“You tell Dori Mae we’re rootin’ for y’all,” Elmer said. “And I’ll give you a tip, son. Marry the girl as quick as you can. People in these parts don’t cotton to others livin’ together without being joined in holy matrimony.”
“Good,” Tanner said. “Maybe that will hurry the lady along to a decision.” He touched the brim of his Stetson, picked up his duffel bag and left the motel office.
On the drive to Dori’s house he couldn’t help wondering if Elmer would have been so friendly if he’d known Tanner could buy and sell him. Probably not. But Elmer wasn’t the person Tanner was most concerned about. Dori’s statement played over and over in his mind. I would never marry a rich man again.
Maybe it served him right. He’d been so determined to find a woman who wasn’t lured by wealth that he’d found one who was repelled by it. And the joke was on him, because this was the woman he had to have. He craved everything about her—her unbreakable spirit, her devotion to her child, her generosity and her largely untapped passion. He’d fallen irrevocably, completely and happily in love.
He stopped by the local Piggly Wiggly on his way back to Dori’s house and picked up a few things for a lateevening snack, keeping her budget for him in mind. He’d decided to postpone any announcement of his financial status for the time being. Their connection was too new and fragile to withstand that sort of information, given her deep-rooted prejudice.
And prejudice it was, though an understandable one. His willingness to let her lead in bed after she’d proclaimed her need for independence had been a subtle message. He’d deliver more of them before he told her the complete truth about himself. Funny, but his goal hadn’t really changed. He still had to convince a woman to love him for himself and ignore what he possessed.
He reached her house and let himself in with the spare key she’d given him. Then he set about organizing romance on a shoestring. When she came home he wanted her to be transported to a world where there were no jealous exhusbands, no difficult customers, no disappointing tips.
He carried her small oak table into the living room and located a white tablecloth tucked in the linen closet. The single candle had been on sale, but he hadn’t thought what to put it in. Then he remembered the six-pack of long-necks he’d bought, thinking he’d like to have some beer around for the rest of the week. He’d just drink one and use the bottle for a candle holder.
Pulling the bottle from Dori’s little refrigerator, he uncapped it and took a drink. He couldn’t believe how much fun he was having planning a cheap evening at home. He’d become accustomed to dropping big sums of money when he entertained women, and he’d unconsciously fallen into the trap of thinking you could measure the kind of time you had by how much you spent.
He leaned one hip against her sink and glanced out the kitchen window toward the Devaney mansion. Tanner would describe it as the Devaney monstrosity. Whoever had designed that gigantic block of rooms should be shot. Dori’s little house had more charm, because it was an honest, utilitarian dwelling that didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t.
His shirt chafed against the tape around his ribs, and he unbuttoned it, leaving it hanging open as he turned away from the uninspiring view out the kitchen window. He and Dori would get Little Jim out of that stifling atmosphere, no matter how much time and money it took.
When the doorbell chimed, Tanner feared a delegation of churchgoers had arrived to protest his and Dori’s living arrangements. He wouldn’t have been terribly surprised. The people around here took their morals very seriously, as evidenced by Elmer’s remark. He set the beer on the counter and walked to the front door.
He opened it to find Little Jim gazing up at him in total shock. Tanner remembered his bandaged nose and black eye. Little Jim was holding the hand of a very attractive blonde who looked barely forty and obviously understood dressing to attract male admiration. Her beige dress dipped softly and subtly to reveal cleavage and wrapped her hips to accentuate her womanly curves. The whole thing looked as if it would come off with the removal of one strategically placed decorative pin.
“Tanner, what happened?” Little Jim asked.
“Just clumsy,” Tanner said. “Ran into a door.”
“You look terrible.”
Tanner smiled. “Thanks.”
The woman stepped forward. “I’m Crystal Devaney, Little Jim’s grandmother,” she said. “May we come in?”
He knew modern grandmothers didn’t look like the Norman Rockwell version anymore, but still he was taken aback. He revised his estimate of her age upward by about ten years. “Sure. Come in.” He stepped back and let them pass.
