“Is that all she does, fight record companies? That can’t be much of a business.” Amy smoothed the letter on the kitchen desk where she kept her recipe books. She could hear Louisa singing to herself in the bedroom. The kids would want to get up soon.
“No, Elise is a contract lawyer, but from the way she talks, I think she likes taking cases that work men over. You know Hank Barlow, the singer who divorced his wife of fifteen years and brought in some hot babe when his album went gold?” Jo didn’t wait for Amy to answer. “Well, Elise is the attorney for his wife. She sued him for breach of contract on some real estate. Mrs. Barlow now owns the mansion and the Ferrari. Elise is one badass attorney.”
“That’s nice,” Amy murmured as Josh started hollering “Mommy!” at the top of his lungs. “I’d like to meet her. Listen, I gotta go. See you tomorrow, then?”
Hanging up after Joella’s farewells, Amy neatly folded the stationery from the legal firm of Fritz and Fitzpatrick and tucked it into her Southern Living cookbook.
She should never have opened Evan’s mail. That was wrong of her.
But she’d thought it was a bill, she reminded herself as she took the stairs up to her children. Evan’s children. The beautiful toddlers who doted on the dad who was never home.
The dad who had just received a letter from an attorney that started out: As we discussed earlier, the following are our standard recommended procedures for clients preparing for a divorce…
A light bulb in the staircase chandelier popped as she walked under it.
***
The heavy rain of the last two days reduced tourist traffic to a trickle. Flint had used the time to work around the shop—avoiding Jo behind the counter—but he was praying the rain let up for the weekend for his kids’ sake. It was Friday and the rain still came down.
“You have to see this, Mama.” Jo ushered her mother out of the downpour. “Amy, leave the muffins on the counter and come look.”
He watched as Jo mother-henned her entire family, including the kids, into the closed café. He wished she’d warned him that they were coming. He hadn’t met her mother before. He was still greasy from ripping out the old grill. He wiped off his filthy hands with a towel and tried not to admire his hired help too blatantly.
Despite the bad weather, the back-room show was still on, and Jo had apparently fixed up for it. She’d wrapped her gold hair into some kind of twist that dangled little curls to the high neck of her form-fitting top. The midnight blue knit had no shoulders to speak of, so he could see she had no bathing-suit-strap marks marring that gorgeous tan. Her blue denim miniskirt possessed a modest flare, but there was nothing modest about those shapely tanned legs and flirty heeled shoes. He really needed to open a liquor bar and put Jo behind it. He wouldn’t even have to fill the glasses. Men would pay to stand and stare.
And he’d have to live in a cold shower. His hand itched to catch her elbow and draw her close so he could kiss that sweet-smelling spot behind her ear.
“Mama, this here is Flynn Clinton, Flint for short.” She gestured at Flint as if he were part of the equipment and helped her mother onto a stool. “Flint, this is my mama, Marie Sanderson. You’ve met Amy and the kids. We’ve come to admire the new stove.”
Apparently, the stove had evened out that angry kiss. She hadn’t said one word about it since, although he’d caught her speculative glances a couple of times. A man could grow to appreciate a woman who kept her mouth shut after he’d made an ass of himself.
Her enthusiasm was catching. You’d think she’d never seen a new stove before. She’d polished the stainless steel until he was afraid to cook anything on it. “Welcome, ma’am. Pleased to meet you,” he responded according to the etiquette of his youth. “Jo’s been helping me update the place a little. She’s good at it.”
Marie Sanderson was the type he called a lean, mean fighting machine, with a lined, weathered face that spoke of years of cigarettes and hard living. But she’d raised two strong daughters by herself, so he had to give her respect.
He suspected Jo had inherited her yellow hair from her mother, but Marie’s was crew-cut short. He could get an entire song of worry and woe out of the tired lines in her high-boned face. If he was writing songs anymore, which he wasn’t.
