Built to Last (Harlequin Heartwarming) (11 page)

“Do we have time to Christmas shop a little?” she asked, when Ryan dropped back to her side.

“Why not?” he said. “Melissa’s coveting those hats. I might buy her one.”

Jo was agonizing over the dream-catchers when Ryan and his kids joined her, Melissa wearing a new lavender felt cloche. “I want to get one for Emma for Christmas,” Jo said. “Melissa, you know Emma. Which of these do you think?”

Obviously torn between being flattered and wanting to snub Jo, Melissa hesitated. Either flattery or her genuine liking for her cousin won.

“That one.” She pointed. “Emma likes blue and green.”

The leather plaited circlet was decorated with feathers and beads. Jo loved the idea of protecting Emma’s dreams.

“It’s a perfect present,” Ryan said in a low voice, just for her, as she paid.

They wandered on, eventually to the warren
of shops on lower levels. The adults bought espresso and sipped as they browsed South American imports and antiques, a shop that specialized in incense and another that sold unusual musical instruments. Both the kids tried out flutes and drums, even Melissa was laughing and having fun. Her dad declined to pay for her to have her palm read, but her mood revived in a shop full of gifts with a dog theme. All carrying packages by then, they had lunch in a vegetarian restaurant where Tyler and Melissa ordered warily but then ate with hungry satisfaction.

Watching Ryan listen intently to something Tyler was saying, Jo felt a peculiar squeezing sensation in her chest. Nobody so handsome should be so
nice,
she thought. It wasn’t fair.

The next moment, he laughed with open enjoyment, the creases in his cheeks deepening and the skin by his eyes crinkling. His gray eyes were suddenly warm.

The waitress paused, studying him with appreciation until she caught Jo’s eye and flushed, moving on. But how could Jo blame her? The wretched man was beautiful! Today his hair was tousled, his shoulders broad in a bulky sweater, his hips and thighs lean in worn jeans. Fathers shopping with school-
age kids weren’t supposed to turn women’s heads, never mind shake the determination of a career woman who intended never to be caught in the marriage trap.

And where had
that
come from? she wondered in dismay.

When Ryan paid the bill, Jo suggested they move on to the aquarium. “Fair’s fair.” Tyler smiled.

Melissa sneered. “Fish are boring.”

He bumped her with his shoulder. “
Shopping
is boring.”

His sister whirled. “Don’t hit me! And it isn’t! You had fun!”

“I did not hit you!”

“You did! Dad!”

“Neither of you are hurt. Quit bickering.” He frowned at them. “And she’s right. You did have fun, Tyler. And you—” he transferred his gaze to his daughter “—will enjoy the aquarium. Trust me.”

He made the mistake then of wrapping an arm around Jo. “Let’s get going.”

Eyes narrowed furiously, Melissa flushed and stomped ahead. Tyler gave his dad a dubious expression and followed.

“When I miss them,” Ryan confided, the
words a low rumble in Jo’s ear, “I forget about the quarreling.”

Much as she adored the warm weight of his arm, Jo casually moved out from under it. “How could you? You have a sister.”

“So I do.” Furrows formed in his brow, but he said nothing about her withdrawal. “Did you fight with your brother?”

“Are you kidding? Like cats and dogs.” Jo gave a shudder. “After seeing Pirate’s eye, I hate that saying.”

“Hey, guys!” he called. The kids had emerged ahead of them into the rainy outdoors and run ahead to the elevator. “I forgot to tell you about the kitten.”

They clustered close until the elevator came, listening to the tale. “
She
rescued him?” Melissa asked once, tone suggesting Jo couldn’t possibly be so noble.

“Yep. All I did is drive,” her dad assured her.

“Like a bat out of—” Jo swallowed the rest. “I held on to the armrest and prayed,” she told the kids. “He was screeching around corners and roaring up to stoplights. It’s a wonder we didn’t end up with a police escort, like a guy
driving his wife to the hospital when she’s in labor.”

Melissa laughed. Tyler instead had an avid expression. “Was his eye really gross?”

“Pretty gross,” Jo admitted. She could still picture it all too easily.

Tyler lifted his face to his dad. “Can we see him when we take Jo home?”

