Blue Bayou

by JoAnn Ross

  He'd always seemed so bold, so strong, so larger than life. Even after she learned of his heart disease, the force of his personality had kept her from realizing exactly how old he was. Oh, she knew that he'd married her mother late in his life, knew that he was now nearly seventy-eight, which didn't necessarily have to be all that ancient in these days of medical miracles such as the one humming away in his chest. Unfortunately, he looked every one of those years, and more.

  She pulled a lime green vinyl chair that matched the waiting room couch up to the bed, sat down, and took one of those aged hands in both of hers.

  He opened his eyes, which, amazingly, considering how the rest of him looked, were still filled with life.

  “Hi, Daddy.” She squeezed his fingers, which felt like chicken bones beneath her touch. “You gave us all quite a scare.”

  “They said you gave me CPR.” His voice was raspy, but, like his eyes, not as frail as his body. “Probably saved my life.”

  “I think that's an exaggeration.”

  “Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.” His eyes narrowed as he gave her one of those probing looks that had always brought witnesses and opposing counsels into line. For a long moment the only sound in the room was the beeps of the monitor and the faint hiss of the oxygen being fed into his system by a nasal tube.

  “Why didn't you just let me die?”

  “Don't be ridiculous. You're my father.”

  “Not exactly an exemplary one,” he muttered.

  She shrugged, refusing to hold a grudge on this day of miracles. “It's not easy being a parent. We all make mistakes.”

  “Have you met her?” he asked. “Your daughter?”

  “Yes. And she's wonderful. Her name is Holly and she's sweet, beautiful, resourceful.” Dani frowned a little when she thought about the hitchhiking. “I can't wait for you to meet her.”

  “Does she know what I did?”

  She couldn't lie. “Yes. But she didn't seem as bitter as I might have expected. And I'm sure we can get past that, Daddy. If you want to. And we all try.

  “We're going to be a family, Jack and Matt and Holly and me, and we'd like you to be part of it.” Dani was not going to let the fact that Jack hadn't yet asked her to marry him get in the way of beginning the life that had been stolen from them. “I'm getting married at Beau Soleil.” She figured if they all worked at it together, they could get the garden ready in no time. “And I want you to be there.”

  “Then you'd better not waste any time,” he said. “Since I could keel over again any day.”

  “No, you won't, because while I've been going crazy worrying about you all day, you've been getting a brand-new shiny computer put in your chest. You're the judicial model of the six-million-dollar man and I'm not about to let you die for years and years.”

  “Anyone ever tell you that you can be damn bossy from time to time?” he asked without heat.

  “I guess I take after my father. So you may as well get used to it.” Her expression sobered. “I'm still not happy about what you did, but I love you and if there's anything the past two years has taught me, it's that life is too precious to waste.”

  She leaned forward, kissed his dry papery cheek, then stood up when the nurse appeared beside the bed, signaling that her time was up.

  Dani squeezed her father's hand again, reassured when he squeezed back. She was almost to the door when she heard him rasp out her name.

  She turned. “Yes, Daddy?”

  “I'm damn proud of the woman you've become, Danielle. Your children are lucky to have you. Jack's lucky. And so am I.”

  Her answering smile was slow and warm and filled with all the joy she was feeling. “I know, Daddy.”

  Jack was alone when Dani returned to the waiting room.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  “Nate took Holly down to the cafeteria for a midnight breakfast. I swear, for such a little thing, she's got an appetite that puts Turnip to shame.”

  “Lucky for Holly that her dad's a great cook.”

  “I'd say we're all pretty lucky. So, how's the judge doing?”

  “He's certainly looked better, but I talked to the charge nurse after I left the room and she says his prognosis is very good.”

  “That's more good news.”

  She nodded. “Yes. It is. . . . He told me he was lucky to have me.”

