Sunny Says

by Jan Hudson

  “But, honey, you were so happy. You were thrilled about the job offer in Washington. It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—” Her face screwed up and tears started rolling again.

  It nearly killed him to see her cry. He scooted closer and lifted her face. “But what, love?”

  “But you’re going to Tel Aviv, and I’ll probably never see you again,” she wailed, the tears coming faster.

  He wanted to take her into his arms, but they would probably fall off the damned ledge if he tried. “I’m not going to Tel Aviv.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re not?”

  “Nope.” He reached into the pocket of his pink shirt, pulled out a small velvet box, and opened it. “I meant to pick a more romantic spot to do this, but will you marry me?”

  Her eyes grew even wider. “But, Kale, how can we get married?”

  “The usual way. You buy a pretty dress, and I’ll buy you some flowers. How about we book one of the Miradores for the ceremony? We’ll find a preacher and—”

  “No, no. How can we get married if I’m going to be in Washington and you’re going to be Lord knows where most of the time? No matter what Estella says, I don’t think that’s much of a marriage. I—”

  He put his finger over her lips. “Love, I’m not going to be ‘Lord knows where.’ My globe-trotting days are over. I’m going to be wherever you are. If you want to stay here, we’ll stay here. If you want to take the job in Washington, I’ll go with you. Just give me a couple of weeks to hire a new anchor for KRIP. After our honeymoon—how does Greece sound?—we can find a nice little town house in Georgetown and—”

  “What would you do in Washington? For a job, I mean.”

  He laughed. “I’m not exactly destitute. Ravinia left Foster and me enough money to last four lifetimes. And I’ve been thinking that I might write a book. I have an editor friend who’s been hounding me about the idea for a couple of years.”

  “But I thought you loved being a foreign correspondent.”

  “I thought so, too, until I had a chance to get away from it. I’ve had my fill of the cesspools of the earth. I’ve resigned. You’ve opened a whole new world for me, Sunny Larkin, and I’m not about to let go of it. I love you, sweetheart. Will you marry me?”

  The sunlight came back into her eyes, and her dimples deepened with a dazzling smile. “I will.” She held out her hand.

  When he slipped the diamond solitaire on her finger, the stone seemed to wink at them in the bright daylight.

  “Dammit, Sunny, let’s get off this ledge,” he said. “I want to kiss you properly.”

  She laughed. “Some things never change. But I love you anyway.”

  They climbed inside to find a dozen pairs of eyes staring at them.

  “We’re engaged,” Kale announced with a grin.

  A beaming Hulon led the applause.

  Before the group could descend on them, Kale dragged Sunny to her small office and firmly shut the door. “Now I want to kiss my fiancee.”

  “Kale, are you very sure that this is what you want?”

  “To kiss you? Damned sure.”

  “No, I mean are you sure you want to resign from your job?”

  “Positive. I faxed my resignation first thing this morning. I would have done it sooner, but, as you recall, things have been a little hectic around here.”

  She looked puzzled. “Then why did your boss call today?”

  “Because Stan is a stubborn old coot who doesn’t understand about love and marriage. But, for me, the choice between going back to my old life and having you was no contest.”

  She frowned. “I don’t want you to make a decision because of me that you’ll regret one day. Maybe we could work out some other arrangement.”

  He shook his head. “Sweetheart, I’m burned out. I have been for a couple of years, but I didn’t have the sense to recognize it. You made me aware of what a damned mess I was in. I’d forgotten how to laugh, how to feel, until I met you. I can walk away with no regrets. And the idea of writing a book appeals to me. I can write anywhere, so we’ll move where your opportunity is. With me around to find your car keys and give you baths, you’re going to be the best damned reporter Washington, D.C., has ever seen. You’ll wow ‘em.”

  Eyes shining and that fantastic smile turned on high, she stood on tiptoes and offered her lips. He kissed her with all the love that was in him.