“You bet. But his eye looks just about normal now. You missed the gross part.”

“Gol.” Tyler left the elevator. “I wish
I’d
been there.”

Hanging back, Melissa looked at Jo. “Is he your cat, then?”

“No,” she said, “I think he’s going to be Ginny’s. Have you met Ginny yet?” The kids shook their head. “Well, she’s only six, but she’s really quiet. Her dad died not that long ago, which is maybe why. But for Pirate, she smiles and even laughs, and she’s endlessly patient when he wants to play or if he just wants to cuddle. So he’s been sleeping with her, and he goes to her first.”

“Oh.” The walk light turned green, but Melissa went forward only when her father nudged her. “Don’t you mind?”

Jo shook her head. “I didn’t especially want
a cat. I think Ginny needs him, and he needs her.”

“Oh,” the eleven-year-old said again, thoughtfully.

Despite the wet wind blowing off the Puget Sound, they paused at a railing to watch a huge green-and-white ferry leave the dock with a blast of its horn and embark on a crossing of the Sound. Across the street, a trolley clanged by. The scent of seafood drifted from restaurants, and Christmas shoppers prowled the warehouse piers turned into malls of boutique.

The aquarium itself was out on a pier. They paid and entered, plunging into a maze of dim rooms lit by the jewel-like colors of aquariums filled with fish so colorful and weirdly shaped, they didn’t look real.

Studying a perch-shaped fish striped in black and lemon-yellow, Jo mused, “Imagine snorkeling or diving with schools of these fish around you. Maybe bumping you or nibbling at your fingers.”

“Have you ever done it?” Tyler asked eagerly.

Jo shook her head. “My aunt has. She told me about it. I’ve always wanted to go.”

She felt Ryan watching her, but didn’t turn
her head. She didn’t want him to think she was suggesting an expensive vacation together. Anyway, someplace like Hawaii or the Bahamas sounded like a honeymoon.

Both kids rushed to the outdoor, covered pool that held the otters. Even Melissa’s face lit with delight when a sleek brown body shot by, twisting so that big brown eyes could study her briefly before the otter dove underwater.

“Did you see his face?” she asked.

Like a child herself, Jo hung over the railing. “He’s darling! Look at those whiskers!”

Ryan watched the other three in amusement as they stayed captivated by the two otters. Occasionally, they’d scramble out onto a rocky landing before sliding back into the cold water. Waddlers on land, when swimming they moved with lithe ease, sleek glistening brown bullets shooting through the water. But it was their faces, intelligent, funny, charming, that enraptured the humans.

Ryan pried them away at last, reminding them that Kathleen was making a nice dinner.

“I
am
hungry,” Tyler said with an air of discovery.

“Me, too,” his sister admitted.

“Me, three,” Ryan murmured to Jo.

She laughed up at him. “You’re always hungry.”

His eyes glinted. “I just like taking you out to dinner.”

Jo stuck an elbow in his ribs. “You’re flirting with me, right in front of your kids!”

He nodded ahead. “They’re not listening.”

“Melissa has eyes in the back of her head. She does
not
like it when you put your arm around me. Haven’t you noticed?”

Manlike, he looked surprised. “No. She doesn’t? Why not?”

Jo made a sound of disgust and strode ahead, catching up with his kids in the gift shop.

The walk back to the pickup was mostly quiet, as if all had realized at the same time that they were tired. It felt wonderful once Ryan got the heat cranked up, sending warm air pouring over their legs. Jo hadn’t realized how cold and damp she was.

“Gosh, are you guys wet, too?” she exclaimed. “You don’t have anything to change into.”

Ryan shrugged. “We’ll be okay. Right, gang?”

Tyler bravely agreed. Melissa mumbled assent.

Jo ignored Ryan. “I have some fuzzy socks you can borrow. And maybe Emma’s jeans would fit you, Melissa, if you rolled up the hems.”

“How come she’s so skinny?” Tyler asked. “You said you’d tell us, Dad.”

For the remainder of the drive, Ryan talked about eating disorders and how hard it was for Emma to eat something she imagined might make her fat. “She’s seeing a counselor, and she’s getting weighed weekly to make sure she doesn’t get any skinnier.”

