Page 1 of Night Fires

PROLOGUE

Rain pattered softly against the window of the hotel room as James Forrester pulled aside the curtain and looked out into the grey street. New Orleans in winter, he thought, and a quick smile curved across his mouth, for a moment softening the hard planes of his face. He’d expected heat and humidity; what he’d found was chill and rain.

The curtain fell back and he stretched lazily, his muscled shoulders pushing against the confines of his finely tailored cotton shirt. He looked at the travel clock beside the bed, then at the photograph propped against it. It was grainy, probably taken by a cheap camera, and the edges had begun to curl with handling.

It was the picture of a young woman, taken outdoors at a distance. The camera had captured her as she walked down a city street. Her hair, long and dark, blew across her face, obscuring almost half of it. Her hand was raised before her, as if she’d seen the lurking camera at the last moment and tried to protect herself from its obtrusive eye.

Forrester looked at the clock again. It was time to get moving. She was an early riser—he’d learned that watching her the last few weeks. It had surprised him: somehow, he’d imagined she’d laze away the mornings in that expensive little house of hers in the French Quarter.

He took his suit jacket from the chair and shrugged it on. The soft grey wool was tailored expertly, emphasizsing his hard, lean body. His glance went to the photograph again, and his eyes narrowed until only the midnight darkness that outlined the cool blue irises was visible against his tanned skin. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he picked up the photo and stated at it.

For a moment, he felt as if the woman’s defiant eyes were staring directly into his.

I know you, she seemed to be saying. But she didn’t. She had never seen him—he knew that. A tight smile twisted across his face as he stared at the picture. It was he who knew her: her habits, her likes, her dislikes—he knew everything about Gabrielle Chiari.

His long fingers brushed lightly over the image, lingering on the full curve of her mouth.

She was so beautiful. She had the face of a madonna, with eyes that seemed to hint at untold mysteries. There was an innocent sensuality in the lushness of her body that brought an ache to his throat.

Forrester drew in his breath. It was all illusion, trickery captured by the camera and nothing more. The woman in the snapshot was beautiful, yes, but she was hardly innocent. Gabrielle Chiari had made headlines back east only a few months before. Her father had been a smalltime gangster, working for Big Tony Vitale, the man some called the Don of all Dons.. He had control of every crooked operation in New York.

Vitale had controlled her, as well—until she’d agreed to testify against him.

He tossed the photo on the table. She hadn’t agreed, he reminded himself, not really. She’d been forced into it by the federal prosecutor, made to turn State’s witness to keep her ailing father from being subpoenaed. But John Chiari had died before the case came to trial. And when he did, when the prosecutor lost his hold on her, Gabrielle Chiari had fled the city and the protection the prosecutor’s office had afforded her.

She had made her first mistake by being involved with a man like Big Tony, and her second in thinking she could escape him.

And that, Forrester thought, as he opened the door to his hotel room and stepped into the hall, was where he came in.

CHAPTER ONE

Gabrielle Chiari paused in the doorway of the converted carriage house and stared into the flagstone courtyard. Fog, thick as cotton, curled over the old brick walls that separated the house and its outbuildings from the street.

She had lived here for two months, but sometimes it felt more like two years. Gabrielle sighed as she flexed first her right leg and then her left. Would she ever think of New Orleans as home, or would her heart always belong to New York? Crazy as it seemed, she missed the crowded streets and the snarled traffic. Sometimes she even longed to hear the irritated bark of automobile horns and the brusque snarl of a Manhattan taxi-driver.

Gabrielle’s mouth twisted. There was no point in thinking about the life she’d left behind. It was over— all of it, the good as well as the bad. Her father had been the good, no matter what the newspapers and the federal prosecutor said, and he was gone. And when he’d died, she’d been able to turn her back on the prosecutor’s lies and the agents who’d turned her quiet life upside-down.

She had begun a new life, and, if it didn’t quite fit yet, it was only a matter of time before it did. Things were falling into place: the carriage house was beginning to feel like home, the flower shop was doing well, and Alma, the woman she’d hired to assist her, was turning out to be a good friend—even though they were as different as night and day.

Damp tendrils of fog snaked around her legs, bare beneath her running shorts, and she shivered, just as she had every morning since arriving in this city on the Mississippi River. Well, she’d be warm enough by the time she reached the shop—not that Alma would ever believe it. Alma greeted her each morning just as she had the day they’d met. Gabrielle smiled as she remembered.

It had been her first day as the new owner of the little shop just off Jackson Square. She’d jogged to work with a change of clothes tucked into a light backpack, never expecting to be greeted at the locked door by a woman who stared at her outfit in disbelief.

‘You must be freezin’,’ the woman had said in a sweet voice, and then she’d blushed. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

A customer, Gabrielle had thought eagerly, and then she’d looked down at her bare legs and sweat-soaked shorts, and she’d swallowed.

‘Don’t apologise,’ she’d said quickly, fumbling for her keys. ‘It’s my fault—I didn’t expect anyone to show up this early. If you’d just wait until I change, I’ll be happy to help you, Miss… ?’

