Be My Baby Read Free Page A

some pretty grisly crimes and at least this pervert hadn’t physically hurt anyone. That didn’t make him harmless, of course, since his actions had terrorized more than half a dozen women who didn’t know they weren’t going to be hurt, until the Mardi Gras-masked burglar slipped away as soundlessly as he’d arrived. But so far he hadn’t injured any of his victims, so with the irreverence common in squad rooms, they’d tagged him with a number of rude handles, the least offensive of which was Panty Snatcher.
    Beau’s insouciant attitude had dissolved like mist under the relentless noonday sun when the guy victimized Josie Lee. That turned it personal. Now Beau was determined to put him behind bars where he belonged.
    And that was going to be a lot more difficult to accomplish with this bogus new assignment hanging around his neck. Playing guard dog to Ms. Lowell was going to eat up most of his time, and it was all due to his arresting the commissioner’s teenage granddaughter.
    This was his payback.
    The maddening thing was he hadn’t even been on duty that night, a little over a month ago—and he sure as hell wasn’t a traffic cop. But as he’d roared down the Huey P. Long, he hadn’t been able to ignore the way the car in front of him was weaving all over the bridge. It had come down to either pulling the vehicle over or living with himself if the obviously loaded driver ended up killing someone, when he could have prevented it. Throw in the fact that a damn drunk driver had been responsible for his parents’ deaths, and he’d had no choice.
    He’d pulled her over, taken her in, and landed at the top of the commissioner’s shit list.
    The union protected him from outright reprisal, and Beau knew his fellow detectives had just been waiting for him to invoke its name today. Playing escort to some uptight Northern socialite sure as hell wasn’t a division detective’s job. Ordinarily that would fall to someone way down the food chain.
    But the commissioner had connections that reached deep, and this wasn’t a grievance a detective could point to as severe abuse of power. He could just hear the response now. You say you have to escort a good-lookin’ woman wherever she wants to go? And the city or her hotel will pick up the tab? Oh, yeah, Dupree, we can see where you’re being misused .
    There was no way around it; Beau was stuck with Ms. Lowell.
    He snuck a look at his passenger as he roared down St. Charles Avenue. God, she was a priss, with those cool rainwater eyes and that honey-brown hair all slicked back in a repressed little French twist. Not to mention the oh-so-restrained gauzy dress she wore, which exposed the delicate wings of her collarbones and her slender arms and ankles and not much else. Every time he looked at her he had this crazy impulse to muss her up….
    No. Hell, no, what was he thinking? He yanked his attention back onto the road where it belonged. She wasn’t the type of woman a guy mussed up—and that was the only kind he’d ever been drawn to.
    His gaze drifted her way again and got stuck on her mouth. Even innocent of lipstick, it was surprisingly lush, like something you’d expect to see on a porn queen. The unlikely analogy tugged one side of Beau’s lips into a derisive curl.
    Talk about a case of false advertising—especially where he was concerned. It was hard to envision her cutting loose with any man, but he’d watched her take one look at him in particular and had seen those eyes go frosty and that aristocratic little nosego up in the air as if she’d caught a whiff of something past its prime.
    Beau’s shoulder hitched impatiently. Well, you won some, you lost some. It was clear, though, that she viewed him as a redneck peckerwood Louisiana cracker. And an oversexed one at that, since she’d caught the tail end of his conversation with Luke.
    For just an instant everything within him stilled. Oh, shit, that was it. Why hadn’t he thought of it