“What if she does?” Tyler asked in a hushed voice. “Will she die? Like Duster? Remember, Dad? He quit eating.”

“He quit eating because he was really, really old and his kidneys were failing. Emma is different. People can die from anorexia nervosa,” Ryan said evenly, “but we won’t let that happen to Emma. If her weight falls at all, she’ll be checked into the hospital. She knows that.”

“Oh.”

Right then Ryan pulled into a parking spot only half a block from the house. He turned off the engine, then laid a hand on Jo’s seat and turned to look at his kids.

“We don’t say anything to Emma. Her
eating is between her, her mother and her counselor. It’ll just embarrass her if you comment. In other words…”

“We get it, Dad,” Melissa said tartly.

“Tyler?”

The boy nodded. “I won’t say anything. Before, I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t, and that’s okay,” Ryan said reassuringly. “But Emma probably won’t eat with us tonight, and I just didn’t want you to make her uncomfortable about it.”

Privately, Jo wondered if it might not be good for Emma to see her peculiar behaviors reflected in the mirror of a normal child’s judgment. Everyone always tiptoed around Emma. She was never forced to see how abnormal her eating was.

But then, Jo thought, what did she know?

Inside, the kids left their wet shoes and socks by the door and followed Jo upstairs. When autumn arrived, she’d found the bare wooden floors in the old house so cold, she’d gone right out and invested in several pairs of fleece socks, cozy enough to wear to bed and heavy enough to wear as slippers. She loaned pairs to both kids. While she was changing into jeans, dry socks and loafers, they went off with Emma and Ginny to meet Pirate.

Dinner, which turned out to be spicy baked burritos accompanied by tortilla chips and salsa, smelled delicious.

“I helped with it,” Emma announced, carrying a dish of salsa to the table. “Mom and I decided to try a new recipe.”

Tyler opened his mouth, met his father’s eyes and shut it.

Emma actually had set a place at the table for herself. She even ate a tiny mouthful of burrito, which earned her a glowing smile from her mother.

“It’s good,” the teenager pronounced, before pushing her plate away.

When Ryan rounded up the kids later to leave, he drew Jo aside.

“You’re flying out Wednesday?”

“Right after my last class.”

“Can you come to dinner tomorrow or Tuesday?”

“Tomorrow night is my night to cook, and I hate to keep cutting out on it.” She hesitated. “Ryan, today was great, but I think the kids would rather be with you. If you keep having me join you, they’re going to think…um…”

“That I’m trying to make you part of their lives as well as mine?” His eyes were enigmatic.

She nodded.

He ran his knuckles lightly over her cheek. “Would that be so bad?”

Curiously breathless, she tried to sound firm. “I’m not stepmother material.”

“Aren’t you?” Ryan murmured, before smiling crookedly. “I’m not so sure,” he added, before turning away and saying his goodbyes to Kathleen, Emma and Helen. Hummingbird’s shoulder he squeezed. Pirate, wrapped in her thin arms, purred contentedly amid the bustle.

Jo, deeply disturbed, was glad to see them go.

Washing dishes a few minutes later, she brooded.

He didn’t believe she wasn’t interested in marriage. Or he was so arrogant, he was sure her convictions would crumble in the face of his assault.

She should quit seeing him.

Jo went still, hands deep in soapy water, unconscious of Helen quietly drying the dishes beside her.

She didn’t want to quit seeing Ryan.

She didn’t even necessarily want to quit seeing his kids. They were okay. A little bratty, but smart and…well, fun. She wouldn’t
mind them that much, not if they were just here for a couple weeks—or a couple months—at a time. She didn’t have to live with them, after all. Like now. She could say,
No,
and avoid them for two days when she got tired of them.

Marriage, being a stepmother… That was another story. Definitely not for her.

She just had to convince Ryan, before he became so insistent she
had
to quit seeing him.

An eventuality, she realized with dismay, that would make her very, very unhappy.

