Goes down easy(10)

Her skirt swished against the velvet curtain as she stepped back onto the stage. The lights were out. Drake didn’t need them for what he was doing, making sure his instrument was in fine working order, a necessity after the way he’d treated his baby tonight. She could still feel that mournful wail raising goose bumps all over her skin.

His head was down when she reached him, bent forward as he fondled the instrument. She could smell him. The smoke and the sweat, the bite of gin. The shiver that hit her took a whole lot of effort to suppress. She leaned down, blew against the shell of his ear, let her lips linger there at the base of his skull for no more than the length of a breath.

He straightened slowly and turned, and then gave her the smoky smile she’d wanted to feel forever. And she swore her heart forgot how to beat when he said, “Sweet Sugar Babin. Kissin’ on me like that. What in the world would your husband say?”





5





JACK GROWLED, and it wasn’t a very nice sound. It was the sound of his impatience, his frustration, his inability to be polite and still tell her to take off her clothes.

The kiss that had started out as a simple connection no longer was. It was about complications and how far they were going to go.

He made his first effort at finding out by bunching the material of her skirt into his fist at her hip. But she was wearing a hell of a lot of fabric and his hand was only so big. He wasn’t getting anywhere and hated to stop.

Perry put him out of his misery with a sound that was half chuckle and half sigh before wiggling against him until he dropped her skirt. When he started to remind her that he had come around to her way of thinking after all, she pressed a finger to his lips and shushed him.

“This is the best part.”

Or so he’d been on his way to find out before her skirt got in the way. She turned around then, tucked her head underneath his chin and snuggled her back to his front. And because it seemed like what he was meant to do, he wrapped his arms around her waist and held her.

It was seconds later when he was settling in to test the waters, when his focus along with his blood had begun the slow return trip to his head, when he realized exactly how perfectly her body fit his that he heard it. The singing. The low smoky voice lamenting love gone wrong.

That was her reason for bringing him here. It wasn’t about showing him the shop at night or wanting to jump his bones. A trick, that’s what it was. Another lame attempt to convince him the stairwell was haunted. To get him to…come around to her way of thinking.

Hell on freakin’ wheels. A part of him raged at the deception. She could have brought him out here and told him to listen without the hot and heavy act. Thing was, he would swear on the closest voodoo priest that she hadn’t been acting.

But then all his pondering over the ins and outs came to a screeching halt. Because he wasn’t just hearing the ghost. He was seeing her.

He and Perry stood behind the counter, five feet from the corner where the frame around the stairwell’s entrance no longer held a door. The outside wall between the first floor and the landing shared the exterior’s brick.

And that was where Jack saw the light.

Not a direct source like a lamp or a flashlight or even a flickering candle flame. This was a wisp. And it floated. Floated and swirled over what he swore was a woman’s figure in a long, formfitting dress.

He stepped from behind Perry, but she grabbed his elbow and stopped him from moving closer. He frowned, but he didn’t argue. He was too busy arguing with himself.

He could not believe, did not believe, that he was seeing what he was seeing. It had to be the same trick of the light from earlier, the one that had turned the shop into Munchkin Land. He wasn’t buying that he was seeing a ghost. No flippin’ way.

“I’ve only seen her three or four times in my life,” Perry whispered. “Della’s seen her more, but then she’s lived here longer than I did. This was the apartment building where she and my father grew up long before she opened Sugar Blues.”

He filed that away, still certain this was all about boxes with false bottoms and suspended panels he couldn’t see. “She died here, you said. The singer?”

Still holding on to his arm, Perry nodded. “From a fall down the stairs. Though everything pointed to the fall being suspicious.”

“Was there an investigation?” he asked, watching the ebb and flow of the ethereal light, listening to the faint murmur of song.

“A cursory one is all I found records of.”

“You’ve researched the death?”

Again, she nodded. “You live with a ghost, you get curious.”

