Built to Last (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Johnson, Janice Kay

  “Oh.”

  Right then Ryan pulled into a parking spot only half a block from the house. He turned off the engine, then laid a hand on Jo’s seat and turned to look at his kids.

  “We don’t say anything to Emma. Her eating is between her, her mother and her counselor. It’ll just embarrass her if you comment. In other words…”

  “We get it, Dad,” Melissa said tartly.

  “Tyler?”

  The boy nodded. “I won’t say anything. Before, I didn’t know.”

  “I know you didn’t, and that’s okay,” Ryan said reassuringly. “But Emma probably won’t eat with us tonight, and I just didn’t want you to make her uncomfortable about it.”

  Privately, Jo wondered if it might not be good for Emma to see her peculiar behaviors reflected in the mirror of a normal child’s judgment. Everyone always tiptoed around Emma. She was never forced to see how abnormal her eating was.

  But then, Jo thought, what did she know?

  Inside, the kids left their wet shoes and socks by the door and followed Jo upstairs. When autumn arrived, she’d found the bare wooden floors in the old house so cold, she’d gone right out and invested in several pairs of fleece socks, cozy enough to wear to bed and heavy enough to wear as slippers. She loaned pairs to both kids. While she was changing into jeans, dry socks and loafers, they went off with Emma and Ginny to meet Pirate.

  Dinner, which turned out to be spicy baked burritos accompanied by tortilla chips and salsa, smelled delicious.

  “I helped with it,” Emma announced, carrying a dish of salsa to the table. “Mom and I decided to try a new recipe.”

  Tyler opened his mouth, met his father’s eyes and shut it.

  Emma actually had set a place at the table for herself. She even ate a tiny mouthful of burrito, which earned her a glowing smile from her mother.

  “It’s good,” the teenager pronounced, before pushing her plate away.

  When Ryan rounded up the kids later to leave, he drew Jo aside.

  “You’re flying out Wednesday?”

  “Right after my last class.”

  “Can you come to dinner tomorrow or Tuesday?”

  “Tomorrow night is my night to cook, and I hate to keep cutting out on it.” She hesitated. “Ryan, today was great, but I think the kids would rather be with you. If you keep having me join you, they’re going to think…um…”

  “That I’m trying to make you part of their lives as well as mine?” His eyes were enigmatic.

  She nodded.

  He ran his knuckles lightly over her cheek. “Would that be so bad?”

  Curiously breathless, she tried to sound firm. “I’m not stepmother material.”

  “Aren’t you?” Ryan murmured, before smiling crookedly. “I’m not so sure,” he added, before turning away and saying his goodbyes to Kathleen, Emma and Helen. Hummingbird’s shoulder he squeezed. Pirate, wrapped in her thin arms, purred contentedly amid the bustle.

  Jo, deeply disturbed, was glad to see them go.

  Washing dishes a few minutes later, she brooded.

  He didn’t believe she wasn’t interested in marriage. Or he was so arrogant, he was sure her convictions would crumble in the face of his assault.

  She should quit seeing him.

  Jo went still, hands deep in soapy water, unconscious of Helen quietly drying the dishes beside her.

  She didn’t want to quit seeing Ryan.

  She didn’t even necessarily want to quit seeing his kids. They were okay. A little bratty, but smart and…well, fun. She wouldn’t mind them that much, not if they were just here for a couple weeks—or a couple months—at a time. She didn’t have to live with them, after all. Like now. She could say, No, and avoid them for two days when she got tired of them.

  Marriage, being a stepmother… That was another story. Definitely not for her.

  She just had to convince Ryan, before he became so insistent she had to quit seeing him.

  An eventuality, she realized with dismay, that would make her very, very unhappy.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JO STOOD BACK and contemplated her brother’s kitchen. Kathleen would have a heart attack if she saw it. Half-unpacked shopping bags mingled with dirty dishes, damp crumpled dish towels, a vase filled with flowers that had long dried up and a towering stack of untouched catalogs and credit card come-ons that Boyce hadn’t bothered to sort. The kitchen wasn’t precisely dirty—the unwashed dishes were all from today, from their looks—but it was definitely cluttered.

