by Jan Hudson
“Picture me nude.”
A devilish gleam came in his eye. “I have. Many times.”
She gave him a playful swat on the shoulder. “Nude with great swirls of blue hair longer than I am.”
Dan looked from Tess to the painting and back again. “My God, it’s you!” She grinned and his eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared as a rush of irrational fury flashed through him. The thought of anyone, even an artist, seeing his Tess nude angered him. He hadn’t even seen her nude yet. “Did you pose for this?” His words were sharp.
Her eyes widened. “Are you such a prude?” She sounded amused.
“Did you?” There was no humor in his question.
“Only the face is mine. The rest is pure imagination.”
Dan felt his gut relax.
Tess rose and tugged at Dan’s hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.” She led him to a painting with another female fantasy figure and hoisted the large oil to eye level. “Look closely at the face of this one.”
He squinted and leaned toward the stylized mermaid with copper hair.
“Look familiar?”
He glanced at Tess and frowned. “It reminds me of your Aunt Olivia.”
Tess smiled. “And that one?” She pointed to another leaning against a flat.
Dan squatted and looked at the central figure whose flowing white hair was studded with starfish. “Gram?”
She nodded again. “Your grandmother was delighted to be immortalized as a sea siren. Hook got a kick out of it, too.”
“Hook?” Dan glanced at the corner of the painting, then up at Tess. “Do you mean . . . Hook?” He sketched the big man’s distinctive scar on his own face, tapped his front tooth, and pointed to large oil. “Hook painted this?”
Looking smug, Tess slowly nodded her head.
“My God,” Dan whispered, stunned. “He’s an ex-con.”
“A sensitive, very talented ex-con. My grandmother and Aunt Olivia first saw his work in a Huntsville Prison art show.”
“I can’t believe it. Tess, I promise you, these paintings are fabulous.”
“I know. Several have bought his work.”
“And he stays on as your aunt’s houseman?”
While they hung Hook’s paintings, Tess told him the story of how her grandmother and her aunt had hired an attorney and used their considerable influence to secure Hook’s parole in their custody.
“It helps when you know the governor personally,” she said as they placed the last of the watercolors. “They recognized Hook’s potential, and he was grateful for their faith in him. He’s completely devoted to Aunt Olivia, as he was to my grandmother before she died. Hook says they gave him a chance when nobody else would. They outfitted a studio in his apartment over the garage and saw that he had art lessons and all the supplies he needed.”
“It’s amazing. I still can’t comprehend that somebody who looks like Hook can paint pictures that look like this.”
“Believe it.” She cocked her head and gave him a complacent grin. “Are you feeling a bit sheepish about judging him by his looks?” When he nodded, looking appropriately contrite, she said, “Good. You’re learning. Come on, let’s get the rest of these up.”
By the time they were finished, it was dark outside and Nancy had gone home. With Dan’s arm draped casually around her shoulders, they stood surveying their work.
“I think we did a fine job,” he said. “We make a good team.”
“A darned good team,” Tess agreed, slipping her arm around his lean waist.
“I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed an afternoon more. I hate for it to end.”
“It was fun, wasn’t it?” She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost dinnertime. We’d better get home or Ivan will have our hide. You’ve become his personal project, you know.”
“Why don’t we have dinner out for a change? Think Ivan would mind if we gave him a call?”
Tess shook her head.
After they phoned, Tess locked the gallery and they walked toward the waterfront. With the loss of the sun, the night air was crisp and chilly. They walked snuggled close together, arms wrapped around each other’s waists and laughing as they bumped hips until they matched the tempo of their strides.
Although she’d been happy living in Galveston for some time now, Tess had never felt more profoundly alive than she did at that moment. Hers. Daniel Friday was hers. A thrill of joy rippled over her and she shivered.
“You’re cold,” Dan said, running his hands over the goose bumps on her arms. “And I don’t have a jacket to offer you.”