  “ 'Bout time.” Jack stepped forward. Stopped. Never in all his years of undercover work had he been this nervous. “Remember me tellin' you how I thought about you while I was in Colombia?” he began, wondering why it was that words that could come so tripplingly off the tongues of his characters, seemed to be lodged in his throat. Maybe you do need a ghostwriter, Callahan, he thought with grim humor.

  “Of course. It was when you were in the mountains with your partner.”

  “Yeah. Then, and a helluva lot of other nights as well. And I haven't stopped thinking about you—and us—since you've come back to Blue Bayou. And you know what I've decided?”

  “What?” She seemed to be holding her breath. Hell, she wasn't the only one.

  “Your marriage didn't really break up because your husband slept with his chief of staff and was, to the core, pretty much of a louse. I think you would have gotten divorced whoever you married.”

  “Well, that's certainly flattering.” The soft smile took any complaint from her words.

  “It's the truth. And it would've been the same way for me, if I'd ever gotten married. Neither one of us could have been happy with anyone else, because deep down inside, we would have been wanting each other.”

  “I can't argue with that, since the same thought has occurred to me.”

  “Good, because I'm willin' to wait till the judge is out of here to make an official announcement, but I want to marry you, Danielle. I want us to make ourselves a family with Matt and Holly, and maybe another baby or two, if you think that'd be a good idea, and have all our children grow up at Beau Soleil where their pretty maman did.

  “I want to go to sleep every night with you beside me and wake up every day the same way. I make enough money to support us in pretty good style, but if you want to keep your job at the library, that'd be great, too.”

  “I would, absolutely, but—”

  “Terrific,” he said, cutting her off. Now that he'd begun, he wanted to state his case before she had a chance to think of any objections. “Fortunately, thanks to Hollywood, you'd have a rich husband who can afford all the nannies we'd ever need. Did I mention the movie folks have bought book number five?”

  “I didn't think you'd finished with the fourth.”

  “I haven't.” He raked his fingers through his hair, took another deep breath, and crossed the small space between them to stand in front of her. “But only because my hero is waitin' for the drug dealer's daughter to admit she loves him. How 'bout it, chère? Does she? Or doesn't she?”

  “She does.” Dani lifted her hand to his face. “With her entire heart.”

  Jack drew her into his arms with a deep sigh of relief. “Then you'll marry me? As soon as possible?”

  A dazzling smile bloomed on Dani's face; her eyes were wet and brilliant, but Jack knew that this time her tears were born of happiness. “I was beginning to think you'd never ask.”

  POCKET BOOKS

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  River Road

  JoAnn Ross

  Available September 2002

  from

  Pocket Books

  Turn the page for a preview of

  River Road. . . .

  Finn stood in the shadow of a broken-winged angel, watching her. Silvery moondust streamed over Beau Soleil's graveyard, illuminating tombs which stood like mute white ghosts in the ethereal glow. She was wearing a clinging moss green dress which, though not entirely true to the period, could have been created from the mist that curled in clinging tendrils around her bare arms. She'd left her fiery hair loose, allowing it to curl over pearlescent shoulders.


  “So you've come,” a deep male vice echoed out of the thickening fog.

  “I hadn't realized I had a choice.” She tossed her head. There was an adversarial edge to her honied southern drawl. “Since you've put Belle Terre under Yankee occupation.”

  “Of course you have a choice.” Captain James Farragut emerged from behind one of the tombs, wearing a uniform of Yankee blue. With his welltrimmed blond hair and beard, shiny brass buttons, and boots polished to a brilliant sheen, he could have stepped off a Union recruiting poster. Fancy O'Halloran had hated him on sight.

  Thunder rumbled like Northern cannon fire in the distance. “During my stay here, you'll meet me wherever I say, whenever I say, and I won't order my men to burn your beloved family home when we leave,” he said matter-of-factly. “Or you can refuse and I'll turn you and your sister over to my men, many of whom are rough farm boys who don't have any idea of how to treat a lady.”

  “And you do?” Her tone suggested that she found it unlikely any man from north of the Mason-Dixon line, especially one from New York City, would have the slightest idea how to treat a southern woman.

