Turn My World Upside Down: Jo's Story

by Maureen Child

  “What’s in this?” she asked.

  Nana smiled. “Issa secret recipe. I tell you another time.”

  “Cool.” Sam cradled the mug between her palms and took another sip.

  “Now you, Michaela.”

  “Seriously, Nana,” Mike said, tugging at her shirt to hold it down even as Nana pulled up on it. “I’m glad the tea worked for Sam, but I’m good. Really.”

  “Michaela, I come to take care of you and your bambinos.”

  “I know.” She sighed out a breath and gave up the fight as Nana’s gnarled fingers won the tugging war on her shirt. Incredible, really, just how much strength remained in her hands. “But I don’t want to smell like a Caesar salad.”

  Sam snorted and Mike glared at her.

  “Issa good, you see.” The older woman leaned over Mike, lifted the hem of her shirt and exposed her full belly. “Olive oil issa good for the skin,” she said, pouring a big puddle of extra virgin oil into the hollow of her hand. “And the babies will like the rubbing.”

  Mike stared at the beamed ceiling as her grandmother massaged her huge stomach and the slow slide of gentle hands began to work some of the tension from her body. She sighed and let herself enjoy the moment, not really thinking about how she was going to get olive oil out of her clothes or, God help her, the fabric of the couch.

  “Ah,” Nana said, her voice as comforting as her touch, “this issa a good time for us. Your papa, the bastardo, is gone—”

  “Nana,” Mike warned.

  She waved one bony hand. “Issa fine. I no talk about the bastardo. This is not about him. This is about the boy. Jack. He is a good boy. Smart. Handsome. And you girls.” She smiled and her wrinkled face shifted, falling into comfortable, familiar lines. “All of you. You and Samantha with the babies, Josefina with her young man—”

  “What?” A single word shot from both Mike’s and Sam’s mouths and together they stared at their still smiling grandmother in stunned shock.

  For one brief moment, there was perfect understanding between Jo and Cash. It hung in the air, and sizzled in the undercurrent of electricity humming all around them.

  Jo felt it. Wasn’t sure what to do about it, but she felt it.

  “Did you see the chair back there?” Jack called out, shattering the moment and giving Jo time to reel in the emotions stuttering to life inside her.

  She wanted to kiss the kid for it.

  “Which chair?” she asked, tearing her gaze from Cash’s.

  “That one.” He pointed. “There’s a dragon carved into the top of it.”

  Even as Jo moved in for a closer look, Jack took off, exploring, leaving the two of them alone. “Hey,” she shouted, “don’t run around in here, it’s—”

  “It’s okay.” Cash spoke up quickly. “He’s been by here a few times after school. He knows his way around. He can’t hurt anything.”

  “So the baseball visit wasn’t the only time he’s come here then.”

  Cash grinned. “He’s come back a few times to practice. He’s getting pretty good.”

  Irritation fluttered inside her, but she fought it down. Wasn’t Cash’s fault she hadn’t had time—or, to be honest, hadn’t made the time—to play catch with Jack. She was just so damn busy all the time. It was as if the Marconi house of cards were tumbling down around her and she was the only one left who could support the last pillars standing.

  Papa was gone, Mike was down for the count, and Sam spent most of her free time hurling. Which left Jo to pick up all the slack.

  Pity party, aisle three.

  She blew out a breath, promised herself to spend more time with her brother, and then turned her gaze on the chair the boy had wanted her to see. “Oh my . . .”

  Cash folded his arms across his chest and said only, “It started out a simple Mission style. But the burl of the wood looked—”

  “Like a dragon,” Jo finished for him as she walked closer to the chair and ran her fingertips over the detail work. Smooth. Every inch of it was smooth as glass and intricately carved. The tiny dragon with its tail furled looked as though it could leap out of the wood and spring into life with a roar and a blast of fire. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looked up at him. “I think we’re having a moment.”

  He grinned. “First time we’ve talked without you threatening to hit me.”

  Jo felt the smile on her lips and couldn’t seem to stop it. “First time you haven’t pushed me into wanting to.”

  That indefinable something was back, stretching between them like a slender, tenuous thread. The slightest movement could break it.

  Something crashed in the back of the room and Jack yelled, “Sorry,” his voice drifting just under the clash of classic rock still pumping from the radio.

  She practically heard that thread snap.

  “I’d better go see if I can afford whatever he just broke,” Jo mused.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cash said, reaching out to lay one hand on her arm. “Jo, I—”

  The music died and in its place came a commercial with a too enthusiastic announcer urging them to vote for Steve Smith for State Senate. A moment later, the voice of the man himself could be heard, promising to fight for all the people of California.

  A yawning chasm opened up inside her and Jo felt all the blood in her head drain down into it. Her stomach did one wild, lurching spin and tiny black dots danced festively at the corners of her vision.

  “Hey. Are you okay?” Cash’s hand on her arm tightened.

  “Fine.” She swallowed hard and repeated the single word, for her own sake if not his. Valiantly, she tried to block the sound of Steve Smith’s voice, but it seemed to storm her defenses and sink right into her bloodstream like some toxic oil leak. “Fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look sick.” He lifted one hand and cupped her chin, turning her face up to his. “You have that reaction to all commercials or just to political crap?”

