Private Passions

by JoAnn Ross

  “Mr. Beauvier? Is that you?”

  “It’s me.” He exchanged a frustrated look with Desiree, who merely smiled and shrugged. “Who were you trying to reach this time?”

  “You. Well, technically, I was trying to call your office.” There was a pause. “The newsroom told me that Ms. Dupree is in there.”

  “She’s sitting right here,” he confirmed.

  “I’ve got a call for her. I think it’s that detective again.”

  He picked up the receiver and handed it to Desiree.

  “Look, O’Malley,” she began with a frustrated sigh, “I know you’re mad, but—”

  “I saw your report this morning,” a deep, husky voice that carried the unmistakable cadence of the bayou interrupted. “You are not only an extremely beautiful woman, Ms. Dupree, you’re very talented, as well.”

  There was something about his voice. Something vaguely sinister. “Who is this?” Desiree demanded.

  “That’s not important. What is important is that I want you to know I appreciate your offer.”

  “Offer?”

  She rubbed her suddenly throbbing temple and turned toward the glass window that looked out over the newsroom. There, on her desk, the phone O’Malley’s detectives had tapped sat idle. Damn! How could she have made such a stupid mistake? Of course, the regular receptionist would have remembered to route all calls to her private line.

  “Your generous invitation to accompany me to the police station, of course. So those thugs wouldn’t harm me.”

  He didn’t sound like a crazed killer, she realized as she madly scribbled a note for Adrian to pick up an extension.

  “Are you saying you’re the French Quarter rapist?” That was all it took to send the producer racing from the room. She watched as he stopped at her desk and carefully picked up the receiver.

  “Of course. Were you expecting Charles Manson?” He laughed at his own feeble joke.

  “You know,” she said with a great deal more aplomb than she was feeling, “you aren’t the first person to confess to a crime you didn’t commit. How do I know you’re really him?”

  “Ah, this is where you want me to tell you something private. Something only the rapist would know.”

  “That would help prove your authenticity.”

  “How about the ribbons? The scarlet ribbons. Such a pretty color, don’t you think?” His voice dropped even lower and turned unnervingly intimate. It was a cross between a purr and a growl, and it made her flesh crawl. “And appropriate for the season, being so festive.”

  “That’s a rather ironic thing for you to say,” she couldn’t help replying. “Killing a girl in a Santa Claus-helper suit wasn’t exactly festive.”

  “That was a mistake.” She heard a flare of temper, which he immediately controlled. “She shouldn’t have fought so hard. A little resistance adds spice to the encounter—” he paused and sighed loudly “—but she should not have fought so hard.”

  Desiree closed her eyes in pain as she thought about the young girl’s last, tragic moments of life. “Look, we really do have to talk.” She was determined to do whatever she could to get this dangerous, psychotic man off the streets.

  “And we will,” he agreed, his tone once again turning smooth and silky. It was a voice of a man accustomed to charming women. It was also, she reminded herself, the voice of a man who killed them. “But not right now. Not when there’s a very good chance that O’Malley has tapped this line. Goodbye, Ms. Dupree. Until next time, Joyeux Noël.”

  “Wait—”

  There was a click. Then the steady drone of a dial tone.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” Desiree was on her feet, pacing the floor, her mind whirling as she chastised herself for having picked up the wrong line and, even worse, let him get away without her having a clue as to his identity.

  Her producer was not nearly so demonstrative. “Well,” he said in an accent similar to the one belonging to her caller, “looks as if you’ve got tonight’s lead.”

  Desiree was exhausted and more than a little cranky when she finally arrived home after the late newscast. Unsurprisingly, O’Malley had not been at all thrilled by the news that she’d spoken with the caller on an untapped line. The way he’d grilled her—someone he had once professed to love—seemingly for hours made her wonder what he was like when interrogating murderers.

  Which her caller was, she reminded herself as she pulled her car into her driveway. As wrapped up in her news story as she was, she couldn’t forget that a serial rapist and murderer had singled her out for attention.

  “Not that O’Malley would let me forget,” she muttered as she cast a glance into the rearview mirror and spotted her shadow pulling the sedan into his regular spot across the street. A street that was especially dark due to the streetlight in front of her house having obviously been broken since last night.

  As she climbed out of her car, she saw a man emerge from the shadows toward her. Even as fear skimmed up her spine she heard the door on the unmarked patrol car open. A moment later, she recognized the familiar face.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I brought you a tree,” Roman said, as if there was nothing at all unusual in the gesture.

  “A tree?”

  “A Christmas tree.”

  “Oh.” She glanced past him, at his car, recognizing the shadowy shape that had been tied to the top. The cop was now less than five feet away, his hand beneath his leather jacket.

  “It’s all right, Officer,” she assured him. “It’s not the man you’re looking for.”

  “Are you certain?” He glanced at the black Porsche, which was almost swallowed by the night, as he pulled out his police-issue 9 mm pistol. “The car’s the same as the one on the APB.”

  “Nevertheless, Mr. Falconer is a friend of mine.” That wasn’t precisely true. The chemistry they’d experienced from the beginning had little to do with friendship. Still, Desiree considered, he had made her tea last night. And covered her with a quilt when she’d fallen asleep.

