Private Passions

by JoAnn Ross

  Once again he was dressed in stark black, giving him the look of a man who spent his life in the shadows. There was not a hint of softness or gentleness in his grimly hewn face. Shaggy black hair curled over his collar.

  “Mr. Falconer?” She thrust out her hand in an assertive gesture. “I’m Desiree Dupree, from—”

  “I know who you are, Ms. Dupree,” he said, brusquely cutting her off. His fingers closed around hers. “I seldom miss a broadcast. You’re very good at what you do.”

  His voice was as sultry as a steamy New Orleans summer. As he held her hand just a heartbeat too long, those deep tones stirred unwilling, reckless emotions.

  She retrieved her hand. “Thank you. I suppose this is where I tell you that you’re very good at what you do. You hooked me with Jazzman’s Blues, and each book gets more riveting.”

  At her words, a shadow moved across his face like a cloud across the moon. “That’s kind of you to say.”

  Silence descended.

  “Well, now that we’ve exchanged the obligatory professional compliments, I suppose I should tell you why I’ve come.”

  She was smaller than she appeared on television, Roman realized, looking down at her. And far more delicate. Her hair, a dazzling, sunlit copper on the screen, was darker in real life, more of a rich, deep bronze.

  “You’re not here for a celebrity interview?”

  She frowned at his blatant sarcasm. “I don’t do puff pieces.”

  His lips curved in a strangely self-mocking, ironic smile. “Good for you. The news has gotten much too soft in recent years. It’s encouraging to meet a reporter who isn’t willing to cave in to ratings and popular trends.”

  When she didn’t respond to that backhanded compliment, he rubbed his unshaved jaw. “Well, if you’re not here to interview me about my writing, I suppose you want to ask me what I was doing at St. Louis Cemetery last night.”

  “Actually, I’m talking with many of the people who were there last night.” That was the truth. So far as it went.

  “But you’re especially interested in me. Because I’m the one who seemed most out of place.”

  She could not deny it. “Yes.”

  Roman shrugged again. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  He knew that talking with anyone—especially a reporter—about what had happened was dangerous. But there was something about Desiree that had him thinking the risk might be worth it.

  Besides, he remembered hearing that she’d been involved with Michael O’Malley, the detective assigned to the French Quarter crimes. If the two of them were still close, it was conceivable that O’Malley, whom Roman recalled having been a driven, never-say-die detective, might share with his former lover some of the details regarding the crimes.

  Roman had never enjoyed using people, not even in his days as a prosecutor, when he could at least justify his behavior as protecting innocent people by putting the bad guys behind bars.

  But like it or not, it was imperative that he discover what Desiree Dupree—and the police—knew.

  Before she could respond, a carriage carrying tourists from Jackson Square pulled up in front of the house. In a jaunty display of holiday spirit, both driver and mule were wearing bright red Santa Claus hats. The tourists—a wife, husband and three kids—stared at Desiree and Roman as the driver delivered his memorized spiel.

  “Does this happen often?” Desiree asked in a low voice.

  “Several times a day.”

  She felt strangely vulnerable. It was, she realized, the same way she’d felt during the long-ago custody battle between her aunt and her grandmother, when she’d arrived at the courthouse with the social workers and had been forced to run the gauntlet of reporters. There were times Desiree found it ironic that she’d chosen the same profession as those former tormentors, even though she’d always refused to succumb to pack behavior.

  While she was accustomed to talking to thousands of viewers every night on television, and had grown used to fans stopping her on the street and in restaurants, she couldn’t imagine tour guides bringing people by her house.

  “I suppose a lack of privacy goes with being a bestselling writer.”

  “I suppose it does,” he agreed mildly. “However, in my case, it’s the house that’s on the tour, not me.”

  “The house?”

  “Like so many other homes in this city, it’s supposedly haunted.” He waited a heartbeat of a second before adding, “By a slave who was found murdered one Christmas morning.”

  When he paused again, Desiree had the distinct impression that Roman was purposefully baiting her.

  He was.

  “She was young and beautiful. She’d been brutally raped, her slender throat slit from one pretty ear to the other.”

  His eyes held Desiree’s with the steely strength of his masculine will. “Later they found six more young women buried in the back garden. All of them had been raped. Then killed in exactly the same way.”

  Roman watched the horrible recognition shiver through her. “Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?” he asked.

  If it weren’t for the pain in those mocking eyes, Desiree would have thought he was enjoying himself by shocking her this way. “Is it?” she asked. “A coincidence?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, his gaze slid back to the carriage, which had yet to move. They could both hear the whir of the father’s video camera.

  “We’ll have more privacy inside,” he suggested. He moved aside. “Why don’t you come into my parlor?”

  Watching him carefully, she lifted her chin in a mute challenge of her own. “Said the spider to the fly?”

  The lady had guts, Roman decided. His teeth flashed in another mocking, humorless smile. “Exactly.”

  The wild idea that Roman Falconer might actually be the man who’d raped pretty young Mary Bretton ricocheted through Desiree’s mind.