The woman’s blush had deepened. ‘I’m Alma Harwood, ma’am. I work here—well, I used to work here, when Mr Kastin owned the shop. I was away visitin’ when he sold it, and I thought I’d stop by and offer… That is, if you need me. I worked for Mr Kastin for more than ten years, and…’

Gabrielle had almost groaned with relief. Buying the shop had seemed like a wonderful idea—until she’d actually done it, and then the enormity of how little she knew about running a business had turned her knees to jelly.

‘Thank goodness,’ she’d said, offering her damp hand to the woman. ‘Mr Kastin told me about you, Miss Harwood. I tried to reach you all last week—I wanted to ask you to stay on. I’m afraid I don’t know as much about flowers as I thought I did.’

Alma had beamed happily. ‘I’d be delighted,’ she’d said as she put her soft hand into Gabrielle’s. Her smile had faltered as their hands met. ‘Perhaps you’d better change,’ she’d said politely. ‘You seem to be—ah—um— perspirin’ most freely.’

Gabrielle had smiled. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’ She’d started towards the little room at the back of the shop, and then something had made her pause and turn back. ‘By the way,’ she’d said innocently, ‘the wo

rd you were looking for is sweat.’

Alma Harwood’s look of innocence had matched hers. ‘Ladies,’ she’d said primly, ‘never sweat.’

That first encounter had set the tone for their relationship. Separated by age and custom, the ex-New Yorker and the southern belle had found common ground in good-natured teasing.

Not that Alma had been teasing about the freezing mornings. With the blithe ignorance of a northerner, Gabrielle had expected the south to be warm in the winter. But December and January had been cool and grey, with the ever-present fog that rolled in from the Mississippi adding to the chill.

Now it was late February and the mornings were downright cold.

‘Don’t complain,’ Alma had said in her soft drawl when Gabrielle had done just that. ‘Soon enough it’ll be summer. You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced a New Orleans July.’ A look of gentle triumph had flashed across her face. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to give up your runnin’ come summertime.’

Gabrielle had laughed. ‘Sorry, but I’m going to have to disappoint you. I’ll just run earlier and sweat harder. You’ll never make me into a southern belle, Alma. It’s too late. I’ve been a New Yorker too many years.’

Too many years. The blare of a fog-horn from the river cut through the early morning silence. Gabrielle blinked against the sudden press of tears.

What was the matter with her today? Memories too painful to bear kept crowding in. It was impossible to think about her father’s death without a dull ache spreading through her, a dull ache that congealed into a bitter rage.

She had never understood how the federal authorities had found out her father was dying. His illness had come on so quickly that she’d barely had time to grasp the awful truth herself. One week, he’d felt ill, and the next he’d been lying in a hospital room, and somewhere in the middle of all that, while she had still been trying to accept what was happening, Townsend and his men had turned up on her doorstep, like sharks smelling blood in the water.

Testify against Tony Vitale, they said. And when she’d insisted she knew nothing, they’d smiled their predatory smiles and told her she was free to stick to that line, if she liked. It didn’t matter to them, they could always subpoena her father and put him on the stand instead.

She shuddered, remembering how she’d pleaded for understanding.

‘Please, leave my father alone. Mr Vitale is a union official, and my father is his chauffeur. What could he say that would interest anybody?’

But Townsend had been deaf to her pleas. And eventually, just as he’d predicted, Gabrielle had agreed to testify. She’d have agreed to anything, just to keep the bastards from her father, although why they wanted her to repeat the pointless details of a phone call she’d overhead Tony Vitale make was beyond her. She’d let the men from the prosecutor’s office do what they wanted, moving her into what they called a ‘safe’ apartment, surrounding her with agents—for her protection, they said, which was, she was certain, a lie.

Who would want to hurt her? Certainly not Tony Vitale. No, they wanted to intimidate her and keep her where they could watch her.

It hadn’t mattered. Nothing was important, not when compared to her father’s illness.

Gabrielle finished the last of her warm-ups, jogged in place for a few seconds, then broke into an easy lope, her running shoes whispering over the uneven flagstones as she moved out of the gate into the early morning streets of the French Quarter.

Running was still new to her. She’d taken it up in the last stages of her father’s illness, when it had begun to feel as if her life was bound by the silence of his hospital room and the silence of the heavy-jawed men who were at her side night and day.

Running took you out of yourself, some blandly smiling celebrity on a television talk-show had said one day. By then, Gabrielle had become so cynical that she’d trusted nothing she heard. Still, she’d been desperate enough to test the glib remark. The next morning, she’d put on sneakers, terry shorts and a ‘Save the Whales’ T-shirt. Then she’d marched into the living-room of the government-owned apartment.

The expressions on the faces of her dark-suited sentinels had been worth seeing.

‘I’m going for a run,’ she’d said sweetly. ‘Does that mean you have to run, too?’

They did, of course, and at first that had been half the pleasure of it—the sight of those pallid, expressionless men panting along beside her in their flannel suits and thick-soled shoes.