“L.J., go play in your room while Mr. Jones and I talk,” she ordered.
Little Jim’s glance was hopeful as he directed it toward Tanner. “Is the White Ranger in my room?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Oh, boy!” He tore off in search of his treasure.
Tanner watched him go. Then he turned back to Crystal and found her staring at his bandaged chest. “Uh, sorry, ma’am.” He started buttoning his shirt.
She fingered the clasp on her elegantly miniaturized shoulder purse. “You’ve been in some terrible sort of fight, haven’t you?”
He gave her a level look. “You could say that.”
“I have a dreadful feeling it had something to do with my son. He dotes on that girl, you know.”
“Mmm.”
She glanced around the room. “Could we…sit down or something?”
He supposed he should be at least marginally polite, although he doubted Dori would want him to roll out the red carpet. Still, he was very curious as to what had prompted Crystal Devaney to show up in her powder blue Cadillac coupe. He waved her toward the couch. “By all means. I was having a beer. Would you like one?”
“That would be very nice.”
When Tanner returned with his half-empty bottle and Crystal’s beer in a glass he’d unearthed, he could hear the sound of an imaginary space battle going on in Little Jim’s room. Probably the White Ranger against an invasion of aliens disguised as teddy bears. He handed Crystal the glass and a napkin before sitting on the opposite end of the couch. She set her purse next to her and crossed her legs. The skirt of her dress inched up, probably on purpose, to reveal excellently toned calves and thighs. This was a woman used to using her appearance to get what she wanted, he thought. Good thing she had no idea she was dealing with a corporate executive who’d seen all those moves before.
“Thank you kindly.” She took a dainty sip. “Elmer told me you’d checked out today, and although he didn’t say where you were, I guessed you might be here. So I took the liberty of calling on you.”
“You probably knew it was the right place when you saw the spray painting on the side of my truck.”
Her green eyes, the genetic predecessor of Jimmy Jr.’s and Little Jim’s, clouded in apparent distress. “I hate all this ugliness. I truly do. I’d like to put a stop to it.”
“That would be terrific.”
“But I need your help, Mr. Jones.”
Uh-oh. Here it comes. “Is that right?”
She lowered her voice and leaned forward, as if to make them coconspirators. Her cleavage became more visible. “It’s for L.J. that I’m askin’, Mr. Jones. That little boy needs his momma and daddy livin’ in the same house again. They’ve had a lovers’ spat, that’s all. Nothing that a second honeymoon in the Caribbean wouldn’t cure.”
Something deep in Tanner rebelled. He’d already become possessive enough not to want Dori in any other-man’s arms, but the specific idea of her sharing a marriage bed again with Jimmy Devaney, Jr., made him a little crazy. “If I understand Dori correctly, and I think I’m in a position to do that, she’d rather roll a walnut with her nose five miles down the main street of Los Lobos, immediately following the Los Lobos sheriffs mounted posse, than have anything more to do with your son.”
Crystal’s hoot of laughter surprised him. “I didn’t expect you to be
so clever.” She batted her eyelashes. “I’m beginning to see why Dori is so distracted by you.”
“She’s not distracted, Mrs. Devaney. She knows exactly what she wants.”
“Please call me Crystal. Everyone does.”
“Grandma, can I come out now?” Little Jim stood in the hallway clutching his White Ranger.
“Except this little devil,” Crystal amended. “Come here, L.J.”
Little Jim walked over to the couch and stood by her knee.
“What’s the one thing you want more than anything in the world?” she asked him.
“All the Power Ranger stuff.”
Crystal rolled her eyes. “No. What do you really want?”
Little Jim took a deep breath, as if about to recite. “Momma and Daddy back together.” It was almost a chant.
Crystal glanced at Tanner, her eyebrows raised asif to say, “See there?”
