of shoulder-length braids. Her yellow tank top clung, giving his imagination help as his gaze slid down her curvy frame . . . He just wished she would step back so he could also see her legs. But he didn’t dare move, lest he frighten her away. Maybe, if God was listening to quick prayers, she’d come into the store.
He’d never seen her around New Orleans before, and she didn’t have the carefree look of a college student on break or the relaxed vibration of a tourist. Her pretty face was cast over with anxiety, her eyes holding a hungry quality of someone hunting for something but not sure what.
“Justin,” his grandmother called out from the back of the store just as the pretty woman in the window looked up.
He hadn’t realized that he’d nearly been in a trance until he heard his name. But now as a pair of gorgeous, intense dark brown eyes studied him, he couldn’t move or speak.
“Justin! Do you hear me calling you, son?”
“Yeah, Grand . . .”
But the moment he turned his head to answer and looked back, the girl was gone. Panic shot through him, although he wasn’t sure why. He’d seen beautiful women before, but this one . . . There was something he couldn’t place his finger on, something surreal about her. Justin rounded the counter and raced across the floor, glad that at this late hour all his usual customers were gone.
The mystery woman had just gone down the block a little ways, and he jogged to catch up to her, admiring how her shorts hugged her round, tight butt from behind. Her legs were killer, too. Although she couldn’t have been more than five foot six, her legs seemed like they belonged to a much taller woman.
He didn’t want to be rude or offend her by just calling out to her; his intention was to get close enough to speak. But she rounded on him so fast and with so much attitude that for a second he was at a loss for words.
“Get out of my face,” she said with a frown. “I did not come to New Orleans for no mess.”
He held his hands up in front of his chest. “I just saw you looking in the store window for something that we mighta had, then you walked away. All I wanted to do was see if I could help you. Dang . . . my bad.”
“Oh,” she said with a lot less venom. “I’m sorry. I just don’t like guys I don’t know running up on me in the street . . . and I’ve been looking all over for a shop that my momma used to come to when she was alive, but I can’t find it. She never came back after the storm, but I was hoping I could remember where it was.”
Justin nodded. “A lot of places didn’t reopen after Katrina . . . and sorry about your momma.”
“Thanks,” Jessica said quietly. “It’s cool. It’s been a couple of years.”
“But you never get used to losing your momma,” he said, looking at her and studying her face. “Justin,” he said in a gentle tone. “The name’s Justin.” He extended his hand for Jessica and she took it, shaking it quickly and then letting it go.
“I’m Jessica, but my friends call me Jess.” She hugged herself.
He had a strange feeling as he stared at her. She seemed disoriented and a little confused, the same way people look when they’re trying too hard to remember a name or to recall something they’ve forgotten.
“You know, this heat out here ain’t no joke,” he said after a moment. “Why don’t you come back down the street and soak up some air-conditioning while I see if we have the stuff you would’ve gotten in the other store.”
“Okay, thanks,” she said quietly, tilting her head as she spoke. “Yeah, maybe the heat is throwing me off.”
She’d never felt like this in her life, had never been so blind to another person’s thoughts. He gave her an inquisitive look along with a brilliant smile, then turned to head back toward his store. She kept her arms hugging her midsection, nursing the mild current of excitement that flowed from his hand into hers from just a touch. He was talking to her but she was only half listening, her mind trying desperately to sort out a hundred random thoughts at once.
Lost in her own thoughts, she tuned in to the slightly musty