The NOLA Heart Novels (Complete Series)

by Maria Luis

  “But there’s no wedding.”

  She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and prayed for patience. “No, there’s no wedding.”

  The portly man flicked his gaze from Nathan to Jade. “Are you sure? You two make a very nice-looking couple.”

  The weight of Nathan’s stare was as tangibly real as if he’d tugged her up against his side. Jade did her best to ignore the fluttery sensation in her stomach, as well as the ridiculous urge she had to put him to the test. What if she said yes? Would he actually marry her today?

  “You see many weddings,” Nathan said, “am I right?”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, today we’ve already had four. Four! There’s another one tonight—another pair of dogs. Two Dobermans, I believe.”

  “Right,” Nathan drawled slowly, giving a strained smile that belied the laughter in his gray eyes. “Do you find that you recall all weddings? Or most of them?”

  The chapel owner shrugged. “As many as I can, I suppose. We have many weddings here. Remember, we are an—”

  “Institution,” Nathan cut in wryly. “Yep, I definitely remember. But my partner here is right in that we’re looking for some information about a wedding that took place here a few years ago. Could we take a look at some of those records?”

  Though he appeared to think hard on it, Mr. Simms finally waved them to follow with a come-here wave. He filed down a narrow hallway before cutting to the right and taking a set of stairs to a second floor.

  As she followed, she could feel Nathan’s focus on her back. Was he wondering what she’d thought of them marrying? Confession: the idea sat better with her than she ever could have imagined. Not that she was ready to get married tomorrow and pop out three kids within the next two years, but, well, the idea of marrying Nathan wasn’t as unsettling as she’d thought it would be.

  If anything, it settled just fine and that was more of a problem than anything else.

  “All right,” the man exclaimed, “here we are. Now, to be fair, I’m only letting you up here because I saw the badge on your hip, Detective.”

  Nathan only slipped a hand into his trouser pockets, further exposing the badge clipped to his belt. “It’s much appreciated.”

  Pointing at the old school desktop, the man powered on the computer and turned for the door. “I’ll leave y’all to it.”

  “Thank you,” Jade said.

  “And if you are thinking about marriage, I’ll give y’all a discount. Because for all your eye rolling, Miss, I see the way you look at him.”

  Jade froze. Do not look at him. Don’t show interest.

  She didn’t have to.

  Nathan stepped forward. “How does she look at me?” he said, voice pitched low enough to send anticipated shivers dancing down her spine.

  “Like you’re everything she’s ever dreamed of and everything she’s ever feared.”

  Jade dropped onto the chair beside the desktop. “Okay, so let’s get to this, eh?”

  Nathan took his time settling into the chair next to hers. “You Canadian now?”

  She concentrated on the home screen, focusing all her will on not letting her cheeks bloom with color. “I can be whatever I want, Danvers.”

  A big hand found her chin and gently coerced her to look at him. She wanted to die a little inside. She felt . . . dreadfully exposed. Exposed in a way she’d never experienced before, especially not with a man.

  She glanced up to his face, and the sight of his warm gaze proved that he’d been waiting for her to make eye contact. “That trick’s not going to work, honey.”

  Jade audibly gulped. “What trick?”

  He gave her a patient look that clearly said, really? “Calling me Danvers. You’ve been ignoring this—us—all week, ever since we slept together. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  Damn it. “You weren’t supposed to notice,” she grumbled, trying desperately to ignore the soft whisper of his thumb brushing back and forth across her lower lip. He was trying to charm her, and God help her, but it was working.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re a man.”

  Chuckling low, he dropped his hand to her neck. “We’re back to stereotyping again, eh?”

  She snorted. “Now who’s pretending to be Canadian, eh?”

  “I’ll play Canadian all day if it’ll get you back in bed again.”

  And at that bomb, he released his hold and turned to the computer, leaving Jade to flounder in the depth of her emotions. Did he want that, her in his bed? Hell, did she want that?