  His touch was too comforting. His voice too filled with concern—especially when she was feeling a little rocky.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, stepping back and away from him, drawing air into her too tight chest, forcing the frantic gallop of her heart to ease into a trot. “That guy—Steve Smith? He’s just . . . icky.”

  “Not going to be voting for him, I guess,” he said.

  “That’s a safe bet,” she murmured, and walked toward the back of the building and the little brother she sorely needed for a distraction—to get Cash off this subject, fast.

  “So what about him bugs you?”

  She felt the crawl of cold memories inching down her spine and did what she could to cover the shiver. This was not something she was going to get into.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Do I look busy?”

  She stopped, looked up at him, and tried not to notice the flash of curiosity mingled with compassion in his eyes. “No, but I am.”

  “Jo, there’s something there.”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, closing the door firmly on whatever friendly moments they’d had. “Besides, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Never know if you don’t try.”

  She felt crowded. Silly. Standing in the middle of the huge workshop, she felt as though the walls were sneaking up on her. “Fine. You say you’d understand. Have you ever been in love?”

  “Yes.”

  Another little ripple of shock rocked through her and Jo could have kicked her own ass for saying anything. She’d thought, being the Woman Whisperer that he was, he’d say no and she’d be able to tell him he’d never understand what he hadn’t experienced. Love. Betrayal. Pain.

  Now, she was stuck. No way out.

  “Me, too,” she said simply, and started walking again, distancing herself from not only Cash, but the conversation.

  Naturally, his long legs made up the distance between the
m in a heartbeat.

  “With Steve Smith?” he asked, his voice tight and low.

  Jo stopped dead, half turned her head to look back at him over her shoulder. She met his gaze briefly, but long enough to fry him with a look that would have warned off an armed warrior. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She’d managed to avoid talking about it for nearly ten years.

  No reason to change things now.

  Eight

  A few hours later, Cash wandered through his empty house and tried to find the satisfaction he kept expecting to feel. He’d built the house of his dreams, lived in the town that had seemed almost magical to him as a child, and yet . . . “Nothing.”

  He stalked across the gleaming, light oak floor, his boot heels clacking loudly in the silence that seemed, now that Jo and her brother had gone home, too loud. His gaze drifted around the room as he crossed to the wall of windows overlooking the tiny lake on the outskirts of Chandler.

  The walls, like the floor, were pale oak, and looked almost golden in the soft, late afternoon light spearing through the glass. The walls were crowded with art, an eclectic mix of modern and traditional that suited his personality—a man haunted by his past and determined to never think about the future.

  Maybe if things had been different, he thought, then shut that line of thinking down. Regrets were useless. He’d made his choices and now he would live with them.

  Talking to Jo had stirred things up in his mind again. The stunned surprise in her eyes when he’d admitted to once being in love. The shaken hurt in her eyes when he’d said the name Steve Smith.

  What was that about?

  What was tearing at her?

  And why the hell was he letting himself care?

  Even a stupid man would have learned better by now and Cash was no idiot. He knew what everyone in Chandler called him—the Woman Whisperer. He supposed most men would be pleased to have such a “gift” with women. But Cash knew it wasn’t so much a gift as a curse.

  It had started in college.

  Cash liked women. All women. Tall and short, fat and thin. They were all beautiful to him. He liked the way they laughed, the way they thought, and the way they smelled. And women loved him back.

  Which, taken by itself, was a good thing. But he’d noticed that the women he took to his bed never stayed. They spent the night with him, and in the morning, they invariably left his bed and went off to save the world or some damn thing.

  The first couple of times it happened to him, Cash just figured it was a coincidence. And when he fell in love, he never for a moment believed that she too would go.

  But she had.

  He slapped one hand against an oak beam and peered out through the glass at the streaked colors of the sunset reflected on the surface of the lake. In that cool blue mirror, clouds sailed and colors blended and the water rippled lazily in a soft wind.

  But he hardly noticed. His mind was lost in memory. Again, he saw the woman he loved toss his ring back at him and walk out of his life, taking her child—the child that had become almost as important to him as she herself had been—with her.

  Now history, it seemed, was repeating itself. Not only was he thinking way too often about Jo—but her little brother was etching out a place of his own in Cash’s heart. Another danger. Another chance for pain.

  He shook his head, tapped his fingers against the cold glass, and lost today in the memories of the past he usually ignored.

  Cash’d discovered much later that his own father had had this “gift” with women. Cash’s mother had once been a rising young executive at a prestigious ad agency in New York City. Then she’d married Cash’s father and changed. She’d lasted a few months with him before resigning from the real world and going off with a group of friends. They traveled the country, working when they had to, exploring all the little roads people so seldom saw.

  A hundred years ago, they would have been called gypsies. In the sixties, they would have been hippies. Now, he supposed, they were just . . . odd.

  Cash traveled with them until he was thirteen and old enough to tell his mother he wasn’t interested in being a wanderer for the rest of his life. That he wanted a home. School.

