For the Love of Jazz

by Shiloh Walker

  He flung out his right arm so forcefully, he almost threw off balance.

  “She don’t want to marry me. She wants to marry my money.” Alex made a rude sound with his tongue, something that sounded more like what Anne-Marie would have done. “I ought to send a big box of it and a ring from a gum machine. Marry this, bitch.”

  Jazz thought it wasn’t a half-bad idea. Although Alex wouldn’t do it once he was sober. He was too nice. “Make sure it’s just one-dollar bills. She doesn’t deserve anything else.”

  Alex snickered.

  “Her mama said she’d tell the whole town I’d raped Maribeth,” Alex said abruptly.

  It was a good thing Jazz had managed to get Alex back to the hood of the car, because he just about dropped him in shock. Easing his friend back to the surface of the hood, he backed up a few steps. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. Said she’d tell the town I’d raped her precious baby…like hell.” Alex snorted and dropped his head to stare at the sky. “Crazy shit. It’s all crazy.”

  “Yeah.” Fighting down anger at what the Parks had been threatening, Jazz rested a hand on Alex’s shoulder.

  Alex wasn’t much in the mood for comforting. He shrugged Jazz’s hand away and got back up, stalking down to the river to stare into the murky, slow-flowing waters. After a long time, he looked back at Jazz, eyes dark and turbulent. “Why did she do it, Jazz?”

  “That girl only knows one thing, buddy. Just like her mother, she looks out for herself and herself only.”

  “It was my baby, too.” Tipping his head back, Alex sighed. He closed his eyes. “I would have helped her out. We were going to get her an apartment, pay for her to go to beauty school like she said she wanted. I was going to take care of her, not just the baby. Then she does this.” He swayed on his feet before managing to steady himself. “It was my baby, too.”

  “I know, buddy. I know.”

  ~*~

  Hours later, they sat on the hood of the car. The beer was long gone. Jazz had opened a couple of cans, more to keep Alex from drinking them than anything else. He hadn’t had more than a sip from each one, then he’d poured it out.

  He hated the taste of beer, hated the smell of it.

  It reminded him of Beau and his big, meaty fists, how they’d fly through the air and strike his mother, in her face, in her belly.

  Alex had gone quiet, locking that anger and hurt inside.

  It bothered Jazz.

  After a time, Alex drifted off, falling asleep.

  Alex was right, Jazz thought. They wouldn’t see stars like this once they left this small, nowhere little town.

  The music of the night sang in his ears, crickets, birds, occasional squeaks and squeals as the night predators caught their prey.

  That caught Jazz’s attention. “No way, buddy. You ain’t gonna go hitting a woman.”

  ~*~

  He came awake when the engine roared to life beneath his sleeping body. Dazed, staring up the star-studded night sky, it took Jazz a minute to figure out where in the hell he was. Groaning, he slid off the car. Empty beer cans rattled under his feet and when flying as he started forward.

  The moon’s watery light was enough to let Jazz make out Alex’s face.

  Jazz didn’t like what he saw.

  Alex wore a grim, dark look and his mouth was set in a tight line.

  “What are you up to, man?” he asked warily.

  “Goin’ back into town,” Alex said.

  “You’ve spent the past few hours drinking and you wanna drive into town?” Jazz demanded. “Gimme the damn keys. I’ll drive you.”

  “My fuckin’ car.” Alex reached for the gearshift again, jamming it from reverse into first. With a curse, Jazz dove across the hood and jumped in, glad he’d left the top of the convertible down. His feet barely left the ground before the tires sent dust flying.

  ~*~

  It was Lawrence Muldoon, a county deputy and brother to the man who had married Jazz’s mama, that was first on the scene. The vintage Mustang had been turned into a pile of twisted metal and smoke.

  Both occupants had been turned into bloody, battered messes and he was in the process of reaching for his radio to call the accident in when he caught sight of a dark, slumped head.

  Hatred burning inside him, he peered at the young man closer.

