Natural Born Charmer (26 page)

“You think so?” April helped herself to another spear of roasted asparagus.

“You’re related, aren’t you?”

Dean felt himself tense, but his little sister had appointed herself the guardian of family secrets. “Mrs. Garrison’s been giving me posture lessons,” she said. “I’m getting real good at walking with a book.”

Nita pointed her third biscuit at Blue. “Someone else could use posture lessons.”

Blue glowered and plunked her elbows on the table.

Nita gave a triumphant smirk. “See how childish she is.”

Dean smiled. Blue was definitely being childish, but she looked so cute doing it—a smudge of flour on one cheek, a strand of inky hair trailing down her neck, a mulish expression. How could a woman who was such a mess be so appealing?

Nita turned her attention to Dean. “Football players make a lot of money for doing nothing.”

“Pretty much,” Dean said.

Blue bristled. “Dean works very hard at what he does. Being a quarterback isn’t just physically demanding. It’s very challenging mentally.”

Riley jumped in as Blue’s backup. “Dean’s played in the Pro Bowl three years straight.”

“I’ll bet I’m richer than you are,” Nita said.

“Could be.” Dean eyed her over a chicken wing. “How much you got?”

Nita let out an indignant huff. “I’m not telling you that.”

Dean smiled. “Then we’ll never know, will we?”

Jack, who could buy and sell both of them, gave a snort of amusement. Mrs. Garrison sucked a food sliver from her front teeth and zeroed in on him. “And what do you do?”

“Right now, I’m building Dean’s porch.”

“Come look at my windowsills next week. The wood’s rotting.”

“Sorry,” Jack deadpanned. “I don’t do windows.”

April smiled at him, and Jack smiled back at her. An intimacy passed between them that shut everybody else out. It only lasted a moment, but no one at the table missed it.

After dinner, Nita announced that she’d
wait in the living room until Blue had finished cleaning up and could drive her home. April immediately rose. “I’ll clean up. You go ahead, Blue.”

But Dean wasn’t ready for Blue to leave. So far, all this little dinner party had accomplished was to remind him how much he missed having her to pal around with during the day and sink into at night. He needed to fix that. “I should burn the trash,” he said. “How about helping me carry it out first?”

Riley did her best to upset his plan. “I’ll help.”

“Not so fast.” April began gathering up the plates. “When I said I was cleaning up the kitchen, I meant everybody was helping except Blue.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “We’ve been working on the porch all day. We deserve a little relaxation.”

Suddenly he and Jack were a team? Not in a million years. Dean grabbed the empty chicken platter. “Sure.”

Riley jumped up. “I can load the dishwasher.”

“You’re picking the music,” April said. “And it had better rock.”

Blue piped in. “I’m not missing out if there’s going to be music. I get to help, too.”

Riley escorted Nita into the living room while the rest of them cleared the table. She came back with her iPod and plugged it into April’s docking station. “I’d better not hear bubblegum coming out of there,” Jack said. “Radiohead would be okay, or maybe Wilco.”

April looked up from the sink. “Or Bon Jovi.” Jack stared at her. She shrugged. “One of my guilty pleasures, and I’m not apologizing.”

“My guilty pleasure is Ricky Martin,” Blue said.

They looked at Dean, but he refused to participate in this cozy family confessional, so Blue decided to pipe up for him. “Clay Aiken, right?”

Nita didn’t like being left out, and she shuffled in from the living room. “I always liked Bobby Vinton. And Fabian. He was hot.” She settled at the kitchen table.

Riley moved toward the open dishwasher. “I sort of like Patsy Cline—Mom had all her stuff—but the kids make fun of me because they don’t know who she is.”

“Good taste on your part,” Jack said.

“So what about you?” April asked Jack. “Who’s your guilty pleasure?”

“That’s easy,” Dean heard himself say. “You’re his guilty pleasure, April. Right, Jack?”

The uneasy silence that fell over the kitchen made Dean feel churlish. He was used to being the life of the party, not the end of it.

“Excuse us,” Blue said. “Dean and I have some trash to burn.”

“Before you go anywhere, Mr. Football Player,” Nita said, “I want to know exactly what your intentions are toward my Blue.”

Blue groaned. “Somebody please shoot me.”

“My relationship with Blue is private, Mrs. Garrison.” He pulled the trash from under the sink.

“I’m sure you’d like to think so,” she retorted.

April and Jack stopped to watch, more than happy to let Nita do
their dirty work. Dean nudged Blue toward the side door. “Excuse us.”

But Nita wouldn’t let it go that easily. “I know you’re not still engaged. I don’t think you ever had any intention of marrying her. You just want to take what you can get. That’s the way men are, Riley. Every one of them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s not the way all men are,” Jack said to his daughter. “But Mrs. Garrison has a point.”