“I’m fine.”
Spotting a souvenir shop that was still open, Dan pulled her inside and insisted on buying her something warm. “Though I hate to cover up that lion’s eye. He’s been winking at me all afternoon.”
They laughed over the funny sayings printed on some of the shirts and clowned around holding some of the more outrageous ones to their shoulders to model. A few minutes later they left, attired in matching hot pink sweatshirts with cross-eyed green frogs and LIFE’S A BEACH stamped across the front.
“It’s you,” Tess said, standing back to admire his gaudy choice and crossing her eyes to mimic the frog.
Dan threw back his head and laughed. Scooping her against his side, he hugged her close. “Tess Cameron, you do strange things to my conservative sensibilities.”
“Good.” She tucked her hand under the band of his sweatshirt and let it rest on the warmth of his belly. “Your conservative sensibilities need a little shaking up. They’ve given you nothing but trouble.”
Since their confrontation at noon, Dan’s behavior had made a hundred and eighty-degree turn—well, maybe closer to a hundred degrees—and Tess was keeping her fingers crossed that he wouldn’t revert to the foul-tempered, straitlaced stinker she knew he could be. She liked him much better the way he was now. She suspected that she was beginning to see the real Dan, the one who’d been hiding away inside a carefully constructed shell. Even if he’d rather die than admit it, she was sure that Kathy and the board had been right to toss him out. Only his damnable male pride had been injured.
The more she was around Dan, the clearer it became that he hated being an executive at Friday Elevators, and he probably always had. How awful that his sense of responsibility to his family had made him endure it for years. No wonder his misery had given him headaches and finally eaten a hole in his stomach and his body had rebelled. He had the soul of an architect. Anybody with half a brain could see that.
If she had anything to do with it, Tess planned to help Dan follow his own dreams for a change.
With Tess pointing the way, they crossed the intersection and walked a block to Water Street, toward a two-story wooden structure extending over the dark water. From a half a block away, delicious aromas of cooking seafood filled the air, overpowering the odors from the wharf and its shrimp boats and fish markets. Her mouth watered.
“Doesn’t it smell wonderful?” Tess asked as they stepped into the smoky restaurant, where a battalion of cooks and servers scampered back and forth behind the cafeteria-type counter in a flurry of activity. “I’m starved. What looks good to you?”
Dan studied the menu painted on a huge wooden sign at the beginning of the line. “I want a giant platter of fried shrimp, french fries, and about a quart of catsup.”
Tess drew her brows together in reproach. “Nothing fried for you, my friend. Say, do you have your medication?”
“In my pocket,” Dan grumbled.
“I’ll order,” Tess informed him as they picked up trays and slid them along the rail. “Two broiled snapper and two baked potatoes,” she told the attendant. “Plain rolls—no garlic butter.”
“Not even a small order of french fries?” Dan asked wistfully.
Tess pursed her lips and shook her head slowly. “Not even one.”
Dan sighed theatrically. Tess giggled.
“You may have pudding. Do you prefer banana, vanilla
, or tapioca?”
“Chocolate.”
“Chocolate it is.” She plunked a bowl of chocolate pudding on his tray and banana on hers, then selected milk for him and iced tea for herself. When he opened his mouth to protest, she gave him her sternest look.
“Yes, Mother,” he said and grinned.
They took their trays upstairs to a large, informal dining room with walls of windows overlooking the dark outlines of the shrimp and fishing boats docked at Pier 19.
“This has always been called the ‘Mosquito Fleet Berth,’“ Tess said, pointing out the insectlike profiles of the small boats along the wharf. “It’s the same area Jean Laffite’s pirate ships used for docking.”
She could have bitten her tongue off the moment the words were out of her mouth. Things had been going so well between them.
Right on cue, Dan asked casually, “What about this map you mentioned?”
