She wished it could last forever. That tomorrow’s dawn wouldn’t bring a return to sulky teenagers and money worries and decisions about an uncertain future.
Why couldn’t every day be as uncomplicated and joyous as this one?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE LAST NOTES of the sax wailed, a sad refrain somehow infused with hope, fading, fading.
In the hush as the saxophonist lowered his gleaming instrument, Tyler looked up. “They’re not going to quit, are they, Dad? Huh? They’ll keep playing, won’t they?”
Ryan smiled over his head at Jo. “I don’t think they’re ready to quit yet.”
Around them, the crowd, mostly standing, waited patiently for music. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, consisting of seven middle-aged men in dark suits, sat on the stage at the front of the small rustic room in a Creole Mansion on St. Peter Street. A few chairs around the outside let older folks sit, or children like Tyler stand higher to see the stage. No drinks were served here, no food. The crowd came only for the music.
Melissa was more restive, Tyler fascinated. Jo’s feet were beginning to hurt after a long day spent at the aquarium and zoo. But the music was gorgeous, ranging from blues to upbeat horns weaving melodies that captured the audience. In the back, couples danced. The rest of the crowd clapped to the rhythm. The sets lasted only forty-five minutes, she knew; she could hold out that long until a late dinner.
They ate afterward at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen, already a favorite, where the pizza didn’t taste much like the rubbery fare of the chain restaurants back home, and the wraps were divine. Tyler chattered about the music and how he wanted to start a band as soon as he was allowed.
“I want to play the trumpet like that man tonight,” he declared. “Did you see the way his cheeks puffed out? He blew so hard!”
Ryan told him about Dizzy Gillespie, whose cheeks had swelled and thinned like balloons because of a lifetime of blowing into a trumpet.
“That’s what’ll happen to you,” Melissa said. “Your cheeks will get so huge they’ll sag when there isn’t any air in them!”
“I don’t care!” Tyler insisted. He took a huge bite of pizza, which puffed his cheeks like a chipmunk’s, then grinned cherubically at his irritating big sister.
Melissa turned pointedly to Jo. “That white gator at the zoo was so weird. Like a ghost.”
“Are we going to do a swamp tour tomorrow?” Tyler asked eagerly. “So we can see alligators just swimming around? Huh, Dad?”
“You know we are!” Melissa snapped. “Why do you keep asking?”
Jo reached out and gently touched her hand. “Tired?”
The girl hesitated and nodded. “I’m glad it’s not hot, like everyone says it is in the summer.”
“Me, too,” Jo admitted. “One hundred degrees would do me in.”
Stomachs full, they ambled slowly the half-dozen blocks to their hotel on Dumaine Street. The sidewalks were empty, the alleys and doorways shadowy and dark. Overhead light spilled from open French doors onto balconies, and laughter and music burst from the doorways of restaurants as they passed. Having just read this tidbit, Jo told the kids that the streets were paved with the stones used for ballast in ships in the city’s early days.
The hotel was exquisite, an 1850s mansion restored to opulent perfection. The rooms all looked out on an interior cobbled courtyard with a swimming pool gleaming deep turquoise at one end and at the other a fountain splashing day and night among lush foliage that seemed untouched by winter.
Tonight was warm enough that Jo consented to putting on her bathing suit and taking the kids down for a dip.
“I’m going to be lazy and lie here and watch the news,” Ryan said. “If nobody minds.”
Jo made a face at him. “You are lazy.”
“Hey.” He grinned. “How can you say that? We’ve been walking all day long! And you made me go to the zoo when I really wanted to take in that architectural salvage place.”
“We promised we’d do that another day,” Jo reminded him.
“Yeah, but I wanted to do it today,” he whined, in perfect imitation of his children, who whacked him with pillows in response.
On the way out the door, Jo took a last peek at him, lounging on the bed. With his blond head propped on one hand, gaze intent on the television set, he was so beautiful, she wanted to shoo the kids on and turn back for a very quick kiss.
Sighing, she resisted temptation and followed Ryan’s children.
