Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

  “I know.” She felt his weary sigh ruffle her hair. “Me, too.”

  “You?” She lifted her eyes to his. “You don't have anything to apologize for.”

  “I didn't believe you. I was rough with you.” He frowned as he took in the bruises on her upper arms.

  “No.” She touched her palm to his rough cheek. “You not believing me was my own fault for not having been truthful from the start. As for what happened, that was every bit as much my doing as yours.” She managed a faint, wry smile. “It was also rather thrilling, while it was happening.”

  When she felt the deep rumbling chuckle in his chest, Dani knew that it was going to be all right. That they'd be all right.

  “I know you have a lot of questions.”

  “They can wait.” He raked a hand through his hair, then touched his palm to her cheek. “I should have been there.”

  And would have been, she knew now. If only she'd told him. “Of course you're right. I made a terrible decision.”

  “You were too young to be making any decisions under so much pressure. What I hate is the idea of you having gone through all that alone. I should have been with you when our child was born. I should have taken care of you. All the way back to Beau Soleil, I kept thinking of all the things I could have done to change things. If I'd stayed—”

  “You had no choice.”

  “That's not true. Looking back on that day, I know that even if your father had made good his threat, my maman would have survived. She was a strong woman who'd overcome losing her husband. Losing her job wouldn't have been the end of the world.

  “I should have stayed,” he repeated with more strength. “Because I loved you. And you loved me. We may have been too young for marriage, but we would have made it work. Somehow.”

  Dani didn't know which surprising statement to take first. “You loved me?”

  “Mais, yeah. Oh, I'd fought like hell against it. But that last night I realized that what we had going for us was a lot more than just sex.”

  “The night we made our daughter.”

  “Yeah.” He took another deep breath, then frowned at his watch. “We need to talk. Make plans. But I figure we've got about two minutes before Nate and Holly get up here—”

  “Her name's Holly?”

  “Yeah.” His smile lit his tawny eyes and warmed her heart. “You're gonna love her, chère.” He brushed his lips against her temple. “And she's going to love you.” Skimmed them down her cheek. “Just like I do.”

  They were the words she'd waited thirteen years to hear. And they were even more glorious than in her most romantic fantasies. Dani was about to tell him that she loved him, too, had always loved him, when his roving lips met hers and she was lost.

  She sank into the kiss, twining her arms around his neck, going up onto her toes to kiss him back. He pulled her hard against him and held her as if he'd never let her go. As if she had any intention of going anywhere, Dani thought as her mouth clung and her heart soared.

  “Hold that thought,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders as he broke off the kiss. And not a moment too soon, as Dani heard Nate clear his throat.

  She braced herself as Jack ran his hands down her arms, soothing her inward tremors. Then he shifted to stand beside her and she was looking into a young face that was familiar and foreign at the same time. As she stared at this beautiful blond child poised on the brink of womanhood, a tangled blend of joy and panic clogged her throat. The years spun away and she was holding her little girl in her arms, pressing her lips against the downy fuzz atop the infant's head.

  Then the doctor had snapped at the nurse who had, without thinking, broken the maternity home rules by allowing the unwed mother even that brief, fleeting moment to bond with the baby she'd carried beneath her heart for nine long months. Dani had wept after they'd snatched her daughter away and rushed her from the cold sterility of the delivery room.

  She'd held firm when the grim-faced lawyers ganged up with the woman who ran the home, using every argument against her keeping her baby, even going so far as to call the judge to try to reason with her.

  Then she'd screamed when, after sneaking down the hallway to the nursery before dawn the next morning, she'd been told that her baby hadn't survived the night. Refusing to believe it, she'd hysterically demanded to see her child. This child, she realized now with wonder.

  They'd called a doctor, who, while two burly orderlies had held her down, injected her with something to calm her down. When she finally emerged from her drugged stupor two days later, her father had been waiting with her daughter's death certificate.