  His boots crunched on the crushed-oyster-shell gravel as he approached. “Absolutely.”

  They were standing face-to-face now, her skirt pressing against his thighs as he backed her up against a crypt, pinning her between the damp stone and his body.

  Lightning flashed, brightening the scene to a daylight brilliance for a fleeting heartbeat of a second. Watching her closely as he was, Finn saw her faint shudder when the captain's fingers skimmed over her bare shoulders. With anticipation or fear, he couldn't tell.

  “Of course,” Farragut mused as his touch trailed lower, tracing the rounded curve of her upper breast, “one could argue that any woman who'd meet a man all alone in a deserted cemetery at midnight isn't really much of a lady.”

  The sky opened up. Rain fell in a torrent, as if being poured out of a bucket. Fancy cried out as he roughly tore the last of her pretty, prewar dress down to her waist, but when he dragged her to the ground and began unfastening his wool trousers, she reached beneath her filmy skirt—exposing a mouthwatering length of silk stocking—and retrieved the derringer she'd stuck in a lacy garter.

  “If you lay a hand on me again,” she said, pointing the weapon directly at his groin, “or so much as touch a hair on the head of my sister or any other woman on this plantation, I swear that you'll be carrying your manhood back to New York in a basket.”

  If he hadn't known that this soap-opera vixen had grown up on one of the last surviving flower child communes in northern California, Finn could have believed that Julia Summers was a true Steel Magnolia of the South.

  They glared at each other for a long, tension-filled moment. The Union captain's eyes glittered with dangerous male intent. The rain had turned her dress nearly invisible; the thin wet material clung to her curves.

  An instinctive—and Finn assured himself, perfectly normal—male response to the provocative sight uncoiled in his loins; he ruthlessly reined it in.

  “Rebel slut,” Shane Langley, the actor playing Captain Farragut, spat the words, then lunged at her again.

  As the thunder boomed around them and the rain fell, Fancy pulled the trigger.

  “Cut!” a male voice broke the night.

  “Cut,” echoed the assistant director.

  The artificially generated storm abruptly ceased.

  “Stone the bloody dingoes if you weren't right, Julia,” the hard-driving Australian director bestowed the first compliment Finn had heard him hand out in three days of filming. “You pulled that scene off in one take.”

  “It was either that or let you rain on me for the rest of the night.” Julia took hold of Shane's hand as he pulled her back onto her feet.

  “I'll see you all back on the set at nine A.M. sharp. Julia, luv, you're due in makeup at seven.”

  “Dammit, Randy. That's only six hours from now. How do you expect me to get my beauty sleep?”

  “I'd suggest you sleep quickly,” the director responded.

  “Don't worry, darlin',” her co-star said, in his own natural Mississippi drawl more suited to a Confederate uniform than Union blue. “You're already drop-dead gorgeous.”

  “Flatterer,” she muttered, slipping her arms into the robe the wardrobe mistress held out to her.

  “It's the God's own truth.” He lifted his right hand.

  “Isn't that sweet.” She patted his cheek, her smile luminous. “But I'm still not sleeping with you.”

  He shrugged good-naturedly. “Can't blame a guy for trying.”

  No, Finn agreed silently. With the image of those long firm legs replaying in his mind, he doubted there were many men anywhere in the Western World who wouldn't attempt to parlay a sex scene like the one he'd just witnessed into the real thing.

  She didn't so much as spare him a glance as he followed her to her trailer; didn't say a word when he walked right in as if he had every right to be there. She'd objected to his presence from the beginning, and even as he was grateful for her apparent change in attitude, Finn didn't trust her seeming acquiescence.

  “God, I feel as if I've gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson,” she complained. “In a mud pit. And I'm going to have bruises all over me tomorrow from that damn gravel.”

  Since he'd discovered that she had a habit of talking to herself, most often when she was preparing for a scene, Finn didn't respond.

