The NOLA Heart Novels (Complete Series)

by Maria Luis

  And he’d never been all that good at turning a blind eye to someone in need.

  Twisting his frame, he stared down at the woman. Mid-twenties, probably. Green eyes. Stubborn chin. A cocky smile that grew wider the longer she held his gaze. Cute but not his type.

  That’s because you only have one type and that type is—

  “You want to talk about it?” he asked gruffly.

  She blinked up at him. “Huh?”

  Feeling a little awkward, Julian shifted his weight. “You said you were feelin’ down.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I didn’t know if you needed to talk. You know, about whatever’s upsetting you.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Twenty-two steps.

  That’s all it’d take for him to make a quick exit. Hell, with twenty-six, he could even swing by table twelve and steal Sawyer away from speed date round number who-the-hell-cares.

  Even from here there was no missing the way she pursed her burgundy-painted lips and slung “get me out of here” looks in his direction every time she made a point to tuck her dark hair behind one ear. She’d been at it for the last hour and some change, and as much as he wanted to play knight in shining armor to her damsel in distress, Sawyer LeBlanc was no damsel.

  It’d been her idea to come here tonight.

  Her idea to swipe on that lipstick and her idea to slip on a pair of stilettos that landed her an extra four inches. She didn’t even like wearing high heels.

  Barefoot or bust, that’d been her motto for as long as he could remember. Back when they’d first met, she’d tipsily hooked her hands around his neck, balanced her bare feet on the tops of his tennis shoes, and announced, “Jack never would have needed Rose to move over if he had these floatation devices to keep him alive.”

  He should have felt insulted.

  He should have nudged her away.

  But he’d laughed, deep and guttural and freely, his chest filling with a warmth he hadn’t recognized, not then.

  Feeling his heart give an unsettled thump, Julian set down his beer. Maybe Sawyer wasn’t a damsel in distress, but he was done with the night and he was her ride. Whether she liked it or not, she had about two minutes before he dragged her out of this bar.

  Five, if the blonde proved tricky to escape.

  “Listen,” he said evenly, “I hope you get through . . . whatever’s bothering you, but I have to—”

  “My vagina is lonely.”

  Oh, hell.

  Abort.

  As if anticipating his need to get the hell out of Dodge, her hand clamped down on his forearm. “And you have really pretty eyes,” she whispered, swaying a little in the non-existent breeze. “Has anyone mentioned that before? They’re just so blue.” She closed one eye, then leaned forward to peer up at him. “Yeah, the bluest of the blues. Like cotton candy blue. Did I mention that my vagina is lonely?”

  Only two times and counting.

  I’m going to kill her.

  And if not kill Sawyer, then at least make her pay. No tacos for the next three Taco Tuesdays. No watching re-runs of Friends, just because it made her happy. Fuck, depending on what it might take to extricate himself from the blonde’s taloned grip, there was a good chance Sawyer would be looking at an entire year without—

  “Do you feel lonely?” The blonde dropped her gaze to his crotch. “You know, down there?”

  If anything, Julian was pretty sure his cock just shriveled in terror. Because yeah, after facing off against World’s Loneliest Vagina? It was dead, which was saying a lot considering the only workout it’d gotten in the last four years were routine shakedowns with his right fist.

  Wrapping his fingers around her wrist, he gave a sharp tug. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m not that lonely.” He totally was.

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  Fighting the urge to look again at table twelve, he grimaced. “No.”

  “A dog?”

  He thought of Sassy, his parents’ Great Dane, who was defeating world-wide records and still living his best life at the ripe old age of nine. But, technically, Sassy wasn’t his, so . . . “No.”

  “Goldfish?”

  His eyes went wide. “What?”

  “Do you have any goldfish? I read a study that commitment-phobe men should overcome their fear by buying goldfish. You don’t have to do much to keep them alive, y’know? Easy maintenance.” She fluttered her lashes. “I can be your goldfish . . . what was your name again?”

  Since Julian couldn’t think of anything worse than this woman looking him up online, he answered, “Luke.”

  “Luke, that is such a nice name. It’s perfect for you!”

  It really would be—if he was an inch shorter, had brown hair instead of blond, and was a good twenty years older.

  Without waiting for her to ask him anything else—or, hell, to straight up pounce and take his head off like a Venus flytrap—Julian made his escape with a blinding smile that he slung over his shoulder like a rock springing from a sling shot.

  “Wait!” she cried. “Be my goldfish!”

  Oh yeah, Sawyer was going to pay.

  2

  Sawyer LeBlanc really hated her job.

  Working for Good Morning, New Orleans was supposed to have been the gift that kept on giving, a gig that should have offered her the chance to kill two birds with one stone.

  The first bird: working for a reputable newspaper that could open doors to having her own weekly column. She wanted to talk about the meaning of life and love and loss and grief. She wanted New Orleanians to sit down at their computer, or their kitchen table, and reads the words that she felt so desperately in her soul. Words that she knew, deep down, could make a difference.

  The second bird: Good Morning, New Orleans was her ticket into the city. She was Boston born and bred, but after graduating from Boston College a few months ago, she’d been determined to move south.

