Magnolia Bay Memories

by Babette de Jongh

  “Wonderful.” She sighed. “My kids love Reva more than they love me, and they love Bayside Barn more than they love their own home.”

  “That’s good.” He sat beside her, then leaned over to steal a kiss. “Our clothes are in the dryer, so if you want to take a walk later, we can do that.”

  She sipped her wine. “We can if you want to, but I’m quite happy to sit here and watch the river go by.”

  “Works for me.” He propped his feet on the rail right beside hers, close enough to play footsie. He stroked her pinkie toe with his. “We could go to bed early, if you want.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “Then we could get up early and—”

  He reached out to take her hand. “I wasn’t thinking about sleeping.”

  “Ohhh.” She drew the word out, slow and sexy. “I could be okay with that too.”

  “But first, I want to apologize again for being a butthead earlier.”

  “Not necessary; it wasn’t even a thing, really.”

  “But it was a thing, and I think I’ve figured out why I temporarily lost my mind.”

  She laughed. “Okay, I’ll bite.”

  “I was so busy trying to get you in my bed that—”

  “Oh yeah? You were?”

  “Yes. I was so intent on seducing you that I didn’t think through what would happen afterward.”

  “Does it bother you that I want to keep this just between us?”

  “No, that’s not it. I understand that you want to protect your kids, and I admire that.”

  “So…”

  “I thought, going into this, that I would be completely happy to seduce you and show you a good time and be your initiation into…into”—he swirled his hand—“all this, and then be just as happy for us to go our separate ways afterward.”

  “And now?” Her tone was gentle.

  “Now, I’d like to… I mean, I’d like to if you’d like to…”

  She squeezed his hand but didn’t speak. With her green eyes glowing in the moonlight, she waited for him to gather his thoughts.

  “I’d like to keep seeing each other, even if we have to do it in secret for a while.” He took a breath in and let it out, surprised at how shaky it sounded, even to him. “I think I’d like to see where this goes.”

  She smiled, looking as serene and calm as he was nervous. “I’d like that too,” she said.

  Chapter 13

  Heather had thought nothing could top Adrian’s expert skills in bed.

  Until they finally wore each other out and he snuggled her close, spooning her from behind, with his arm draped over her waist, holding her breast lightly in his hand.

  This, she decided sleepily, this blissed-out-in-the-afterglow cuddling, might be better than sex.

  Adrian kissed the back of her neck. “If you wake up before me, check to be sure I’m still breathing, then make yourself at home.”

  “Unlikely that I’ll wake up before you do.” She sighed. “I may sleep till noon.”

  A second later, she heard his breathing slow and deepen. She smiled to herself and fell asleep, feeling protected and cared for and maybe even just a little bit loved.

  She woke the next morning to the scents of coffee and clean laundry. “Coffee on the bedside table.” He dropped her clean folded clothes on the bed beside her.

  He was already fully dressed in khaki-green cargo shorts and a black T-shirt with a fleur-de-lis logo from the Three-Legged Dog Bar & Grill. His hair was still damp from a shower. “We can hit Riccobono’s for breakfast on our way to pick up that dog, unless you’d prefer beignets at the Café Du Monde.”

  All this food talk was making her hungry. “What if I want it all?”

  He grinned. “Darlin’, if you want it all, I’ll make sure you get it all.”

  “And yet,” she said with a pout, “you are standing there with all your clothes on.” She rocked forward onto her hands and knees and looked down. “Shoes too.”

  He smacked her backside. “Get dressed. I will be waiting for you on the balcony.”

  She showered and dressed in under ten minutes, then found Adrian leaning on the balcony, looking out over the river. She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  He turned and gave her a coffee-flavored kiss. “Hey, you.” With his back against the railing, he spread his legs wide and brought her hips up to his, linking his hands at the small of her back. “Reva called while you were in the shower. All is well; the kids had a good night, and she just got back from dropping them off at school.”

  “That’s good to hear. Thank you.”

  “She also said that we can’t get that dog until noon.”

  “Why?” It almost seemed like Reva was somehow colluding with that vet’s office to manufacture reasons for Heather and Adrian to spend more time together.

  “They want to give him a bath first.”

  “Does it feel to you like Reva might be…I don’t know…instigating something between us on purpose?”

  A slow, sexy smile grew on his face. “I don’t know, but if she is, I’ll be the first to thank her for it.” He kissed her, and this kiss held a hint of goodbye, or maybe it was just sadness that their time together—at least this time together—was ending.

  Though Adrian had committed to coming to ride Charlie a couple of times a week, Heather was about to start working full-time, so even then, he’d be at her house when she’d be at the shelter. She wouldn’t see him unless they made specific plans.

  He pulled away slowly and stared down at her, his deep-blue eyes somber. “Let’s go make the most of our time in the Big Easy.”

  Adrian locked up, and the two of them strolled hand in hand through Crescent Park on the way to Decatur Street, where they paused often to window-shop. Heather appreciated Adrian’s patience with her. She stopped to look in the window of an antique jewelry store and pointed to a poison ring in the display. “I’ve always wanted one of those.”