  Then, as he recognized Jazz, Larry let go of his radio and assessed the situation. The county golden boy, Alexander Kincaid, was breathing his last. Larry had seen a few men die—it hadn’t even bothered him—so he knew what he was watched as Alex died right in front of him.

  Then he turned his eyes to the dark-haired, dark-eyed bastard who was responsible for helping to put his brother in the ground. Didn’t matter not one bit that he was just a kid, and it didn’t matter that the bastard’s mama had pulled the trigger.

  Jazz was alive—Beau wasn’t.

  It was simple enough in Larry’s mind.

  The hate had been eating him alive for a good long while.

  Now fate had presented him with a fine opportunity.

  One boy dead, the other unconscious, when the deputy finished his handiwork and made the call, there was nobody to dispute him.

  ~*~

  Three days later, Jazz woke in a hospital, gazing at the white ceiling overhead. They had told him the previous night that Alex was dead. He was handcuffed to the bed and the county sheriff had already been in to talk to him.

  Jazz was to blame, they said. He’d been driving.

  He’d killed his best friend.

  “Jazz?”

  Closing his eyes, he turned his face away from the door. He knew that voice. And it was the last voice he wanted to hear. Full of tears and grief, just like her eyes would be.

  “Jazz?” Anne-Marie asked again, her voice a little louder this time.

  Turning his head, he stared at Anne-Marie. Her father, his eyes full of grief and rage, stood at his daughter’s side, his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, Annie,” he whispered, staring past her and her father, unable to look at them.

  “Is it true?” she asked tearfully. “Were you driving?”

  “I dunno, Annie.”

  “They say it’s your fault he’s gone,” she told him. She closed her eyes tightly, pressed her lips together and tried not to cry. “Is it your fault?”

  That, he did know. “Yeah. I guess it was,” he responded, turning his head away. Why else would he feel so guilty? “Dr. Kincaid, I know it doesn’t mean anything, but I’m…” His voice trailed away and tears blinded him.

  “I know, son,” Desmond Kincaid said quietly, sighing. He shoved a hand through his salt and pepper hair, staring down at the battered body of his son’s best friend. How many times had he heard, Alex will come to no good, hanging around that McNeil boy. Muldoon done went and ruined him.

  How many times?

  If he had listened, would Alex be alive today?

  Taking Annie’s hand, he led her out of the room, away from the boy who lay silently crying on the hospital bed.

  Chapter Two

  Now

  The day was overcast, which only seemed fitting. Crouched by the gravesite, Jazz studied the pale gray headstone with troubled eyes.

  “Why did you have to go and die, Sheri?” he whispered. Even though nearly two years had passed, he still couldn’t quite believe she wasn’t going to be lying in bed next to him in the morning. They had been married less than two years when Sheri was diagnosed with a brain tumor, an inoperable one.

  She was dead less than six months later, and all the treatments in the world couldn’t have saved her.

  Jazz had decided that loving him was a death sentence. Anybody and everybody he loved died. It made it hell to look at his daughter, that precious little miracle he’d made with Sheri.

  Bawdy and bright, with a loud, infectious laugh, she’d somehow managed to cut through his walls and made him love her. Now she lay under six feet of cold, dark earth, that gamin grin gone from every
where but his memories.

  Not even Mariah remembered her. She’d been almost three when her mother died and now, two years later, she hardly remembered the woman who’d given birth to her, although Jazz kept a picture of Sheri by Mariah’s bed.

  He could see something of Sheri in Mariah’s grin—hear the echo when his little girl laughed, and that hurt almost as much as it helped. He hadn’t planned on loving Sheri. They’d gotten married because of the baby. Both of them wanted a child, they liked each other well enough and had planned on that being enough.

  It would have been, too. If Sheri hadn’t died. Jazz had fallen in love with her, slowly, day by day. The woman made him laugh like he hadn’t laughed in years and for a while, he stopped taking life so seriously.

  Life hadn’t liked that much, so life took something from him to remind him who was in charge.

  “I miss you.”

