JEZEBEL'S BLUES

by Ruth Wind

  This was a completely different kind of crowd. There was an almost palpable aroma of anticipation of the music that was coming, a fervid excitement. And Eric, her Eric, had put it all together.

  Shortly after his return to Gideon, he had spent several days engaged in secret errands. Finally, with his plans firmly in motion, he revealed his idea.

  And for weeks he’d thrown himself into the preparations for this night, the grand opening of his blues club. Celia smiled to herself. All the suppressed energy she had sensed in him came out as he made dozens of phone calls, ordering supplies, and chairs and tables, calling musicians he knew, who knew others, who agreed it was time for a major blowout.

  “I’ve never even seen him perform,” Celia said helplessly.

  Laura laughed. “Oh, honey. You love him now.” She grabbed her arm. “Just wait.”

  The club had been given a fresh coat of whitewash and a sign outside proclaimed its name proudly. Inside, a bevy of bartenders poured beer from taps and clacked ice into glasses, and a flurry of waitresses tried to keep up with orders. A ripple of excitement rushed through Celia.

  Just as the three women took their seats, the first cluster of musicians ambled onto the stage. The young man Celia had seen at Eric’s house picked up a guitar, and the reed-thin old sax player grinned at him. A piano player Celia didn’t know sat down. The crowd started to cheer and holler and whoop, its excitement drowning out the sounds of the warm-up from the stage.

  At last Eric came forward, smiling easily as he lifted a hand. Celia felt her stomach flip over. She clutched her fists in her lap. This was the real Eric, the man she had seen lurking in the magnetic charisma that was nearly too large to be contained in even this big room.

  And everyone knew it. There were genuine screams as he bent over the microphone—piercing whistles and roaring from both men and woman. He started to talk, but was drowned out. With a wry half smile, he glanced at James.

  Lost in the audience, Celia stared at Eric. He wore his simple uniform of jeans and boots and a chambray shirt. His hair was too long, but it gave him just the right aura of rakishness to go along with his heart-stopping smile.

  When the crowd showed no signs of settling down, he bent over the mike and whistled back. “Hush, y’all, or we’ll never get to anything.”

  In a daze Celia heard him introduce the various blues greats who would be singing and playing this evening. He thanked Gideon, to more shouts and hollers, and promised the town would be a center of the blues if he had anything to do with it.

  Then he stepped back, winked at James, and they eased into the first song.

  Celia recognized the notes instantly. They were the same ones Eric had played in her attic the night they had talked of his childhood. Woven in were the bits and pieces she had heard him playing on Laura’s porch, the melancholy notes that called up visions of lonely graveyards.

  Eric played the harmonica on the intro, then bent his head and began to sing.

  It was a song about a man, restless and hungry, who traveled far away from home; about a man who sought the truth of his life, over and over, and never found it because the truth was left behind in a little town by a river that sang magical songs. It was lyrical and mythical and folksy, like all good blues.

  It was the story of Jacob Moon. As Celia met Eric’s eyes, watching him through a blur of tears, she thought it was the finest tribute her father could have had—a blues song written in his honor. It made her cry. Laura squeezed Celia’s hand. Celia looked up to see that Laura’s eyes were filled with tears, as well. “I never thought he’d play again, Celia,” Laura said, and she wetly kissed Celia’s cheek.

  When Eric finished, he smiled across the room. Celia shook her head and raised her hands to clap with the rest of the crowd, even stuck her fingers into her mouth and whistled, smiling in pride at him.

  “Before we move on, I’d like y’all to meet somebody.” He lifted his hand and gestured toward Celia. “Come on up here, sugar.”

  Celia blushed and widened her eyes at him, warningly, shaking her head infinitesimally.

  He grinned at the crowd. “She’s shy.” He jumped off the stage and cut straight through the tables to her, amid chuckles and shouts and whistles of approval.

