Michael: The Defender

by JoAnn Ross

  “What if I don’t agree?”

  “I suppose we have two choices. You can try to talk your director into firing me—”

  “I already tried that,” she muttered. “Unfortunately, he was outrageously stubborn.”

  “He couldn’t be as stubborn as me. Which brings me to my second option.”

  “And that is?”

  “We can wrestle for it. Two out of three falls.”

  “That’s no fair. You’re stronger.”

  “You called that one right.”

  Surprised that he was actually beginning to enjoy himself, Michael skimmed a finger down the slope of her nose. He’d spent years telling himself that he was over her. Now, although not accustomed to second-guessing himself, he decided that he just might have been wrong.

  Neither of them spoke as they waited for her luggage to arrive, although he did lift a brow when she handed him the baggage stubs.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I suppose I expected more.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “You were expecting, I take it, the glamorous Beverly Hills movie star laden down with designer trunks.”

  “I suppose that’s dose,” he admitted.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  It was his turn to skim a glance over her, an openly masculine appraisal that irrationally made her wish she’d chosen something more glamorous, more sexy, than her usual traveling clothes of black jeans, white long-sleeved cotton shirt and sneakers.

  “On the contrary,” he drawled, his voice as rich as the pralines she’d seen for sale beside the plastic alligators, “I’m not at all disappointed, Lorelei. I always predicted you’d grow up to be a beauty.” His smile was slow and wickedly seductive. “And you did.”

  As she felt herself beginning to drown in his dark blue eyes, alarms sounded. Having always admired Michael’s integrity, she was forced to wonder what had happened to him during their years apart. What kind of man had he grown up to be? she wondered.

  The Michael O’Malley she’d known and loved would never have looked at a woman with lust in his eyes when he had a wife at home. Lorelei felt torn between cold fury and profound disappointment.

  “What about Desiree?” she asked. “Is she beautiful?”

  “Desiree? How do you know about her?”

  “People talk.”

  “Obviously Shayne told your director.”

  “Obviously.” Her voice was ice, her gaze chilly.

  She’d turned as rigid as one of the iron girders on the Huey P. Long Bridge. Lorelei had never been a particularly temperamental teenager—except on those occasions when he’d reluctantly refused to take the sex she’d so enticingly offered. Obviously, Michael thought with regret, her years living the glamorous Tinseltown life had changed her.

  “Now that you bring it up, yeah, Desiree’s beautiful. Inside and out,” he tacked on significantly.

  Now she was forced to wonder what type of woman he thought she was. Did he actually believe all the tabloid hype? Did he think, just because she so often portrayed a woman of loose morals in the movies, she’d actually go to bed with someone else’s husband?

  “You’re a lucky man.”

  Once again her words were tinged with frost. He couldn’t believe she’d actually resent his having been involved with another woman. What the hell had she expected him to do after she’d dumped him? Join an order of Trappist monks and embrace a life of celibacy?

  “I’d say Roman’s the lucky one,” Michael responded after a long pause. He was getting angry, he realized. Her snotty tone had caused a temper he seldom allowed himself to acknowledge to begin to simmer.

  “Roman?”

  “Roman Falconer.”

  “The novelist?”

  “That’s him. He used to be parish prosecutor before he turned writer.” Roman was also one of the few politicians Michael had respected. Even if he had, at one time, seriously considered arresting the guy for murder.

  The baggage carousel finally came to rumbling life with a loud announcement buzz. Ignoring it, Lorelei combed a distracted hand through her hair. Once again Michael caught the glitter of diamonds and wondered if the bracelet had been a gift from a lover.

  “I remember Roman. Actually, he was a neighbor.” As had Desiree Dupree for a very brief time. Her rigid, hard-hearted grandmother had sent her off to boarding school in Europe before the young girl had had time to unpack her suitcases.