Marie spun the stool to scan the shelves of plates adorning the newly turquoise wall. “Charlie would just die if he could see this now. He hated change.”
Flint winced before Jo could elbow him. A lot of people resisted change, including him. But he was learning. Of course, if Jo won the lawsuit, she could own all this. No wonder she was excited. It was kind of convenient knowing just where he stood in her eyes. Experience sure wiped the romance out of him.
“Everybody seems to like the change real fine,” Jo admonished. “Dave even brought his wife over to buy some of the plates. I didn’t know she collected them.”
“That’s because Dave is a snob but Jane is down-to-earth,” Amy concluded, pulling a muffin in half and handing the pieces to the kids.
With the children settled, Amy came around to inspect the stove Flint had spent the day ripping out cabinets to install. “I could bake three batches of muffins at a time in this.” She sighed with admiration and smoothed the top with her fingers, just as Jo had.
Outnumbered by women and children, Flint started feeling a little uncomfortable. He wondered if he ought to just bow out and let them chat while he returned to his office and the bills he hadn’t paid yet. But Jo was wearing some mouth-watering scent that urged him to lick her all over, and he couldn’t quite tear away.
She knew damned well that she fueled his flames, but she didn’t seem to acknowledge the term personal space. She leaned against the counter beside him, her elbow poking him every so often to make a point.
He liked her proximity too well. He liked the way she included him in her family. He liked the way she thought. And he sure enough loved the way she kissed.
Flint worked his sore hand and contemplated kicking something just to show them he wasn’t the teddy bear they apparently thought he was.
He didn’t need a counselor to tell him that he was trying to hide from the heart-racing, gut-churning uncertainty that women called feelings.
“If we stay open in the evenings, maybe you could bring the kids in and mix up muffins for mornings,” Jo suggested. “It might get crowded behind the counter, but maybe Flint could move it again.” Her eyes danced with laughter as she slanted them his way.
The look clamped around his heart, and Flint had only to see the excitement in Amy’s expression to know it was a done deal. Hurricane Joella had struck again.
“Would you let me bake cupcakes?” Amy asked shyly. “I mean, if you’re going to have dinner customers and all, they might like dessert.”
“The ones with the fudge goo inside!” Jo demanded, looking up to Flint for agreement. “You have to taste them to believe them.”
“They have to make money,” he reminded her. “I’m not a charity.”
To his amazement, the sisters immediately began adding up costs of ingredients, dividing them up into cupcake quantities, and performing the kind of higher math that had even his business head spinning.
“We’re used to counting pennies,” Marie said from the counter where she was minding the kids and apparently reading his mind. “It comes of growing up poor.”
“It comes of growing up smart and taking advantage of what you have.” He’d grown up rebellious and disdaining everything he had. Like his kids, now that he thought about it. The more he was around them, the more he understood them.
“Well, some of us have to learn the hard way,” she agreed. “I was lucky and had two good-spirited girls. If I’d had a boy, he’d probably have turned out like you.”
Flint had to laugh. “Mean and ugly?” he suggested.
“No child of mine would be ugly,” Marie said with a smile of irony. “And we all can be mean when we want. But men have this one-track mind that leads them down al
l the wrong paths before they find the right one. Their daddy was like that.”
He didn’t have time to ask if their father had ever found the right path. Jo grabbed his arm and pulled him around to look at a dark booth in the back corner next to the counter that she thought they could take out.
He was dissolving beneath the pressure of her breasts against his arm, and she was chattering so fast that he didn’t even attempt to follow. The one-track-mind theory worked real well under the circumstances.
“Don’t you think?” she ended the excited stream of chatter, looking up at him with an expression in her wide green eyes that meant he’d just been snowed under.
“Does it matter what I think?” he asked, just because.
“Of course it matters! You don’t see me dragging you back to where the guys are setting up, do you? You told me you didn’t want to go, and I left it at that.” She looked at him indignantly. “I am not a bossy woman who won’t take no for an answer.”