  Images of them together sharpened in her mind. Yes, yes she did.

  Feeling light as a feather, Jade mentally slapped herself and focused her attention on the computer. On the case. It was the only reason that she and Nathan were at this wedding chapel in the first place.

  It certainly wasn’t because they were getting married.

  Definitely not that.

  She sat very still, watching as he moved the mouse and opened a desktop file titled 2013-2014 Marriage Reports.

  “Seems easy enough,” she said hopefully as the desktop loaded the folder. “We might even have time to grab dinner before the sun rises tomorrow.”

  The file loaded.

  Jade felt her stomach drop clear to her toes.

  “Díos mío,” she whispered, hand pressed to her chest, “That is . . . That is . . . ”

  He arched a brow. “You were saying about dinner?”

  Like a matrix of equations, the words on the screen did not seem to make much sense. And there were thousands of them. She squinted and raised a finger to the page number at the bottom of the file. “There are five hundred pages. Five hundred.”

  “It could be worse.”

  “Oh, well, sure,” Jade said with a dramatic flair of her arm, “There could be five thousand. There’s not even a search bar. By the time we find them, the Dobermans will have been married for five doggy years.”

  Nathan reached out and tugged on her ponytail, effectively shutting her up with the sweetness of the gesture. “You’re cute when you get all dramatic, but this would go a whole lot faster if we got to work.”

  Still reeling from the “cute” comment, Jade nodded dumbly.

  “Good.”

  They buckled down and tried to make sense of the formatting. While at first there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the layout—for a legendary institution, Heavenly Met hadn’t bothered to file the weddings by days of the year, weeks, months or even in alphabetical order.

  No, instead they’d filed by breed.

  As in, humans, animals, and, in one marriage documentation, the marriage belonged to an “other.”

  Jade would have laughed if she hadn’t felt like crying.

  After what felt like ten hours but couldn’t have been more than two, Jade’s tired eyes found exactly what they were searching for. “There,” she said loudly, shoving her finger at the screen, “stop scrolling. Right there.”

  Sure enough, Miranda Smiley’s name was listed after the entry, “Blessed Poodle.”

  “Can you click on her name?” she asked, not above dropping to her knees and praying. “See if anything comes up?”

  “Let me see.”

  With a click of the mouse, Nathan leaned back in his chair, chin ducking to his chest in what was clearly threadbare patience. He inhaled sharply through his nose.

  By some God-given miracle, a scanned copy of a marriage register popped up. To the left was Miranda Smiley’s name, both in typed form and with her signature scrawled above on the dotted line. To the right was Charlie Zeker’s name, but . . .

  “No.”

  Nathan glanced sharply at her. “What?”

  Jade tapped the screen. “This,” she exclaimed, “that’s not his name.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look!” She shoved her chair back and began to pace the room. “I’ve done this. When I was an Archaeology major, I took more than my fair share of paleography classes. We studie
d handwriting, how to make out the words on vellum, wood, papyrus, everything.”

  He was watching her wearily, which sent Jade’s hands to tightening her ponytail in exasperation. This, she knew. She might not be a homicide detective. She was hardly a crime lab technician, really, but this, this she knew.

  She stalked back to the computer, intent on making him see what was so very obvious to her. “Look closely—here. And here. The signature may say “Charlie Zeker,” but the handwriting is shaky. Written, if I had to guess, with the opposite hand. Or maybe not an opposite hand, but look at that Z . . . see the way the backend dips and then flips back up? And even the K; it’s not done smoothly at all.”

  Drawing in a deep breath, she turned to him. “I’d argue that it’s not Charlie Zeker’s signature.”

  For a moment, Nathan did nothing but watch her. She squirmed under his heady stare, forcing herself to stand still and to stand strong.

  “This is what you brought me along for,” she told him, wishing that she could read his mind. “You wanted me along in case we came across evidence to catalogue.”

