Ciji Ware (39 page)

“Sorry,” she murmured.

Making no reply, he put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a soft squeeze. His reassuring embrace made Corlis irrationally yearn to snuggle against his chest and tuck the top of her head under his chin.

Ignore it, lady! There’s too much at stake this time around!

King drew her closer against his chest, and she felt his body heat raising her own temperature several degrees. As she stared into his eyes, only inches away from hers, she was forced to swallow hard and close her lids. Then, slowly, she gave him a warning shake of her head.

“How ’bout we rattle some folks at the Hummingbird Grill and go get a late-night breakfast?” she heard him ask.

“Dressed like
this
?”
Virgil protested, looking into his rearview mirror and pointing to his elegantly coiffed wig and the lacy jabot at his throat.

“Great idea!” Manny chimed in. “Virgil and I missed dinner.”

“Okay, okay,” grumbled Virgil. “Let’s give those late-night characters in Corlis’s neighborhood a thrill.”

Corlis heaved another sigh. The sooner she put a Formica tabletop between herself and King Duvallon’s handsome presence, the better. Thank heavens the all-night restaurant was less than a block from her front door on Julia Street, behind which she’d be safe from the odd, tingling sensations that were percolating in her solar plexus.

“The Hummingbird it is,” she quickly agreed.

Man, oh man, she thought, she’d gone from having visions of long-lost relatives to suffering serious palpitations over somebody she’d wanted to throw in
jail
a decade or so ago.

***

Within minutes Virgil parked the van outside the restaurant in the Warehouse District. Inured from years of Mardi Gras excess, few of the late-night denizens in the Hummingbird bothered to note the entrance of the four musketeers. Before they devoured their breakfast, however, Corlis ducked into the ladies’ room, removed her wig and mustache, and stuffed both inside her voluminous leather shoulder bag.

King laughed when she sat down, pointing to her upper lip. “You looked pretty cute with all that hair… but a lot better, now.”

When their food arrived, King, Corlis, and her crew set about their enthusiastic consumption of waffles saturated with thick, sweet cane syrup, plus multiple cups of coffee. Corlis resolutely snatched the bill away from the men to establish that the meal was a purely business affair, but she hadn’t the strength to protest when King insisted on walking her around the corner to her front door. Manny, Virgil, and the WJAZ news van headed down St. Charles Avenue past one of the streetcars that King would eventually take back to the edge of the French Quarter.

It was long after midnight, and Julia Street was deserted. The silent row of brick facades thrust both sidewalk and street into shadow. On the opposite side of the road, old-fashioned globed streetlamps stood like a line of night watchmen, casting circles of mellow light over the sidewalk. Side by side, King and Corlis strolled silently down the hushed block. Suddenly she was brought up short by the clip-clop sound of horses’ hooves.

Oh no! Corlis thought, she couldn’t be—

Please, don’t let it happen again. Not now. Not in front of King!

Chapter 17

April 5

An open carriage with battery-powered headlights turned the corner at Church Street, heading toward a livery stable. At the reins was a tourist guide with a boom box blaring full blast on the seat next to him. Vastly relieved, Corlis gave silent thanks that she was still tethered to her own century.

“Got your house key, Ace?” King asked, leaning a cloaked arm against the carved white molding that framed the entrance to her building.

“The damn thing’s in here somewhere,” she muttered as she rooted at the bottom of her purse. At almost the same moment she found her key ring she felt King slide his hand up her arm.

“Well, sugar,” he murmured, his mouth only inches away from hers, “that was quite a party tonight, huh?” To both her joy and dismay, he slowly and deliberately bent down and brushed his lips against hers with a come-hither invitation that she’d have to be unconscious to ignore. After a few long, delicious seconds, he backed off a bit and scrutinized her closely.

“I guess this is good night,” she murmured. For another long moment, she was virtually incapable of breaking from his steady gaze.

Then, in an act of pure instinct, she released her grip on her key ring and allowed it to fall to the bottom of her purse. She withdrew her right hand from the depths of her shoulder bag and felt the leather pouch slide down her arm and land with a soft plop near her feet. As if someone had switched her to automatic pilot, she put both arms around King’s shoulders, closing the short space between their lips, and held on to steady herself. She tilted her head back and sought to inhale
his
breath—as if the man’s very life force could keep her grounded.

When she thought about it afterward, Corlis couldn’t recall who had made the next move, but their second kiss was electrifying, terrifying, and foreshadowed a potential for intimacy that was shocking in the extreme. She opened her mouth the merest fraction and nearly gasped when she felt his tongue’s feathery touch, redolent with the honeyed taste of cane syrup. Like his breath, the tip of his tongue felt hot against hers… hot as the flames that had licked sugarcane fields in some other life she had once briefly glimpsed.

Then another heady fragrance piqued her senses: King’s aftershave. It was a sophisticated blend of tangy lemon verbena, overlaid with the unmistakably masculine scent of a man who had spent a long, sultry evening in a heavy velvet costume. She was faintly conscious that she had begun to lean into him, so that now their bodies were pressed against each other with nothing separating their torsos except for a few layers of fabric. Their kiss became an exploration, a first tentative probing around the edges of their secret selves.

She felt bereft when King finally pulled away from her. He hesitated, as if waiting for her signal that she would welcome him further. “My, my…” he murmured, “the lady from California certainly likes to be kissed.”

“And the gentleman from New Orleans?” she whispered.

“The gentleman from New Orleans,” he mumbled, brushing his lips against hers again with galvanizing sweetness, “very much likes… kissing the lady from California… after midnight… on Julia Street.” She felt him smile briefly against her lips before he began to nibble seductively along her jawline to her earlobe.