“Yeah, you are.” He grinned at her, feeling more sure of himself than he had all week. “But it’s okay because I’m a bossy man who will keep telling you no.”
“Yeah, masterful,” she breathed the same way she had the night they’d met.
For a brief moment, it was just the two of them again, the stars were twinkling overhead, and he had images of her in his arms, hot and lush and eager.
“Hey, Flint, is it okay if we start moving the tables?” Coming in from the back room, Slim intruded on their silent communication.
Well, hell.
“Looks like we might have to add tables for Friday evenings if you want to do dinner,” Jo whispered, pulling away and leaving an empty space where she’d been.
More money he didn’t have. But he had this terrifying notion that if he could have Jo, he wouldn’t need money.
How in hell did he know if he’d found the right path until he took it? Jo sure looked like a one-way path to heaven, but so had Melinda.
If his instincts demanded unmaternal glamour girls who sought fame and fortune, did that mean he really was a lousy father?
Thirteen
Flint tried to shut out the bass beat of the band as he entered another number into the minus side of his calculations. He’d saved his laptop from the auction, but the keyboard was too cramped for his hand, and he couldn’t enter numbers easily. He’d have to buy a bigger keyboard. For now, he could calculate the old-fashioned way—by pencil and Charlie’s adding machine.
He stopped at the sound of Jo’s clear soprano ringing over the rumble of the crowd in the next room. His toe tapped to the rhythm of her song. It must be somebody’s birthday. He’d learned Jo never appeared on stage as she had for him. She usually sat at the table of the friend she was targeting with her song.
He’d give hard money to wander in there and listen, but he didn’t think he could settle at just watching her this time. He could see her wiggling her fanny in that fringed leather with his eyes shut. He’d woken up this morning dreaming of her in bed beside him with her golden curls draped across his pillows.
The heat-seeking missile in his pants had found its target and needed only the right excuse to take aim and fire, without considering the consequences.
And in this case, the consequences could be very ugly. Jo wanted what he’d given up. He knew too much to be seduced back into that life again, no matter how hot her kisses. He didn’t want to lead her into thinking differently, but Jo was used to manipulating men, and she’d think she could change him.
He tried to concentrate on numbers as Jo’s song ended, but every column showed him coming up so far in the red that he didn’t want to think about it. Between the mortgage and the credit line at the supply store, he owed more than he was worth. If business slowed down for any reason, he’d have to give up the house and sleep in the back room.
Or in Jo’s apartment, but that was back to mixing business with pleasure and would be disastrous for his relationship with the boys.
He had safely turned his thoughts to entertaining John and Adam tomorrow, when his office door crashed open, slamming into the cracked chair behind it.
With backlighting from a lamp in the hall, Joella appeared to hover inside a golden halo, but no angel ever looked like Jo. She had hot sex stamped from the supple curves of long legs and arms, to the outline of her full breasts behind the blue knit.
“Mama’s took sick, and I need to get her down to the hospital in Asheville. Can you look after the kids so Amy can go with me? We need her SUV.”
Flint responded to her panic and not the song his body was singing. “I’m better at driving than taking care of kids. If Amy will let us have the SUV, I’ll drive, and she can use my truck to take the kids home. Where is your mom?”
Flint was at the door, catching her elbow and turning her around, before Jo could protest his orders.
She swiftly fell into stride with him. “In the restroom. Everything she ate came up, and now she’s shivering and hardly conscious. She has hepatitis and cirrhosis and takes a lot of medicine. I think it’s a reaction to a new one.”
Flint had only just met Marie, but he hated to think of that feisty woman hurting.
They found Sally reassuring Josh and Louisa outside the restroom. “If you could drive us to my parents’ house, I’d be happy to look after them,” Sally offered. “I can’t drive.”
“And Evan is out of town—again,” Jo said. Her sarcastic tone morphed into cheerfulness as she shoved open the restroom door. “How are you doing in here?”