  Telling herself that she was being fanciful again, that the author of all those slasher thrillers was merely having some type of sick fun at her expense, she tossed her head, straightened her spine and walked resolutely through the arched doorway of Roman’s haunted house.

  Inviting the newswoman into his home had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. One Roman regretted the moment she crossed the threshold.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asked, playing the role of the congenial host as he tried to figure out what to do with her. “Some coffee? Or I think I have some tea bags in the cupboard.”

  He didn’t mention that the tea had been left by a former lover he’d met while researching his current book. A rookie beat cop assigned to the Quarter, Janet Osborne had introduced him to several teenage prostitutes—including each and every one of the rape victims. Roman wondered how long it would be before O’Malley made the connection.

  The shutters guarding his eyes had, if possible, deepened. That steady, unblinking gaze made Desiree’s mouth go dry. “I’d love a glass of water.”

  “Coming right up.” He gestured toward a nearby doorway. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”

  Curious about what kind of man would spend his life delving into the dark corners of people’s minds, Desiree went into the room, which at one time had undoubtedly been a formal parlor and was now obviously a library.

  Mythological figures created in delicate bas-relief decorated the high plaster ceilings. It had been awhile since anyone had cleaned the room. A layer of dust had settled over the antique tables and rolltop desk, and stacks of newspapers were piled up on what appeared to be a very expensive oriental carpet.

  Three walls were lined with bookcases, the shelves filled with an eclectic blend of nonfiction and fiction. There was, as she would have expected given his past profession as a prosecutor, an expensive, leather-bound set of law books, as well as numerous texts on forensics and investigative techniques. Telephone books from around the country took up nearly an entire wall, along with several texts on local architecture and customs.


  A pair of French doors on the far wall opened out onto a courtyard that was overrun with a virtual jungle of subtropical plants. In the center of the tangled, unkempt garden stood a crumbling fountain, home to a trio of comely nymphs who appeared to be dancing in the green, algae-choked water.

  If Roman was to be believed, this was the same spot where a previous occupant of the house had buried six young women he’d raped, then subsequently murdered. When that thought proved too disturbing to contemplate after last night’s vicious crime, Desiree returned her idle attention to the bookcase beside one of the doors.

  And that’s when she saw it.

  Its thin red spine was barely noticeable, hidden as it was between a copy of a latest bestseller and a former president’s autobiography.

  Private Passions was a small volume of erotic short stories first published in paperback by an alternative press located in San Francisco. When the book garnered unexpectedly high sales, rights were sold to a New York publisher, who reissued the slim text in hardcover. Response to the stories had proved overwhelming.

  One tale in particular—”Scarlet Ribbons”—drew a remarkable number of frank letters from female readers relieved to discover they weren’t alone in indulging, during their most private moments, in a secret, age-old rape-bondage fantasy.

  Indeed, so many women wrote to the publisher demanding more such stories that the anonymous author—known only as Mirielle—had gone on to write a sequel entitled Fears and Fantasies. Published this past July, it was already in its fifth printing.

  Desiree took the slender book from the shelf, but did not open it. She was more than a little familiar with the sensual stories. She should be, having written them.

  Although most of the fan letters the publisher had forwarded had been from women, enough had been written by men to reveal that the appeal of erotica written from a woman’s point of view went beyond female readership. Still, finding her book—which was incredibly personal to her—in the private library of a man whose work she was currently reading seemed more than coincidental.

  Desiree’s first encounter with erotic literature had been when she’d run across a rare collection of Victorian erotica stashed away in a dusty corner of a used bookstore on Decatur. The stories, written over a century ago, had stimulated sensual fantasies she’d never known were lurking in her subconscious.

  When she wrote a few of them down for her own amusement, it was as if a dam had burst. Once set free, her imagination created more and more erotic tales—stories she never considered trying to get published. Until the day she covered a demonstration outside the home of a local author known for writing erotic literature.

  The parade of placard-carrying protestors, accusing the writer of all sorts of heinous crimes and warning her of hellfire and brimstone, had been topped off with a symbolic book burning that had gotten the leader of the radical religious group arrested and had made for very good television.

  No fan of censorship, Desiree had interviewed the writer on the following night’s newscast. Later, over coffee after Sugar had packed up his minicam and left, Desiree had admitted to having written a few erotic stories herself. When the author gave her the name of a small publishing house in San Francisco, Desiree assured her the stories had not been written for publication. That was when the slender brunette, who certainly did not look like the pornographer her detractors were calling her, had reminded Desiree of how much pleasure she’d derived from the stories she’d read. Perhaps others would receive the same pleasure from hers, she’d suggested.

  So Desiree had typed them up and sent them off as a lark, and had been stunned when the acceptance phone call came six weeks later. And now, although she’d never planned for it to happen, she’d become a popular—albeit anonymous—writer of erotic fiction.

  Not wanting to be caught with this particular book in her hand, Desiree replaced it on the shelf and sat down in a fancifully carved antique hunt chair across the room.

  A moment later Roman returned with a tall tumbler in his hand.