Tess sighed and put her fork down. “I know it sounds bizarre unless you know the family history.” She leaned closer and said in a low voice, “It’s not something that’s widely known, but Jean Laffite was my great-great-great-great-great—is that five or six?” she asked as she counted the “greats” on her fingers. “Anyway, he was my grandfather several generations back.”
Dan raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“It’s true!” she said, exasperated. “Our branch is descended from the daughter, and only child, of his second wife, Contessa. I’m named for her. She was a young woman from South Carolina, and she died in childbirth in 1826. Their daughter’s name was Violet and she grew up on her grandparents’ plantation near Charleston. She stayed with them even after Laffite married again a few years later, moved to St. Louis, and changed his name. I gather that there was some animosity between her grandparents and Laffite. When Violet married in 1843, her father gave her a deed to property in the newly formed city of Galveston and a Bible with the treasure map inside.”
He continued to eat his fish as if he didn’t believe a single thing she said. Refusing to look at him or to utter another word, Tess picked up her fork and attacked her own food with a vengeance.
When he had scraped the last drop of pudding from his bowl, Dan leaned back and laced his fingers across the green frog on his chest. “Tess, as a boy I was fascinated with pirates and privateers. I used to have quite a collection of books about them. As I recall, Jean Laffite died shortly after he was run off Campeche and Galveston island by the United States government. That would have been some time in the eighteen-twenties.”
“Nope,” she said, pushing a slice of banana to the side of her bowl, where she had deposited several others. “He died in 1854.”
“Tess—”
“What?” Irritated, she looked up, ready to do battle. He was staring at her bowl.
“Why didn’t you get vanilla pudding if you’re not going to eat the bananas?”
“Because I like banana pudding. I just don’t like the bananas.”
Dan shook his head and gave a mirthless chuckle. “I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else you’ve said.”
She put her spoon down and looked up at him. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
He shrugged as a smile began to play around his lips. “I guess you should know if you like bananas or not.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
He leaned forward and took one of her hands in his. “Tess, I promised I wouldn’t jump to any more conclusions without all the facts. And right now I don’t want to argue with you. I can think of at least ten things I’d rather do.”
His thumb brushed back and forth across her knuckles and his eyes were on her lips.
“Oh?” A slow smile came as she began to imagine what some of those things might be.
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
As the horse’s hooves clip-clopped along the asphalt street, Tess and Dan sat snuggled close together in the old-fashioned carriage. His arms were around her and her head rested on his shoulder as they looked up at the stars and listened to the banter of the driver, an elderly gentleman in a top hat. A crisp breeze ruffled Tess’s hair and a stray lock tickled Dan’s nose.
He smoothed the strand back. “Comfortable?”
“Very.”
“This isn’t what we get when we call a taxi in Pittsburgh.”
“But isn’t this better? No exhaust fumes.” She burrowed closer. “And much more romantic.”
They were content with the quiet and one another as they rode slowly through neighborhoods of old houses and tree-lined streets. Shadows of the night kindly disguised the buildings with rotting boards and peeling paint and revealed only the dramatic lines of their former elegance.
Tess reveled in the comfort of Dan’s arms around her, the warm pulsations of his strong body next to hers, the smell of him that permeated the shoulder of the soft sweatshirt where she rested her cheek.
The emotions he aroused in her were almost overwhelming, and snatches of fantasies she dared not allow full birth made her wiggle with anticipation. She thought of the things yet to come, things that would come slowly, to be savored and treasured. Not for a moment did she question that love would grow between them. She could sense it beginning to stir and send out roots deep inside her. She imagined the feel of his bare skin next to hers and she snuggled closer.
“Cold?”
She shook her head. “My frog keeps me warm.”
He chuckled and gave her a little squeeze.
The horse-drawn carriage pulled to a stop in the back parking lot of a hotel that fronted the seawall. Daniel climbed down and helped Tess descend.
“I’ll get a cup of coffee across the street while you and your young man take a walk,” the driver said to Tess.