  “Then you should have one.” He put a hand at her waist and leaned in for a closer look. “You never know when you might need to poison someone.”

  “I like the fact that it has a hidden compartment for hiding secret potions.”

  “Appeals to the witch within, huh?” He kissed the side of her neck.

  “Something like that.” She enjoyed the idea of intrigue, the sense of history. “Can you imagine the potential schemes and conspiracies and machinations that might have caused someone to need a ring they could fill with poison?”

  “I dread to think.”

  She smirked at him. “I’m a little worried about your lack of imagination.” Clearly, he had never read a Gothic romance novel.

  She turned to go, but he held her back. “Let’s go inside.”

  “I wasn’t serious about wanting one of those rings.” She’d never had the time or the money for anything so frivolous and unnecessary, no matter how intriguing it might be. “I don’t need anything in there.”

  “I think you do.” With both hands on her hips, he steered her through the store’s open doorway and waved to the store’s proprietors, a couple of gray-haired men sitting at the far end of the shop behind a counter. “She’d like to try on a ring we saw in the window.”

  “I really don’t need a ring,” she protested.

  One of the men came out from behind the counter. “Which one do y’all want to see?”

  “The gold poison ring with the blue stone.”

  The man unlocked the door to the window case and placed the ring in Heather’s palm. “This blue sapphire ring is from the early Victorian era, eighteen-karat gold.”

  She slipped the ring on her finger. It fit perfectly. And she had to admit, it was pretty. But… She took it off and held it out to the shopkeeper. “Thank you for letting me try it on, but I don’t need a ring.”

 
; The man took the ring back, his lips pursed with displeasure over being made to indulge a tourist who had nothing better to do than try on a ring she never intended to buy.

  Adrian handed out a credit card. “We’ll take it.”

  While the man toddled off to ring up the sale, Adrian wrapped his arms around Heather from behind and whispered in her ear. “It fits. Reva would say that’s a sign from God.”

  “Somehow,” she whispered back, “I don’t think God interferes in jewelry purchases.” But when Adrian slipped the ring onto her finger right before they left the store, she had to admit she was glad he’d insisted on buying it for her. Now, no matter what happened between them going forward, she would have a lasting memento of their time together.

  ***

  After café au lait and beignets at the Café Du Monde, Adrian and Heather walked around Jackson Square toward St. Louis Cathedral. He noticed her glance into a couple of shop windows, but she didn’t pause for a closer inspection. “Why aren’t you stopping to look? We have plenty of time.”

  “I’d like to window-shop,” she said, “but now I’m afraid you might decide to buy something else for me.”

  He put a hand over his heart. “I swear, I won’t buy anything else for you today.”

  “Thank you.” She dragged him toward a toy shop on the square. “Because I really want to go in here.” The two window displays that flanked the old-fashioned wood-and-glass door were filled with the kind of dolls whose staring glass eyes had the power to keep people up at night.

  “Those dolls are kind of creepy.”

  “You can wait outside if you’re scared.”

  Actually, he kind of was. “I’ll wait here.” He pointed to a bench outside the store.

  She smirked at him. “Scaredy-cat.”

  “I am pretty sure that at least half of those dolls come to life at night, and the other half probably bite without warning. But you go ahead and have fun.”

  He released her hand and backed away, waving as if it might be the last time he saw her. “If you don’t come out in half an hour, I’ll come in after you. But I’ve gotta say, I won’t be holding out much hope of your survival.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

  He sat on the bench between the shops and the pop-up art displays outside the Cathedral Park’s fence. He checked his texts and sent replies, then waded through emails.

  He’d been very bad at checking in on clients, especially considering it was the middle of the week. He hadn’t even looked at his phone or his laptop since yesterday morning, and now he was getting a few emails with subject lines that started with S.O.S.

  He replied first to the one with the subject line of S.O.Fucking-S.

  He was just hitting Send when Heather sat next to him. “I thought you said you’d come save me if I stayed longer than thirty minutes.”

  “Damn.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry. I got distracted.” He made a big show of checking her arms for bite marks. “Are you okay?”

  She slung a fancy drawstring bag from the shop onto the bench between them. “My checking account has suffered.”

  “Yeah?” He tugged at the drawstring. “If I look in there, will a zombie doll bite me?”

  “I hope not because you’re my ride home. But anyway, you can’t see it. They gift-wrapped it already. It’s a ballerina fairy doll for Caroline. That means I have to find something special for Josh and Erin too.”

  He stood and took her hand. “I know exactly where we need to go.”

  He knew how—and where—to shop because he had two younger sisters who had moved away from New Orleans but loved to come back and stay at his loft whenever they could get away from their jobs, husbands, and kids. Hand in hand, Adrian and Heather noodled back toward his loft, zigzagging from one interesting shop to the next. She bought a stack of artisan-made bangle bracelets for Erin and an assortment of cool fossilized shells for Josh.

  Just after noon, they made it to the vet’s office to pick up the three-legged dog, who had been named Bones by the vet staff. Heather paid the bill while Adrian took the dog outside for a pit stop. Bones—a handsome, mostly white Catahoula-and-American-bulldog mix with one blue eye and one brown eye—still hadn’t quite figured out the logistics of hiking to pee with only one back leg.