  They’d been married just under six years and the only reason they’d married was because of Mariah, but Sheri Robertson McNeil had been the focus of his life. The loneliness that ate at him had disappeared when he had met Sheri at a party, only to return in full force now that she was gone again.

  As the clouds overhead opened, a heavy downpour falling, Jazz opened his eyes and stared at the headstone for a long moment before looking up at the sky. “Doesn’t that just figure?”

  Blowing out a harsh breath, he rose and stared down at the gravesite one last time. In the morning, he’d bring Mariah by one more time to say good-bye to her mama, and then they were heading south.

  After sixteen years away, Jazz was finally going home.

  A voice from the past whispered in his ear, You’re cursed, boy. Everything you touch is destroyed, and everybody you love dies.

  Cursed.

  Yeah, he could believe that.

  Chapter Three

  With one hand pressed to the small of her back, Anne-Marie stretched work-stiffened muscles. Chasing after toddlers and preschoolers all day was hard work, she didn’t care what anybody said. Ear infections, pink eye, runny noses, head lice and all, she wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  She couldn’t even comprehend why a person would want to be an adult doctor. What was the fun in that? Her father, God love him, couldn’t understand why she had chosen pediatrics. She linked her hands together and stretched them high overhead, before sighing with relief. Her nurse and best friend laughed as Anne-Marie bent down to touch her toes.

  “You look like you just finished an aerobics class,” Jackie Smith said, taking her stethoscope off and tossing it on her workstation.

  “I feel like I just finished an aerobics class,” she replied. “Let’s call it a night—oh, hell. Did Shelly forget to lock the door again?”

  Behind the frosted glass window, a tall, dark shadow stood at the sign-in desk. “Can we kill her yet?” Jackie asked, a hopeful light in her eyes. “Please?”

  “Be nice,” Anne-Marie replied. She picked her lab coat up and slid her arms back into it. Pasting a pleasant, and completely false, smile on her face, she walked up to the window and slid it open. The words Can I help you? died on her tongue as she got an eyeful of the most delicious man she had ever laid eyes on.

  Tall, broad-shouldered with hair as black as sin, eyes the color of dark, melted chocolate, and a mouth that would have made a nun blush. High cheekbones and a hard, chiseled chin with a dent right in the center.

  If his face looked like that, what kind of body did he have? If it was half as good, her heart would give out before she reached his abdomen. If it was a match, she just might start stripping out of her clothes right there.

  Torn out of her trance by Jackie’s elbow in her side, she focused her eyes back on his face, on that sculpted mouth. But for the life of her, she couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Her heart had suddenly started doing this odd little jumping-around-in-her-chest dance and her knees were getting weak.

  A soft little voice piped, “I got a owie.”

  Anne-Marie shook her head slightly, frowning, feeling as though she had just come out of a trance, pulled out by the sound of the tiny voice.

  The demigod bent, lifted a child that looked more like a cherub than anything. “She busted her head open,” he said, holding a blood-soaked pad on the child’s forehead. “Tripped over a box and hit the corner of the coffee table. I was taking her to the hospital when I saw your sign, the lights. It hasn’t stopped bleeding.”

  The sight of blood and the distress in his eyes cleared the lust-induced fog long enough for her training to kick in. “You’ve not been here before?” she asked, motioning for Jackie to put them in a room. If he had, then he must have seen Jake because Anne-Marie would have remembered this guy.

  Those dark eyes were familiar, the square jaw, the sculpted mouth. Where had she seen him before? Other than in her wildest fantasies, that is. The way her heart was racing and dancing around and leaping with joy–she had seen some seriously good-looking guys before but not a one of them had caused this kind of reaction. Of course, up until a few months ago, Anne-Marie had been too busy with medical school, her internship and everything else required to get licensed to practice medicine. So maybe all the guys had just slipped under her radar and she was too busy to notice.

  Then again…maybe not. Something about the way this particular guy made that radar scream had Anne-Marie thinking this was a one-time occurrence—or at least a one-man occurrence.

