Diary of a Blues Goddess (16 page)

He grabbed my hand, the radio soft, me chilled from the sexual tension. I didn't feel hot. Nervous, more. Cold. Frightened. I collected men like lost puppy dogs, Nan told me. Men with broken hearts, broken wallets, broken dreams. But Rick wasn't broken as far as I could see. This upped the ante. I felt as if I was playing poker and bluffing with only a pair of threes, while he had a royal straight flush.

"Sing to me?"

"What?" I asked him incredulously.

"Sing to me. One of your blues songs."

"I'm too embarrassed."

"You sang in front of me at Cammie's wedding."

"Yeah. But that was different."

"Please… " He begged in a way that made me wonder what would happen if he begged in bed. He was utterly irresistible.

"No."

"Georgia Ray, please sing for me. I've been thinking of your voice since I saw you at the wedding. I think you owe it to me."

"Owe it to you?"

"Sure, I'm certain my billing went down this week. Every time I was supposed to be working on a case file, I was thinking of the lovely Georgia Ray Miller and that voice of hers."

His own voice was almost a soft growl. I couldn't say no.

I sang "The Man I Love," an old jazz standard that just makes my heart break a tiny bit each time I hear it or sing it. I was embarrassed at first, but then I found that place, that blues goddess place that fills me with a quiet confidence and an old grief that needs to be sung about, and I sang from that place. The place that wondered if my father was alive or if I was an orphan. If he would ever come to get his records or if they were truly mine. When I was finished, we were stopped by the side of the road. I hadn't noticed.

"Are we at your house?" I looked around and could see nothing in the darkness.

"No," he whispered. "I just couldn't drive anymore. If I was standing, Georgia, you'd have brought me to my fucking knees."

He put the car in drive again, and we went on to his apartment. He lived on the top floor of an old house in the Garden District.

Personally, I think calling it an apartment is like calling my house a cottage.When he opened the door, I took in the floor-to-ceiling windows and crown molding, the wainscoting. The rooms echoed as my heels clacked on the parquet floors.

"This place is beautiful." I spun around. Original art, lit by tiny little lamps, lined the walls like in a museum.

I wandered, spellbound by the art. I heard him in the kitchen, heard a cork pop, and he returned with two glasses of champagne. He put them on the dining-room table.

"If I don't kiss you, I'm going to go out of my mind," he whispered.

"Come here," he growled. But I was rooted to the floor, unable to move, not sure if I could even trust my knees. "I'll come to you, then," he said softly, taking the space between us in three strides.

We didn't so much kiss as consume each other. Never in my life, I thought, if I lived to be an old woman like Nan, would I experience anything like it again. We stopped at some point to stare at each other. In my mind, I couldn't believe that after ten years, whatever it was about him that drove me wild was still there. And that he could feel the same way. Then I realized it was something much more. Yes, there had been a connection ten years ago, but this was like a sexual soul mate.

Something about him told me that if we went to bed, I'd never want another lover for as long as I lived.

He walked over to the dining-room table. "Okay… so before I lose my mind completely, here's your champagne, Georgia." He held the glass out to me and took my free hand. "Let me show you the place."

We wandered room to room. He told me about each piece of art he had collected. Some of the pieces were new artists, some New Orleans natives. He had some outsider art, colorful eclectic pieces. But he also had a Miro and a Degas passed down from his family.

I looked at his hand holding mine, brought it up to my lips and kissed it. His hands were very masculine and very strong. He leaned in close to me and kissed my neck. I felt completely torn. If I stayed, I would never be able to stop whatever happened next. If I asked him to take me home, I would go crazy until I saw him again. I would lie awake while all that sexual energy filled me with a nervous sleeplessness.

"Stay the night, Georgia?" he whispered.

"I don't know, Rick. This night has been pretty amazing, but this really isn't my modus operandi. I don't usually hit it off with someone like this. Don't usually do this."

"It's fate that we ran into each other."

"Or after a while, you play enough weddings in this town, you run into everyone you ever knew."

He smiled and then leaned in to kiss me again. "You've gotten just a little cynical there, Georgia Ray. God… I even love your name."

I kissed him and then pulled back. "Not cynical… But you really can't imagine what we singers get to see from our vantage point."

"Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid that I'm full of shit. I think I can, actually, guess at what you see playing weddings and conventions. Our firm handles some old family money, and I get invited to a lot of company Christmas parties—the companies those old families own. I see what they're like. I would guess every guy in the room sees you up on stage and makes a play for you."