  “Oh yeah. I’d forgotten that.” Although he’d spent every Saturday morning mowing the vast Longstreet lawn, Michael had never been invited to the privileged environs on a social basis.

  “I don’t understand,” Lorelei said.

  That made two of them. “Understand what?”

  He was standing over her—hovering over her, actually—making her tilt her head a very long way back to look up at him. He was too close. Too distracting.

  “What does Roman Falconer have to do with your wife?”

  “My wife?” Michael was momentarily baffled. Then the missing pieces clicked into place, like the sevens on all those slot machines that had nearly deafened him in the casino last week. “You thought I was married to Desiree Dupree?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Of course not.” It was his turn to drag a frustrated hand through his hair. “Hell, Lorelei, what kind of guy do you think I am? I wouldn’t tell a woman she was beautiful—even if she was drop-dead gorgeous—if I was married to someone else.”

  Lorelei felt the blood rush to her face. She tried to remember if they had earthquakes in Louisiana, feared they didn’t, but wished for one anyway, to swallow her up along with her embarrassment. When the floor didn’t open up beneath her Keds, she realized there was only one thing to do.

  “It seems I owe you an apology.”

  Since her scent had been driving him crazy since she’d gotten off the plane, Michael decided to make her suffer. Just a little.

  The way he continued to look down at her, with that unreadable, frustratingly neutral expression she suspected was a holdover from his cop days, was beginning to make her nerves hum and her stomach burn. Lorelei considered digging into her purse for the ever ready roll of antacids, but decided there was no way she was going to let him know how strongly he affected her.

  She heard a murmured complaint behind her and without taking her gaze from Michael’s steady one, moved a few inches to the left. As if attached by an invisible cord, Michael moved with her.

  “Well?” She folded her arms across the front of her shirt. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “I thought it was your turn. Weren’t you about to apologize?”

  Her chin jutted out. Her eyes sparked with a temper only this man had ever been able to ignite. They moved again, this time for a young couple who pulled two duffel bags from the carousel.

  “Obviously, Eric was confused.” When his only response was a lifted brow, she ground her teeth, making a silent apology to her parents, who’d spent a fortune on her youthful orthodontia. “He mentioned Desiree Dupree had been at the center of two of your cases.”

  Michael nodded. “He got that part right.” The second time had been his last case as a NOPD major crimes detective.

  “He also said something about the two of you living together.”

  “We did, for a time.” He paused, wondering how much more to tell her. Wondering if she cared. And, more to the point, why it mattered to him that she did. “It didn’t work out.”

  “Oh.” Lorelei had thought she’d been in trouble when she’d exited the jetway and suffered that jolt of feminine awareness. Finding out that he was not married made the man even more dangerous. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was over a long time ago.” It didn’t hurt now because, despite how much he’d truly cared for the sexy newscaster, it hadn’t hurt then. Only one woman had ever possessed the ability to break his heart. And unfortunately, she was standing too damn close for comfort.

  Wanting—needing—to return
to neutral ground, Michael turned toward the rotating carousel. “Are those yours?”

  She dragged her gaze from his shuttered face to the suitcases he was pointing toward. “That’s them.”

  The spell that had made them oblivious to anything but each other had been broken. He retrieved the bags, tucked them both under one arm, and as she walked beside him toward the terminal exit, Lorelei couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or disappointed.

  Although the crew was staying at the Fairmont, Michael had arranged for Lorelei to register under an assumed name at the Whitfield Palace Hotel.

  “I doubt even you can keep my arrival in the city a secret,” she said as they took the private VIP elevator to the top floor penthouse suite.

  “That’d probably be impossible,” he agreed. “But at least this way, once the filming stops at the end of the day, we’ve got you isolated from the rest of the crew.”

  “Are you suggesting my stalker could be someone I know? Someone I actually work with?” She was as shocked by the idea now as she’d been when Detective Gerard had first suggested it.