“We won’t be long, Amos. It’s a bit nippy tonight.”
“Take your time, li’l lady. Me and Snooks don’t have nothing better to do.”
“Thanks, Amos.” Tess waved at the old man, and she and Dan crossed the boulevard.
“He’s a character,” Dan said as they walked down the steps to a deserted strip of beach lit by the moon and street lights along the seawall. “Do you own fifty-one percent of the horse?”
Tess laughed. “No, Amos and I are just friends. I’ve known him since I was a little girl and spent every summer here with my grandmother and Aunt Olivia. I like to ride with him once or twice a week in the off-season when he isn’t too busy.”
“To make sure Snooks has enough oats?”
She shrugged.
He smiled. “That’s what I thought.” He took her hand and they walked along the damp sand near the water’s edge. “Where did you spend your winters?”
“In Galveston until I was about four. My mother died shortly after I was born, and I lived with my grandmother and Aunt Olivia until my father remarried. Then I went to live with him and my stepmother in Dallas.”
“Do you have brothers or sisters?”
“Two younger half brothers. They both work in my father’s bank and are very happy. They’re ‘chips off the old block.’ We’re not close. I never fit in very well with that part of the family.”
They paused to watch the waves lap the beach and Dan smiled. “I’m not surprised. Somehow I can’t see you as the conservative banker type.”
“Oh, but I was.” Tess turned to look up at Dan. “Or at least I tried to be. I have an MBA in finance and was a money manager in the trust department of Dad’s bank until I was recruited by an investment firm in New York. I was sort of a whiz kid with investments.”
Dan’s eyebrows raised “You?
“Me.”
“Somehow I can’t picture a woman who plays the bagpipe and drives a car named Buttercup as a banker or an investment consultant.”
She laughed. “Pin-striped suits, red power ties, and all. I led the rat race for several years.”
“What happened?”
“Aunt Olivia broke her hip, and I came to Galveston to take care of her. Once I got off the
treadmill and had some time to take a look at my life, I discovered I hated the city and my job. Funny, I never thought of it as a career, only a job. I found that I hadn’t really laughed or enjoyed myself in years. Money and investments had become the prime focus of my world. I was extremely dedicated.” Tess made a dramatic gesture, then laughed at herself.
She looked down and patted a broken shell into the sand with the tip of her shoe. “But while I was here and had time to take stock of things, something in me rebelled against living my life according to what I thought I should do. When time came for me to go back, I couldn’t do it. And there was really no reason to. I love this island, the people, the slower pace and freedom I have here. I’d made enough money so that, properly invested, I would have enough to last me the rest of my life. So, instead of catching a plane back to New York, I called and resigned. I’ve never regretted it, and I’ve never been happier. Now I do what I want to do.”
Dan looked out over the Gulf and was quiet for a moment. The breeze scattered the rising moon’s reflection across the dark water. Only the roar of waves splashing against the jetties and tumbling over one another as they rolled into shore broke the silence. His hand gripped hers tightly, and Tess could feel his inner turmoil as she watched him. After what seemed like forever, but was only a few minutes, he turned to her.
Lifting her chin with the crook of his finger, he smiled and said, “I’m very glad you made the decision to stay in Galveston. If you were still in New York, I might never have met you.”
He leaned forward and slanted his lips over hers in the gentlest of kisses. Nuzzling his cheek against the tip of her nose, Dan said, “Your nose is cold. We should go.”
“Not yet,” Tess said in a throaty whisper. Her arms went around his waist and she lifted her mouth to him once more.
“Lord, Tess, I ache for you.” He gathered her close and, with a low groan deep in his throat, covered her lips with his.
She clung to him as his tongue explored the warm secrets of mouth and his strong hands kneaded the curves of her back. One arm slipped down to scoop her pelvis closer against him, and Tess whimpered. Waves of warmth, more powerful than the ocean’s, dashed over her and drove away the chill of wind and water.