J
O STOOD BACK
and contemplated her brother’s kitchen. Kathleen would have a heart attack if she saw it. Half-unpacked shopping bags mingled with dirty dishes, damp crumpled dish towels, a vase filled with flowers that had long dried up and a towering stack of untouched catalogs and credit card come-ons that Boyce hadn’t bothered to sort. The kitchen wasn’t precisely dirty—the unwashed dishes were all from today, from their looks—but it was definitely cluttered.

What’s more, nothing was where it seemed to Jo it should be. Pans were in a cupboard up high by the refrigerator; canned goods down low beside the oven. Cereal—well, that was in the cupboard with the bowls, which Jo supposed made sense of a sort.

“Where’s the sugar?” she called, pouring hot water over a tea bag into the mug she had located with some effort.

“Uh…” Still pulling a sweatshirt over his head, her brother appeared in the kitchen.
He’d picked her up at the airport straight from work, dressed in a well-cut gray suit. “I don’t have a sugar bowl. You’ll have to get it out of the canister.”

“Which is…where?”

“It’s on the counter.” He strode over and shoved grocery sacks aside. “Right here.”

“Oh. Well.” Jo dipped her spoon into the canister before shoving it back. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”

Boyce stepped back and eyed the countertop ruefully. “Yeah, it’s kind of a mess, isn’t it?”

“It reminds me of your bedroom, when we were kids.”

He groaned. “Remember the wars?”

“How could I forget,” she said with a shudder.

Their father had intermittently decided that Boyce’s room should be clean. Unfortunately, Boyce had genuinely seemed not to know how to tidy his possessions. He’d end up shoving everything under the bed and into the closet, which worked until Dad caught on. Sometimes, when she had still thought she could please their father, she had helped Boyce straighten his room to avoid the fights.

Shaking off the memory, she said practi
cally, “We’ll have to clean up to cook Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Yeah.” Her too-handsome brother rubbed his hands on his denim-clad thighs. “Hey, Jo?”

She knew that tone of voice. He wanted something. He intended to wheedle her into giving it.

Eyes narrowed, she faced him. “What?”

“See, here’s the thing.” His smile was sheepish but charming. “I don’t know how to cook Thanksgiving dinner. I bought a turkey, but, uh, do I just stick it in the oven the way it is? I mean, I guess I take the plastic off first, but there’s supposed to be stuffing inside it, isn’t there? Except…I looked! There isn’t any inside.”

Hiding amusement, Jo said sternly, “Are you telling me that you expect me to cook the Thanksgiving dinner that you invited me to?”

“You don’t have to cook. I mean, if you can just tell me what to do, I’ll manage. Or maybe there’s a Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner For Dummies book. Yeah, that’s what I’ll…” He stopped, eyeing her suspiciously. “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? Jo! You made me feel guilty!”

She laughed aloud at the ring of accusation in his voice. “You should feel guilty.”

“Yeah.” He screwed up his face in apology. “I should. But…you will help?”

She crossed the kitchen and kissed his cheek. “You know I will. Just let me drink my tea and then we’ll make a grocery list. If we buy everything we need tonight and get the kitchen clean, we’ll be set for morning.”

His face brightened. “Cool! Hey. How’d you learn to cook a turkey?”

“In college, a roommate and I decided to try one Thanksgiving. Neither of us had anyplace to go. Anyplace we wanted to go,” she amended. “I made this elaborate stuffing. Cooked the giblets—that’s the neck and organs that are filling the cavity inside the turkey, by the way. Chopped ’em up in this stuffing and discovered, after hours of labor, that I hate giblets.” She made a face, remembering. “But the turkey was good. I’ve had friends over for a couple of Thanksgiving feasts since.”

“You’re amazing.” He sounded like he meant it. “Of course, you’re my sister, so you have to be, right?”

Jo laughed again. She forgot how much she enjoyed Boyce’s company. Twenty-four
now, he had added a man’s muscles in the past couple of years, filling out his tall, rangy body. With his dark, straight hair long enough to pull into a stubby ponytail—which Dad would hate, she thought with relish—and eyes the color of whiskey, Boyce must have women flocking around. But to her, he didn’t seem arrogant. He was his same old self: smart but bumbling, funny and humble, ready to laugh at himself.

She could have done a lot worse in the family department, Jo surprised herself by realizing. Plenty of people didn’t have a brother and an aunt as special as hers. As for Dad, well, maybe she really could feel indifference toward him this time.