  Celia set her jaw and vowed silently to kill her husband when she got him home. His laughing eyes told her he knew it and that he’d welcome the tussle. He grabbed her hand and tugged her to her feet. “This beautiful ray of sunshine is my wife, and you have her to thank for this night.” He looked at Celia, his eyes shining. His voice dropped to a more sober note. “Because if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here.”

  And right there, in front of hundreds of people, in front of Laura and Lynn, who were cheering along with everyone else, he kissed her.

  Celia swallowed, flushing as the crowd clapped with enthusiasm.

  “Now I’m going to get out of the way and let some other folks play.” He nodded toward James. “I have to dance with my woman.”

  James fell into a song Celia recognized as Eric pulled her from the stage to join others beginning to mill out onto the floor for a slow dance.

  He took her in his arms. “Remember this song?”

  Celia nodded. “You walked out on it the last time.”

  ’’Jezebel’s Blues,’” he said. “It was the first song I wrote.” He pulled her close. “Thank you for giving it back to me.”

  Celia smiled. “It wasn’t me that gave it back.”

  His clear, untroubled eyes met hers. For a moment they were puzzled, then he grinned in understanding. “I guess we owe old Jezebel quite a bit, don’t we?”

  “You owe her another song, I think,” Celia said.

  He pushed her head into the crook of his shoulder. “I’ll write her a whole ream of songs.”

  Celia just settled close, feeling his voice humming through his chest, hearing the celebration of the blues in the tapping feet and hazy pictures dancing all over the room.

  “I love you,” she whispered, and knew she meant the blues and Gideon and the river, but most of all her precious, beautiful drifter, whose loneliness was gone forever.

  The notes of the music drifted out the door to mingle with the song of the river, who sang peacefully between her banks, mollified. A bright sign shone over the door of the club, and its reflection shimmered in her dark waters.

  Jezebel’s.

  ~~###~~

  For the blue-eyed, gorgeous, legendary Putmans; especially Madoline O'’eal Putman, who gave me the magic of Texas in her stories. Thanks, Grandma.

  BARBARA SAMUEL O'NEAL

  Barbara Samuel (also known as Barbara O’Neal) is the bestselling author of more than 40 books, and has won Romance Writers of America’s RITA award an astounding six times, and she has been a finalist 13 times. Her books have been published around the world, including France, Germany, Italy, and Australia/New Zealand, among others. One of her recent women’s fiction titles, The Lost Recipe for Happiness (written as Barbara O’Neal) went back to print eight times, and her book How to Bake a Perfect Life was a Target Club pick in 2011.

  Whether set in the turbulent past or the even more challenging present, Barbara’s books feature strong women, families, dogs, food, and adventure—whether on the road or toward the heart.

  Now living in her hometown of Colorado Springs, Barbara lives with her partner, Christopher Robin, an endurance athlete, along with her dog and cats. She is an avid gardner, hiker, photographer and traveler who loves to take off at dawn to hike a 14er or head to a faraway land. She loves to connect with readers and is very involved with them on the Internet.

  You may read more about Barbara’s books at her main website, find her at her A Writer Afoot blog and on Facebook. She also blogs regularly at The Lipstick Chronicles.

  Visit Barbara on the Web!