  “Mr. Falconer?” The cop came closer. “Hey, it is you.” As Desiree watched, he visibly relaxed his rigid, on-duty stance and returned the ugly black pistol to its shoulder holster beneath his jacket. “You’re right about it being okay,” he told Desiree. “Mr. Falconer used to be one of us.”

  With that recommendation, he turned and walked back to the car.

  “It’s nice to be remembered,” Roman murmured.

  “A district attorney with a ninety-seven percent conviction rate is bound to have friends at the cop shop.”

  “Sounds as if you’ve been checking up on me.” Roman wondered if her interest had been personal or professional.

  “It’s my job to check up on people,” she reminded him as she turned and began walking toward her front door.

  “Sounds good to me.” His smile was a friendly slash of white, with none of its usual sardonic overtones. “So, how about the tree?”

  Growing up with her grandmother had taught Desiree that no gift ever came without strings. “Why on earth would you bring me a Christmas tree?”

  “Because unless you’ve gone shopping since last night, you don’t have one.”

  “You don’t, either.” Or he hadn’t, when she’d been at his house. And from the gloomy mood that had hung over the place like a shroud, she wouldn’t have expected him to.

  “I figured you might let me share yours.”

  His tone was unrelentingly and uncharacteristically upbeat. She leaned forward, damning whatever rotten, adolescent monster had broken the streetlight. If she could only see his face better...

  “I don’t have any ornaments.”

  Childhood Christmases spent alone at boarding school, with only the staff for company while her classmates were home with their families, had never been a happy time for Desiree. Unfortunately, those rare Christmases she’d spent in New Orleans with Olivia Porter had proved even worse. That being the case, Desiree saw no reason to go overboard c
elebrating the season that others seemed to get so excited about.

  Once, during her sophomore year in college, she’d driven out to the bayou to visit her father’s family—the dozens of aunts and uncles, and the cousins who, if things had been different, she would have grown up with. But she could tell that the expensive presents she’d brought them, professionally wrapped in gilt paper and silver ribbons, had made them uncomfortable.

  And although she was nothing like her grandmother, she could tell that they considered her more Porter than Dupree. The gulf that had grown between them during the decade-long separation had proved too wide and too deep to breach.

  So, having no family to spend the holidays with, she wrote generous checks to several charities, brought cookies to the station Christmas party, contributed a Barbie doll with extensive accessories and clothes to the marines’ toy drive and did her stint, along with other members of the news crew, dishing up a hot meal at one of the city’s many homeless shelters. That was about all the festivities she could handle.

  “I stopped at Santa’s Quarters on my way over here and picked up some ornaments,” he said with the persistence of a telemarketing salesman. “Just in case you didn’t have any.”

  First a Christmas tree. Now ornaments. This was getting curiouser and curiouser. “Exactly how much have you had to drink?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Not a single drop all day.”

  They’d reached her front porch. Desiree studied him intently in the yellow glow of her porch light and decided that about this, at least, he seemed to be telling the truth.

  “I really am exhausted.”

  “I’m not surprised, considering the hours you’ve put in today. But you’re in luck, because I’m a dynamite tree trimmer. You don’t have to do a thing but sit on the sofa, sip eggnog and tell me whether on not the angel at the top of the tree is on straight.”

  “I don’t have any eggnog.”

  “Ah, but I do.”

  “Gee, you don’t look like Papa Noël.”

  He slanted her his most appealing smile. “Appearances can often be deceiving.”

  And she was definitely an example of that. Although she looked as soft and delicate as the angel hair his mother used to put on their family Christmas tree, he’d already discovered that the lady was a helluva lot tougher than she looked.

  Even as tired as Desiree was, the scenario Roman was describing was admittedly appealing. And tempting. Too tempting, perhaps.

  She realized this was the second time they’d been together that she actually felt comfortable with him. The previous time had been over dinner, right before Adrian had called about the rapist’s latest victim.

  “Don’t think about him,” Roman said softly. “Not tonight.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do.” He’d watched the color fade from her cheeks. Seen the shadow move into her eyes. “The creep’s on everyone’s mind these days. But, hey, it’s Christmas.” He took both her hands in his. “A time of peace on earth, goodwill toward men. A time of joy, of mistletoe and merriment, of Dasher and Dancer, and Rudolph, and—”

  “I get it.” Desiree laughed and shook her head, both confused and charmed by this change in Roman.

  “Did I happen to mention that I also picked up some fudge from Laura’s?”

  Laura’s Original Praline and Fudge Shoppe was New Orleans’s oldest candy store, located not far from the station. Desiree had often sworn that she could gain ten pounds just walking past the building and breathing in the rich aroma.

  “Not the kind with pecans.” Although the store specialized in seven varieties of pralines and was famous for its hand-dipped chocolates, Desiree’s personal favorite was the sinfully rich pecan-studded dark fudge.

  Roman grinned. “Is there any other kind?”

  She could feel herself giving in, as she suspected he’d known all along she would. “I don’t understand. What happened to you, anyway? Did the Ghost of Christmas Past show up and turn your life around?”

