by JoAnn Ross
Her head whirling with the horrible reality of her situation, Tessa downed the rest of her champagne and rose unsteadily to her feet.
“Where do you think you’re going? We’re not finished here.”
“I have to pee.”
“You need a downer.”
She didn’t deny it. “You don’t understand, dammit—”
“Of course I do.” Even though she knew this sudden show of concern was an act, Tessa didn’t resist as he gathered her into his strong arms. “I understand your career is at a crossroads right now, baby. I also understand that it’s got to be scary, thinking about losing your agent.”
Tessa wrapped her arms around his waist. “I don’t know what I’d do without Terrance,” she mumbled into his chest.
“We’ll figure out something.” He ran his hand down her hair. “Meanwhile, since there’s no way either one of us can come up with a cure for liver cancer in the next twenty-four hours, we may as well find something to take our mind off our problems.” His hand slid slowly, past her waist, cupped her bottom and lifted her against him.
“You always think sex is the answer to everything.”
“Not everything.” He leaned back and grinned down at her. “Did I happen to mention that I busted a guy selling coke at a dance club last night?”
Against her will, she felt that little trip of her heart. “I don’t suppose you happened to miscount how many Baggies he had on him?”
His smile widened. “What do you think?”
“I shouldn’t. Not with all the champagne I’ve drunk.”
“You haven’t had that much.” His lips plucked at hers. “Come on, sweetheart. We’ll get a little high, have some mind-blowing sex and in the morning everything will be coming up roses.”
Anything would be better than this constant arguing. If only Terrance were here.
But he wasn’t. And if Jason was telling the truth—and about this, there was no reason to doubt him—he wouldn’t be coming back. Tessa couldn’t imagine what she was going to do without the man who’d so skillfully guided her career through the rough white water that was Hollywood dealmaking.
“Perhaps I should call Miles.” Miles had set her up with Terrance in the first place. Maybe he’d know what to do.
“You don’t need to call my damn brother. When are you going to get it through that gorgeous red head that I’m all you need?”
Before she could respond, Jason had picked her up and was carrying her into the house. The very same house on which she owed two months’ back rent.
There had to be an answer, Tessa assured herself. After all, she’d already had more than her share of luck. She was a successful actress. Her publicist had called last week to set up interviews with ET and TV Guide, and there was even talk of her making the cover as one of three upcoming stars of the future.
As Jason had pointed out, she lived in Beverly Hills and drove a Porsche. And not just any bottom-of-the-line model, either, but a Targa that screamed success. Okay, so they were both leased, but the majority of wannabe actresses in town wouldn’t even be able to afford a fraction of the payments.
Something would work out, she assured herself as Jason dropped her onto the bed. It always did.
“One day Coyote came across some otters playing a game of nanzoz,” Molly read to the children who’d gathered at her motor home. Today was inoculation day in Canyon de Chelly and now that all the shots had been given and tears dried, she was entertaining her young patients by reading from a book of Navajo legends. “He asked if he could play with them.”
“But the otters knew he was a rascal,” a little girl about Grace’s age volunteered.
Molly rewarded her with a smile. “They certainly did, Helen. They told him to go away, but he begged and begged and finally they agreed to let him join the game. So long as he bet his skin, the way they did.”
“But when they lost their skins, they just jumped in the water and got new ones,” a little boy said.
“Exactly. And, of course, Coyote, who didn’t know how to play the game nearly as well as the otters, lost his skin. But when he jumped in the water—”
“He didn’t get a new skin,” the children shouted the familiar story line in unison.
“He jumped into the creek again and again, but his skin didn’t come back,” Molly agreed. “Finally he was so exhausted, the otters took pity on him and pulled him out of the creek, dragged him to a badger hole, threw him in and covered him up with earth.
“Well, before he got into all this trouble, Coyote had had a beautiful smooth coat, just like the otters. But by the time he dug his way out of that badger hole, he was covered with fur again, but it was a coarse, rough fur, like badger fur. And this is the coat Coyote has had to wear ever since.”
“Tell us about Coyote fighting the spiders and swallows,” Helen Redhouse said. “That’s my favorite one.” Her smile lit up her dark face and her eyes, like polished brown stones, looked up at Molly with something bordering on adoration.
“I want to hear about Bear Woman,” a boy called out, prompting an argument as the various camps took up sides.
Molly glanced out the window, to where the sun was setting in the west behind them. Following Navajo tradition, she’d parked the motor home so her door faced the east, and the rising Father Sun.
“I think, if we don’t waste time arguing, we just may have time for both before your parents have to take you home.”
Since the adults in question were enjoying themselves at the trading post, bartering, pawning, selling, buying and gossiping, Molly knew they would not mind her keeping their children a little longer.
The truth was, although she worked each day until she was exhausted, and had put thousands of miles on the motor home driving from outpost to outpost, she hadn’t been able to entirely shake her depression. The only times she ever felt truly happy—and fulfilled—were times like now, when after a day’s work, she was surrounded by children. Children she could pretend, for a brief time, were her own.
When the cheers settled down, she turned the page and began to read another of the beloved stories they all knew by heart.