  After leaving the hospital, her breasts aching from the pills they'd given her to dry up her milk, Dani would have the same dream every night. A dream that it had all been a horrible mistake, that Jack had returned home from wherever he'd gone, had been thrilled to discover he was a father, had proposed right on the spot and the three of them had all left the hospital together, their daughter dressed in a ruffled pink dress, little white socks on her pudgy feet and one of those stretchy baby headbands, to begin a new life together.

  The dream had become more infrequent over the years, especially after Matt had been born, but it always returned on the anniversary of her first child's birth.

  Now, wonder of wonders, it was turning out not to be a dream after all, and Dani couldn't say a word.

  “Holly,” Jack said, jumping into the lurch to rescue her, “this is your mother. Danielle, meet Holly.”

  “Hi,” Holly said. Beneath a poise beyond her years, Dani sensed nerves as tangled as her own.

  “Oh, baby.” Dani felt her eyes mist. “I want to hold you.”

  Holly's blue-green eyes, which were like looking into a mirror, were moist and shiny as well. “I think I'd like that,” she admitted on a voice that was more child than woman.

  Dani was across the room without having been aware of moving and gathered her daughter close, holding her to her breast as she'd dreamed of doing so many times.

  When she'd finally accepted that what Jack had told her was true, Dani had been terrified that her child would, at worst, hate her. At best, resent her for having abandoned her. But as she felt the slender arms wrap around her waist, she allowed herself a glimmer of hope.

  “Where have you been all these years? How did you know to come here to Blue Bayou? To Beau Soleil? Did you come with your”—she could not yet say the word parents in regard to anyone but she and Jack—“the people who adopted you?”

  Holly opted to answer the last of Dani's breathless, rapid fire questions first. “My parents died when I was nearly ten. They were sailing off Depoe Bay—that's in Oregon—when their boat capsized.”

  Dani rubbed circles against Holly's slender back. “That must have been terrible.”

  “It was. I was sent to live with my uncle in Oceanside, he was in the Marines, but I'd never met him because I guess he and my dad, my adoptive dad,” she corrected with a quick look Jack's way, “didn't get along real well.”

  “He was your dad in all the ways that counted,” Jack said. “No one's going to try to take that away from you, chère.”

  Relief flittered across her face.

  “Does your uncle know where you are?” Dani knew she'd be frantic if Matt just took off and left home.

  “No. But he wouldn't really care.”

  “Of course he would,” Dani said, feeling the need to stick up for this man she'd never met, if only to reassure her daughter that she was loved.

  “I really don't think so, since I haven't seen him for the past couple years.”

  Dani exchanged a startled look with Jack, who nodded. “They got a divorce,” he revealed, helping Holly out a bit with catching Dani up to date. “Apparently his wife had kids from a previous marriage and didn't feel any responsibility to her brother-in-law's child. And it was tough for him, since he's in the military and has to move around a lot.”

  Dani was certain there must be some sort of family
hardship circumstances that would have gotten him out of the Marines, but didn't remark on this possibility since she didn't want to hurt her daughter any more than she'd already been hurt.

  “So where have you been since then?” she asked, dreading the answer.

  “In foster care,” Holly said in a matter-of-fact way that broke Dani's heart. “Uncle Phil signed away custodial rights, so I could have been adopted out, but people don't want older kids, so that wasn't much of an option.”

  Dear Lord. How was she ever going to make this up to her? Dani wondered miserably.

  “I told her that there're lots of people who'd love to adopt a jolie fille like herself,” Jack revealed. “Not that she has to worry 'bout that, now that she's got us.”

  “Absolutely,” Dani agreed, trying to read Holly's face to see what she thought about this. She desperately wanted to assure her that she had a family, a family who loved her, but still wasn't certain of how much resentment the girl might be harboring. How could she not, after all she'd been through? Dani's stomach fluttered.

  “Why don't you pretty ladies sit down and have yourself a nice get-acquainted talk,” Jack suggested. “While Nate and I go get you some pop from the vending machines.”