The water was deliciously warm, and she was glad she’d come when she floated on her back, looking dreamily up at the wrought-iron balconies, golden squares of windows and, above, the dark canopy of sky. Today might be chilly by New Orleans standards but compared to Seattle it felt balmy. They’d left dirty snow still lying on the ground and freezing at night on the streets. Here, gardens were still green and tropical.
Tyler dove and splashed energetically. Melissa left him to float beside Jo. Finally they shifted to the hot tub, where Jo could still keep an eye on Tyler.
Steam rose around them, making Melissa’s face indistinct.
“Do you think Dad would mind if I called Mom?” she asked.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t.” Jo tried to make out the girl’s expression. “You must miss her.”
After a long pause, Melissa confessed, “Kind of. I mean, we’ve been so busy. But…I wish she was here. Only not really. Because you are, and she and Dad don’t like each other that much, and I’m mad at her, too, but… Do you know what I mean?”
Jo nodded. “Did you know my mother died when I was seven?”
“No.” Melissa sat up, shaking water off her hair. She sounded shocked and awed. “Really?”
“She was crossing a street and was hit by a car. So it was sudden. One morning she made my lunch and sent me off to the school bus, and the next morning she wasn’t there anymore. My dad wouldn’t talk about her at all. I started to forget her really fast. Now I realize he got rid of lots of her things, too, because they made him sad. Her piano and guitar and clothes. At that age I felt as if she’d been wiped away, never existed. I wondered sometimes if I’d imagined her, if I’d ever had a mother.”
“How awful.” Melissa scooted closer, the movement sending water lapping against the sides of the hot tub. “You must have been really mad at your father.”
“I was, and at my mother, too. I blamed her. Why did she have to do something so stupid?” Jo let out a shaky breath. “Just a few weeks ago, my father sent me a box of my mom’s things that he’d saved, I guess on a closet shelf. Pictures and letters and jewelry. And a book of stuff she’d written down about me, like when I first walked and talked and what I said.”
“What was your first word?”
“Dada.” She still marveled at that. Had he been so different then, proud of his first child? Had he tossed her in the air, talked baby talk to her? “Then ball,” she said.
“You must have missed her so much.”
“Horribly. Especially when I got to milestones in life. You know. Girl stuff. I hated having to ask my father about that stuff.” She remembered his expression, which she had taken for revulsion. She watched Tyler cannonball off the side of the pool.
“Maybe I could ask you things like that,” Melissa said tentatively.
With an astonishing burst of pleasure, Jo smiled at Ryan’s daughter. “Of course you can. But what I was trying to say is that you’re lucky enough to have a mother you can ask, too. I know you must be hurt and mad at her, and I don’t blame you. But…she’s still your mother. Ryan—your dad—thinks she really does love you. So try to stay in touch with her, okay? Maybe your father is, oh, steadier and more reliable, but she has lots to offer you, too. And that,” she concluded, “is enough of that lecture. I’m sorry! I didn’t intend to start one.”
As if she, who’d been afraid of having a family, was any expert!
But Melissa startled her again by reaching over and giving her a quick hug. “I liked your lecture. I’
m glad Dad and you are friends. I wish—” She stopped. “Nothing. I’m just glad. That’s all.”
“Glad of what?” Tyler joined them by dropping into the hot tub with a splash way out of proportion to his skinny little body.
“You can’t stay for more than a minute,” Jo warned. “Melissa, you probably shouldn’t be in here this long, either.”
“What are you glad about?” he repeated.
“Nothing!” his sister said crossly, before glancing quickly at Jo. “I mean, I was just saying that I’m glad Dad and Jo are friends. That’s all.”
“Yeah!” he agreed enthusiastically. “This week has been really fun. And we get to miss school, too.”
“We’ll have to make up all the work.” Melissa made a face.
“Maybe not. Since we’re starting there in the middle of the year anyway.”
“That’s true.” She looked hopeful. “Wanna go back in the pool?”
“Yeah!” he exclaimed.
Jo went, too, floating again while they played tag. She felt boneless and…happy. How extraordinary, she thought, startled by the very awareness. She couldn’t remember many times in her life when she’d been more than contented.