  What’s more, nothing was where it seemed to Jo it should be. Pans were in a cupboard up high by the refrigerator; canned goods down low beside the oven. Cereal—well, that was in the cupboard with the bowls, which Jo supposed made sense of a sort.

  “Where’s the sugar?” she called, pouring hot water over a tea bag into the mug she had located with some effort.

  “Uh…” Still pulling a sweatshirt over his head, her brother appeared in the kitchen. He’d picked her up at the airport straight from work, dressed in a well-cut gray suit. “I don’t have a sugar bowl. You’ll have to get it out of the canister.”

  “Which is…where?”

  “It’s on the counter.” He strode over and shoved grocery sacks aside. “Right here.”

  “Oh. Well.” Jo dipped her spoon into the canister before shoving it back. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”

  Boyce stepped back and eyed the countertop ruefully. “Yeah, it’s kind of a mess, isn’t it?”

  “It reminds me of your bedroom, when we were kids.”

  He groaned. “Remember the wars?”

  “How could I forget,” she said with a shudder.

  Their father had intermittently decided that Boyce’s room should be clean. Unfortunately, Boyce had genuinely seemed not to know how to tidy his possessions. He’d end up shoving everything under the bed and into the closet, which worked until Dad caught on. Sometimes, when she had still thought she could please their father, she had helped Boyce straighten his room to avoid the fights.

  Shaking off the memory, she said practically, “We’ll have to clean up to cook Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “Yeah.” Her too-handsome brother rubbed his hands on his denim-clad thighs. “Hey, Jo?”

  She knew that tone of voice. He wanted something. He intended to wheedle her into giving it.

  Eyes narrowed, she faced him. “What?”

  “See, here’s the thing.” His smile was sheepish but charming. “I don’t know how to cook Thanksgiving dinner. I bought a turkey, but, uh, do I just stick it in the oven the way it is? I mean, I guess I take the plastic off first, but there’s supposed to be stuffing inside it, isn’t there? Except…I looked! There isn’t any inside.”

  Hiding amusement, Jo said sternly, “Are you telling me that you expect me to cook the Thanksgiving dinner that you invited me to?”

  “You don’t have to cook. I mean, if you can just tell me what to do, I’ll manage. Or maybe there’s a Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner For Dummies book. Yeah, that’s what I’ll…” He stopped, eyeing her suspiciously. “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? Jo! You made me feel guilty!”

  She laughed aloud at the ring of accusation in his voice. “You should feel guilty.”

  “Yeah.” He screwed up his face in apology. “I should. But…you will help?”

  She crossed the kitchen and kissed his cheek. “You know I will. Just let me drink my tea and then we’ll make a grocery list. If we buy everything we need tonight and get the kitchen clean, we’ll be set for morning.”

  His face brightened. “Cool! Hey. How’d you learn to cook a turkey?”

  “In college, a roommate and I decided to try one Thanksgiving. Neither of us had anyplace to go. Anyplace we wanted to go,” she amended. “I made this elaborate stuffing. Cooked the giblets—that’s the neck and organs that are filling the cavity inside the turkey, by the way. Chopped ’em up in this stuffing and discovered, after hours of labor, that I hate giblets.”
She made a face, remembering. “But the turkey was good. I’ve had friends over for a couple of Thanksgiving feasts since.”

  “You’re amazing.” He sounded like he meant it. “Of course, you’re my sister, so you have to be, right?”

  Jo laughed again. She forgot how much she enjoyed Boyce’s company. Twenty-four now, he had added a man’s muscles in the past couple of years, filling out his tall, rangy body. With his dark, straight hair long enough to pull into a stubby ponytail—which Dad would hate, she thought with relish—and eyes the color of whiskey, Boyce must have women flocking around. But to her, he didn’t seem arrogant. He was his same old self: smart but bumbling, funny and humble, ready to laugh at himself.