  “Could be.” He stopped watching the numbers flash above the door and looked down at her. “I’m surprised Gerard didn’t bring it up.”

  “He did,” she admitted reluctantly. “But I assured him that he was wrong.”

  “And he dropped it?”

  “He didn’t share his investigation with me, but I received the impression that he was willing to trust my instincts.”

  “Somehow I doubt that. I’d guess that since he’s obviously got a heavy caseload, it was easier just to hand you over to me.”

  “My case,” she reminded him archly, bristling as he’d expected. “Nobody hands me over to anyone.”

  “Point taken.” He would not, Michael vowed, allow either her seductive scent or her prickly independence to stop him from doing his job. “But since more than a few men working on this project fit a suspect profile, I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I don’t believe this.” She put her hands on her hips and stared up at him. “Name one.”

  “I can do better than that. But I suppose we can start with John Nelson.”

  “John?”

  “As director of photography, the guy has the technical know-how to set up that rig in your bedroom.”

  “He might have the knowledge. But he’d never do it. Besides, John would be the last person on the crew to be interested in me in that way. He just happens to be gay.”

  Michael did not appear to be surprised by that little newsflash. “He also has an unfortunate addiction to playing the horses at Hollywood Park and is in debt up to his eyeballs to his bookies.”

  Lorelei had known about the gambling; it would have been impossible not to notice the tout sheets and phone calls. “Even if he is in financial difficulty, what would that have to do with me?”

  “How much do you think the tabloid rags—or better yet some porno production company—would pay for film of you in the buff?”

  She shuddered, felt the headache hum and the acid burn and giving up all pretense of cool composure, pulled the roll of Turns from her purse and chewed two of them. Then a third for extra measure.

  “He’d never do that,” she insisted. “We’re friends. In fact, he even offered to let me stay with him last winter after my house was flooded by a storm.”

  He shrugged. “It would have been easier to get the shots in his own place.”

  Her response to that was an earthy curse that never would have escaped the teenage Lorelei’s lips. The elevator dinged as it reached the top floor.

  “That still doesn’t explain why he’d suddenly turn stalker.”

  Michael didn’t answer, frustrating her further. “I don’t like this,” she muttered as the steel doors slid open.

  “That makes two of us.”

  The doors opened directly on to a marble-floored foyer. The walls were draped in a muted ivory-striped silk, the frame on the oversize mirror was tastefully gilded without being overly ornate, the furniture was neoclassical. As she stepped out of the elevator, Lorelei was surrounded by the heady fragrance of peach roses, pink gladioli, and white lilies.

  “I was referring to you investigating my friends.”

  He shrugged as he pulled the electronic key out of his jacket pocket and inserted it into the slot on the door at the far end of the foyer. “I would have checked out your enemies, but amazingly, you don’t seem to have any.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  Once again her sharp tone slid right off him like August rain off a duck’s back. “Except, of course, the guy who’s been stalking you.” He opened the door, stepped back, and gestured her into the suite. “We’ll discuss the rest of the crew over a late supper.”

  “I don’t normally eat supper.”

  “You should. As terrific as you look, you could use a bit more meat on your bones. However,” he continued, ignoring her sharp, angry intake of breath, “I do, as a rule, eat supper and since I spent an hour waiting for your delayed flight to arrive, I’m hungry enough to eat a gator.”

  “Perhaps the chef will run out and capture one for you,” she said with feigned sweetness.

  “That’s an idea,” he said easily. “But I’m willing to settle for a double cheeseburger. Despite its five-star billing, the Whitfield has the best burgers in town. And the fries are nearly as good as the ones you can get at The Port of Call.”

  “I don’t eat meat any longer.” She didn’t add that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d indulged in a French fry. It wasn’t always easy being a sex goddess.

  “Figures.” He shrugged. “I guess you can just sip mineral water or champagne, or whatever movie stars drink while I eat, then.”