  Holly ordered a Diet Pepsi, as did Dani, who didn't really want anything but understood that Jack and Nate were leaving them alone to talk without an audience. She was grateful for their sensitivity until the heavy silence descended as soon as they'd left the room.

  “This is harder than in my dreams,” Dani murmured.

  “Mine, too,” Holly agreed.

  Dani looked at her, surprised. “You dreamed about me? About us?”

  “All the time. Sometimes I thought you were a famous opera star who traveled the world and couldn't take care of a baby. I used to watch PBS all the time, wondering if one of those ladies singing at the Lincoln Center might be my mom.” She smiled a little shyly. “I know it's not cool for a kid my age, but I like opera.”

  “So does your grandfather Dupree. He always used to play it in his chambers. Sometimes loud enough that he could hear the music from the bench, but low enough that no one else in the courtroom other than his bailiff could.”

  “What's his favorite opera? Composer?”

  Dani lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “I'm afraid I don't know.”

  “Is he going to die tonight?”

  “I hope not. The doctors seemed optimistic.” She sighed at the thought of what her father had done. How many years he'd cost them all. “Let's sit down, shall we?” She took her daughter by the hand, led her over to the couch, which, rather than the obnoxious orange of the ER waiting room, was the color of a ripe lime.

  They turned toward each other, knee to knee, face to face. “I'm assuming, from what you said about my father, that Jack explained some of the circumstances surrounding your birth.”

  Holly nodded. “Yeah, he pretty much told me all the facts. About you doing what the adults had convinced you was for the best, then you changing your mind about keeping me, and your father fixing it so you'd think I'd died.”

  “That's pretty much it.” How strange it seemed to have the most traumatic time of her life condensed into a single concise statement.

  “But what he couldn't tell me about how you were feeling, because he didn't know, you did.”

  “Me?”

  “In your letter.”

  The letter! It had been the first one, and she'd spent days agonizing over what to say, finally writing the final draft the night before her daughter was born, sharing with her unborn baby the truth—that she'd been conceived in love and would always live in her mother's heart. She'd tried to explain, as best she could, why she was giving up custodial rights and how she hoped that her child would someday understand that her actions had also been born in love. Of course she'd changed her mind the next day. But it hadn't mattered, because she'd lost her child anyway.

  “That's how I found you,” Holly explained. “You wrote about growing up in Beau Soleil, and about how some day you'd love to introduce me to another part of my heritage, so you were going to register with that place that links up children with their adoptive parents, if they both want, when they're eighteen. You said you wouldn't try to find me, in case I didn't want my life disrupted, but that you'd always be there for me.”

  “That's true.” Dani bit her lip to keep from bursting into tears. “I gave the letter to the social worker to give to your adoptive parents, but when I could start thinking straight again, I assumed it had been thrown away.” As impossible as it seemed, Dani wondered if a part of her had continued to know, in some secret part of her heart, that her daughter was still alive. Perhaps that's why she'd felt moved to write those letters every year. Letters she couldn't wait to share with her newly found daughter.

  “Well, I guess it wasn't thrown away, because I found it when I was about eight and was snooping around in a box in my parents' bedroom closet. I'd always known I was adopted, so it wasn't like it was any big surprise and I don't know why I stole it, but later I was glad I did, since it gave me something to hold on to the past two years in the foster homes. I couldn't wait to turn eighteen and could register to be matched up with you.”

  Dani silently blessed the social worker who, for reasons only she would ever know, had secretly gone against the judge's orders and passed on that fateful letter. “But you're not eighteen.”

  “I know. But once I saw the picture of Beau Soleil on the front of that newspaper, I knew where to find you, so I decided not to wait any longer.”

  “You ran away?”

  “Yeah.” Holly shrugged slender shoulders clad in a hot-pink top that looked as if it'd been created from shrink wrap. “A few days ago.”