  “Nawww,” Adrian said with a grimace. “Don’t do it that way.”

  The poor dog had sidled up to a shrub to hike but was facing the wrong way, so he ended up aiming the wrong way and peeing on his front legs instead of out to the side.

  You’d have thunk that peeing out past the missing back leg would have been a natural choice, but the dog—two years old by the vet’s reckoning—must have been used to hiking the leg he now had no choice but to stand on. “Dude. That ain’t right.”

  Adrian led the dog over to the truck and rummaged through the thoughtfully prepared bag Reva had packed for the trip. Under the dog toys, the paper towels, the poop bags, and a baggie of dog treats, he found a packet of wet wipes. “Come here, dude. Let’s get you cleaned up.” He knelt and cleaned the dog’s front legs, then he walked over to the cleanup station outside the office and discarded the used wipe.

  The dog moved awkwardly to keep up, taking a step with each front leg, then hopping up with the back leg. The unnatural gait seemed to put a lot of strain on that back leg and hip but also on the dog’s spine because it had to arch out long to accommodate the front legs’ forward steps, then hunch over with every hop of the back leg to catch up. “You’re gonna love the pool, buddy.” Swimming would enable the dog to gain some fluidity of motion and build muscle without putting so much strain on his joints.

  Heather came outside, carrying a bag of dog food and another, smaller bag with medicine and paperwork. She bent to pet the dog’s head. “Ready to go home, Bones?”

  The dog smiled up at Heather, his eyes half-closed with joy over being touched. But he didn’t show any recognition of his name. Adrian took the bags from her and gave her the dog’s leash. “I want to try something. Y’all stay right there. Keep petting him.”

  He walked toward the truck, then turned around and called the dog’s name. The dog didn’t take a blind bit of notice. “Now, stop petting him for a second.”

  Heather took her hand off the dog’s head. “Bones,” he called. Then again, a little louder. The dog glanced over when Adrian raised his voice, but again, didn’t show any of the signs of name recognition he would have expected. “Did you see that? His ears didn’t go forward. He didn’t acknowledge that I was calling him.”

  Heather nodded, then went back to petting. “Well, he was a stray. He hasn’t been named Bones for very long.”

  “I don’t think Bones is the best name for him. I mean, he’s not skinny, and he’s not an orthopedic surgeon or a forensic pathologist, so the name doesn’t make sense. We ought to change it.”

  “He was very skinny when someone brought him in after he’d been hit by a car.”

  “Well, he’s not skinny now.” Adrian put the bags on the back floorboard, then picked up the dog and put him in the large crate on the back seat.

  “I don’t mind changing his name. Reva says animals often want a different name to mark a new passage of life, and this qualifies.” Heather tossed in a stuffed toy and a chew antler from the bag Reva had provided, then latched the crate door. “We can discuss it on the drive home.”

  But the dog wasn’t up for any sort of discussion. He was in output mode only. They’d hardly gotten out of the parking lot before he started scratching at the crate. He whined, then he howled, then he whined some more.

  Heather gave treats to the dog, hummed to the dog, sang to the dog.

  Adrian turned up the music, turned down the music, changed the music. He tried cool jazz, soft rock, mellow instrumental. Nothing helped.

  “Maybe we s
hould pull over and get him out of the crate,” Heather suggested. “He wants to sit up here with us.”

  “I’m not gonna stop on the side of the highway and take the dog out of the car to get him into the front seat. It’s too risky. We’re almost at the generator place; we’ll handle it then.”

  Meanwhile, the dog kept singing the songs of his people. He might be one leg shy of a full complement, but there was nothing wrong with his lungs. “Maybe we should name him Pavarotti,” Adrian suggested.

  “I see your lips moving,” Heather yelled above the dog’s howls. “But all I can hear is this dog hollering.”

  When they reached their next destination, Adrian and Heather worked together to leash the dog, then Adrian lifted him out of the back seat and set his three legs on the ground. “Did Reva pack a doggie seat belt so he can sit up front?”

  Heather leaned into the back seat to riffle through the bag, and Adrian took the opportunity to admire her backside. Even though her jeans were baggy, there was no hiding her curves.

  “Found it.” She came out holding a short strap with a leash-style clip on one end and a seat belt buckle on the other. Then she noticed that he’d been ogling her and gave his backside a playful swat with the strap. “You are bad.”

  He grinned, unrepentant. “Is that a bad thing?”

  She took the dog’s leash and nodded toward a grassy patch by the fence. “I’ll see if he needs a potty break while you check in with the office and hitch up the trailer.”

  The rest of the drive to Magnolia Bay was much more peaceful. The dog slept with his head on Heather’s lap and his one back leg sprawled out across Adrian’s thigh. While the dog snored, the two humans discussed likely dog names but didn’t come up with any winners. They talked about shelter business, with Heather telling Adrian about all the vendors she’d secured for the grand opening fund-raiser on Labor Day.

  “Was I supposed to have done something?” He had a sneaking memory that they’d tried to rope him into something during that last meeting, but he’d been surreptitiously texting with clients on his phone and only halfway paying attention.