It was Ryan, of course. But she was having a revelation, which didn’t let her stop there. Amazingly, she was glad they’d brought the kids. She’d had fun with them. Much of what they had seen had taken on more vivid hues for her because she’d tried to look through their eyes. As an adult, she might have strolled through the plantation house and grounds with academic interest, for example, but for the way Melissa and Tyler wanted to finger candlesticks and wainscotting and doorknobs, and peer closely and speculate aloud on what might have happened in parlors or verandahs or bedrooms. Tyler had been positively ghoulish when they walked through the simple, white-washed slave quarters at Oak Alley, but he’d been right to be so. He’d made the adults remember the horrors that had occurred here.
The fact that she actually liked Ryan’s kids should have shocked her. It didn’t, because, even as dense as she’d been, Jo had noticed that she liked Emma and Ginny. She was even, apparently, good with children. She knew that, because Ginny and Emma liked her. It appeared that Melissa and Tyler did, too.
She’d never minded doing preschool story hours at the library, or book talks at the elementary school to try to lure kids into summer reading. Part of the job, Jo had always told herself briskly, ignoring the pleasure she took in choosing books and finding new rhymes for the preschoolers or gory stories for the fourth-graders. She’d even known she was good at working with children. Which did not, she had told herself, mean that she wanted her own.
After all, how could she be a capable, never mind loving, parent, when her own father hadn’t shown her the way? It just wasn’t in her genes.
And she’d bought in, hook, line and sinker, to Aunt Julia’s version of her parents’ marriage. Mom had sacrificed a brilliant career for love, only to find herself changing dirty diapers. No woman could have career and family both. If she thought she could, she was deluding herself.
Rocking on a wave raised by splashing children, Jo thought wonderingly, But Mom did love me. She did want me. And maybe Dad did, too.
Did his failings automatically mean they would be Jo’s, too?
Why had she never asked herself such a simple question? Her mother might have been, must have been, a wonderful parent. Ryan had once asked her how she’d come out so normal if she’d been raised so badly. Maybe, she thought now, because of her mother. By seven years old, a great deal of her basic character and sense of self had been formed. She had forgotten too much, but that didn’t mean the knowledge wasn’t still there, deep inside her, a secret part of her nature.
Out of nowhere, a hand grabbed her ankle and yanked downward. Rearing out of the water, Jo wrestled a slippy, wet boy into submission.
“I’m tougher than you are,” she warned him, laughing. She tossed him away with a great heave. He curled into a ball and succeeded in washing a torrent of pool water over her.
“What a brat!” Melissa called, before diving on a subterranean mission to get her brother.
No, Jo thought, not a brat; just a sweet, smart boy, with insecurities normal to his circumstances, and the spirit to triumph over them.
And Melissa: she could be snotty, sure. Who could blame her? But she reminded Jo a little of herself at that age. She was so full of questions and doubts and hopes, it hurt to empathize sometimes.
Feeling light-headed, Jo drifted to the pool steps and watched them play. I can love them, she thought in profound amazement and relief. All these years, she’d believed herself to be emotionally stunted. Her father’s fault, she had bitterly told herself.
The truth was, she had just been an emotional coward. Love opened her to loss. She had been too young and vulnerable to learn a lesson so painful. It hadn’t yet been balanced by other lessons, ones about intimacy and laughter and hugs and someone to whom she could tell anything. Hurt himself, her father hadn’t kept teaching her. Really, when she thought about it, she was astonishingly normal, considering.
Jo’s chest ached, it was so filled with deep affection—no, love—for Ginny, Emma, Helen, even Kathleen… Melissa and Tyler, of course. And most of all, for Ryan. Afraid to love, she hadn’t known she did. She could hardly believe she had been so blind. What had she done when her heart swelled with sympathy for Emma’s inner anguish or Ginny’s sadness? Taken an antacid and called it heartburn?
She wanted to march upstairs and throw herself into Ryan’s arms. With amusement that curved her mouth, Jo thought, Well, I wanted to do that anyway.
Was he still thinking about marriage? Or were things different now that he had custody of his children?