  “Where were you living?”

  “In San Diego County.”

  “That's so far away. How did you get all the way to Louisiana?”

  “I hitched to Yuma, Arizona, because I was afraid to buy a bus ticket in case the police were looking for me. Then I took the bus from Yuma to here.”

  Even though she'd obviously survived the experience, Dani's blood turned to ice at the idea of her beautiful, young, vulnerable daughter hitchhiking. “That was horribly dangerous,” she scolded in the tone she had seldom used with Matt. “I don't want you ever hitchhiking again.”

  Holly surprised her by laughing at that. She brushed her sleek slide of hair behind her shoulder. “Yes, Mother. . . . I still have the Pooh bear,” she volunteered. “He's been restuffed twice. Mom said it was my favorite baby toy.”

  More memories flooded back. Dani had bought the bear at a toy store during one of her rare Saturday afternoons away from the home. “That's so nice to hear,” she managed to say on a voice clogged with emotion.

  Surely it couldn't be this easy?

  “I want you to know,” Dani said, “that I'll understand if you resented me. Even if you still do.”

  “No. You did the right thing,” Holly said, the bright laughter fading from her eyes as she turned serious. “Mom and Dad were wonderful and I loved them and they loved me. I'm not sure I ever would have contacted you if they hadn't died.”

  Dani ignored the little twinge of hurt and concentrated instead on the fact that her daughter had known at least ten years of happiness. “I understand,” she said mildly.

  “But I've been dreaming of this ever since they died, and I had to go live with Uncle Phil and Aunt Sara.” Tears sparkled in her thick gold lashes. “But this is even better than I dreamed because I never, ever thought I'd find both my father and mother at the same time.”

  “It's been a strange set of circumstances,” Dani murmured, thinking how all the turmoil in her life these past years had brought her back to Blue Bayou so she could find Jack again and the daughter they'd created that longago summer could find them.

  “Yeah. Jack told me about the piano.”

  From the choked sound in Holly's voice, it was obvious she was trying not to laugh. But because the Steinway had
been one of the stranger strings fate had pulled, Dani couldn't keep her own lips from quirking at the absurdity. “It sounds as if you and Jack had quite a conversation.”

  “We've been talking since I showed up. Well, except for when he came into town to tell you.”

  Studying her carefully, Dani was relieved not to see a hint of concern in the girl's expression. Obviously Jack had kept their personal troubles to himself.

  Holly sighed. “He's so wonderful.”

  “You won't get any argument from me about that,” Dani agreed.

  “I asked him if he loved you. And he said he always had.”

  “That's handy, since I love him, too.”

  “Are you going to get married?” Dani knew that it was more than just idle curiosity that had Holly asking the question. “He hasn't asked me yet.”

  “He will,” Holly asserted with a childish conviction. “And if he doesn't ask you, you'll just have to propose to him.”

  “How old are you, anyway?” Dani asked with a faint smile, knowing the answer all too well. “Twelve going on thirty?”

  “Everyone has always said I'm very mature for my age.”

  She would have had to have been, Dani thought sadly, to have experienced the loss of her parents, the breakup of another home, and the subsequent years in the revolving door of the foster-care system.

  A nurse appeared in the doorway, accompanied by Nate and Jack, who'd returned with the cans of soda. “The judge is awake and asking for you, Ms. Dupree. Dr. Ancelet says you can visit for five minutes.”

  “I won't be long,” she promised. She gave Holly another hug and experienced wonder that it felt so right. So natural.

  “I'll be here.”

  Dani touched her fingertips to her daughter's smooth cheek. “I think those are the most beautiful words I've ever heard.”

  Dani's heart, which had been floating on air, took a crash dive when she walked into the CCU and saw her father looking swallowed up by the narrow hospital bed. His complexion was the color of library paste, his hands, lying limp on the sheets on either side of him, were spotted and blue-veined, and lank strands of white hair revealed a great deal of his scalp.