LITMIR.BIZ

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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 Josh had spent most of his adult life establishing himself independently of the Eastman family, he found it ironic that the shirt his grandfather had worn while sitting for this portrait some forty-odd years ago was the same green-gray shade Josh had on right now.

      “Except for the hair,” Lennon observed, gaze darting back at him. “You’ve got a ponytail.”

      He shrugged, unsure whether this was good or bad. The length of his hair had been a grooming concession for his latest investigation. When he went undercover with drug dealers, he looked the part. With all the red tape and police reports he’d been wading in lately, he hadn’t found time for a haircut.

      “Life been treating you all right?” he asked, deciding that if her luscious appearance was any indication, she’d been treated very well.

      “Sure has, thank you. How about you?”

      “Better than I deserve.”

      Except at the moment. Somehow when he’d agreed to help out Miss Q, he’d still thought of Lennon as a girl.

      A big mistake, he now realized, but one that didn’t surprise him. Bottom line was he hadn’t thought much about Lennon, Miss Q or any of his own family since he’d gone to college and devoted his life to breaking away from his controlling grandmother.

      She’d been hell-bent on grooming him to pick up the reins of the family art import-export business. The business hadn’t interested Josh, but the art had, so his grandfather had encouraged him to explore where that path might lead. There’d been tension between his grandparents over which direction Josh’s life should take. His parents had routinely swung back and forth between the opposing factions, wanting their son to be happy, yet wanting the demanding matriarch to stop making all their lives miserable with her efforts to get her way.

      Thanks to youthful stupidity, Josh had simply walked away from the fight. He’d had a big chip on his shoulder at the time and felt as if he was disappointing everyone. Swapping the family mansion in the Garden District for a refurbished warehouse in the art district, he’d cut himself off so completely from his family’s social circles he may as well have been living on another planet.

      His grandmother had written him off as a lost cause, but his grandfather and his parents had kept in touch through the years. They told him what happened in their lives, tried to find out what was happening in his. But Josh rarely picked up the phone himself. More often than not, he’d used work as an excuse to avoid meeting his mom for lunch, or dropping by his dad’s club for a drink, or making an appearance at his grandfather and Miss Q’s annual Mardi Gras masque.

      With age and experience came the knowledge that he might have handled his rebellion with more maturity and less rebellion. He suspected that if he’d just stood up to his grandmother, he might have found his grandfather and parents supportive of whatever path he chose. Which was why he’d rushed to Miss Q’s assistance tonight. He owed his grandfather at least this much.

      “Listen, charity case, we’ve got a problem,” he said. More than one, actually, but his starved libido was technically his problem and not hers.

      “I assumed. Why else would you be here? Is your family all right?”

      Josh nodded, surprised that she would inquire about people who’d never had the time of day for her. Then again, he shouldn’t be surprised. Quinevere McDarby had reared her, and she was a woman who opened her heart to everyone. Including him.

      Which was another reason he’d come tonight.

      Miss Q had always been full of the hugs and approval Josh had professed not to need, but had secretly placed himself in the line of fire for. He remembered thinking that fate had played a nasty trick by not allowing his grandfather to meet Miss Q long before he’d met Josh’s own grandmother.

      Then again, if his grandfather had met Miss Q first, Josh would

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