A Billion Reasons Why (15 page)
“Katie! I’ve met Heather Wolf once, and that’s the truth! But the woman slung over my shoulder?” He leaned in and whispered again. “I know her intimately, and if she’s open to the idea of engagement, would you tell your client that I’m ready to enter negotiations?”
“Ugh! You are impossible. Everything’s a joke to you.”
His phone got louder. “Katie, that paper is ridiculous. I am not engaged.”
“Then who is Heather?”
“I—”
“Just answer your phone, it’s driving me nuts.” She walked away, mumbling to herself. “He thinks I’m just a public relations ploy. How many women did he parade around with on the cover of those tabloids? ‘Billionaire bachelor dates this starlet, billionaire bachelor dates that starlet, billionaire bachelor, is he capable of settling down?’ Multimillionaire, ha. He’s just avoiding the subject. The
Tattler
calls him a billionaire. How does he explain that?”
“Katie?” Ryan DeForges strode into the tarnished ballroom and stretched his arms toward her. He looked as if he’d spent the day, indeed his lifetime, on the polo field. Or, more likely, at a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. Ryan wore the youngest brother badge proudly without a hard day’s work to show for himself.
The fact that the DeForges money came from bootlegging was an old New Orleans secret. The fact that the fortune was drying up from a lack of DeForges ingenuity or that the majestic house on Charles Street showed some wear and tear obviously had yet to touch Ryan. Rumor had it he was too proud to let Luc put any money into the house. The world would take care of Ryan somehow. It always had.
“Katie!” He skipped toward her and wrapped her in a hug. “Katie darling, oh my goodness, Katie.” He pushed her away. “Let me look at you. Let me take a good look at you.” Then he squeezed her tightly again. “You haven’t changed a bit. Not one bit.”
“It might be time for you to visit the eye doctor.”
Ryan took his large hands and circled her waist with his thumbs meeting on her front and the fingers on the small of her back. “You still have that Katie Scarlett waist. Remember how we used to say that, Luc?”
“She won’t for long if Poindexter has his way,” Luc groused, one ear still to his phone.
“Who? What?” Ryan wrinkled his forehead.
“Ryan, Luc has yet to acknowledge that my pathetic marriage proposal eight long years ago is no longer valid or that I’m marrying another man. Who asked
me
, I might add. Maybe you could remind him that I’m only here to get my engagement ring, the family heirloom? And sing at your wedding, of course. Where is the bride? I can’t wait to see who is marrying Ryan DeForges. What is she like?”
“You can’t marry an outsider, regardless of what an imbecile my brother is. We always said he was slow with people and quick with money. He’s come to his senses. Eight years, that’s about right.” Ryan grabbed her hand. “We don’t mean to let you go.”
As the rest of the members of the big band filed in, they stopped and focused their attention on her and Ryan.
“I’m going to warm up.” The trumpet, oboe, and trombone players sat in their positions. She leaned over to the piano player. “‘The Man I Love’?”
She cradled the old-fashioned silver mic. Not one of those modern emaciated contraptions, but a meaty chunk of metal she could wrap both hands around. “Someday, he’ll come along . . .”
Luc slowly lowered the phone from his ear.
Katie searched for that ardent cavity in her soul where she connected with the deeper, mournful emotions and sang out strong. As the music faded into another song, she began an ode to unrequited love: “I’m Old Fashioned.” She sang it directly to him, a song Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire had sung to one another about their differences . . . and their similarities.
In that brief moment, eight years and a billion reasons faded in the darkness of the club. All the pain disappeared, and she loved Luc DeForges like no other man so why make apologies for it now? Sure, she’d decided to marry practically, but that didn’t mean that their history wasn’t rich and full of the bloom of love when they were younger. It was time to get over that romanticism, but she could still appreciate it for the beautiful gift it had been in her life. How would she have ever truly known what a torch song meant to the soul if Luc had never touched hers?
She stepped off the stage and heard the bandleader give directions to his musicians. She walked straight into Luc’s arms, and he circled them around her. They clung to one another, swaying gently to the music in the background. If there was music . . . she couldn’t be certain.
“Katie,” he whispered in her ear. “Katie.” His cheek pressed hard against her own. He kissed under her ear, tiny, gentle brushstrokes, and traced his lips down her jaw. His kisses grew more demanding. They stood in the dark of the club, completely surrounded and yet completely alone.
His name escaped her lips and he kissed her again. Words swirled in her head.
“Passion,” Luc said.
“Dangerous,” she answered between kisses.
“Heavenly.” He pressed his lips against hers.
“Affected.” She slowly regained her ground. “Hurt.”
“No.” He encircled her waist with his arms and kissed her urgently, his breath warm and rushed as he repeated her name. “I love you, Katie. No one else—”
The music stopped, and the house lights came up. A clearing of a throat interrupted them, and they looked around at all the eyes upon them. Strangers mostly, but Leon, Luc’s driver, held a saxophone in his hand and started to blow to drown out the awkward silence and the stares.
“Luc, how could you? I’m going to be engaged!”
As the room grew louder, Luc’s cell phone rang and they were alone in the chaos once again.
“How could I have let that happen? I should never have said yes to Dexter. I’m an adulteress, like in the Old Testament. My lips drip honey. I’m supposed to be engaged, just as soon as I could get my r—”
He kissed her again.
She stood silently, fiddling with the fabric rose corsage at her waist.
“You’re shaking.”
“This is so wrong,” she said, but that wasn’t why her whole body trembled. She’d forgotten the power he had over her. No, that wasn’t true. She remembered it. She’d come precisely to inoculate the source, but to be caressed by his touch, to feel her body come alive, she realized she was no match for her emotions. Why did she have to be so weak? There was a good man back home. A good man who wouldn’t make her feel any of these uncomfortable feelings. Dexter wouldn’t make her question her faith or her force of will.