Tanner was sickened. Encouraging the kid to believe in a happily-ever-after for his parents, who’d never belonged together in the first place, was just plain cruel. “Hey, Jim,” he said. “I think there’s some orange soda in the refrigerator. And that swing set out back looks as if nobody’s played on it in a long time. Why don’t you get the soda and show the White Ranger all your secret places in the backyard?”
The boy’s eyes widened. “How did you know I had secret places?”
Tanner smiled at him. “Good guess.”
Little Jim gave him an admiring glance before he headed into the kitchen.
Once Tanner heard the back door close, he turned to Crystal. “Face reality, Crystal. Dori doesn’t want to be married to your son. Accept that and stop making life more miserable for that little boy by pretending there will be a reconciliation. There won’t.”
“You can’t know that!”
He held her gaze. “Oh, yes, I can.”
“You’re the problem.” She stared into her glass of beer. Her lower lip had begun to quiver as her composure slipped. “I know they won’t get together as long as you’re around. She imagines you as some white knight dashing into town to make everything all right. What a foolish thought.”
“Only if you don’t believe in white knights.”
Her gaze lifted to his. “Well, I don’t, Mr. Jones. And I can tell I’m wasting my time appealing to your finer nature, so I’ll come right to the point.” She laid a manicured hand on her leather purse. “I have ten thousand dollars in cash. Leave this afternoon and you can take it with you.”
He glanced at the purse. “I’m afraid that’s not enough.”
“Then tell me what is enough.” Her voice crackled with eagerness. “I’ll find a way to get it. Just say you’ll leave.”
He looked into her eyes. “Sorry. You couldn’t pay me enough to abandon Dori to a pack of jackals like you, your husband and son. Not to mention my concern for Little Jim. Some authorities might construe what you’re doing, using him as a tool to reinstate the marriage, as child abuse.”
She almost spilled her beer all over her expensive beige dress. “I love that boy!”
“If that’s true, which I seriously doubt, you’ll help him adjust to the confusing world of divorce, instead of giving him false hope that the divorce will go away.”
Tears spilled from her eyes and coursed through the artful makeup on her cheeks. She clutched her beer glass like a votive candle holder, and tears splashed into the amber liquid. “You don’t understand. I need that little boy. James and I need him. When Dori had him, when he didn’t live with us, I…I didn’t feel like livin’ anymore.”
Tanner felt some sympathy, but not much. “Then I guess you can imagine how Dori feels. She’s his mother, and she never gets to read him bedtime stories, or kiss him before he goes to sleep, or fix him his favorite breakfast, or watch Saturday-morning cartoons with him. You’ve stolen six months of Little Jim’s childhood from her.”
“But if she’d just come back…” Crystal choked back a sob.
Tanner took a wild guess. “Not every woman’s willing to settle for a hellish marriage.”
Crystal sniffed and set her beer on the end table beside her. She used the napkin to dab under her eyes. “It’s not hellish.”
“No?”
“There were times…” She looked away from him. “But ever since Little Jim was born, James has been a whole new person. Having that child around has made everything wonderful.”
“Well, you have him back now. Why are you trying to get Dori, too?”
She glanced at him. “Jimmy Jr. wants her. He can’t stand the idea that she threw him over. No girl ever did that. And L.J.—well, he really misses her. Sometimes I come up to his room, and he’s got all the pictures of her spread out on his bed, and he just looks so pitiful.”
“I’m sure he does.”
She twisted the napkin between her fingers. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to do it.”
Abruptly, she stood. “I’m going to fetch him. We have to get back. James will be home any minute, and he likes to see L.J. first thing when he gets home from the office.”
Tanner rose when she did. She picked up her glass of beer and carried it with her to the kitchen. She put it on the counter before she walked to the back door, opened it and called for Little Jim. The simple act of picking up after herself revealed to Tanner that she hadn’t always had money. She’d obviously allowed herself to like it far too much, which made her a slave to the wishes of James Devaney, Sr. And he was Tanner’s true adversary. Not Jimmy Jr., who was a coward, and not Crystal, who could still be moved to tears over the fate of her grandson. But James Devaney claimed ownership of Little Jim to satisfy his own ego without any thought to the child’s welfare. Tanner realized he’d walked into the wrong office that afternoon, after all.