  www.BarbaraSamuel.com

  www.AWriterAfoot.com

  www.BarbaraONeal.com

  ~~~

  * * *

&n
bsp; BONUS MATERIAL

  Please enjoy excerpts of some of Barbara's other Books:

  Excerpt: A Minute to Smile

  Excerpt: Breaking the Rules

  Excerpt: In The Midnight Rain

  Excerpt: Light of Day

  Excerpt: Walk in Beauty

  Excerpt: Rainsinger

  Excerpt: Summer's Freedom

  Excerpt: The Last Chance Ranch

  Additional titles, including those from other genre, are listed at the end of the excerpts or click HERE to jump there.

  Barbara is very active writing new books and converting her backlist into eBooks. To find the most up to date information, please visit her website.

  A MINUTE

  TO SMILE

  (Excerpt)

  by

  Barbara Samuel

  Prologue

  From the window seat in his tiny office, Alexander Stone could see a great portion of the university campus. The big, multi-paned window was the one redeeming feature of the stuffy room, located high in a tower, and today the view acted as a balm on his aching heart. Trees branched out in feathery green, waving their slender topmost branches into a vivid Colorado sky. Beyond the sprawling campus, dusty blue foothills surrounded the city of Boulder like brawny sentinels.

  Alexander’s gaze was focused below, upon the whirling reds and russets and wines of a festival sponsored by the history club each year. The sound of medieval flutes and harps floated through his open window, mingled with the laughter and catcalls of the students below.

  He watched the quadrangle for a long time. As usual, everyone had thrown themselves into the preparations for the fair—a great many of them his students. He had been among them until an hour ago, when the sense of his own isolation had driven him upstairs to this quiet room. Once, he had enjoyed the bustle and noise, but that had been back in the days when he’d had someone to share it with. Now the fair seemed like just another obligation to fulfill.

  Obligations. He eyed the stack of final exams on his desk, but the thought of wading through them held absolutely no appeal.

  Picking up a pair of binoculars he kept in the office to examine the birds that often sang outside the window, he scanned the high branches and was rewarded with the sight of a shiny black crow alighting briefly on a branch before it swooped down toward a knot of discarded food on the sidewalk. Alexander watched the bird descend almost dizzily, snag the food and sail away.

  Through the binoculars, he caught sight of a group of his students who were singing a rousing—and no doubt bawdy—song in front of a hedge. He smiled to himself. Farther on was a fellow professor, sprawled against a tree, eating chicken. A pair of dark-haired children chased one another in the grass. Handsome lads, he thought distractedly, moving his binoculars a little farther.

  He paused as a woman came into view, no doubt the mother of the two little boys. The vivid yellow of her blouse caught his eye, a yellow impossibly at odds with the cloud of pale red hair skimming her bared shoulders. Those colors should never have worked together, he thought.

  But they did. He admired the bold combination for a moment, and found his eyes sweeping the flawless, milk white of the woman’s skin. Generous breasts and hips balanced the roundness of her arms. As he watched, she laughed robustly, then reached out to snag one of the children, affectionately tumbling him into her lap to nibble his neck and tickle his ribs. There was a vividness about the woman, about the vibrant love spilling out from her that stirred Alexander deeply.

  As the small boy giggled helplessly against his mother, Alexander felt a wistfulness move through him, a pinch of hunger he’d not felt in a long time. He watched the woman kiss her child almost reverently, then hold out an arm to the other boy, who sank next to her, his face flushed.

  All three of them simply sat there for a moment, spent with the festival, dappled by the speckled shade that fell through the branches of an oak tree. Alexander felt the restless stirring within him grow and ache for an instant before he could push it away. He threw down his glasses and turned away from the window, shedding the mantle he’d worn for the festival in favor of his street clothes. There was no restlessness, no pain that a good round of combat in the dojo couldn’t cure.

  One

  Esther Lucas was running late. As usual. This afternoon, it was for a typical reason. She’d been unable to find the boys’ gis, which turned out to be exactly where she’d put them—folded in a neat stack on the dryer. It was the towels folded on top of them that had thrown her off.

  Now she checked her watch and hurried the boys along. “Come on, guys. This isn’t a city hike. We have to get to the dojo.”

  “Sensei said it’s important to be on time,” Jeremy, her youngest reminded her.

  “I know.” Sensei said had preceded a solid third of his sentences in the past few weeks. Most of them were the kinds of things a mother loved to hear her children mouth, but they all mainly revolved around a sense of orderliness and balance that Esther had never mastered.