Her tea downed, she and Boyce talked about friends, school and work while they cleaned the kitchen, working together with the comfortable familiarity of family. He sorted the mail, recycling most, while she washed dishes. The groceries got put away, the dish towels into the wash and the burner pans scrubbed. She sent him to the store with a new list while she mopped his kitchen floor. On the way out the door, he was still protesting.

“Why am I getting the good part of this deal?”

“Because you don’t know how to clean!” she called after him.

“Hey!” he said indignantly.

“Go!”

“All right, all right!” The front door slammed.

Jo set the alarm so that she could put the turkey in the next morning. She dragged her sleepy, reluctant brother out of bed so he could watch if not contribute.

“Gross!” he proclaimed, when she wormed the giblets out of the still icy cavity under warm running water. “People actually eat those?”

“I truly do not know why,” she said. “Friends of mine cook them for their cats. Speaking of which…” While he chopped onions, she told him about Pirate’s rescue. “He is such a kick, now that he has the Elizabethan collar off. Even Kathleen enjoys him, except when he decides to scale the living room drapes. Or her bare leg beneath her bathrobe when she’s eating breakfast.”

Tears in his eyes from the onions, Boyce laughed. “Yeah, well, I can see how the drawing of blood might dim her enthusiasm.”

“You should get a cat,” Jo suggested.

He raised a brow, an effect killed by red-rimmed eyes and a veil of uncombed hair. “To fill the void left by Jennifer?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Jo scraped the celery she had just chopped into the biggest bowl she’d been able to find in her brother’s kitchen. “To keep you company. To make you smile. To warm your toes at night.”

“Gee.” He leveled a look at her. “That sounds like—I repeat—you think a cat would take Jennifer’s place.”

“You’re still sulking, I see.” Jo took the cutting board from him and added the onions to the celery. Ripping open a package of dried, herbed bread chunks, she dumped it into the bowl.

“You mean, I’m still nursing a broken heart, don’t you?”

“Are you?” she asked, spooning margarine into a saucepan to melt over a warm burner. “Brokenhearted, that is?”

He scowled. “No. Yeah, maybe. I liked her.”

Jo cracked an egg into a smaller bowl. “But did you love her?”

Frowning, he shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t ready to start a family or anything like that, and some things she did irritated me, but…sometimes she’d have a moment where she’d smile so sweetly, I’d feel something, oh, just kind of twist inside.” For a moment, pain carved lines in his face. “And I’d think, I want her smiling like that at me for the rest of my life.”

“I’m sorry,” Jo said softly.

“Thanks.” He let out a deep breath and jerked his shoulders in resignation. “She didn’t love me. She thought I was incredibly ‘establishment’ because I wouldn’t pierce my eyebrow.” He cleared his throat. “What seemed free-spirited when I met her was beginning to bug me, which I guess means we weren’t meant for each other.”

But what if they’d thought they were? Jo wondered. Just long enough for one to make the ultimate sacrifice of career or self?

“Do you think Mom and Dad loved each other?” she asked abruptly.

Boyce shoved his hair back and stared incredulously at her. “What brought that to mind?”

“Just…wondering. If Mom and Dad were meant for each other, or if they only thought
they were and then found out they’d been wrong.”

He swore. “How would I know? I hardly remember her. You’re older!”

“I…don’t remember her well, either.” Jo busied herself mixing the stuffing. “You know that.”

“You should. You were, like, seven when she died.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“But you’ve forgotten.”

Her eyes stinging with tears—from the onion, she told herself—Jo grabbed the slippery turkey and maneuvered it into the roasting pan. “Not everything. But I should remember more.” She heard her own fierceness. “I think I just missed her so much, I didn’t let myself remember.”

“And Dad didn’t like to talk about her.”

“No.” She saw herself, no more than eight or nine, quailing from her father’s frightening anger because she’d asked…what? Something about her mother, that’s all she remembered. He’d shouted.
She’s gone! What difference does it make?

How odd that she could remember what he’d said, but not her mother’s face when she tucked her daughter into bed at night.

“Why did you invite him?” she asked her brother. She didn’t look at him as she spooned stuffing into the turkey.