  Her scent, which hit him the instant he walked into the library, was every bit as enticing as Roman suspected this woman he invited into his bedroom every weekday night through his television screen to be.

  “I seem to have run out of ice cubes.”

  Her intelligent topaz eyes were thickly lashed and home to gold facets that radiated outward like the rays of the sun. He wondered why he’d never noticed her eyelashes before and decided that the intense glare of the studio lights undoubtedly overwhelmed them. A scattering of freckles, also undetectable on television, were sprinkled across her cheekbones and the bridge of her slender nose. Her complexion was the true, almost-translucent ivory of a natural redhead.

  Her mouth was wide and mobile, her painted lips as red as ripe berries. The way they’d parted on a surprised gasp when he’d first opened the door had made him—a man who rarely gave in to impulse—want to taste them to see if they were as sweet and succulent as they appeared.

  “I apologize for not being a better-prepared host,” he said instead.

  “This will be fine.” Unnerved by the way his gaze had settled on her mouth, she took a sip.

  Although the library was comfortably spacious, the man literally overwhelmed it with his subtly dangerous masculinity. Seeking something—anything—to say, Desiree dragged her gaze from his and glanced up at the intricately carved woodwork.

  “This is a marvelous house,” she said honestly, deciding to overlook the layer of dust, the copies of the Times Picayune piled up on the carpet and the overgrown garden that could easily be cleaned up with a few days’ hard work. “I can see why you bought it. Despite the alleged ghost.”

  “The ghost was not a liability. On the contrary, I found it one of the more appealing selling points. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been so much as a blood-curdling scream or a rattling chain since I moved in.”

  She thought about the story he’d told her, made the inevitable comparison between the victims of one of the previous owners of this house and the girl last night and shivered. “You find rape and murder appealing?”

  “Not appealing,” he corrected. “But most people have a primal attraction to violence.”

  Desiree frowned, thinking back on the crowd that had gathered last night. “That’s not a very comforting idea.”

  “Not comforting, perhaps. But true. How else would you explain the success of Rambo movies, and all the other so-called male adventure films they spawned?”

  “Those movies are geared solely to male adolescent fantasies.”

  “Granted.” He smiled in a way that left her feeling uneasy. Almost set up. “But surely you’re not saying that women don’t also fantasize about violence?”

  “As a rule, I don’t think the average woman fantasizes blowing up buildings.”

  “That’s probably just as well,” he decided. “But although I’m no expert in the workings of the female mind, I’ll bet more than one woman has incorporated a bit of controlled violence into her sexual fantasies.”

  Currently working on her third book, entitled Forbidden Fantasies, Desiree found herself on suddenly shaky ground. Her royalty statements were proof that women’s fantasies were a great deal more uncivilized than the men in their lives might suspect.

  When she felt her emotional side responding to Roman’s deep, dark look, she knew it was time to change the subject. “As fascinating a topic as this is becoming, I’m afraid I’m due at the station for a staff meeting soon,” she said, briskly returning the conversation to her reason for having come here in the first place. “Could we please discuss last night?”

  “Of course.” Behaving like a man who had nothing to hide, Roman sat down across from her, linked his fingers behind his dark head, spread his long legs out in front of him and said, “Ask away.”

  4

  DESIREE TOOK a notebook from her leather shoulder bag and crossed her legs, making Roman wish she’d chosen to wear a skirt instead of those charcoal gray
flannel slacks. The brief, unbidden charge of sexual interest provided a welcome respite from the dark thoughts he’d been inflicted with lately.

  Noticing a beautiful woman’s legs was a perfectly normal male reaction. Perhaps he hadn’t gone completely over the edge.

  Yet.

  Desiree saw the flash of attraction in his eyes and felt a responding twinge. She’d been comfortably celibate for months. This was not the time, she scolded herself firmly, for a flare-up of hormones.

  “Why don’t we begin by you telling me what you were doing at the cemetery?” she suggested.

  “I was taking a walk. When I saw the patrol cars, I decided to wander over and see what all the commotion was about.”

  “Do you always take walks in the middle of the night?”

  “Sometimes, when I’m working on a book and the words stop flowing.” His eyes returned to hers and lingered. “Do you always smell so damn good?”

  Desiree found the slanted half smile that had replaced his usual remote glower distractingly appealing. Reminding herself that she’d come here for answers, she refused to surrender what little control she had of the situation. “I believe I’m the one asking the questions.”

  “Point taken,” Roman said agreeably.

  “So you arrived after the police?”

  “Asked and answered,” he responded in the courtroom jargon that reminded her he was more than a little familiar with interrogation techniques. “I already said I was drawn to the cemetery by the police cars.”

  “So you did. I suppose that also means you didn’t see anyone leaving the scene of the crime?”

  “If I were a witness to a crime, Ms. Dupree, I would have probably made a fool of myself by trying to apprehend the perpetrator. At the very least I would have called 911 and stayed with the young woman until the police arrived. You certainly wouldn’t have had to track me down.”

  “Yet when the police did arrive at the scene you didn’t stay.”