  She turned her back on him, as she'd been doing since they'd been forced on each other, and shrugged off the robe, dropping it onto the floor. The wet, muddy dress that revealed more than it concealed followed, leaving her in a muddied corset and lacy silk pantaloons that might have come from a nineteenth-century Victoria's Secret. “If you're going to insist on hovering over me like some oversize bullmastiff guard dog, you may as well make yourself useful and get me out of this damn straitjacket so I can breathe again.”

  The corset was white floral satin, heavily boned and laced up the back. It looked uncomfortable as hell but had the effect of winnowing her waist down to an unbelievably narrow size he figured he could span with his fingers. Fingers that were practically itching to touch her.

  “Why don't I call Alice?” he suggested.

  “Because she's had a long day since Randy got it into his head to change costumes every two hours, and she still has tomorrow's wardrobe to get ready.”

  She flashed him a deliberately provocative look over her bare shoulder. “Which leaves you to undress me.”

  The pink satin ribbons, tied at the back of her wasp-slender waist, were wet and muddy. Deliberately testing his self-control, Finn drew them through the loops slowly, allowing his fingers to brush against perfumed flesh that felt like cool satin to the touch.

  Neither spoke. But the higher he got, the more he sensed the tension that had been stretched nearly to the breaking point between them these past days begin to ease. When his knuckles brushed against her spine, not by accident, but design, he heard a slow languid sigh escape from between her lips.

  “What did you think?” she murmured.

  “About what? Lift up your hair so I can unlace these top ones.”

  She did as instructed, revealing a slender neck he found unreasonably erotic. “About the scene.”

  “I think it was getting pretty hot.” He slipped the last ribbon through the loop, “Until you shot the guy's balls off.”

  “Did that make you wince? Want to grab your own?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” There was a rasp of harsh denim against smooth silk as she leaned her nearly naked body back against him in a way that sent the last of the blood rushing straight from his head to his boxer shorts.

  Finn knew the move was calculated when she looked up at him, her sexy come-and-kiss-me lips tilted up in the same smile he'd watched her use two days ago when her character had seduced her sister's Confederate army fiancé before sending him off to fight for a losing cause.

  “My graciou
s,” she said on Fancy's slow magnolia drawl. “Is that your gun, Special Agent Callahan? Or are you just glad to see me?”

  “What the hell do you think?” Because he suspected it was what she wanted, Finn refused to be embarrassed by his body's response and move away.

  Buns of steel earned from daily workouts wiggled against him in a way meant to test his resolve. Oh, she was good, Finn decided as he ground his teeth and forced his sex-crazed mind to run through the entire 1978 Yankees lineup. He was trying to remember who'd replaced the injured Willie Randolph at second base late in the season when Julia gave him another smile, more wickedly seductive than the first.

  “It's nice to know you're actually human, darling. I was beginning to wonder.” With that less-than-flattering remark, she let her damp red hair fall back over her shoulders, held the corset against her, and disappeared into the bathroom.

  When he heard the shower turn on, Finn imagined her naked, imagined himself joining her in that compact shower, smoothing the fragrant soap that clung to her skin and made him think of darkeyed gypsies dancing around burning campfires over her lush curves.

  As his imagination wandered into forbidden territory, flashing dirty pictures that would make the old Playboy magazines his brothers used to snitch from him back in high school seem tame by comparison, Finn leaned his head against the wall and reminded himself that if he allowed his rampant hard-on to drag him into that shower with her, he'd undoubtedly be breaking every rule in the book. Along with some that hadn't even been written yet.

  But that crack about being human was pissing him off. What the hell did she think he was? Some sort of sexless android? Just because he didn't believe in giving into temptation and mixing work and pleasure? Of course he'd never been so tempted, either.

  During his years at the FBI, Finn had gained some measure of fame as a profiler. He'd also been threatened, shot at, and had even foiled an assassination plot that had earned him an ugly knife gash in the thigh and an invitation to the White House to have dinner with the President and First Lady.