  With Julian O’Connor.

  Or, perhaps more accurately, for Julian O’Connor.

  The good news: Good Morning, New Orleans hired her.

  The bad news: the editor had hired her to write their dating column, since the former columnist recently got hitched.

  It’d taken Sawyer less than two months on the job to realize that life as a dating advice columnist could only be described as hell personified.

  She had to physically tuck a hand under her jaw to keep herself from yawning.

  “So, there I was, you know,” said date number eight of the evening, “convinced that I was about to be fired by my boss. I’m groping around, right? Trying to find my underwear or whatever, and my co-worker is looking at me like she’s just been welcomed into heaven—orgasms, you know—when . . .”

  Sawyer stared at her empty wine glass, wishing she could snap her fingers and have another appear out of thin air. Suffering through tonight without wine was a travesty of the first order, and she’d made the amateur move of drinking her glass too fast.

  After round one, there’d been no time to go for a refill.

  Since Maurice—was his name Maurice? She couldn’t remember—seemed content to talk to himself, she cast her gaze past table thirteen to search for familiar broad shoulders.

  No matter the room, Jules was always the tallest.

  The tallest and also the—

  A little shock of anticipation skated down her spine when she spotted him not at the bar, where he’d been for the last hour, but headed her way. When they’d first met, she’d likened him to a Viking, and it was the case now more than ever before.

  Julian was tall and broad with a shock of platinum blond hair always in need of taming. The fact that he spent his days sitting behind a desk never seemed to make a difference, either. His skin was always golden and his body . . .

  Sawyer swallowed.

  That lean, tight body cut through the arrangement of high-top tables, his fingers lifting to his shirt collar. Deftly, he undid the top two buttons, like the
heat in the bar was threatening to suffocate him. But the loosened collar of his black dress shirt only managed to turn her mouth dry when it revealed the hollow of his throat and another swarth of golden skin.

  She reached for her wine glass, forgetting that it was empty until she was literally guzzling nothing but air.

  Dammit.

  This was what Julian O’Connor did to her. He made her clumsy, he made her smile, and, without even trying, he made her weak in the knees.

  “Want another?” Maurice-not-Maurice asked, wriggling his dark brows. He leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table between them, palm held out in an invitation for her to take. “Or we could somewhere else, somewhere more . . . private. What do you say? Wanna ditch?”

  “She’s not going anywhere I’m not takin’ her.”

  Jules.

  Her gaze drifted from her date to where her best friend stood behind him, like an imposing statue cut from marble. One glance at his blue eyes, though, and she found that they weren’t trained on Maurice but locked on her.

  That wintry stare left no room for argument: they were leaving.

  Thank God.

  If she had to sit through another round of speed dating, she was liable to stab someone.

  “Wait.” Maurice looked from her to Jules. “You’re leaving?”

  “Good luck with your next round,” she said, grabbing her massive purse from the chair and hooking the strap over her shoulder. Stepping next to him, she knuckled him in the shoulder. “Break a leg, Maurice. I believe in you.”

  “Maurice?” he echoed, his brows drawing tight. “My name isn’t Maurice.”

  Huh. She could have sworn he’d said Maurice.

  “Matthew?” she offered.

  “No.”

  “Manning?”

  Beside her, Jules let out a droll, “Please don’t insult Louisiana’s finest like that.”

  She shot him a quick look. “There are other Mannings in the world besides the football-playing kind.”

  The corners of his lips twitched. “Are there? I had no idea.”

  “You would say that, you Saints-loving-fanatic.”

  “Better that than obsessing over a game where you try to score a ball in a tiny hole—”

  Agile as ever, Jules sidestepped her playful punch to his bicep. His handsome face lit with challenge, and before she knew it, he caught her wrist and started pulling her toward the front doors.

  “So you’re aware,” he said, sparing a brief look over his shoulder, “I’m cutting you off from tacos.”

  “Because I refused to let you say that mini golf isn’t a sport?” Sawyer faked a peeved sniff. “If I knew tacos were on the line, I’d take it back.”

  “Would you?”

  “There’s not much I wouldn’t do for tacos, Jules. You know I have an unhealthy addiction.”

  Just before he tugged her over the threshold, a voice shouted, “My name is Bart, dammit!”

  “He looks more like a Maurice,” Jules said idly.

  A bubble of laughter warmed her chest. “Right? I thought so too.”

  “You’ve been wrong before, though.”

  “Are we back to the mini golf argument?”

  “It’s not a real sport.”

  “It is in my world, Mr. O’Connor, and there is a zero-percent chance of you changing my mind.”

  The humidity hit her in the face as soon as they stepped outside, and it was only when she went to push the already frizzing strands out of the way that she realized Jules still clasped her hand in his.

  Her heart galloped in her chest.

  It wasn’t the first time that they’d touched.

  Jeez. Was touched even the right word for what they’d done?

  In the last four years, there’d been random moments that equaled to nothing but somehow felt monumental all the same. Shoulder brushes and hand squeezes and there’d been that one time, when they’d stayed up watching old re-runs of Friends, where his hard thigh had pressed firmly against hers. At the risk of him shifting away, to the other side of the couch, Sawyer hadn’t dared to move a muscle.