“He’s our father. He could have been worse.”

“Could he?” Her jaw muscles hurt.

“He picked me up from wrestling and track practice at the high school every day for four years, even though he had to rearrange stuff at work. He even came to some meets. Did you know that?”

Jo shook her head, wordlessly.

“Do you remember him driving you to that spelling bee, when you reached state?”

Her hands went still as she plunged into her memories. Nervous. She was nervous, sitting in the front seat of the car. The dictionary was open on her lap, but she was getting car sick from trying to read the small print. Her father… She saw his hand reach out to gently close the dictionary. “You know what you know,” he said.

“I’d forgotten,” she confessed to Boyce, her throat tight.

“He got stuck being mom and dad both, and he wasn’t very good at it. I wished…” Boyce cleared his throat. “Sometimes I wished he’d pat me on the back and say, Good
going. Something. But he did drive me. He was there. Which is more than Tony’s dad was. Remember Tony? His dad walked out when he was four or five, and he said he’d take the kids weekends, but then he never showed, and I used to hear Tony’s mom yelling on the phone trying to get child support. So, you know, our dad could have been worse. Lots worse.”

Moved despite herself, Jo fought to shore up her anger. “That’s why you invited him? Because he could have been worse?”

“I like to feel connected,” her brother said simply. “Is that so bad?”

Her shoulders sagged as her anger drained uselessly away. “No. Of course not.”

“You’ll be nice?”

She gave him a crooked, painful smile. “Maybe.”

“Ask him about Mom. Why she never sang.”

“He won’t answer. He never would.”

Boyce’s gaze held hers. “Try.”

“All right. I will.” Of course she would, she realized; why else had she come? She shouldn’t have spent the money for the airline ticket, as tight as her budget was these days. She’d wanted to see Boyce, of course, but he
wouldn’t have been alone if she hadn’t come. They might have ended up with a very odd Thanksgiving meal, given Boyce’s cooking skills, but he wouldn’t have been alone.

No, she had wanted, needed, to see her father. She was due, she thought wryly, for her every-other-year pilgrimage, to see if he had changed, or she had changed. If something was different.

This year, she had the strangest idea that something was.

I
T BOTHERED
J
O
every time she saw her father to realize how much she and Boyce looked like him. A Frenchman, born to immigrant parents, he had passed on more than the name Dubray to his children. They shared his dark eyes and hair and lean physique. Boyce, who had gained height from his maternal genes, was taller than his father, who stood a couple of inches under six feet. Jo knew very well that her petite stature was inherited from him.

She hated to think any of her qualities but the external ones came from her father.

He had aged well, she had to concede, when he arrived. His temples had grayed but the rest of his hair was still dark. The lines on his face almost made him more handsome.
He must be…fifty-four, she decided, after a quick mental count. For the first time, it occurred to Jo to wonder whether he dated or considered remarrying.

She didn’t remember him ever dating while she and Boyce lived at home. He went out sometimes without telling them where, and it might have been to see a woman. She had never once thought of him as a man, rather than as her father.

“Dad!” Boyce shook his hand. “Look who’s here.”

He hadn’t told Dad she’d be there? She shot him a glance before going forward.

“Dad.” She politely kissed his cheek, felt his hand press her back as if he had almost hugged her. “How are you?”

“Well.” He stepped back. “And you?”

“Just fine.” Already, she couldn’t think of anything to say. “Um…come in. Would you like a coffee or tea?”

“Coffee. Thank you.” He let Boyce take his coat and followed Jo to the living room, which her brother had spent the morning straightening. “Is it just the three of us?” he asked, as if the answer didn’t matter.

“Yeah, Jennifer and I broke up.”

Jo’s father sat in the armchair. “And Jo? You don’t have anybody important?”

No, Dad. You taught us so little about intimacy, neither of us is apparently capable of finding true love.

“Afraid not,” she said carelessly, then had an odd moment of shame, as if she’d denied something—someone—she shouldn’t. She tried to send a silent message:
I’m sorry, Ryan.
The moment she did, she frowned, trying to understand the shame. He wasn’t that important. Was he? She’d never let anybody be that important.