  Author Notes

  I hope you enjoyed SUNNY SAYS. I loved writing and researching this story and revisiting those memories as I updated it recently. If you liked this ebook, I would appreciate your going to the site where you purchased it and writing a review. It should only take a few minutes and would mean the world to me as an author.

  Also, if you liked Sunny and Kale’s story, I think you might like the next book in the STRUCK BY LIGHTNING series. It’s one of the few stories of the more that thirty books I’ve written which is set primarily in a place other than Texas (but still in the U.S.). HOT STREAK starts in New Orleans with our heroine Amy Jordan meeting the hero, Neil Larkin, Sunny’s older brother. (You’ll recall that he was also under that tree when it was struck by lightning.) An excerpt follows below.

  * * *

  HOT STREAK Chapter One

  The pane squeaked as Amy Jordan wiped a little spot in the condensation to peek out the bakery window that fronted Jackson Square.

  He was still there.

  An extremely handsome man from what she could tell, he’d been sitting on that bench almost all day, staring into space, looking totally dejected and forlorn. Nicely dressed in a conservative suit and tie, he had a small suitcase at his feet and a raincoat folded atop the garment bag lying on the bench beside him.

  He hadn’t moved since she spotted him around noon, not even to don his raincoat when the damp, overcast day turned to drizzle, and it was now six-thirty and almost closing time. With the growing dusk and messy weather, the artists and street vendors had packed up and gone home for the day, and the nightlife was not yet in full swing. As crazy as the natives and tourists were, nobody else was sitting in the rain.

  Amy had been curious about him earlier, but now she started to worry. Her sister Rachel, who owned the bakery, would have told her to blow it off and mind her own business. After all, Rachel always said, half the nut cases in the United States eventually made their way to New Orleans and Jackson Square—those who didn’t stay in California. But Rachel was a cynic, and Amy didn’t have a cynical bone in her body.

  In fact Rachel—and a few other people she could name offhand—had accused her of being hopelessly naive and gullible enough to buy swamp land from every snake oil salesman that came down the pike. That wasn’t true. One couldn’t spend two years as a social worker in a children’s hospital and four years in Dallas’s inner city and remain naive. Burned-out, soul-shattered? Yes. Naive? No. Nor was she gullible. Not exactly. She was simply tenderhearted and a natural born nurturer. And if being so had gotten her into trouble a time or two . . . well, several times, that was a price she willingly paid for caring.

  And she did care. Deeply. Excruciatingly.

  That’s why she dithered over the man on the bench.

  His blond hair had darkened from the drizzle, and his clothes were getting soaked. Amy was sure that something must be seriously wrong. He might be ill. Or have amnesia and be lost. October’s first cool front was sweeping through the city and bringing more rain. Of course it wasn’t supposed to get below sixty degrees, but still, he could get pneumonia if he sat out there all night. She couldn’t just let him stay there all alone in the rain, could she?

  Certainly not.

  She grabbed her umbrella from behind the counter, and the bell above the door tinkled as she went outside. Strains of a lonely blues song from Pop’s Place drifted across the square and under the dripping canopy, the melancholy sax overlaying the sodden air with a bone-deep sadness that seemed to match the droop of the man’s shoulders.
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  Unfurling the umbrella that looked liked a giant red poppy, she held it above her head and tiptoed through the shallow puddles. “Excuse me,” she said, trying to get close enough to shelter him with the red petals and still respect his space. “Excuse me.”

  He turned his head slightly and glanced up at her with eyes that took her breath away. Blue as the shallows of the Caribbean, they seemed to draw her into depths that rivaled an ocean abyss. But something other than the beauty of his eyes struck her. Pain. Shock. Sorrow. She had seen enough of it, experienced enough of it to identify it. Gut-wrenching misery bled from his eyes, seeped from his pores, and slithered into her heart as if by osmosis. She had to consciously throw up barriers against his pain.

  “May I help you in some way?” she asked.

  He shook his head and looked away.

  “How about a cup of coffee? You need to get out of this rain. It’s going to get worse.” She touched his shoulder. “You’re going to catch cold.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” he mumbled.