  She could have done a lot worse in the family department, Jo surprised herself by realizing. Plenty of people didn’t have a brother and an aunt as special as hers. As for Dad, well, maybe she really could feel indifference toward him this time.

  Her tea downed, she and Boyce talked about friends, school and work while they cleaned the kitchen, working together with the comfortable familiarity of family. He sorted the mail, recycling most, while she washed dishes. The groceries got put away, the dish towels into the wash and the burner pans scrubbed. She sent him to the store with a new list while she mopped his kitchen floor. On the way out the door, he was still protesting.

  “Why am I getting the good part of this deal?”

  “Because you don’t know how to clean!” she called after him.

  “Hey!” he said indignantly.

  “Go!”

  “All right, all right!” The front door slammed.

  Jo set the alarm so that she could put the turkey in the next morning. She dragged her sleepy, reluctant brother out of bed so he could watch if not contribute.

  “Gross!” he proclaimed, when she wormed the giblets out of the still icy cavity under warm running water. “People actually eat those?”

  “I truly do not know why,” she said. “Friends of mine cook them for their cats. Speaking of which…” While he chopped onions, she told him about Pirate’s rescue. “He is such a kick, now that he has the Elizabethan collar off. Even Kathleen enjoys him, except when he decides to scale the living room drapes. Or her bare leg beneath her bathrobe when she’s eating breakfast.”

  Tears in his eyes from the onions, Boyce laughed. “Yeah, well, I can see how the drawing of blood might dim her enthusiasm.”

  “You should get a cat,” Jo suggested.

  He raised a brow, an effect killed by red-rimmed eyes and a veil of uncombed hair. “To fill the void left by Jennifer?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Jo scraped the celery she had just chopped into the biggest bowl she’d been able to find in her brother’s kitchen. “To keep you company. To make you smile. To warm your toes at night.”

  “Gee.” He leveled a look at her. “That sounds like—I repeat—you think a cat would take Jennifer’s place.”

  “You’re still sulking, I see.” Jo took the cutting board from him and added the onions to the celery. Ripping open a package of dried, herbed bread chunks, she dumped it into the bowl.

  “You mean, I’m still nursing a broken heart, don’t you?”

  “Are you?” she asked, spooning margarine into a saucepan to melt over a warm burner. “Brokenhearted, that is?”

  He scowled. “No. Yeah, maybe. I liked her.”

  Jo cracked an egg into a smaller bowl. “But did you love her?”

  Frowning, he shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t ready to start a family or anything like that, and some things she did irritated me, but…sometimes she’d have a moment where she’d smile so sweetly, I’d feel something, oh, just kind of twist inside.” For a moment, pain carved lines in his face. “And I’d think, I want her smiling like that at me for the rest of my life.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jo said softly.

  “Thanks.” He let out a deep breath and jerked his shoulders in resignation. “She didn’t love me. She thought I was incredibly ‘establishment’ because I wouldn’t pierce my eyebrow.” He cleared his throat. “What seemed free-spirited when I met her was beginning to bug me, which I guess means we weren’t meant for each other.”

  But what if they’d thought they were? Jo wondered. Just long enough for one to make the ultimate sacrifice of career or self?

  “Do you think Mom and Dad loved each other?” she asked abruptly.

  Boyce shoved his hair back and stared incredulously at her. “What brought that to mind?”

  “Just…wondering. If Mom and Dad were meant for each other, or if they only thought they were and then found out they’d been wrong.”

  He swore. “How would I know? I hardly remember her. You’re older!”

  “I…don’t remember her well, either.” Jo busied herself mixing the stuffing. “You know that.”

  “You should. You were, like, seven when she died.”

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  “But you’ve forgotten.”

  Her eyes stinging with tears—from the onion, she told herself—Jo grabbed the slippery turkey and maneuvered it into the roasting pan. “Not everything. But I should remember more.” She heard her own fierceness. “I think I just missed her so much, I didn’t let myself remember.”

  “And Dad didn’t like to talk about her.”