  “No. We just moved here and hadn’t gotten settled yet,” he said irritably. “Can you take a look at her or not? I can pay up front, if that’s the problem.”

  Well, shit. He looked that good, Anne-Marie should have figured there was going to be some kind of problem. Gorgeous or not, it seemed he had a chip on his oh-so-delectable shoulders. Have mercy, don’t all the good ones have some kinda problem, she thought disgustedly as his insinuation that she was only in medicine for the money came through loud and clear. She’d only been in practice a few months now, partnering up with Jake midwinter but the innuendo wasn’t an uncommon one, not even in town where she knew half the population.

  “I’m not concerned about the money just yet.” She kept her voice pleasant, even though that tone of his had already put her back up. “Come on inside and I’ll take a look.”

  As head wounds went, it wasn’t bad, shallow and skinny, right near the hairline. “We need to clean this up a little, Jackie. Can you soak it for a minute or so? I need to take a closer look at it.”

  While Jackie tended to that, Anne-Marie hunted up the paperwork she needed. Which took considerably longer than it should have. Anne-Marie was certain that Shelly LaCrosse had some good points, some excellent qualities, but secretarial skills were not among them. Which was odd, because talking on the phone was one of her finer abilities.

  She made appointments and forgot to enter them into the computer. She scheduled five-year-old checkups before the patient’s fourth birthday. She expected the doctors to give answers to patient questions when she couldn’t even remember to write down the question. She scheduled prenatal interviews for a mother who had already delivered. She showed up on Sundays, but forgot to come to work on Mondays. And she had put the paperwork for new patients in a file that generally only held information on deceased and/or released patients.

  No, Shelly was not medical receptionist material.

  But she was Anne-Marie’s second cousin, and Anne-Marie was too nice to fire her simply for being stupid. At least, she had been. With a soft growl, Anne-Marie rose, staring at a phone note from a potential partner that Anne-Marie and Jake Hart had been waiting on. It was dated from three days before. It, too, had been filed away with charts belonging to former patients.

  “Three more days, three more days,” she chanted. “Then Jake and Marti are back, and chaos will end. Three more days. Three more days.” Three more days and she could fire her empty-headed cousin.

  “Three more days to what?” Jackie asked, stripping off the gloves as she slid the door shut behind
her.

  “Until Jake and Marti are back. And I’ll never let them take a vacation together again.”

  “They’re married, hon. That won’t work,” Jackie said, grinning.

  “So we’ll have them get divorced and all our problems will be solved.” She waggled the forgotten phone message in front of Jackie’s nose. “Wednesday! He called Wednesday.”

  Glancing at the note, Jackie turned her eyes on Anne-Marie and smiled beatifically. “I told you we’d be better off hiring a real temp.”

  Giving Jackie a quelling look, she muttered, “I don’t need to hear the I told you so’s.” Anne-Marie grabbed a clipboard from the wall just as the exam room door slid open, revealing the late-night patient and her surly father.

  “Are you going to come in here any time soon, Dr. Hart?”

  Too irritated to correct him, she thrust the patient forms at him. “We need these filled out, sir,” she said as she pulled on a pair of gloves. Anne-Marie was proud to discover her insides didn’t quiver as she walked past him.

  At least, not much.

  “Can’t it wait?” he demanded, tossing the paperwork an incredulous glance.

  “Unless it’s life or death, I’m not allowed to treat your daughter without consent and some basic history. This isn’t life or death and even then, I would at least need a verbal consent to treat. Medical history is always nice—medication allergies, history of seizures. Also, I need to know if she lost consciousness.” Already aggravated by the addition to the long day, Anne-Marie was in no mood to put up with a surly, temperamental jerk.

  No matter how good looking he was. Mouth wateringly, heart-stoppingly good looking. Nope, never mind that.

  She’d been up since four a.m. when the hospital called about a newborn with breathing difficulties. Added to that was the irate family she had dealt with earlier. Imagine, they weren’t pleased to be released from the practice simply for an unpaid debt of $862.91. And, of course, having to deal with Shelly’s ineptness all day hadn’t helped.