Dean curled his free hand around Blue’s arm. “Blue can take care of herself.”

“The girl is a walking disaster,” Nita retorted. “Someone has to look out for her.”

That was too much for Blue. “You don’t care one thing about looking out for me. You just want to make trouble.”

“Listen to that fresh mouth.”

“Our engagement is still on, Mrs. Garrison,” he said. “Let’s go, Blue.”

Riley jumped forward. “Could I like maybe be a bridesmaid or something?”

“We’re not really engaged,” Blue felt duty bound to inform her. “Dean is amusing himself.”

Their fake engagement was too convenient to let her spoil it. “We’re engaged,” he said. “Blue is just sulking.”

Nita rapped her cane on the floor. “Come into the living room with me, Riley. Away from
certain people.
I’ll show you some exercises to strengthen your leg muscles so you can take ballet again.”

“I don’t want to take ballet,” Riley muttered. “I want to take guitar lessons.”

Jack set down the pan he was drying. “You do?”

“Mom always said she’d teach me, but she never did.”

“But she showed you some basic chords, right?”

“No. She didn’t like me touching her guitars.”

Jack’s expression grew grim. “My acoustic’s at the cottage. Let’s go get it.”

“Really? You’ll let me play your guitar?”

“I’ll give you the damned thing.”

Riley looked as though he’d dropped a diamond tiara on her head. Jack tossed aside the dish towel. Dean pulled Blue outside, not feeling at all guilty about leaving April to Nita’s mercies.

“I don’t sulk,” Blue said as they stepped off the side porch. “You shouldn’t have said that. And it’s not fair to raise Riley’s hopes about being a bridesmaid.”

“She’ll survive just fine.” He stalked toward the oil drum where they burned trash. It was full. He struck a match from the box April kept in a Ziploc bag and tossed it in. “Why won’t they all go away? Jack’s still around. April’s not going until Riley does. That old witch is the last straw. I want all of them out of here! Everybody but you.”

“Except it’s not that easy, is it?”

No, it wasn’t that easy. As the fire caught, he moved back to sit in the grass and watch the flames. This past week, he’d seen Riley’s confidence grow. Her indoor pallor had faded, and the new clothes April had bought her were already getting loose. He liked working on the porch, too, even if he had to do it with Jack. Every time he drove a nail he felt as though he was putting his own mark on this old farm. Then there was Blue.

She moved behind him. He picked up a cellophane wrapper that had fallen into the grass and tossed it toward the fire.

Blue watched as the wadded cellophane landed at the base of the drum, but Dean didn’t seem to care that he’d missed the shot. His brooding profile stood in perfect silhouette against the twilight. She walked over to sit in the grass next to him. Another bandage had appeared on his hand, this one across his knuckles. She touched it. “Construction accident?”

He propped his elbow on his knee. “I’ve got a fair-size lump on my head, too.”

“How are you getting along with your coworker?”

“He doesn’t talk to me, and I don’t talk to him.”

She crossed her legs and gazed at the fire. “He should at least acknowledge what he did to you.”

“He has.” He turned his head toward her. “So have you had that particular conversation with your own mother?”

She plucked a blade of grass. “It’s different with her.” The fire popped. “She’s sort of like Jesus. Would Jesus’s daughter have the right to complain that he’d ruined her childhood because he was always running off saving people’s souls?”

“Your mother isn’t Jesus, and if people have kids, they should either stick around to raise them or put them up for adoption.”

She wondered if he intended to be around to raise his kids, but the idea of him at home with his family while she was off globe-trotting depressed her.

He slipped his arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t say a thing about it. The flames leaped higher. Her blood hummed. She was sick of settling for second best. Just once in her life, she wanted to indulge in a dangerous extravagance. The night wind caught her hair. She rose up to her knees and kissed him. Later, she’d put him in his place. For now, she wanted to live in the moment.

He didn’t need any encouragement to kiss her back, and before long, they were stumbling behind the barn into the tall grass out of sight of the house.

Dean didn’t know why Blue had changed her mind, but since she had her fingers inside his waistband, he wasn’t going to ask.

“I do not want to do this,” she said as she pulled open the fastener of his jeans.

“Sometimes you have to take one for the team.” He whipped her
shorts and panties to her ankles, went to his knees, and nuzzled her. She was sweet, spicy, a heady potion to his senses. Long before he’d had enough of her, she fell apart. He caught her and drew her down, keeping her on top to protect her from the weeds that were jabbing him in the butt. It was a small sacrifice for the reward of finally sinking into that warm, writhing body.

She grabbed his head between her hands, clenched her teeth, and said fiercely, “Don’t you dare rush me!”