In the next second, the song ceased as abruptly as if someone had turned off a CD player. The stairwell went dark in a flash. It was the strangest thing Jack had seen in a while—at least the strangest he wasn’t able to explain.

Except the explanation became clear in the next moment when the sudden loud thump that followed turned out to be Della hobbling down the stairs.

Perry rushed forward. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”

“I was. I think it was Sugar who woke me,” Della said, leaning heavily against Perry until Jack moved forward to take her weight. “Jack. You’re still here.”

“He was camping out in the kitchen in lieu of a lock on the door,” Perry said, brushing loose hair back from her aunt’s forehead.

“I’ll finish with the deadbolt tomorrow,” he said, his arm around Della’s waist. “And pick up paint once you tell me what color.”

“Oh, Jack,” Della said, her brow lined with worry. “I’m afraid I have bad news. I believe Dayton Eckhardt may be dead.”





IT WAS FOUR in the morning when Perry helped Jack get Della settled in the kitchen. She sat in one chair, propped her bandaged foot in another. Once she was situated, Jack rolled up his sleeping bag and carried it out to his SUV. Perry put on a pot of coffee.

She doubted any of them had plans to go back to sleep, then wondered if Jack had slept at all. He’d been wide awake when she’d come downstairs an hour ago, and he’d certainly shown no signs of being tired since.

She could not believe that she’d kissed him, or the way she’d tried so desperately to crawl into his clothes and down his throat. She’d met him at most eighteen hours ago, yet had gone after him like she hadn’t had a man in, well, longer than she cared to admit.

It wasn’t like Sugar Blues was a convent; she waited on plenty of male customers, flirted with more than a few. Then there were her male neighbors at Court du Chaud, with whom she teased and bantered regularly. And, of course, the male friends she’d made while living and working in the French Quarter.

But it had been many years since there’d been a man who lit the spark necessary for her to want to take things further.

Jack did. And in a very big way.

Standing in front of the steaming coffeemaker as the carafe filled, she cursed her renegade thoughts. She didn’t like having to force her mind away from kissing Jack to focus on her aunt’s needs.

Neither did she like the way Della’s revelation had put a huge scowl on Jack’s face before he packed up his gear. The truth was she didn’t like thinking about Jack at all. Except that was a big fat lie.

Pulling three mugs down from the cupboard, Perry glanced to the side and caught her aunt’s gaze. “How’s your foot?”

“It hurts, but I’ll be fine,” Della said, brushing away the concept of pain as nothing.

Perry looked up at the clock on the wall behind the table. “You’re due for another pain pill.”

“And I took it before I came downstairs.” Della repositioned the cushion beneath her heel. “What I want to know is what I interrupted by doing so?”

Perry felt her color rise. “Nothing, what do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.” Della arched a wise brow. “What’s going on with you and our new handyman?”

“He’s not new, he’s temporary, and I was trying to get him to open his mind about Sugar.”

“A worthless endeavor, of which you should be well aware,” Della said with a sigh. “Perry, sweetie, you can’t force anyone to see what they don’t want to see.”

“I know.” And she did. It was just hard to believe Jack—or anyone—couldn’t see the same things that were so clear and so real to her. She poured her aunt’s coffee. “He may not have opened his mind completely, but he knew she was there.”

“He told you that?” Della asked, taking the cup from Perry’s hand.

“No. But I could tell. She wasn’t just singing this time. We saw her.” Perry picked up her own cup at the same time Jack walked back through the door.

“I’m not surprised that you did,” Della said.

Perry’s only response was to offer coffee to Jack. He took the mug, asked, “Did what?” then blew across the surface and sipped.

“Saw Sugar,” Perry replied, watching his expression as she brought her own mug to her mouth.

He didn’t respond except to move to the table and pull out a chair opposite Della’s. Once he sat, he still didn’t say a word about having seen Sugar’s ghost.

In fact, he seemed to dismiss both the subject and the incident without another thought, turning to Della to ask, “What makes you think Eckhardt is dead?”