Was she really brave enough to make all those promises that had once terrified her?
She was smiling again, idiotically. Oh, yes. She’d do it in a heartbeat. If he asked.
Which would not be tonight, unless he planned to go on his knees in front of the kids.
Melissa and Tyler had tired and were now drifting quietly. Jo stood, water sluicing down her body, and said, “Guys, I’m ready for pajamas and a chapter of my book. Let’s go up.”
They didn’t argue too much. Towels wrapped around them, rubber sandals slapping the carpeted floor, the three found Ryan yawning as he turned off the TV.
“Have fun?” he asked the kids, even as his gaze went to Jo. It sharpened, became penetrating as he saw something on her face.
“Yeah!” Tyler kicked off his sandals. “You should have come.”
“The hot tub felt blissful,” Jo said, trying to disguise her mood.
He dropped the remote control onto the bedside table and crossed his arms behind his head, his narrowed gaze not wavering from Jo’s face. “So does lying here.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” Melissa announced.
“Okay,” her father said, “but first, I’ve made some changes to tomorrow’s plans.”
Ready to snap his towel at his sister, Tyler turned instead. “You mean, we aren’t going to the swamp?” he asked in disappointment.
“We’re still going on the swamp tour. But I made a few calls while you were down in the pool, and I arranged for you two to go on a haunted history tour tomorrow night. It sounds suitably spooky. The hotel manager’s eighteen-year-old daughter will go with you and,” he added when his daughter opened her mouth to protest, “stay with you until we get in. Jo and I are going out on the town.” His eyes met hers. “I made dinner reservations at Antoine’s, and we’ll sample Bourbon Street afterward.”
She smiled. “That sounds wonderful.”
“No fair,” Tyler muttered.
Ryan raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you want to go on the voodoo tour? I can cancel…”
“No! That sounds cool. If we see a vampire,” he said with relish. “It’s just…it would be more fun if you came, too.”
“Thank you.” Ryan smiled at his son. “But I did promise Jo we’d do one r
omantic evening on our own. Mushy though that probably sounds to you.”
Tyler shuffled his feet. “No, that’s okay,” he mumbled.
Ryan looked at his daughter. “Melissa?”
She rolled her eyes. “We don’t need a babysitter!”
“This is a strange city. I couldn’t enjoy myself if I didn’t know someone was keeping an eye on you.”
She huffed a little but conceded that she could survive the evening without her father and Jo. If Tyler wasn’t too big a pain.
Ryan’s eyes met Jo’s again, and for just a moment she tried to let him see that something had changed. One charged look had to do—until tomorrow.
JO WAS IN a dreamlike state throughout the candlelit dinner at the elegant restaurant in a historic building. Her filet mignon with peppercorns melted in her mouth. Ryan, more adventuresome, tried grilled pompano, and they shared tiny, delicate puffs of potato. In a charcoal suit and tie, Ryan was incredibly handsome. Jo had bought the red silk sheath she wore tonight especially for the trip, and with her hair up and tiny diamonds in her earlobes, she felt almost beautiful. Maybe she really was, at least in Ryan’s eyes. His potent gaze never left her, even when the dark-suited waiter paused to be sure they lacked nothing.
She knew even as they talked that later she wouldn’t remember a word they’d said. The words weren’t important. The way his eyes darkened when she smiled, that was important. So was the tone to his voice, and the slow, impossibly sweet smile that was just for her.
His hand was warm and tender on the small of her back when they left the restaurant. He made the act of tucking her black velvet wrap around her shoulders a caress, his thumbs sliding along her collarbone.
Outside the night was cool, but Jo was flushed from the romantic byplay and the intimacy of Ryan’s arm casually enfolding and guiding her. Shy with him now that she understood her own feelings, Jo found herself avoiding his gaze while helping to keep the conversation meaningless.
Bourbon Street was crowded.
They stopped briefly twice, listening to blues, raw and powerful. In neither club did they stay for long. After five or six blocks, Ryan said abruptly, “Do you want to stay?”
Built to Last (Harlequin Heartwarming) Page 21