  Julian was her best friend. And, maybe, when they’d first met, he’d been only that.

  Somewhere along the way, something had changed.

  The butterflies in her stomach whenever he met her gaze.

  The sweaty palms whenever he stood too close.

  The heat that pulsed between her legs when she climbed into bed each night, in a room separated by the wall bordering his, and wondered, What if?

  What ifs were all kinds of dangerous, but hadn’t she spent her entire life with that one question always on the tip of her tongue? What if her mother hadn’t died when she was just a baby? What if her dad stopped thinking that she was a total failure because she’d opted out of staying in Boston, and taking a job with The Boston Globe, to move halfway across the country because of a guy?

  What if she stopped being such a chicken-shit and just went for it?

  A kiss. A hug that turned into sex. Anything more than this halfway purgatory where she tiptoed around her feelings because the prospect of losing Julian was a harder pill to swallow than not ever having him at all.

  The heat of him swallowed her now, as he let go of her hand and shifted his weight to close in on her left side and keep her away from the open street. Julian might design video games for a living, but he’d inherited his protective instincts from Luke, his police officer stepdad.

  “Tacos aside, did you get everything you needed tonight?” came his low, New Orleans drawl when they hit the crosswalk, their hands jammed into their respective pockets. “You looked . . . busy.”

  “Busy” was one word for what she’d done. You know, if “busy” actually translated to “boring as all hell,” and “boring” was synonymous with “don’t make me ever do this again.”

  Her boss would be pleased, even if Sawyer was already dreading the time it would take to type up tonight’s fiasco. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t pass out from pure boredom. Last time, she’d woken up with the keyboard’s T plastered to her forehead.

  Very classy, if she did say so herself.

  “There was great chardonnay,” she said blithely, focusing on the good, “even though I only managed to drink one glass.” She eyed his lean frame in the city-bathed light, pausing a little too long to admire the hard cut of his stubbled jaw and the flex of his biceps in his dress shirt. “Did you get everything you needed? I saw someone trying to chat you up.”

  “Her vagina was lonely.”

  Sawyer tripped over her stilettos. “What?”

  Holding up his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture, Julian shook his head. “Weirdest come-on I’ve ever heard.” He shot her a small grin that practically screamed trouble. “Put it in your column.”

  So she could actively think about watching someone else hitting on him? Not a chance in hell.

  She flicked her gaze to the sidewalk before them, taking care not to fall into any potholes. In New Orleans, they seemed as notoriously abundant as the beads that tourists threw from the balconies on Bourbon Street.

  Breaking her neck was not how she’d choose to cap off the night.

  “The column is supposed to be about my dating adventures,” she said, “not yours.”

  “Easy enough fix.” His hand landed on the small of her back, leading her toward his parked car. “Your vagina was lonely, which led you to a night of speed dating. Turned out it was a failed endeavor, no thanks to Maurice-turned-Bart.”

  Her vagina was lonely, but still—

  “I reject this idea,” she announced.

  His fingers pressed into her lower spine, the tip of his thumb accidentally slipping under the hem of her shirt to graze bare skin. Sawyer’s breath hitched, just as he said, “I rejected the idea of going in the first place, but you didn’t give me much of a choice.”

  “I thought we could do it together.”

  “There are a lot of other things that I’d rather we do together.
”

  Was she imagining the husky timbre of his voice? The naked want?

  Please, please, please.

  Resolutely, Sawyer kept her gaze locked on Julian’s car, a beat-up Ford that he’d had throughout college. It had made the long drive back to New Orleans countless times, including one last ride two months ago, when she’d called Jules and greeted him with, “I found a job near you.”

  A job. A life. A prospective future.

  For better or worse, New Orleans was now her home because Julian was her home.

  She liked the city well enough. Loved its food and the people and, though it wasn’t her first time meeting them by far, she loved Anna and Luke O’Connor something fierce. Sunday night dinners at their house never failed to make Sawyer just happy. For a few hours every week, she could watch their devotion to each other, and their devotion to Jules. She could bask in their hilarious antics and forget that her childhood had been so empty of laughter and affection and encouragement.

  But the hard truth remained: if Julian weren’t here, Sawyer never would have made the change. She didn’t know if that made her more hopeless or pathetic. Honestly, she didn’t like thinking about it too hard.

  They stopped at the passenger door of his car, and she paused with her hand on the handle. Then cut her gaze to the man standing less than a foot away, his face half-cast in shadow. Where the ambient light hit, his golden skin turned an almost pearlescent white.

  “Take me someplace,” she murmured.

  Leaning against the car, his hip a scant few inches away from her hand, Jules turned his body so that he had her in his full line of sight. “Anywhere?” he asked, dipping his chin in that way he always did when he was listening to everything she wouldn’t say out loud.

  Matching him pose for pose, Sawyer folded her arms over her chest. “Anywhere.”

  “You sick of N’Orleans already, LeBlanc?”

  His soft drawl slid over her, sinking into her veins and heating her cheeks. The idea that she could be sick of this city, that she could be sick of him, was ridiculous. “Definitely not.”