“I feel like a damn fool.” Theo stood in front of the full-length mirror, staring grimly at her reflection.
“What on earth do you mean?” Lena asked.
“Surely you’re not having doubts?” Molly asked at the same time, exchanging a concerned look with her sister.
“Not about marrying Alex.” Never about that. “It’s just this getup.” Theo ran her hands down the front of the ivory lace jacket topping a chiffon tea-length skirt that swirled around her ankles.
“You look beautiful,” both sisters said in unison. The subsequent smiles they traded held none of the tension that had hovered between them for days.
“Like a blushing bride,” Molly tacked on.
“That’s just the point. I’ve already been married—”
“Only for two weeks,” Lena pointed out. “Thirty years ago.”
“I never would have suspected George was gay,” Theo mused. “I mean, back in those days, they didn’t have TV talk shows. I was so damn innocent, I figured I must be the only woman in the world to come home and discover her new groom makin’ whoopie with the pool boy.”
“That must have been a shock,” Lena said sympathetically. Theo had told her the story two days ago over a long lunch.
“Well, you certainly don’t have to worry about that with Alex,” Molly said.
“No.” To both sisters’ amusement, Theo blushed like a girl at the thought of her fiancé’s lovemaking. “That’s for sure. But I still think I should have just worn my purple satin. Alex likes that one a lot.”
“The purple looks gorgeous on you. But this makes you look as if you stepped from the pages of a bride magazine,” Molly said.
“When you tried it on last night, Grace said you looked like a fairy queen,” Lena reminded her.
“Nah.” Theo turned this way and that, her frown sof
tening as she studied the uncharacteristically feminine dress sprinkled with seed pearls. “George was queen of the fairies.”
As she laughed along with Molly and Lena, Theo began to feel more like herself again. Maybe it was a ridiculous dress for a woman in her fifties to wear. But dammit, she felt pretty. And for someone who’d worked overtime all her life striving for over-the-top glamour, she was discovering that pretty and feminine could feel nice, too.
“What about my hair?” She patted it nervously.
“Perfect. I love the new shade,” Molly said reassuringly.
“You look just like Jackie O,” Lena seconded.
Theo leaned closer to the glass. “I think my nose is shiny.”
“Your nose is perfect.” As they heard the harpist downstairs begin to play, Molly put her hands on Theo’s lace-clad shoulders and turned her toward the bedroom door. “You don’t want to keep your groom waiting.”
The wedding was being held in the Longworths’ garden. From the upstairs window, the women could see Alex, standing beside Dan—who he’d asked to be his best man—beneath the rose-covered arbor. A green-and-white striped tent had been erected beside the pool for the reception; a buffet fit for royalty had been set up on the damask-draped tables, and silver urns held nuggets of sparkling ice and dark green bottles of champagne.
“No.” Theo squared her shoulders and reminded herself that not many women were fortunate enough to be so loved. “We’ve both waited too long as it is.” She scooped up her bouquet, a tasteful arrangement of white orchids. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“So,” Joe Salvatore asked Molly two weeks later as they were preparing to leave the hospital, “how was the wedding of the year?”
“Absolutely perfect. The bride was beautiful and the groom was a wreck.” Molly grinned as she thought back on the obvious nervousness of the man who’d risked his life so many times during his years on the L.A. police force.
“Sounds like the situation was normal. Although in my family, Uncle Thomas always gets drunk, tries to give the bridesmaids hickeys and grabs the microphone sometime during the evening to sing ‘Volaré.’ I don’t suppose anything like that happened?”
“Everyone was a model of decorum.”
“The average Californian is obviously too laid-back to have any flair for the dramatic. I suppose you brought pictures?”
“Tons.” She pulled the snapshots out of her purse and handed them over. He flipped through the stack, making appropriate comments, pausing when he got to the one of Alex awaiting the arrival of his bride.
“Looks as if he’s getting along pretty well with those artificial legs.” Molly had told him the story of Alex’s accident, and what he’d endured on the way to recovery.
“He plays in a police veteran’s basketball league,” she informed him. “And not one of those wheelchair leagues for disabled cops.”
“That’s terrific.” He nodded his medical approval and moved on to the next photograph, which happened to be of Grace, standing in the garden, holding her flower-girl basket of snowy rose petals. “Jeez, that’s a gorgeous child!”
“She is, isn’t she?”
Molly experienced that same unbidden surge of maternal pride she’d felt when she’d first seen her daughter—Lena’s daughter—in a powder pink lace dress that was a perfect foil for her gleaming jet hair. As she’d done all the other times, she’d firmly tamped it down. Still, as hard as she tried, she knew she’d never forget the musical sound of Grace’s childish laughter as Reece scooped her up into his arms after the wedding and began dancing across the wooden platform that had been laid beneath the tent.
“She’s definitely going to break a lot of hearts.” He turned to a family photo of Grace, Lena, Reece and Molly. “Although they’re both good-looking, she doesn’t seem to resemble either of her parents,” he murmured.
“Not all children do,” Molly said quickly. A bit too quickly, she realized, when he looked up at her, a tinge of curiosity in his expression.