He understood her point of view, but she was so tight, so wet, and he’d been pushed too far…He sank his fingers into her hips, pulled her down hard, and let himself go.

Afterward, he was afraid she’d take a swing at him, so he drew her flat on top of him and hooked one of her legs over his hip. Kissing her deeply, he reached between their bodies. She arched and trembled. A surge of protectiveness came over him. He moved his hand and set her free.

When they were done, he stroked her hair, which had come out of its ratty ponytail. “Just to refresh your memory…” He traced the small of her back under her T-shirt. “You said I didn’t turn you on.”

She sank her teeth into his collarbone. “You don’t turn me on—not the rational part of me anyway. Unfortunately, I also have slutty parts. Those you definitely turn on.”

He wasn’t nearly done with her, and he started to touch those slutty parts all over again, but she rolled off him into the weeds. “We can’t stay out here fornicating all night.”

He grinned. Fornicating, indeed.

She still wore her T-shirt, but the rest of her was naked. She reached around for her panties, which gave him an outstanding view of her bottom as she spoke. “Riley is the only person who won’t have figured out what we’re doing.” She located the panties, stood up to pull them on, and had the gall to sneer at him. “Here’s the way it’s going to be, Boo. I’ve decided you and I are going to have an affair—short and nasty. I’ll be using you, pure and simple, so don’t go
all touchy-feely on me. I don’t care what you’re thinking. I don’t care about your feelings. All I care about is your body. Now are you okay with that or not?”

She was the damnedest woman he’d ever met. He grabbed her shorts before she could pick them up. “What am I getting in return for the humiliation of being used?”

The sneer reappeared. “You’re getting me. The object of your desire.”

He pretended to think it over. “Add a few more dinners like today, and I’m in.” He snaked a finger under the leg hole of her panties. “In all the way.”

Jack pushed his chair back from the cottage’s kitchen table and began tuning his old Martin. He’d recorded “Born in Sin” with it, and now he wished he hadn’t been so impulsive about giving it away. Those dings and scratches represented the last twenty-five years of his life. But finding out that Marli wouldn’t let Riley near any of her guitars made him crazy. He should have been aware of something that important, but he’d kept himself in deliberate ignorance.

Riley pulled up a chair, sitting so close their knees nearly touched. Her eyes filled with wonder as she gazed at the battered instrument. “It’s really mine?”

His regret evaporated. “It’s yours.”

“This is the best present I ever got.”

Her dreamy expression made his throat tighten. “You should have told me you wanted a guitar. I would have sent you one.”

She mumbled something he couldn’t make out.

“What?”

“I told you,” she said. “But you were on the road, and you must not have heard.”

He had no recollection of her mentioning a guitar, but then he seldom gave their strained telephone conversations all his attention.
Although he frequently sent Riley gifts—computers, games, books, and CDs—he’d never picked out any of them himself. “I’m sorry, Riley. I guess I missed it.”

“That’s okay.”

Riley had a habit of saying things were okay when they weren’t, a practice he hadn’t noticed until these past ten days. He hadn’t noticed a lot about her he should have. As long as he paid her bills and made sure she attended a good school, he’d figured he was doing his fair share. He hadn’t wanted to look beyond that, because getting more involved would have interfered with his life.

“I know most of the open chords,” she said. “Except F is hard to play.” She watched intently as he tuned, soaking in everything he did. “I looked up stuff on the Internet, and, for a while, Trinity let me practice on her guitar. But then she made me give it back.”

“Trinity has a guitar?”

“A Larrivee. She only took five lessons before she quit. She thinks guitar is boring. But I’ll bet Aunt Gayle will make her start again. Now that Mom’s dead, Aunt Gayle needs a new partner, and she told Trinity they could be like the Judds someday, except more beautiful.”

He’d seen Trinity at Marli’s funeral. Even as an infant, she’d been irresistible, a rosy-cheeked cherub with blond curls and big blue eyes. The way he remembered it, she’d seldom cried, slept when she was supposed to, and kept her baby formula in her stomach instead of turning it into a projectile as Riley had. When Riley was a month old, Jack had left on tour, glad to have an excuse to get away from a moonfaced, screaming baby he didn’t know how to comfort and a marriage he’d already discovered was a big mistake. Over the years, he’d sometimes thought he would have been a better father if he’d been given a charmer like Trinity, but the past ten days had enlightened him.

“It was nice of her to lend you her guitar,” he said, “but I’ll bet her cooperation didn’t come free.”

“We made a deal.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Do I have to?”

“Depends on whether you want me to show you an easier way to play the F chord.”

She stared at the spot under the sound hole where his fingers had worn off the finish. “I told Aunt Gayle that Trinity was with me when she was really with her boyfriend. And I had to buy them cigarettes.”