  His words brought her low seethe to a hot simmer, and Lorelei was about to let Michael know, in no uncertain terms, exactly how annoying she found his chauvinistic behavior, when his next words stopped her in her tracks.

  “And while we’re at it, you can give me the names of all the guys you’ve slept with in the past six months.”

  4

  BEFORE LORELEI COULD destroy Michael with a few well-chosen words, a faintly familiar man stood up from a brocade couch, his smile warm and far more welcoming than any she’d received from Michael thus far.

  “Hello, angel.” Without asking permission, Shayne wrapped his arms around her. “It’s about time you decided to come back from Lotus Land.”

  Recognition immediately dawned. “Hello, Shayne.” His warm hug was highly unprofessional, but managed, just barely, to ease a bit of her irritation. “It’s good to be back.” She smiled up at him, unsurprised that the devil-may-care boy she remembered had grown up to be a devastatingly handsome man. “At least it was, until Michael decided to give me the third degree.”

  Shayne laughed and skimmed a hand down her cheek. Although the gesture, like the hug, was more than a little intimate, Lorelei couldn’t help noticing his touch didn’t affect her in the same way his brother’s had.

  “That’s his specialty. When I first showed up back in town, he pointed a gun on me.”

  “Perhaps that had something to do with my catching you breaking into my building with a gun in your hand,” Michael suggested dryly.

  Although he believed Shayne’s assertion that he’d given up his playboy ways when he’d fallen in love with Bliss Fortune, Michael damn well didn’t like the sight of Lorelei wrapped in his brother’s arms. Nor did he like the dazzling smile she was tossing back up at Shayne.

  “Really?” Lorelei amazed and irritated Michael by laughing at that. Michael had yet to find a single humorous thing about the incident that could have ended up getting them both killed. “You always were incorrigible.”

  Michael felt like punching Shayne when he laughed right along with her. There was none of the tension between the two of them he’d felt earlier in the airport or during the nearly silent, twenty-minute drive to the hotel. It was as if the intervening years had never happen
ed, as if they were kids again, hanging out on a lazy summer afternoon.

  “It’s a long story,” Shayne said.

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. And I can’t wait to hear all about it. Although I doubt if I’ll believe a word, since you were always the worst liar in the O’Malley family. Probably the entire state of Louisiana.” She laughed again and shook her head. “And now you and Michael are partners. Amazing.”

  “There are days when I can hardly believe it myself,” Shayne assured her. “But it’s true.” His boyish grin sparkled in the pale blue eyes that swept admiringly over her uplifted face. “You know, I thought I was giving up the high life when I came back to Louisiana. Who could have imagined I’d get lucky enough to guard the most gorgeous woman in Hollywood?”

  Her lips turned down in a mock moue. “Michael thinks I’m too skinny.”

  Lorelei’s complaint invited his practiced male gaze to zero in for a longer, more critical look. “I sure don’t see any grounds for complaint.”

  “Thank you.” She shot a victorious look over her shoulder at Michael. “He also wants a list of all my lovers.”

  “Ouch.” Shayne looked at Michael with surprise.

  “You don’t pull any punches, do you, big brother?”

  “In case the two of you have forgotten, this isn’t a social visit. We’ve been hired to protect Lorelei. Not feed her feminine ego, which undoubtedly gets enough strokes as it is from adoring fans.”

  Shayne cringed at the gritty words and tone while Lorelei began to simmer anew. Promising to meet them after tomorrow morning’s shoot in Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, he gave Lorelei another hug and left the suite.

  Once again an uncomfortable silence settled over Lorelei and Michael. Refusing to be intimidated, Lorelei was the first to break it.

  “Didn’t you say something about eating a gator? Or a cow?” She waded through the thick carpeting to the phone, plucked the receiver from the cradle and held it out to him. Her smile, which had bestowed such warmth and pleasure on Shayne, was blatantly feigned. “Perhaps you’ll be in a better mood once you’ve had that cheeseburger.”