  “Now is that any way to talk? Of course you care. Or you will when you start coughing and going through a box of tissues a day. At least come inside the bakery for a minute and have a cup of coffee.” She gave him her warmest smile and tugged on his coat sleeve.

  He shrugged, stood, and started for the bakery, leaving his belongings behind. Holding the umbrella handle between her chin and shoulder, Amy quickly scooped up his things and hurried after him.

  When he opened the door and noticed her struggling with his baggage, he mumbled, “Sorry,” then took his things and tossed them on the floor just inside the door.

  “No problem.” She smiled again, let down the umbrella and shook it, then bustled into the bakery that was fragrant with yeasty aromas and warm from the wood-burning brick oven. “Plain coffee or cafe au lait?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He glanced around the bakery absently as if trying to get his bearings.

  “Well, of course it matters. Do you want cream or not?”

  “Not.”

  “Then plain coffee it is. Take off your coat so that it’ll dry out. As you can see, you have your choice of places to sit,” she said, gesturing to the chairs around the four marble ice-cream tables up front. “Things are a little slow right now.”

  As if to mock her words, three customers came in the door. She waited on the first, and while two and three perused the goods, she quickly poured a cup of coffee for the man and set it on the table in front of him.

  “There you go,” she said. “Drink up. I’ll be back in a shake with a refill.”

  After she’d rung up the final sale, she filled a tray with a basket of assorted rolls and pastries, a second mug, and an insulated carafe of coffee. When she started toward the man, she was struck again by the aura of desolation surrounding him. Strangely, she sensed that such feelings were ordinarily foreign to him. This guy was no wimp.

  Even though he looked as if he’d lost his last friend, there was an air of authority and strength about him. And with his hair drying into a tousled gold crown, he was drop-dead, Hollywood handsome, barely saved from being pretty by a strongly chiseled jaw. Though he wasn’t a muscle-bound brute, his shoulders filled his white dress shirt quite nicely. From his build, his tan, and the fairer sun streaks in his hair, she might have pegged him as a California surfer at first glance, but none of the ones she knew ever wore a suit or had enough depth to be morose about anything.

  He didn’t look up when she set down the tray. He remained seated in the white curlicued metal chair. With both hands wrapped around the mug, he stared into its contents.

  “See anything in there?” she asked, sitting down across from him.

  He glanced up, looking blank. “Pardon?”

  She gave him her perkiest smile. “In your cup. You were studying it so carefully, I thought maybe you were reading it like Madame Zinora reads tea leaves.” She held up the pot. “How about some more?”

  He nodded and she poured.

  She broke a roll, slathered it with butter and offered it to him. “Try it. We bake the best in the Quarter.”

  He took a bite. Then another. “Very good,” he said politely, though he didn’t seem to have his heart in it.

  “Told you.” She buttered the other half and gave it to him. “By the way, my name is Amy Jordan. What’s yours?”

  “Mud.”

  Startled for a moment, she recovered quickly and said, “Like Roger Mudd, the newscaster?”

  “No, Mud with one d. At ten o’clock this morning I became a pariah, and my name is Mud.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I.” He stared down into his mug again. “None of it makes any sense. I ran those experiments a dozen times. The result was always the same. Now . . .”

  Amy waited, but he didn’t answer.

  The bell over the entry tinkled, and the brief blare of a jazz trumpet slipped through the open door before it was closed again. Amy looked over her shoulder and nodded to the scruffy, skinny man who was none too clean and wore a tattered raincoat and a watch cap pulled low over his eyebrows.

  She turned back to the man sitting across from her, struck anew by his sorrowful, arresting eyes and extraordinary good looks. Touching his arm lightly, she met his gaze and said, “If you’d like to talk about it, I’m told I’m a very good listener.”

  He raked his fingers through his hair, then glanced up at the ceiling. “God, I don’t even know where to start.”

  “The beginning is always a good place. Or you can jump in anywhere, and we can work our way backward and forward from there.” When he only looked at her and blew out a big breath, she smiled and said, “We can start with your real name. I know it isn’t Mud.”