After a while, all that mattered was the sense of release she felt while she ran through the city streets.

And it still worked, she thought as she ran lightly along the quiet streets. The morning’s run took away the bittersweet remembrances the night always brought. By the time she reached the flower shop, she’d be ready for the day’s work, and after that there’d be no time for anything but arranging displays and filling orders and learning the hundred and one things she had yet to learn about the flower business.

Everything that had happened in New York was history. Her father was gone, and the authorities were never going to be able to use her again.

And neither would anybody else.

The streets of the French Quarter were almost empty at this early hour. At night, Le Vieux Carr6 was thronged with tourists and street performers. Now, the old city showed what Gabrielle thought of as its true face: housewives leaned from balcony windows as they shook out bedclothes, restaurant doors stood open as the old buildings were swept clean.

And the Quarter smelled wonderful. Gabrielle breathed deeply, loving the heady scents of freshly roasted coffee and Creole spices. She teased Alma all the time, telling her she was an inveterate New Yorker and always would be, but the truth was that even she was beginning to fall under the spell of New Orleans’ unique charm—not that she’d chosen the city for that reason. In truth, she’d picked it at random, influenced as much by the travel poster at the airline ticket counter as by anything else.

‘One-way to New Orleans,’ she’d said, and as easily as that she’d left her old life behind.

But the choice had been a good one. The city was different enough to make forgetting the past a possibility. Here, she could escape the notoriety of being the reclusive star witness against the man the papers called ‘Big Tony Vitale’. Here, she was not the woman those same papers had eventually hinted was Vitale’s beautiful mistress.

It was what the authorities thought, too. She would never forget the way Townsend had looked at her the day after her father’s funeral, when she’d announced that she was leaving.

‘You can’t do that, Miss Chiari. We’ll subpoena you.’

‘Do whatever you want,’ she’d said coldly. ‘My father is gone, and you can’t threaten me any more.’

‘Vitale’s not going to let you just walk away, young lady. You know too much.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Gabrielle had snapped. ‘Mr Vitale isn’t a villain. He’s been very good to me.’

The sly look on the man’s face had enraged her. She’d turned on her heel, knowing she owed no explanations to him, knowing as well she had nothing to fear from the man who’d been like an uncle to her.

Still, when she’d bought her ticket to New Orleans, she’d surprised herself by using her mother’s maiden name. No one would be looking for Gabrielle Shelton, a little voice inside her had whispered, and she’d quickly forced it aside, telling herself the reason for the change of name was simple.

Didn’t a new start deserve a new name?

Gabrielle’s breath rasped in her chest, and she raised her hand and wiped her wrist across her forehead. Of course it did—but that didn’t explain why she sometimes awoke in the night to the desperate pounding of her heart, or why she’d avoided making new friends, or why sometimes the sound of footsteps behind her would make her pulse begin to race…

Stop thinking that way, Gabrielle! she told herself. It’s nonsense and you know it. Tony Vitale’s not the first union official who’s been accused of

being crooked and he won’t be the last. But he’s not crooked. Men with power always had enemies, and everybody accused them of…

Damn Townsend and his men for planting such ugly ideas in her head. Gabrielle picked up her pace. She was running harder now, panting a little, but it felt good. The fog was beginning to burn off, and the old buildings and narrow streets of the Quarter were bathed in soft golden sunlight.She raised her arm and glanced at her watch. It was later than she’d realised. Alma would be at the shop already, waiting with her usual end-of-the-week list of things that had gone wrong.

What would it be this time? There was never anything major—La Vie en Rose was in good repair. It was just that Alma was—Gabrielle searched for the right words— she was perhaps a little too conscientious.

‘The roses are dyin’, Gabrielle,’ she’d say breathlessly, which would turn out to mean that one petal on one rose was turning brown at the edges.

‘They delivered the most terrible orchids today,’ she’d say, which would probably mean that one orchid was less than perfect.

It had been mouse droppings in the back room last time. As for today—hadn’t there been something about the temperature in the refrigerated case being too high? Or was it too low?

Gabrielle sighed. It would take another ten minutes, at least, before she reached the shop. By then, Alma might be wringing her hands in distress.

Just ahead, a narrow alley angled away from the street. It was a shorter route and would cut the time in half. She sighed again, shook her head, and turned towards it.

‘OK, Alma,’ she murmured softly, ‘I’m on my way.’

She had used the alley once before, and she hadn’t liked it. For one thing, the pavement was so badly broken that she had to keep looking down. And there was a feeling about the narrow passageway that she disliked, a sense of isolation that was unpleasant. The overhanging balconies, so much a part of the French Quarter, blocked out the sun, adding to the feeling of separation from the rest of the world.

Gabrielle’s footsteps faltered as the oppressive brick walls swallowed her up. She grimaced and picked up her pace. There was nothing to be afraid of here. There were sections of the city you didn’t walk at all, day or night, and others you avoided after dark, and some of those places were right here, in Le Vieux Carrd.

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