Drew neared the hotel, taking in the old place and her flower-decorated balconies and dark windows. Was the building on the city’s historical register? If it wasn’t, then Josie should take measures to make sure it was placed there immediately. Also, he needed to check into the laws that would prevent Rove from building something not in line with the architectural integrity of the area. Laws Drew’s client may have already bypassed by greasing a few of the right palms.

The Mississippi River wasn’t the only thing that ran crooked down here.

Drew stopped in front of the double doors. Closed. He cupped a hand and looked inside. Dark.

Damn.

Had Josie closed up and gone to bed?

He rang the bell he knew would alert her up in her private rooms.

Nothing.

He stepped back and looked up at the fourth floor. He thought he saw movement near the balcony to what he guessed was her room, but he couldn’t be sure.

What he could be sure of was that she wasn’t going to answer the door. And he realized it was no more than he deserved after deserting her.

He waited for five minutes, then wove his way through the tourists back toward the Marriott.


JUST AFTER DAWN, Josie locked the hotel after herself, leaving a note for Monique and Philippe that they should take the day off and that she’d call them later. She tucked her handbag under her arm and watched as Jez scampered down the street, surprisingly limber given her age. Apparently she was satisfied that her company was no longer needed and was off to do whatever it was she did between feeding times.

Josie glanced around the street before choosing a direction. At this time of the morning, the area looked like a ghost town. Stores and clubs and restaurants were closed up tight, discarded cups and litter dotted the curbs and sidewalks, and the stench of urine and beer was strong. At somewhere around ten, when everyone stirred to start the workday over again, employees would sweep and water down the sidewalks and street in front of their places of business. Until then, it looked like someone had held a party and left a helluva mess.

Josie was used to it. This was where she’d grown up. She knew which corners the homeless preferred for sleeping. Knew which puddles not to walk through. Which alleys to steer clear of.

Of course, trying to focus on her surroundings was a diversionary tactic that wasn’t quite working. She’d gotten little sleep last night. Not just because of her mysterious back-door visitor. But also because all she could see was Drew’s somber face as he’d stood on the street below, waiting for her to open the door.

For some reason she couldn’t define, she’d simply peered through the balcony doors at him, leaving him standing there. Perhaps it was an instinctual reaction designed for self-protection. Not from physical harm. But from emotional devastation.

She’d never have expected that she would come to feel what she was for the striking, grinning stranger from Kansas City. She’d had great sex before without attaching herself to the individual. But with Drew…

With Drew, all she had to do was think his name and her pulse thickened and her heart gave an off beat.

If pressed to point at any one reason for her uncharacteristic behavior, she couldn’t have done it. It was the way he put his hands on her and the way he didn’t. It was what he whispered into her ear and what he left unsaid. It was the way he slept with his arm protectively encircling her, as if he didn’t want to let her go. It was the way he did release her without her saying a word, seeming to understand her need for freedom and independence.

It was everything. It was nothing.

And she had as much control over it as she did her own heartbeat.

A trombone player was already setting up on a corner, using his case as a chair while he polished his instrument, a small cigar box at his feet for change. He spotted Josie and smiled.

“Morning, Miss Villefranche.”

“Good morning, Harry. How’s life treating you?” She tossed a dollar bill into his box.

“Better all the time.”

She smiled and continued down the street.

It took her about twenty minutes to walk to her destination. Thankfully the caretaker had already opened the gates, which were closed at night because the voodoo queen Marie Laveau’s grave had been looted one too many times by tourists and locals alike. She passed the aboveground tomb in question, which was decorated with all sorts of mementos and voodoo icons, walking silently between the narrow rows until she reached the far wall. She paused for a long moment, unmoving, then touched the plaque engraved with her grandmother’s name.

In the past year, it seemed only this place was able to give Josie a sense of peace she’d lost along with Josephine Villefranche. Her mind cleared of all thought and her body relaxed, the act of being there giving her a sense of life’s cycles. Her, her mother, her grandmother and her mother before her. Each woman different yet with the same blood running through their veins.