"Not exactly, but I see enough to get a little negative."

"I see a lot, too, believe it or not. I see families fight each other over inheritances. I once saw two sisters fight over a set of spoons. Sterling-silver spoons. And both of them came into over two million dollars. To this day, they've never spoken to each other again."

"Doesn't that make you cynical?"

"Honestly… no. I mean, I guess I was always a little jaded. Georgia, my family is one of New Orleans's royalty. My parents have black-tie functions in our dining room and go to Palm Beach for polo season. People like that aren't always the nicest. Trust me, I learned before I was eight years old that money can't buy you happiness. I think that's why you always fascinated me. Your family has been in New Orleans almost as long as mine, but you all are French Quarter. You're on the edge. You in that crazy house of yours. Now
that's
what I wanted. To break out of my stuffy family. So while I think I've seen it all, when it comes to you, lady, I'm not cynical. I refuse to be."

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"I'll stay the night." He had charmed me completely. As he always had. I said yes without thinking about Jack. Without thinking about anything but how it felt to kiss him.

"I want you," he growled. We put down our champagne glasses and kissed again, our hands pulling each other closer. I felt like a man-eater, like I really wanted to devour him, to make him part of me.

We didn't make love. That was what Jack and I did, mistakenly, now I realized. Rick and I fucked. This was moaning-screaming-wake-the-neighbors-shake-the-ceilings sex. Do we each have a sexual soul mate? Do we have multiple soul mates? Doesn't that defeat the idea of a soul mate? How could this man I didn't know well fuck me when old boyfriends had tried for months to please me, to drive me wild, to take me to the place he took me effortlessly? We fucked and then curled around each other in a comfortableness I didn't know I could have with someone.

I had no shame with him. No embarrassment. I didn't believe in fate, but if Sadie could have seen me that night, naked, on top of him, kissing him, I knew she would approve. I was a sex goddess.

The next morning I woke up to the enticing smells of bacon and coffee. Rick had laid a cashmere robe out on the bed for me. I put it on; the robe was sinfully luxurious. I could get used to being cared for like this. And like last night. We had topped my personal record of four orgasms in one night.

I went into his bathroom and rinsed my mouth with mouthwash. Taking a glance at myself in the mirror, a night of sleeping in my makeup had not been kind to my face. I washed up and scrubbed at my skin until it was shiny and passable for my "morning after" look. Then I went and found him in the kitchen.

"You make breakfast like this every day?" I grinned, approaching him at the stove. "I could get spoiled, you know."

"That's the whole idea. Get you very used to this. I canceled my first two appointments of the day to cook you breakfast and then take you home." He kissed me then popped a piece of bacon in my mouth.

"Mmm."

"Coffee?"

"Uh-huh."

"You singers really are night owls. I was up by six-thirty, but there was no waking you."

"Well… I know one way you could have." I wrapped my arms around him.

"You—" he hugged me and kissed the top of my head"—are very naughty. And I could get used to
that
."

I nestled against his chest, and for the first time I wished I wasn't a singer. Every Friday and Saturday for as long as I could remember, I had worked. I had worked Christmas Eve and all through the holiday season… putting up the tree on the lone night we weren't playing a party. Now I had someone I wanted to have a weekend life with, only I had no weekend. He was a day creature. I was a night one.

We ate breakfast together, and then he loaned me a pair of sweatpants and an oxford-cloth shirt to go home in.

"Glamorous." I smiled, his shirtsleeves hanging down past my hands.

"Baby, I'd like to see you in my shirts every morning."

He dressed in an expensive suit with a crisp white shirt, starched and pressed by the dry cleaners, and a Jerry Garcia tie. I have a thing for a man in a dark blue suit. And men with black curly hair. And blue eyes. If you went down my mental checklist of what made a man deliciously fuckable, as Dominique would say, Rick had it all, including six-pack abs and a voice like a late-night deejay's, raspy and seductive.

I folded my clothes from the previous night into a shopping bag he gave me, and then off we went. Pulling in front of my haunted house, he said, "All right… you can't get out of this car until you tell me when I'm seeing you next."

"Monday night?" We were working Friday and Saturday, and Sunday was the Saints Supper. I didn't think I was ready to introduce him to the gang yet. What was I thinking? I knew I wasn't ready to introduce him, and I would bet five Snickers bars that he wasn't quite ready for a night with Dominique and my friends.