  He broke his silence with a light caress to her hip. “I brought you along because I needed your instincts. Instincts,” he said in a husky pitch, “that you just proved.”

  She shook her head, refusing to accept what he said. “Instincts aren’t my job. My job is to take pictures and collect hair samples.” She gave a rueful smile. “This isn’t even my job,” she said, indicating the computer with a tilt of her chin, “but I studied penmanship heavily in school. Minored in paleography for my undergraduate degree. I can almost guarantee you that that isn’t Charlie Zeker’s signature.”

  The brush of his fingers on her hip tightened. Slid over to the empty belt loop and hooked a finger, tugging her close. She willingly stepped into the wide V of his thighs, and he rewarded her with a warm but intense smile that set her on fire.

  In a low voice that signaled he halfway dreaded her answer, he said, “Whose signature is it?”

  Jade took a deep breath. Covered the mouse with her hand and moved the pointer from Charlie Zeker’s name to the left.

  Meeting Nathan’s gaze head on, she answered, “I’m pretty sure that it’s Miranda Smiley’s.”

  23

  Mid-City, New Orleans

  “We need a plan,” Jade said, grabbing a salted French fry from the wicker basket and swiping it through a puddle of ketchup. After leaving Heavenly Met—and escaping Mr. Simms, who’d cornered them by the altar on the way out—they’d immediately decamped for much needed sustenance.

  Jade’s growling stomach had never been more thankful.

  “I don’t trust Ms. Simms’ record-keeping.” Seated across from her, Nathan pushed his half-eaten plate away from him. “I need to re-check with the state about that marriage license. I looked last week, when I first met with Miranda Smiley, and I know for a fact that that she’s listed as unmarried—which proves your theory that the license has been forged. In the meantime, we need a search warrant.”

  Shoving the rest of the fry into her mouth, she turned that piece of information over in her head. “Is it hard to get one of those?”

  “We need sufficient evidence, something more than this.” He gestured toward the printed copy of the wedding certificate that sat on the table. “Something more than what might or might not be a fraudulent signature to a marriage that may or may not have happened.”

  This time when Jade swirled a fry in the ketchup, she did so slowly, buying herself some time as she digested his somewhat hurtful statement. “I thought . . . ” She cleared her throat. “I thought you believed me on this.”

  Gray eyes snapped up to meet her own. “I believe you,” he said gravely, “but having never seen Charlie Zeker’s signature before, I doubt your claim would hold up in the court of law. It’s not enough.”

  Not enough.

  Words she’d been hearing all her life.

  She hadn’t been enough when it came to matching up to her sisters’ successes, no matter what Sammie argued to boost Jade’s self-esteem. She hadn’t been enough, with all of her higher education behind her, to do anything more than switch tracks and start at the bottom of the totem pole. She hadn’t even been enough when it came to John Thomas, who’d never pushed for anything more than a silent girlfriend who did as he bid. If she’d been enough, wouldn’t he have cared more?

  Jade was tired of not being enough.

  “I know enough,” she snapped, irrationally irritated by Nathan’s lack of faith in her. “What do I need to do to prove it? Do you want me to find a copy of Zeker’s signature somewhere else? Will that do it?”

  “Yes.”

  Her chin jerked back. “What?”

  Shoving his plate to the side, Nathan dropped forward on his elbows, eyes lit with determination. “That’s exactly what we have to do.”

  “And your plan involves . . .? We can’t just go breaking into Miranda Smiley’s house without a search warrant,” she said. “And after this afternoon, I highly doubt she’ll be welcoming us into her home anytime soon. I can just imagine how well she’d take to finding us back on her front porch.”

  “Yeah, not so much. But the fact that the state doesn’t have the marriage documents mingled with your suspicion that they’ve been forged? It’s a good lead. A better lead than Shawna Zeker.” Nathan sat back, scrubbing a hand over the growing stumble on his face. “Still doesn’t solve the problem that this is a goddamned mess.”