  “No.” She saw herself, no more than eight or nine, quailing from her father’s frightening anger because she’d asked…what? Something about her mother, that’s all she remembered. He’d shouted. She’s gone! What difference does it make?

  How odd that she could remember what he’d said, but not her mother’s face when she tucked her daughter into bed at night.

  “Why did you invite him?” she asked her brother. She didn’t look at him as she spooned stuffing into the turkey.

  “He’s our father. He could have been worse.”

  “Could he?” Her jaw muscles hurt.

  “He picked me up from wrestling and track practice at the high school every day for four years, even though he had to rearrange stuff at work. He even came to some meets. Did you know that?”

  Jo shook her head, wordlessly.

  “Do you remember him driving you to that spelling bee, when you reached state?”

  Her hands went still as she plunged into her memories. Nervous. She was nervous, sitting in the front seat of the car. The dictionary was open on her lap, but she was getting car sick from trying to read the small print. Her father… She saw his hand reach out to gently close the dictionary. “You know what you know,” he said.

  “I’d forgotten,” she confessed to Boyce, her throat tight.

  “He got stuck being mom and dad both, and he wasn’t very good at it. I wished…” Boyce cleared his throat. “Sometimes I wished he’d pat me on the back and say, Good going. Something. But he did drive me. He was there. Which is more than Tony’s dad was. Remember Tony? His dad walked out when he was four or five, and he said he’d take the kids weekends, but then he never showed, and I used to hear Tony’s mom yelling on the phone trying to get child support. So, you know, our dad could have been worse. Lots worse.”

  Moved despite herself, Jo fought to shore up her anger. “That’s why you invited him? Because he could have been worse?”

  “I like to feel connected,” her brother said simply. “Is that so bad?”

  Her shoulders sagged as her anger drained uselessly away. “No. Of course not.”

  “You’ll be nice?”

  She gave him a crooked, painful smile. “Maybe.”

  “Ask him about Mom. Why she never sang.”

  “He won’t answer. He never would.”

  Boyce’s gaze held hers. “Try.”

  “All right. I will.” Of course she would, she realized; why else had she come? She shouldn’t have spent the money for the airline ticket, as tight as her budget was these days. She’d wanted to see Boyce, of course, but he wouldn’t have been
alone if she hadn’t come. They might have ended up with a very odd Thanksgiving meal, given Boyce’s cooking skills, but he wouldn’t have been alone.

  No, she had wanted, needed, to see her father. She was due, she thought wryly, for her every-other-year pilgrimage, to see if he had changed, or she had changed. If something was different.

  This year, she had the strangest idea that something was.

  IT BOTHERED JO every time she saw her father to realize how much she and Boyce looked like him. A Frenchman, born to immigrant parents, he had passed on more than the name Dubray to his children. They shared his dark eyes and hair and lean physique. Boyce, who had gained height from his maternal genes, was taller than his father, who stood a couple of inches under six feet. Jo knew very well that her petite stature was inherited from him.

  She hated to think any of her qualities but the external ones came from her father.

  He had aged well, she had to concede, when he arrived. His temples had grayed but the rest of his hair was still dark. The lines on his face almost made him more handsome. He must be…fifty-four, she decided, after a quick mental count. For the first time, it occurred to Jo to wonder whether he dated or considered remarrying.

  She didn’t remember him ever dating while she and Boyce lived at home. He went out sometimes without telling them where, and it might have been to see a woman. She had never once thought of him as a man, rather than as her father.

  “Dad!” Boyce shook his hand. “Look who’s here.”

  He hadn’t told Dad she’d be there? She shot him a glance before going forward.

  “Dad.” She politely kissed his cheek, felt his hand press her back as if he had almost hugged her. “How are you?”

  “Well.” He stepped back. “And you?”

  “Just fine.” Already, she couldn’t think of anything to say. “Um…come in. Would you like a coffee or tea?”

  “Coffee. Thank you.” He let Boyce take his coat and followed Jo to the living room, which her brother had spent the morning straightening. “Is it just the three of us?” he asked, as if the answer didn’t matter.