  She’d said she couldn’t give that to him, but she did take him to his father. But the old man didn’t want him, either, though he was willing to pay for boarding school.

  Every September, his mother Kate dropped Cash off for the school year and every year he begged her to stay. She never did, though, and Cash was alone again. By the time he won a scholarship to college, he’d stopped asking her to stay.

  Then, when the woman he’d loved left him, he’d vowed to never ask anyone to stay again. Because he was tired of being the one left behind.

  He’d made a choice years ago. He’d decided back when his heart was still aching that he would only sleep with women he didn’t love. Or better yet, women who were unhappy with their own lives.

  That way no one got hurt.

  No one expected more than they got.

  “And nothing’s changed,” he muttered, and the sound of his own whispered voice sounded like a shout in the stillness.

  But even though he’d like to tell himself otherwise, Jo Marconi didn’t fit his “rules.” She didn’t slide easily into any little compartment in his mind. She was . . . different.

  Damn it.

  He enjoyed her. Liked being around her. Dreamed about the feel of her skin against his, the taste of her mouth, the sigh of her breath. And he didn’t want to care. Didn’t want to want her.

  Sleeping with her was the answer, of course. Then she’d be out of his life. She’d move on and he could go back to doing what he did best.

  Alone.

  “But the hell of it is,” he said, shifting his gaze to the deepening blue of the sky, “I don’t want to lose her yet, either.”

  And that bugged the hell out of him.

  When the doorbell rang, he jumped, startled at the intrusion. He was far enough out of town that you had to make a real effort to “drop by.” And since he knew damn well that Jo was probably still steaming over the way they’d left things that afternoon, it wouldn’t be her ringing his bell.

  He left the great room and moved down the long hall to the double doors, his boot heels beating a loud rhythm against the wood floor. Grabbing hold of the antique brass knob, he gave it a turn and yanked the door open.

  And his day finished its trip to hell in an instant.

  The sun was down by the time they got home, but Jo thought it was worth it. Once they left Cash’s place, she’d decided that it was time for a little Marconi bonding. Hell, Jack deserved better from his oldest sister than having his homework checked. Besides, she’d needed the extra time to cool down after having her past jump up and slug her in the stomach.

  “This is great,” the boy said from the passenger seat. He spooned up another mouthful of hot fudge sundae and Jo felt as if she’d won a medal. Stopping on the way home for ice cream had made her a hero.

  Wasn’t as hard as she’d thought, she realized. Only a year ago, she’d wondered if she’d ever find a way to be close to the child who was her brother. Not that she blamed Jack or anything, but he surely was a four-foot-tall reminder of how far her father had slipped off his pedestal.

  But then, she thought, Papa’d never asked to be up there where only the perfect could be comfortable. It was she and her sisters who’d taken care of that.

  Then when he’d proven himself to be just a human being, Jo’d turned on him like a snake. Not a nice thing to admit about yourself, but there it was. Papa’s secret came out and shattered them. If her own ever came out, it would grind what was left of them into dust.

  “You okay?” Jack asked, eyes narrowing as he watched her.

  “Yeah,” she said, and reached out to push his hair back from his brow. “I’m fine. But you won’t be if Nana sees you eating that before dinner.”

  “I’m almost done.” To prove it, he grinned aga
in and plowed a heaping spoonful of ice cream and whipped cream into his mouth.

  “Right,” she laughed and opened the truck door. “Stay out here until you’re finished, okay? I’ll tell Nana you’re—” She came up blank. “I’ll think of something.”

  “ ’Kay.”

  Grabbing up her ever-present binder filled with job files, she hopped down and started up the walk toward the front door. The porch light shone in the twilight like a modern-day candle in the window.

  Shadows slipped from every corner of the house, stretching out dark fingers to claim the night. The flower beds needed weeding, the trim needed painting, and the porch rail looked a little wobbly.

  But to Jo, it was perfect. Home. The place where she’d grown up. The place she’d run to ten years ago, when her brand-new world had crashed and burned around her.

  The old Victorian meant safety.

  Comfort.

  She took the porch steps in two long strides, opened the front door and stopped.

  Sam was stretched out on the floor, hands over her stomach, eyes closed, mouth grimly flattened into a tight, thin line.

  From the kitchen came the nearly orgasmic scent of red-wine beef stew. Garlic flavored the air with enough strength to knock a less hardy soul to her knees, but she couldn’t enjoy that just yet.

  “Are you dead?” she asked, and kicked Sam’s booted foot.

  “If God is a good God, I will be soon,” Sam muttered, without prying her lips apart.

  Drama. One thing the Marconis all shined at. “What’re you doing on the floor?”

  Her sister pried one eye open and looked up at her. “Got dizzy. It was either lie down or fall down. This seemed easiest.”

  Jack clattered up the steps behind Jo and stuck his head around her. “What’re you doing, Sam?”

  “Resting.”

  “On the floor?” He sneaked past Jo into the hall.

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Josefina, you are home,” Nana called from the kitchen. “Step over your sister and comea taste the stew.”