Even her cousin figured in there, as part of a long line of strong Villefranche females.

“Granme, I need your help,” she said quietly, the raised lettering defined under her fingertips. “I’ve fallen in love.”

She hadn’t been aware that’s what she was going to say when she’d opened her mouth, but there it was. Two women had been murdered at the Josephine, and she was in danger of losing the hotel altogether, but it was her conflicted emotions for Drew Morrison that had drawn her here, searching for some of her grandmother’s no-nonsense advice.

Although, she understood that even her grandmother hadn’t always been the wise woman she remembered. Josie’s mother and aunt stood as clear reminders of that. When Josephine Villefranche had been younger than Josie was now, she’d fallen for a man. A brush salesman traveling through town. A handsome white man whose name Josie had never learned, although he had been her grandfather.

“Beware of love, Josie.” She heard Granme’s voice as clearly as if she’d been standing right beside her. “Love is the one thing over which you have no control. It can make you stronger or it can destroy you.”

Josie had been all of ten at the time and had knocked on her grandmother’s door during one of her “spells,” short periods of time when she’d withdraw from hotel duties and stay in her rooms, shut off from the world.

“Which did it make you, Granme?” she’d asked, settling into an armchair across from where her grandmother sat staring toward the windows. Windows that had been covered by sheers, blurring the scene beyond.

“Both.”

Josie opened her eyes and stared at the plaque.

If you didn’t have a choice in who or how you loved, did you then not have a choice in how that love affected you? Could you decide whether it made you stronger or destroyed you?

And therein lay the danger she suspected her grandmother had been trying to make her aware of.

Here she was with problems piled on her doorstep, and rather than seeking ways to save a hotel that was as much a part of her heritage as her grandmother had been, she was instead searching for answers to questions that had no practical relevance.

“Men are the devil, Josie. Especially white men. They mean no harm. They saunter in with their natty clothes and charming grins and make you feel like the most beautiful woman on earth. But then they’ll leave you behind like a bag of garbage at the curb.”

“How are white men different from black men, Granme?”

She’d pointed a gnarled finger at Josie. “Because you expect the black men to stay.”

So had her grandmother expected, or at least hoped, that her white lover would stay and marry her? Had he even known their brief affair had produced a child?

And had Josie’s mother decided not to make the same mistakes her own mother before her had? Had she seen her chance to get that forever and sacrificed everything in order to get it?

Were there days she regretted her decision? Or was she even now completely happy and content?

Josie dropped her hand from the plaque.

“This place, this hotel, it will never betray you, girl. It will never take up with another woman, or leave you pregnant, or move on to the next town without you. Remember that. Respect that.”

Josie opened her purse and fished inside for a silver dollar, which she placed on a small shelf below the plaque. She left her fingers on top, pondering the many words her grandmother had imparted. The advice, the warnings, the wisdom. Never had she considered the possibility that much of it was born of a woman scorned.

She squared her shoulders. “I’m going to save the hotel, Granme. Of that you can be sure.”

Then she turned and made her way back through the graveyard, a new resolve filling her.

14

DREW KNEW ONE THING and one thing only: he had to come clean with Josie. Tell her exactly who he was and what he had come there to do…and what he now wanted to do. Or, rather, wanted to help her to do. And that was to save her hotel.

At around nine-thirty the next morning, after having made calls to check the liquidity of his cash resources, he headed to the hotel, only to find a note on the door meant for Josie’s employees. He read it, then returned it to where it had been.

Where was she? While he would be the last to profess to know Josie better than anyone else, he sensed that she wasn’t the type of person just to up and leave her hotel with the Closed sign hanging in the window if there wasn’t a good reason.

Was she inside?

He rang the bell then stepped back to look up at the doors to her rooms. In fact, the doors to all the rooms were closed. It was the first time he’d seen that.