Luc did all of the above and more. Time had done nothing to relinquish his grip over her. When he looked at her, it was as though there wasn’t another living being on the planet. The all-encompassment of it. In God’s Word it said that women who marry didn’t have the things of God on their minds, but the things of family. She couldn’t imagine what a love like Luc’s did to a woman. It couldn’t be healthy. God was a God of order, not chaos. He preferred structure, reverence, thoughtfulness . . . traits she never embraced with Luc.
What kind of woman prepared for engagement to one man while trembling under the touch of another? Like the woman caught in her sins, she needed to go and sin no more. Katie clasped her eyes shut against the emotions that flooded her system. To give up Luc was to give up earthly love for something greater. She and Dexter would do God’s work. They would build a family and a ministry together.
Go
, she told herself.
Sin no more
.
Luc forced her eyes to his by tipping her chin. She felt like Ingrid Bergman in the arms of Cary Grant. The lovely blue with specks of gold sought something in her she couldn’t name. Meanwhile, the brass section continued to warm up behind them, but to her it sounded like the strains of wounded fowl. In Luc’s eyes, everything reflected more light, including the sounds around her. She drank in every detail.
“Do you love him?” Luc asked.
She resented the question. “I loved you, and a lot of good it did me.” Her love with Dexter was manageable, a slow burn of respect and mutual desire that would increase with time and effort. “I want a balanced life. Whatever’s between you and me—this doesn’t last. It burns away with time. What I have with Dex will increase and burn steady.”
“What you’re telling me is that you want a can of Sterno rather than a bonfire.”
“Do you think that a shared love of jazz standards and an era gone by is a better connection than what Dexter and I share? He and I want the same things, Luc. He wants a family, the white picket fence, a companion to share life with. Not a white picket fence around his private island or at the edge of his yacht. He wants a life with me.”
Luc lifted a lock of her hair and twisted it around his fingers. “God didn’t paint you with a brushstroke of safety, Katie. He brought out the fiery colors for you.”
“I need to go.” She straightened the sash about her waist. “I’m done defending Dex to you.”
“Maybe you need to defend him to yourself.”
“I’m going home to get my ring. I’ll catch a commercial flight home.”
“You’re going to abandon my brother four days before his wedding?” Luc’s phone trilled from his pocket. “Imagine what the papers will have to say about that.”
“You’re manipulating me!”
“I know where your nana’s ring is, Katie-bug. If you can look me in the eye on Ryan’s wedding day and tell me it’s all right to marry without this”—he brushed his hand between them—“whatever this is, I’ll get you the ring, and I won’t bother you again.”
She swallowed hard and felt the wind rush out of her lungs. Passion, like beauty, was fleeting. “Dex is a good man. I betrayed his trust. How much can one man be expected to hear his fiancée confess before the wedding?”
Luc pulled his hat over his eyes. “Maybe she’s confessing to the wrong man. It’s better to marry than to burn with passion. Isn’t that right, Katie-bug?”
She yanked herself away. Luc called her Katie-bug because she snuggled up to him like a roly-poly. Once it had been a term of endearment, now it sounded like a pathetic name for the desperate codependent she once was—so dependent on the opinion of the mighty Luc DeForges.
A
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“Are we gonna practice or not?” It was Scully, a tall, skinny black man who barely registered from behind his clarinet, which was the same shape as he was.
The band mumbled, but all of them moved toward the stage, and Katie instinctively joined them. Luc watched her go, his mind filled with plans.
Katie . . . her red dress swinging gently back and forth, embodied everything a man wanted in a wife: the girl next door, nurturing with just enough fight to keep it interesting, intellectual, generous to a fault, and of course . . . that heavenly figure. He’d made a tactical error. Revealed too much up front, lost himself in the emotion of his desire.
One has to be able to walk away from the table
. He laughed aloud. That might be an option in business mergers. In mergers of the heart, he wasn’t so rational. Not when it came to Katie. He’d protected her from a truth she wasn’t ready for, taken the high road, if you will—only to feel the full impact of his decision until this day. The question remained. Was Katie ready for the truth now?
He’d been so ignorant. Thought he’d make his money and come back and show her the security she craved. He’d missed that train. Security to Katie came in the form of a boring engineer who would be home for dinner when he said he would, who would protect her from the emotional pain she’d already endured—the pain Luc helped afflict in his youthful exuberance.
Katie glanced back at him from the stage, and he spoke to her heart. “What you don’t realize,” he murmured under his breath, “is that kind of life will ultimately kill who you are.” A life without music, without her soul touched by the natural rhythm within her—was that a life at all? She was born for deeper things, the way music touched her. God had created the music within her.
Up on the stage, Katie embraced the microphone with all the ease and grace of the experienced musicians who surrounded her. In that moment, time disappeared. Not a moment had passed since he’d first laid eyes upon her. It still bothered him that Ryan knew her first. Ryan had brought him down to the club, where he’d gotten a job singing. His artsy flighty brother never did anything that was expected of him but somehow always managed to get away with being the chosen son.
The stage was filled to capacity that night with a full big band, backup singers, and a bandleader, but all eyes went directly to Katie. Including his own. She owned the stage and the audience. Ryan had met her in theater class, and her family had come upon hard times. Naturally, his bleeding-heart brother took it upon himself to get her work and recommended her for the Barrelhouse Club, an old drinking establishment meant to provide an alternative “safer” experience to the more wild Bourbon Street bars. The owner had founded it on his love of jazz standards and the way life used to be. Mr. Montrose and Katie found a mutual respect in each other. The rest was history.