The question sounded so upbeat that Flint would have mistaken the seriousness of the situation if he hadn’t learned Jo’s body language well. She was stiff as a board and would have started throwing things if anyone set her off.
“Just take me home,” he heard Marie say. “The hospital costs too much. I’ll be fine.”
“You are not fine,” Joella argued. “You have insurance. That’s what it’s for.”
Relieved that Jo’s mother wouldn’t have to come up with emergency room costs, Flint turned back to Sally. “I’ll take Jo and her mom down,” he commanded the situation, acting in the only way he knew how. “The kids would be better off in their own beds.”
His instinct was apparently correct. Sally looked relieved, and just inside the door, Amy stepped out to gather up her worried children and give him a grateful smile. “You’re a saint, Flint. Jo would have driven us off the mountain in this rain, she’s that frantic.”
He nodded and prayed that he didn’t do the same. Jo had the ability to spin his head off his shoulders on a good day. This wasn’t turning out to be a real good day.
***
“She’s resting, Miss Sanderson. You can’t do anything more. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?” The nurse nudged Jo to the door.
Jo glanced past the nurse, hoping for one more glimpse of her mother, but the aide had pulled the curtains around the bed and turned off the lights. Frightened, she didn’t want to leave. “I could just sleep in that chair over there,” she suggested.
“The room’s much too small, Miss Sanderson. I’m sorry. We have to think of our other patients. Visiting hours start at nine.”
Ushered down the hall to the waiting room, blinking back tears, Jo had Flint’s arms around her before she remembered walking into them.
“How is she?” he murmured, cuddling her as if she were a small child.
He did that so well. His arms were big and strong, and his wide shoulders shielded her from a world of woe. She wanted to curl up against him and weep, but she’d done that before and didn’t want to wear out her welcome. He was being amazingly kind for someone who had every right to distrust her.
He’d taken over and returned order to her chaos. For that alone, she was grateful.
“She’s sleeping. They’re giving her fluids and antibiotics. They think it’s just a bug.” She prayed it was just a bug. Watching her mother pass out like that had scared her straight through. “She’s going to kill me th
ough. The mill’s HMO won’t cover the emergency room because we didn’t call her doctor first.”
She rested against Flint, absorbing his strength and life force. He simmered with passion and energy, and she marveled that he didn’t explode from holding it all in. His arms tightened around her, and she didn’t fight his embrace, even knowing she should. He’d already showed her plainly that the heat between them had no future. Not in his head, anyway. Hers was ready to accept anything in exchange for more of his kisses. Guess that made him smarter than she was.
“Do you have some way of paying the bill for her?” he asked.
“Amy, except Evan is getting nasty about money. We always figure it out.” She dismissed the problem with a shrug, although the constant worry about money was as debilitating as her mother’s disease.
“Do you want to get a room here so you can be back first thing in the morning?”
This was a tourist town in summer. Rooms on a Friday night didn’t come cheap if they could be found at all. She could stay with Rita, but she wasn’t up to her friend’s questions. “Amy can drive down. Tomorrow’s your time with the boys. Peggy can’t handle the café alone.”
“We’ll worry about that in the morning. Let’s get you home.”
Jo didn’t want to leave Flint’s arms. She was a strong woman. Life had taught her to stand on her own. But every once in a while, it was nice to have someone to lean on.
She’d relied on men before and look where that had got her. Jo straightened and stepped back from the security of Flint’s iron-clad hold. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She’d fall apart if she saw the least bit of sympathy there.
“I appreciate this, Boss Man,” she said, putting a distance between them to cool off the sparks they were striking. “You went above and beyond the call of duty.”
If he was ticked at her cool response, she couldn’t tell. They took the elevator and walked out of the hospital in silence, not touching. The rain hadn’t let up while they were inside. Hoping the downpour would cool off any simmering embers, Jo dashed across the blacktop rather than have Flint pull around for her.
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