  “It’s Larkin. Neil Larkin.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you, Neil Larkin.”

  She started to extend her hand to him, but he glanced sharply toward the door as the bell tinkled. Scowling, he yelled, “Hey, you!”

  Before Amy could stop him, Neil jumped up and took off after the shabby fellow who’d been in the bakery. She hurried after them in time to see Neil tackle the fleeing man.

  “What are you doing?” Amy shrieked.

  Neil pushed himself to his feet. “He was stealing your bread. He hid it under his coat.”

  He glowered at the man on the ground who had drawn himself into a fetal position, his darting eyes wide with fear.

  Amy laid her hand on Neil’s arm. “This isn’t Les Miserables.” She helped the downed man to his feet and patted his back. “Sorry about the misunderstanding, Pullet. Are you okay?”

  Pullet’s head bobbed on his long, grimy neck, but he eyed Neil warily as he pulled three mashed baguettes from beneath his coat. “But the bread’s all broke up.”

  Amy examined the loaves. “Oh, they’re not too bad, but if you’ll come back to Rachel’s, I’ll find you some others.”

  She steered the two men, who shot leery glances at each other, back to the bakery and replaced the three crushed baguettes with others and added a sourdough pain for good measure.

  When the ragged little man had gone, Neil said, “Will you explain why you replaced a thief’s damaged merchandise?”

  She laughed. “Pullet’s not a thief. He’s a street person. When I found him rummaging in the alley garbage cans for old bread, I told him to come by at the end of the day, and we could cut out the middleman—or can in this case. By tomorrow morning all the bread on this table won’t be good for much except for bread pudding or driving nails. I hate to see it go to waste.”

  Neil raked his fingers through his hair. “God, I feel like such a fool. This hasn’t been my day.”

  “Good heavens, don’t worry about the misunderstanding with Pullet. You were only trying to help. Have you had dinner? No, of course you haven’t. I’ll bet you missed lunch too. I’m starved, and I know that you must be. Coffee and a roll aren’t substitutes for proper nourishment. Know what I’d like? A big bowl of sea
food gumbo and a glass of wine. Doesn’t that sound scrumptious? Why don’t you go in the back and change into some dry clothes while I close up, and we’ll go over to the Gumbo Shop and eat. Come on.”

  She picked up his suitcase and garment bag and started to the back of the store.

  “Here, let me take those,” he said, relieving her of the baggage. “Where do I go?”

  She led him through the large kitchen and pushed open the door to a small room with a cot folded in one corner. “Here’s a good place. This is where our baker Emile stays sometimes when he and his wife Felice have a fight. They haven’t had any problems lately, so things may be a little dusty. Not from dirt,” she interjected quickly, “but from flour. In a bakery, flour gets everywhere.” She ran her finger over a small, scarred chest just inside the door. “Nope. Looks clean. Put on some jeans or something, and I’ll go close up.” She patted his arm and gave him her most reassuring smile. “Even though it might not seem like it at the time, things always get better. Especially if you have someone to talk to.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Yep. I’d rather believe that than the alternative.”

  * * *

  Neil stood at the door and, shaking his head, watched her go, dark ponytail bobbing. He felt as if he’d been caught up in the maternal bosom of a whirlwind. Except that it wasn’t the maternal appeal of Amy’s bosom that struck him. She had a veiy nice bosom. In fact her whole body was very nice. About five and a half feet of very, very nice.

  And she had one of the warmest smiles he’d encountered in a long, long time. So warm that he was almost sure that he could heat his hands by it. Her whole face became animated with dimples when she smiled—deep ones in her cheeks, two smaller ones at each corner of her mouth. Just being around her had made him feel a little lighter, made him forget for a moment—

  Forget? How could he ever forget the towering humiliation he’d endured? No, it was more than mere humiliation. Embarrassment he could live with. His reputation, his credibility, his entire career had been shattered beyond redemption. He didn’t know how to begin to pick up the pieces.