“Midnight on Julia Street…” she echoed. “It’s so beautiful. I’ve never been outside
on
Julia Street this late… kissing…”

“Glad to hear it…” he said with a mock growl, and kissed her some more. Finally he leaned back a second time to gaze at her. “You know, darlin’, we are literally taking our lives in our hands to be standing in a doorway in the Warehouse District at this late hour…
so
?”
His questioning glance clearly seemed to say,
It’s your decision, my dear Scarlett.

This pause in their avalanche of kisses provided Corlis with a sane moment in which to come to her senses.

“What time is it really?” she asked, peering at King’s wristwatch. “Two a.m. Oh, boy. I think we’d better—” she floundered, embarrassed now.

King straightened to his full height. “We’d better… what?” he asked, the faintest hint of coolness edging his voice.

“We’d… I mean I… well, we should probably…”

“Probably go inside,” he finished her sentence. “And I’d better hop that streetcar I hear trundling down St. Charles. Got hold of that door key again?”

Corlis grabbed her purse off the sidewalk, plunged her hand into its recesses, and in an instant located the key. She swiftly inserted it into the lock and opened her front door. Then she turned to King and bit her lip.

“We can’t, you know… ah…” she began helplessly. “I mean, you’re a news source, and I’m a reporter covering a story that
involves
you. So, I hope you can understand that, even though I… responded to… ah, I
can’t
… or rather, I don’t think that we should…”

King stared intently into her eyes and seemed to come to an unhappy conclusion. “I’ve been down this road a few times before, sugar pie,” he reminded her with a smile, just short of being curt.

“Look. King—”

“Don’t worry ’bout tonight,” he interrupted, as the streetcar squealed to a halt. “You’re a gorgeous woman, Corlis McCullough. Who wouldn’t want to kiss you senseless?”

Gorgeous? Wow…

“King?” she said softly, trying hard not to put a hand on his arm.

“Look… sometimes people get their signals crossed. These things happen. Gotta go.” He turned and began to sprint toward the waiting streetcar that was nearly empty of passengers. “The main thing is,” he shouted over the shoulder of his velvet cape as he leaped aboard, “we’re beginning to get the goods on you-know-who. See ya, Ace!”

No!
Corlis wanted to shout to the dashing cavalier.
Come back here!
But she didn’t.

***

By the next morning Corlis awoke determined to put out of her mind what had happened between King and her on Julia Street in the wee hours of the morning and to forge ahead on the information she’d gleaned from the memos in Grover Jeffries’s home office. To do anything else would be personal and professional suicide. As long as she was on this current assignment—if she ignored King’s kiss, then
he’d
ignore it. Of that she was certain. It was the written Code of Southern Gentlemen. And besides, the negative repercussions, if they
didn’t
put aside personal feelings, could be as profoundly dangerous for him as they were for her. They would both be flirting with disaster, big-time, if they didn’t abide by these rules.

By midmorning she had settled down in her living room to read the Sunday papers, sipping a cup of steaming, chicory-laced coffee. Scanning the arts section of the
Times-Picayune
,
an advertisement suddenly caught her attention. It announced a list of performers participating in the celebrated Sunday afternoon jazz concerts at Café LaCroix. She would go. It was time that she got down to business and advanced her story in a new direction.

Just before two o’clock in the afternoon, Corlis walked through the beaded curtain that marked the entrance to Café LaCroix, a nightclub off Decatur near Governor Nichols Street in the heart of the French Quarter. Even with bright April sunshine pouring down on the street outside, the small intimate interior was cast into dim shadow. Despite the institution of no smoking decrees, generations of fumes clung to clung to black-painted walls.

Corlis spotted Althea LaCroix standing next to a battered upright piano on a small stage at the front of the room. The woman was conferring with a man whose round features resembled her own, as did those of another portly young man standing nearby. The LaCroix Brothers and Sister—all six of them—were part of a renowned musical family in New Orleans.

Althea looked up as she heard Corlis approach, and after an initial pause, grinned with a look of recognition.

“You’re Corlis McCullough!” she exclaimed. “Now you’re workin’ for WJAZ, am I right? You did that
ah-mazin’
story about my friend Daphne’s wedding.”

“Guilty as charged,” Corlis said with a wary laugh. “And you played an ah-mazing number of Bach sonatas while we were waiting all that time in the church.”

“You coming to the session here this afternoon just to see if I can actually play anything else?” she joked.

“I hear you play great jazz,” Corlis said, nodding.

“Well… welcome!”

“I’d love to hear all of you play,” Corlis amended diplomatically. “I also have an idea about a story for WJAZ, and I’d love to ask you a couple of questions before you get too busy to talk.”

“Yeah?” Althea said, sounding intrigued. “Hey, Rufus,” she called, “get the lady a cup of coffee, and your sister one, too, okay?” To Corlis she added, “Rufus is next to the youngest, so I boss him around a lot, don’t I, baby?”

Rufus nodded with an air of mock resignation and headed for a small room behind the bar to their right. Althea’s other brother, Eldon, nodded politely and resumed making notations on a piece of music he’d propped against the piano.

The two women sat down, and Corlis withdrew her reporter’s notebook from her shoulder bag. She quickly explained the general background to the controversy concerning the demolition of the buildings on Canal Street in favor of a high-rise hotel.

“Since you’re friends with King and Daphne, I expect you already know about some of this,” she finished.

“I just know that King is real fierce about protecting these old buildings he loves,” Althea said with an affectionate laugh. “He saved this one from the wrecker’s ball, sure enough.”

“He did?” Corlis asked, glancing around the room with renewed interest. She added carefully, “Well, I was just wondering if your family had any associations with the Selwyn buildings… way back, say a hundred years ago?” A recollection of a furious Althea Fouché shouting at Julien LaCroix as he stormed down the stairs of Martine’s town house flashed before Corlis’s eyes.