  “We’re almost there,” she said. “See?” She pointed to a small, unassuming building sandwiched between a photographer’s studio and a quilting shop. A sign in the window announced the form taught, Shotokan Karate, and the instructor’s name, Ryohe Kobayashi, in Roman letters. The lovely calligraphy of Japan followed, presumably announcing the same information.

  The boys slowed as they reached the door and entered the dojo with a dignity and hush that always surprised her. Esther tagged behind, scowling at the bank of heavy clouds that hung over the mountains. Ordinarily the precious hour the children spent at their lessons was the only time she had to herself in a day. She used it to stroll along the streets nearby, sometimes stopping for a cup of tea or a sweet while she waited.

  Today, the impending rain made that impossible.

  Just inside the doors of the studio was a bank of chairs and Esther settled in one, desultorily taking out a book to read while she waited, thinking with longing of the piece of pie she’d intended to treat herself to before the clouds had ruined her plan.

  A pretty Asian girl sat behind a low counter to Esther’s right, tallying numbers on an adding machine. She smiled at Esther’s sigh.

  Off to the left through an archway, was the main room. Long and wide, it consumed the rest of the space in the dojo except for a few smaller rooms toward the back.

  Her wandering gaze caught on the figure of a man at her end of the dojo going through elaborate, stylized exercises. It was tai chi, Esther realized after a moment; the same form her friend Abe practiced.

  But Abe had never looked like this.

  The man wore only a loose pair of trousers, leaving his chest and feet bare. Tall and lean, with thick, unruly dark hair and a beard, his movements sent the long muscles in his arms and back rippling with the sleek grace of a jungle cat. His skin was tawny, his nose blunt and broad, and his hair curled over his well-shaped head like a mane.

  A mane, Esther thought. Yes. He was no ordinary jungle cat. A quickening shivered through her middle. He looked like a lion—king of all the lesser beasts, master of jaguars and tigers and foolish monkeys. It was in the arrogant tilt of his proud head, in the intelligence of his wide brow.

  The quickening rippled outward from her belly, into her limbs. Who was he? She knew she had never seen him here before.

  As he shifted once more, the light from a window high on the wall spilled over him, showing tiny strands of silver in the glossy mahogany hair. He wore a neatly trimmed beard, and it had been heavily painted with the same silver. Esther inclined her head with a small frown, sure he’d not yet seen forty. She wondered if genetics or tragedy had given him that early frost.

  Absently she thought she should quit staring. But somehow it seemed as silly to turn her eyes away from the natural splendor of his male form as it would be to turn away from the brawny shoulders of the mountains. She let herself admire him until his set was complete. He paused, shaking his hands loosely. The heavy canvas trousers rode his hipbones,
showing a lean, tanned stomach with a line of dark hair running over the muscles as if for emphasis. Another quiver ran over her nerves.

  Then he met her gaze and for an instant, she was riveted. It was an unflinchingly masculine face, rendered in clean, bold strokes. But she was snared less by the face itself than by something strangely compelling in his unsmiling expression. There was incandescence in his eyes, and a definite sense of recognition.

  As she watched, a strange flash of bleakness bled everything else from his eyes, giving Esther a fleeting glimpse of a hopelessness so vast she could barely fathom it.

  Abruptly he bent down to pick up a short canvas robe. As he walked toward the back of the room, carefully skirting the mat where the children were practicing, he shrugged into the robe. He didn’t look back.

  Esther touched her breastbone, feeling her heart threading below. A blast of rain struck the window behind her and she started, whirling to look at the gray sheeting into the glass. The bleakness in the man’s eyes had looked just that color, she thought, and decided that tragedy had silvered his beard.

  * * *

  Several days later, Esther washed shelves in the organic and natural foods shop she ran from the front of her old home. The alternative radio station was playing a Jelly Roll Morton tune and the fragrance of a freshly brewed pot of her special herb tea wafted through the sunny, plant-filled room. Expertly she analyzed the scent as she dusted antique tins that held plastic bags of the same mixture of rose hips, hibiscus, chamomile and various other beneficial herbs.

  “Too much hibiscus this time,” she told the Victorian face on the ornate box.

  The bell over the door rang and Abe Smith limped in. “Caught you talking to your tins again,” he teased with a shake of his head.

  Esther grinned ruefully. “You always do.” She watched him carefully, a tall man with thick dark hair he wore too long and the remains of an ache-ravaged childhood on his face. He moved stiffly, each step carefully measured. “Bad day?” she asked gently.