“Now that you mention it, my brother, Dominic, takes after my mother, my sister, Ann, resembles my dad, but except for the same coloring, I don’t look like anyone else in the family.” He studied the photo again. “Actually, you know who she looks like?”
Molly’s blood went cold. Although no one had said anything, she’d been aware that several of the wedding guests—and everyone in the family—had noticed the remarkable resemblance. “Who?” she asked in a voice that was not as strong as she would have liked.
“The kid’s a dead ringer for you.”
Molly turned to gaze out the window, pretending a sudden interest in the towering red-rock formation in the distance. “Do you really think so?”
“Don’t you? She’s got the same wavy black hair, the same blue eyes, the same stubborn chin. And her nose tilts to the left, exactly like yours.”
“My nose isn’t crooked,” she argued in an attempt to change the subject.
“Of course it is.” He took her hand and led her over to the mirror above the white pedestal sink in the doctors’ lounge. “See?” He ran a finger down the slope of her nose. “Right here, it takes just the slightest turn.”
“It does not.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re real cute when you get your back up, Sister Molly?”
“And to think I was about to offer to cook you dinner.”
“Really? Honest-to-God food that doesn’t come in a cardboard box and has to be nuked in a microwave?”
“Actually, now that you bring it up, I was planning to reheat it in the microwave. I made too much lasagna last night and will never be able to eat it all by myself.”
“Brains, beauty, and the woman can cook.” He sighed, and stretched, working out the kinks earned from a long day treating everything from cold sores to arthritis to a broken elbow, to an emergency C-section. “I think I’m in love.”
Accustomed to his teasing attitude, which reminded her of Reece, Molly didn’t take him seriously. “You probably say that to all the nurse practitioners you work with.”
“Nah. Just the drop-dead gorgeous ones.”
Something flickered in the depths of his dark brown eyes. Some unnamed emotion that came and went so quickly, if Molly hadn’t met his gaze at that precise moment, she might have missed it. Something that seemed strangely close to a masculine appreciation that had nothing to do with her medical skills.
Deciding that notion was ridiculously fanciful, she put the idea away. “Such a tongue you have on you, Dr. Salvatore. Are you certain you’re Italian, and not Irish? I have the feeling you must have kissed the Blarney stone.”
“Perhaps in some other life,” he agreed, his mood lightening to match hers as they left the hospital and crossed the parking lot to the motor home that had served as her home for nearly four years. Since so much of the space had been converted to a portable clinic, her living quarters were little more than a kitchen, a propane stove, a table, two wooden chairs and a narrow bed. Although it wasn’t spacious, compared to some cloistered nun’s cells Molly had heard the older nuns describe, it was downright homey.
But it wasn’t home. Not really. A home was what Reece, Lena and Grace shared. And now Theo and Alex. And even as she tried to remind herself that God had never promised that the road she’d chosen would be free of bumps, Molly could no longer ignore the haunting thoughts of what might have been. And the even more tempting thoughts about what, if she were brave enough, could still be.
A silence settled over them as she took the lasagna from the refrigerator and put it into the microwave. While the dinner warmed, Joe opened the bottle of wine he’d retrieved from a hiding place in the doctors’ lounge.
“This is damn near close to perfection,” he said with a warm, satisfied smile. He was a remarkably good-looking man, making Molly wonder, not for the first time, how he’d managed to get all the way through medical school, an internship and a residency without some woman staking her claim on him.
T
elling herself that Joe Salvatore’s love life was absolutely none of her business, she began buttering some French bread to serve with the lasagna.
“Would you like a glass of wine?”
Molly paused. Although she’d drunk a bit of illegal beer during her rebellious teenage years and wine on special occasions, like the champagne at Alex and Theo’s wedding, she’d always worried that her father’s tragic tendency for alcoholism might run in her veins.
“Would you feel safer if I promise not to get you drunk and have my way with you?”
His teasing tone made Molly realize he’d misunderstood her ambivalence and concern. “Just a bit,” she said. “I’m really not much of a drinker.”
“Just a bit.” True to his word, he poured a scant few inches of the ruby red burgundy into her glass.
After complimenting her on the lasagna, assuring her it was every bit as delicious as his grandmother used to make, Joe didn’t say another word. Sitting across the narrow table from him, Molly realized he was deep in thought and decided he was undoubtedly running through today’s C-section in his head. During her tenure at Mercy Sam, she’d seen Reece sitting silently reviewing a patient’s treatment countless times.
A comfortable silence settled over them as they finished the simple meal. Molly cleared the table, then settled back, not complaining when he topped off her wine.
“You are, you know,” Joe said suddenly, his words shattering the stillness inside the van.
“Am what?”
“Drop-dead gorgeous.” He leaned toward her, his forearms on the table between them. “I love what you’ve done to your hair.”
She tensed slightly as he reached out and ran his palm down the rippling waves that had suddenly appeared when she’d had her straight, nearly waist-length hair cut to a more stylish shoulder length for the wedding.
“Joe—”
“It looks like obsidian, all black and shiny,” he said, ignoring her murmured warning. “But it feels like silk. And your eyes. Lord, if you only knew how many nights I’ve lain awake thinking about your eyes.”
