Besides, he was like no one she’d ever kissed before. Good heavens, he had her stomach doing flips and barrel rolls!
Triana was on the verge of asking Remy if he wanted to sneak upstairs to her old room when he pulled away so suddenly she almost fell over. She’d thought for a moment he must have read her mind, but then she realized he’d stepped back to put a disturbing amount of distance between them. At the same time, he reached down to rearrange the front of his jeans, which suddenly seemed too tight for him.
She opened her mouth to ask him what was up when a creaking sound on the stairs behind the cashier counter startled her.
“Triana, is that you down there making all that noise?”
Her eyes widened even as Remy gave her an apologetic smile. He’d pulled away because he’d heard Mom coming downstairs. Damn, he must have some seriously good ears. No shock there. The rest of him was frigging awesome, why not his ears?
She ran her hands over her little black dress as she heard her mom coming down the last few steps. It was a good thing, too. The dress, which was already short, had crept up and would have flashed a load of skin. From the knowing grin on his face, she imagined Remy might have had something to do with that.
Her mother wasn’t a prude by any means, and Triana wouldn’t have been embarrassed if she’d found her kissing a guy. But still, it was better to avoid the whole issue. Her mom was going to be shocked enough to see Remy as it was.
“Yes, Mom, it’s me,” Triana said. “And look who I ran into on Bourbon Street.”
Her mother reached the bottom of the stairs, grumbling about how Triana expected her to see anything with the lights off. When her mother flipped them on, Triana was shocked to see her standing there with a baseball bat over her shoulder like she’d been about to bean whomever she’d heard down here.
Tall and slender, her mother was a graceful woman in her sixties with a spring in her step and dark, curly hair she always wore tied back in a scarf.
Her mother’s eyes widened when she saw Remy, but then a warm smile spread across her face.
“Oh Lord! Remy, is that you?”
Her mother set down the baseball bat, leaning it against the wall, then hurried across the shop in a way that made Triana think she already knew the answer to that question.
“Yes, Mrs. Bellamy, it’s me,” Remy said with a laugh, stepping forward to give her mother a hug.
When her mother pulled away, she looked Remy up and down with a sharp eye. “Goodness, look how much you’ve grown. What the heck have you been eating, entire cows? And stop calling me Mrs. Bellamy. It’s Gemma.”
Remy chuckled. “I’ll try, but you’ve always been Mrs. Bellamy to me, so I’ll probably screw up a few times. I’m sorry we woke you up. Triana was showing me around the shop.”
Her mom threw a glance her way, a knowing look in her dark eyes. “Just showing you around the shop, huh? With the lights out?”
Remy didn’t even bat an eye. “We left them off so we wouldn’t wake you up. The glow of the neon in the display windows is more than enough to see by.”
The smile tugging at the corners of her mother’s lips suggested she knew Remy was full of crap. “Uh-huh.”
“Remy is a police officer in Dallas now,” Triana quickly said before her mother could ask what else they’d been doing down here in the dark, though it was obvious she already knew. “He and three of his fellow officers are in town for training, and I was lucky enough to run into him in a club. I just turned around and there he was.”
Her mother arched a brow, studying Remy thoughtfully. “You just walked into a random club on Bourbon Street and ran into Triana by pure chance? That’s…amazing.”
Remy’s mouth curved. “Right place at the right time, I guess.”
“Maybe,” her mother agreed. “Or perhaps the fates took a hand and made sure you two ran into each other tonight.”
Triana stifled a groan. She might have known it was simple, random luck that Remy had found her in the club, but her mom took this destiny-and-fate thing seriously. While Triana didn’t buy into any of that stuff, she also never mocked her mom for believing in it.
“Where are you boys staying while you’re in town?” her mom asked suddenly, catching Triana completely off guard.
“The DoubleTree over on Canal Street,” Remy said. “The department was able to get a really good deal on the rooms, which is the only reason we’re not stuck in a cheap motel out by the airport.”
The DoubleTree was a nice place and close to a lot of the big attractions near the river, but it was also on the far side of the French Quarter from the shop. Triana winced as she realized Remy was going to have a long walk back tonight, unless he called a cab. Her mother must have been thinking the same thing because she frowned.
“Why don’t you and your friends stay here while you’re in town?” her mother suggested. “I have plenty of space, and it will save your police department some money.”
Triana blinked. Okay, she hadn’t expected that. Inviting Remy to stay was one thing, but letting three guys she’d never even met was out of character for her mother, to say the least.
Remy seemed surprised too, but he recovered quickly. “I appreciate the offer, Mrs. Bellamy—Gemma—but my commander expects us to use the rooms he put all the work into getting for us. Besides, we’ll be stomping in and out at all hours of the day and night. We’d only wake you up all the time.”
