one thing right today. He’d behave professionally with Juliet if it was the last thing he did…and think about Josie Lee later.

But in the back of his head, an enraged voice kept repeating,
I can’t believe my partner, my good and true friend, is screwing my baby sister!
And he wanted to hit something.

He gave the door another rap instead. A moment later, Roxanne’s voice asked who was there.

“It’s Dupree. Open up.”

She opened the door and blinked up at him. “Sergeant, hello. I’m sorry…have you been out
here long? I fell asleep and only now heard your knock.”

“I just got here, Miz Roxanne. Y’wanna get Juliet for me?”