ALL DURING HER SHIFT Dori expected Jimmy Jr. to show up and make a scene, but finally nine o’clock arrived and he hadn’t made an appearance. She could go home to Tanner. Her body quickened with anticipation as she drove the familiar route to her house. Along the way, she pulled the net from her hair and tossed it on the seat beside her.
A part of her still feared that Tanner would disappear when she wasn’t looking, but his battered truck sat in her driveway. He was inside, waiting. Coming home to Tanner every night would be very special indeed. If she could come home to Tanner and Little Jim, life would be perfect.
He opened the door before she got her key in the lock and drew her into a fairyland of dancing candle flame and muted love songs on the tape player. Nudging the door closed with his foot, he gathered her close and kissed her gently. “Welcome home,” he murmured. The next kiss was deeper, filled with a longing that heated her blood and sent it singing through her veins. He pushed her hair aside and nuzzled the curve of her neck. “I thought you’d never get here.”
She molded her body to his. “It was the longest shift of my life.”
“Then you missed me?” He leaned away from her to look into her eyes.
“Desperately.”
He cupped her bottom and pressed his hips gently against her. “Is that what you missed?”
“Yes.” She laced her fingers behind his neck and leaned back, keeping her pelvis locked tight with his. “But that’s not all. I missed your smile, and the way you make me believe that no matter how hopeless the situation seems, it will turn out okay. I missed the way you listen to me, as if what I say really matters. I missed the sound of your voice, which has a bit of a caress in it whenever you talk to me.”
He gazed at her. “That’s dangerous talk, lady.”
“I know,” she murmured, her heart full of the emotion she didn’t quite have the courage to name. Not yet.
“I hope you know where it could lead.”
“I think I do.”
“How about joining me at this intimate café I know, and we’ll talk about it?”
“I’d love to.”
He led her to the table he’d placed in the cen
ter of the living room. On it sat a beer bottle holding a candle, an uncorked bottle of wine, two unmatched stem glasses from her cupboard and a tray of crackers, cheese and fruit.
“Tanner, this is so creative.”
He held her chair for her. “You have to be creative when you’re on a budget.”
“Are you mocking me again?”
“Absolutely not.” As he scooted her forward he leaned down and kissed the side of her neck. “You’ve taught me what’s important. I had more fun putting this together than I did going to those five-star restaurants.”
“Those?” She turned her face up to his. “You’ve been to more than one?”
He caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Yes, but I’m a changed man, Dori. Anybody can make reservations.”
She smiled up at him. “No one has ever gone to this much trouble to give me a romantic evening, Tanner.”
“It’s only the beginning, my love.”
Her heart lurched as she looked into his eyes.
He met her gaze. The endearment hadn’t been carelessly tossed out. He dropped a lingering kiss on her lips before going to his chair opposite hers and sliding into it. He reached for the bottle on the table. “Wine?”
“Please.” Her country-western tapes played softly in the background.
He poured a glass for each of them. Then he picked up his glass. “I remember something couples used to do when they toasted each other. I don’t know if anybody ever does it anymore. They’d—”
“Link arms,” Dori finished, leaning forward. “Yes. Let’s.”
“You wouldn’t think that was overdoing it?”
“Tanner, I want to overdo it.”
“Me, too.”
She positioned her arm on the table, glass raised, and he leaned forward to wrap his forearm around hers.
“To us,” he said.
“To us.” She moved close, keeping her gaze on his as they sipped from their glasses.
He lowered his glass but didn’t move away. “Give me your other hand.”
She placed her left hand in his.
He twined his fingers through hers, and his gaze burned hotter than the candle flame. Her heart thumped in response.
Holding Out For A Hero Page 13