  More like the Ghost of Christmas Present, he could have answered. A present that had grown so dark and so terrifying, he knew that if he didn’t allow himself this brief respite from the horrors that had taken hold of his mind, he’d go mad.

  “Nothing that dramatic.” He lifted their joined hands to his lips and brushed a light kiss against her knuckles. “We got off to a bad start, Desiree. Which I’ll readily admit was entirely my fault. And now I’m trying to atone for my bad behavior.”

  Although the cold front had blessedly blown eastward out of the city, the night was still cool. When the brief, unthreatening touch of his lips against her hand warmed her skin, Desiree reminded herself that Roman was an intensely complicated man. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t quite trust his sudden change in attitude.

  “What you’re trying to do is get me into bed.”

  “That, too.” He flashed her an unrepentant grin that was surprisingly boyish. And, heaven help her, infinitely appealing. “You’re an extremely attractive woman, Desiree. Any man in his right mind would want to make love with you. But for now, why don’t we just start with the tree, take things nice and slow, and if we end up together in bed, it will be because we both want to be there.”

  It sounded reasonable. Rational. Even as a faint warning voice tried to make itself heard in the back of her mind, Desiree threw in the towel. “I think I might like a tree,” she admitted.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  As she watched him jog back to the Porsche, Desiree felt a surge of something that felt remarkably like anticipation, and suddenly realized that she was not nearly as tired as she’d first thought.

  Given the compact size of her house, she figured that Roman would have purchased a small, tidy little tree that would fit on a table.

  But no. Like everything else about the man—like Roman himself—the towering blue spruce was larger than life.

  “Don’t you do anything halfway?” she asked two hours later. She was sitting on the couch as he’d promised, her feet tucked underneath her as she sipped the nutmeg-garnished eggnog he’d poured into glass mugs. “That looks like the Christmas tree that ate New Orleans.”

  He turned from putting a blown-glass ornament on an upper limb. “You don’t like it?” he asked, looking down at her from the tall ladder. Although he’d been forced to cut two feet off the bottom of the spruce, the top was still touching the ten-foot ceiling.

  “It’s lovely.” Actually, it was better than lovely, it was the most perfect tree she’d ever seen in her life. “It’s just a little large.”

  “It looked smaller surrounded by all those other trees.” He backed down the ladder and observed the evergreen, covered in exquisite, handmade ornaments and twinkling white lights. “I guess I did kind of overdo it.”

  His disappointed look was so far removed from the scowl she’d grown accustomed to seeing on his rugged face that Desiree felt the last of her resistance melting away.

  “When I was a little girl, I dreamed of having a tree like this,” she admitted softly.

  “Really?” Roman was pleased that he’d finally managed to do something right where this woman was concerned. “I would have thought your grandmother would have had professionals come in to decorate each year.”

  Not that any of the neighbors would have been invited in to see the results, he realized, remembering that Olivia Porter had been the only resident of Audubon Place who’d refused to open her door to the neighborhood carolers each year.

  “She did.” Desiree sighed and ran her finger around the rim of her mug. “But she never let them use a real tree—the needles get in the carpet.”

  “I guess that explains that stainless-steel monstrosity gracing her front window every year.”

  Desiree grinned, glad to find someone who’d found the tree as hideous as she had. “Don’t forget the rotating colored spotlights.”

  “Ah yes, the spotlights.” He return
ed her smile. The wicker creaked as he sat down beside her on the sofa. On the CD player, Nat King Cole was promising to be home for Christmas. “My father always said they made your grandmother’s front window look like a used-car lot.”

  She laughed in absolute agreement. “I think I’d like your father.”

  “I know he’d love you,” Roman said honestly. “In fact,” he said, in an offhand way that belied the fact that he’d been working his way up to this all night, “how would you like to do me a big favor?”

  Desiree was feeling more relaxed than she had in days. In weeks. In fact, if she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he’d spiked the eggnog with a heavy dose of tranquilizers. “I don’t see how I can refuse,” she said. “After you brought me a tree.”

  “A big tree,” he drawled, feeling pretty damn relaxed himself.

  “A stunningly beautiful tree.” She reached out and turned off the lamp beside the couch, displaying the towering spruce in all its sparkling glory. “I wonder if it’s too late to get my house included on the Holiday Home Tour?” she asked whimsically.

  The annual charity tour showcased a number of beautifully decorated homes each year. She’d covered the event her first week at the station five years ago, before moving from features to the harder-edged crime coverage she preferred.

  “Funny you should mention that,” he said, “because it’s what I want to ask you about.... My folks are on the tour this year, and as you may know, one of the draws are the musicians and choral groups that perform at each of the stops.”

  She nodded, wondering where this was going.

  “Well, somehow, my mother talked me into playing my sax at the damn thing. I haven’t played professionally since college, and it’d be nice to have someone other than my parents around to offer a little moral support. So, what do you say?”

  Desiree didn’t know which she found more surprising—that Roman had once been a professional musician or that he was so willing to put himself in the spotlight for his mother.

  “I think I’m speechless.”

  He put his arm casually, unthreateningly, around her shoulders. “Just say yes.”