  Emboldened by the exhaustion she heard in his voice, Jade straightened her leg under the table and tapped his foot with hers in comfort. The same way he’d done for her weeks ago at his parent’s house.

  “Isn’t this why you became a homicide detective?” she murmured quietly, letting her foot rest atop his. “To figure out how to solve all the ‘goddamned messes’ in the world?”

  He shook his head. “Not the world. Just N’Orleans.”

  Way to put a foot in it, Jade. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “I tried the world thing, once, back when I was a marine.”

  And now she was feeling even more oafish, more verbally incompetent, than she had moments earlier. Struggling to find something worthy to say, she blurted, “I remember you saying you were a marine.”

  Yes, Jade, point out the obvious, why don’t you?

  She tried again. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”

  You are not getting any better at this.

  The half-smile Nathan gave her barely lifted his lips. “War usually isn’t easy.”

  “You’re right,” she stammered, “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Because you’re trying to understand something that you couldn’t possibly.”

  The words weren’t sharply spoken. If anything, they were like a wisp of a cool breeze across the skin, there but hardly felt. Strangely, she didn’t think he’d meant for them to be an insult . . . just the way she hadn’t meant to totally stumble over her words and come off sounding like an idiot.

  “But to answer your question, the world is full of deaths. I did my fair share of trying to keep people alive, both my brothers and the locals in Iraq.” He dropped his gaze to the table, and snagged a cold fry from the basket. He dunked it in the ketchup, stared at it, and then dropped it on his plate. “I’ve got what people would call a hero complex.”

  Before she could think better of it, she quipped, “Isn’t the first step to recovery admittance?”

  “Guess so,” he said evenly with a roll of his big shoulders. “The one time I went to a therapist he told me that part of recovery was fixing your addiction on something else.”

  Jade furrowed her brow. “Are we talking addiction?”

  “Kinda one and the same for some people, don’t you think?”

  Without waiting for her to respond, he shifted forward and withdrew his ever-ready pack of gum. He tossed it onto the table, then followed it up with a pack of cigarettes still tightly wrapped in plastic.

  “Are you offering?
” She stared at the two packs in confusion. “I don’t smoke.”

  “I didn’t,” he said, using one hand to place the gum pack on top of the Marlboro Reds, “Then I went to the Middle East and realized I was capable of a whole lot more than just smoking cancer sticks.”

  Even though the remaining words were unspoken, she heard them loud and clear. He was responsible for death.

  “You asked me once why I joined the NOPD—do you remember what I told you?”

  At the question, she strained her memory to recall a day that hadn’t occurred all that long ago but felt like eons earlier. His words came back in bits and pieces, and she slid them together into one complete puzzle.

  “You said that you replaced your addiction to the military with an addiction to the NOPD.”

  Chin jerking down in a quick nod, Nathan said, “It wasn’t an addiction to the marines. It was an addiction to death—or, rather, the reverse of death.”

  “Life,” Jade whispered, somewhat stupidly. Of course, life was the only opposite of death. She was on a roll tonight.

  “I obsessed over it, in the only way someone with survivor’s guilt possibly can.”

  Jade’s stomach dropped. “Did you have friends—?”

  “Yes,” he said swiftly, cutting her off before she could travel that path, “Thank God there weren’t more. But even though I was lucky enough to see my brothers go back home to their families, I obsessed over how many of the locals lost their lives. They didn’t deserve what happened to them, having their homes burned in fires or having to escape and go elsewhere with nothing but the clothes on their back.” His gray eyes burned valiant silver. “What sort of life is that? What sort of life leads you to only know fear?”

  Jade thought of Nathan’s childhood, and wondered if he realized how close to his own words he had endured for over a decade. There was a difference, she understood, between living in a home that was unstable and a country that was unstable, but still . . . Had he ever known what it was like to live or had he spent years living in the shadows, behind a façade that wasn’t fully accurate?