display case, and to smooth golden skin where her bare arm draped over the black velvet.
But Josh knew better. She might be a sleeping beauty, all right, but not from any child’s version of the tale. Not with a huge marble erection propped upright on her lap.
Sleeping Beauty could only be Lennon McDarby, all grown up.
Moving silently into the new gallery, he drank the espresso he’d picked up in the museum’s security office and surveyed the woman before him. She’d been, what?—ten, maybe eleven the last time Josh had seen her, right before he’d headed off to college. A skinny girl, all arms and legs and conversation about things he couldn’t have cared less about.
He hadn’t thought much about her since, though he’d heard of her from his grandfather and Miss Q. But who’d have guessed that gangly kid would have grown into this golden vision? Not him.
Even if Josh had guessed, he’d never have pictured the erection—which wasn’t, incidentally, the only erection around. A watercolor nearby showed a man servicing his own needs.
“Don’t blame you a bit, pal.” He rested his gaze on a sleeping Lennon. “She’s definitely something to look at.”
Definitely.
She was the best sight he’d seen in a long time. More sexy than all the art in the room combined. With her long slender curves, silky blond hair and gold-dusted lashes fanned out in half circles on her cheeks, Lennon couldn’t look more delicious if she’d been spread out on a bed.
Unless she’d been naked.
Now there was an image to inspire more than a few late-night fantasies. Lennon, all gleaming gold skin and sleek curves, with her eyes closed and her lips parted as if awaiting his kisses.
An image that made Josh long to kneel down beside her, peel away her clothes and wake this sleeping beauty with a kiss right now, because the very idea of tasting those pouty lips and touching all that smooth golden skin clouded his thoughts and inspired an upsurge in his pulse rate.
Josh shook his head to erase the image. How in hell was he supposed to help Miss Q by protecting Lennon this weekend, when he’d spend his time protecting her from himself, instead of the bad guys?
A damned good question. This woman was passion personified. The closest he’d ever come to his perfect fantasy. And except for the unusual piece of art resting strategically on her lap, the only thing to mar the view was the portrait of his grandfather, which loomed above her head to remind Josh why he’d come. Guilt. Loads of guilt. Otherwise he’d never be in this new gallery wing at the crack of dawn. In the French Quarter during Mardi Gras, no less.
Josh didn’t celebrate Mardi Gras, hadn’t for years, anyway. When he’d been a kid, his grandfather had routinely commandeered him from his parents and grandmother, all of whom had believed the party in New Orleans proper was nothing more than a peasant festival. The real action, as far as they were concerned, took place uptown, in the mansions of the Garden District.
He hadn’t partied with his grandfather at Mardi Gras since he’d been seventeen years old. A lifetime ago. Nowadays, Josh scheduled himself out of town during the first half of February, and he’d managed that task for the past five years running.
This year he hadn’t been so lucky. A self-employed private investigator, he was just wrapping up a missing person case that had ended with a corpse, and he’d spent the past two weeks giving depositions to multijurisdictional authorities.
Just his luck. If he hadn’t been in town tonight, his answering service would have fielded the call that had turned out to be the last person on the planet he’d expected to hear from—Quinevere McDarby, his late grandfather’s mistress and the woman he’d known as Miss Q throughout his youth.
She’d worked him over in a big way, and here he was with the unenviable task of breaking the news to her great-niece.
“Lennon,” he whispered quietly, not wanting to startle her. “Lennon, wake up.”
She inhaled deeply, a soft sound that rippled in the quiet, and made the slight parting of her pouty peach lips seem as enticing as if she’d brushed that sexy mouth across his skin.
Josh swallowed hard. Without even opening her eyes, grown-up Lennon was having an absurd physical effect on him. An effect that had to be the combined result of his too-long-ignored libido and the giant phallus sitting in her lap. With that giant open mouth propped on the display case, firing his imagination with all sorts of tempting pImages**, no wonder the seam of his jeans suddenly dug into his crotch.
She tipped her heart-shaped face up and blinked open whiskey-colored eyes. Eyes he hadn’t thought about in years, but suddenly remembered with startling clarity.
Startling being the operative word, because Lennon shot bolt upright at the sight of him, inadvertently rolling the sculpture off her lap. It hit the carpeted floor with a thump.
“Penis envy, chère?”
She dragged her wide-eyed gaze down to the marble sculpture. Her mouth popped open. With jerky, panicked motions, she grabbed the huge phallus and lifted it off the floor.
Even with the low lighting, Josh could see the flush of color stain her cheeks as she repositioned the sculpture on the display base. But her flush was nothing compared to the heat rushing through him at the sight of her fingers wrapped around that smooth marble.
Taking another gulp of espresso, he barely noticed it scald his throat on the way down. “Long time no see, charity case.”
He called her by the nickname he’d coined during a long-ago conversation where he’d lamented his grandmother’s never-ending disapproval. Lennon had countered with her own tale of being quasi-orphaned and totally dependent on her great-aunt’s charity. He remembered thinking that she’d had the better deal.
Shooting a startled glance at his grandfather’s portrait, Lennon shook her head as if trying to shake off sleep, before turning back to stare at him.
“Black sheep!” She continued the name game, using a soubriquet he hadn’t heard since the last time he’d seen her, and that she remembered it pleased him. “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he extended a hand and helped her stand—a fluid movement that drew his attention to every curve between her head and her toes. Then he noticed her whiskey gaze glued to the cardboard travel cup he still held in one hand.
“Espresso, black,” he said.
“Do you mind?”
He handed her the cup and watched as she sucked down an appreciative swallow. Her eyes shuttered briefly and she sighed as if she’d never tasted anything as good. “It’s uncanny.”
“What?”
“How much you look like your grandfather.”
He gazed up at the portrait again. No denying it. The resemblance was nothing short of remarkable—a fact that came as a mild surprise. His grandfather had been close to sixty by the time Josh had been born, so the only memories he’d had of the man in his prime had been from photos. No getting around the fact that besides their dark coloring and green eyes, the facial structures matched almost identically.
Though
