A Minute to Smile (4 page)

A blaze of brightness flared in Daniel’s eyes for an instant, and then his lids swept down and he licked his cone. “If you want.”

Jeremy grabbed Esther’s hand, nearly tugging it out of the socket in his exuberance. “I want to!” he cried.

“Take it easy, honey.” She gave Alexander a smile, raising her eyebrows.

“Never, ever still or quiet,” Alexander said and amusement lightened the planes of his face. Esther found herself noticing his mouth for the first time. It was mobile and sensual, his lips firm and full. She didn’t know how she’d missed that before. Ice cream dripped on her thumb, and glad of the distraction, she licked it away.

Their walk had carried them into a residential neighborhood of older clapboard homes. The sidewalks were made up of tiny cement squares. Old-fashioned lilac bushes, feathery white spirea and enormous stands of purple, yellow and white irises filled the grassy yards. Alexander paused before one freshly painted Victorian. “This is my stop,” he said.

“This is yours?” Esther asked with delight. “I’ve always loved this place.” It had a wide wooden porch that circled around the side, and windows in odd nooks and crannies. She grinned. “You know what I’ve always noticed about it?”

He smiled, inclining his big lion head. “Tell me.”

Esther pointed to the second story, at a window open to the breeze. Set before it was a heavy ceramic pitcher and basin for washing. “That’s the most serene window I’ve ever seen.”

A network of lines creased the skin below his eyes as he smiled. He looked first at Esther and then at the window. “I’ve never noticed before.” He chuckled. “Luckily you’ve never seen the inside—your picture would be quite transformed.”

“Why?”

“It’s a junk room, I’m afraid.” Comfortably, he gestured toward the house. “Can I persuade you to come in for a glass of tea or something?”

She wasn’t really quite ready to leave behind his easy company. “All right. Thank you.” Then she looked at Jeremy and back at the neatly painted house. “Please tell me you don’t have rooms full of priceless antiques.”

To her surprise, Alexander laughed. “It’s just a house, Esther. He won’t injure anything.”

Again, she found herself smiling at him in gratitude, and for an instant she was caught in the gentle admiration she saw on his face. Shyly she turned to call for Jeremy as Daniel followed Alexander up the steps.

Inside, she was relieved to find that his statement was true. There were no spindly chairs or brocaded sofas. The rooms were large and scattered with comfortable groupings of chairs, ottomans and tables. Braided rugs covered the floors.

“You see?” Alexander said, gesturing broadly. “Nothing to worry about.”

She nodded and her attention was caught by a series of framed prints on the long west wall. “Oh,” she sighed, going forward to examine them. “Maxfield Parrish. They’re beautiful!”

On a second wall were scenes from the King Arthur legend, done in the same Victorian mode. “Look, Daniel,” she said. “Guinevere, King Arthur and Lancelot. And Camelot.”

Behind her Alexander said, “That was my favorite legend as a child.”

She turned. “Mine, too. But I never believed it was a legend. I think it really happened—maybe not exactly the way they say it did, but there was a Camelot and a great king.”

“And a beautiful queen?” He lifted an eyebrow.

He shook his head. “Perhaps you need my class as much as any of the students. History is never as romantic as we’d like it to be.”

“Perhaps,” she said lightly, “you’re in need of a pair of rose-colored glasses.”

He met her gaze for a minute, and a thousand things rushed over the surface of his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said finally.

A fat gray cat wandered into the room and leaped with surprising nimbleness into a chair, then stared at the lot of them with unmistakable malevolence in its yellow eyes. “Are we invading your territory?” Esther asked it quietly.

It was a scruffy Persian mix with missing tufts of fur and a fat face and enormous paws. One ear was battered, half torn away a long time ago. It glared at her.

“That’s Piwacket,” Alexander said. “Don’t bother to treat him like a cat. He thinks he’s a reincarnated pirate.”

Esther considered the notion. “All he lacks is the eye patch.”

Piwacket looked at Alexander with an almost human expression of smugness. As if he’d spoken, Alexander said, “Don’t let it go to your head.” He turned to the boys. “Would you like some tea, gentlemen?”

“No, thanks,” Daniel said, speaking for both of them as he often did. “Can we play outside?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Go ahead,” Esther said with a nod. As they raced for the door, she called, “Don’t pick the flowers!”

That left Esther and Alexander standing in the middle of the room. She found her eyes traveling over the slice of skin visible at the unbuttoned edges of his shirt, and hurriedly dipped her head, brushing hair nervously from her face.

Alexander cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “Shall we go to the kitchen? I’ll pour you a glass of tea.”

It was crazy to have agreed to coming in, Esther thought. This man was way out of her league—he ought to be offering cool drinks to a lawyer or a sleekly intelligent psychologist, not a disheveled and motherly shopkeeper.

But since she’d already agreed, she followed him toward the back of the house, unwilling to be rude. She’d drink her tea and get away as quickly as she could.

Alexander led her into his kitchen, a spacious room with an oak table and long windows. He gestured Esther into a chair, then took tall glasses from a cupboard. “What did you think of the notes I sent you?”

“It looks like a great class,” she said. “I think I’ll be able to work out some lessons you’ll like.” She leaned on the table as he sat down across from her. “If I bring my plans to the first class, will that work all right?”

As he settled in his chair, Alexander was struck with her full beauty, just inches away from him. Her hair floated around her oval face in soft red waves, and her lips were as plump as September plums. The dress she wore this afternoon was as unusual as the other things he’d seen her in. It was a style copied from the thirties—a sheer black and floral pattern over a dark slip. Winking white rhinestone buttons traveled up the front.

Alexander had been finding it difficult since he’d first caught sight of her in the street to avoid the alluring glimpses of pale flesh he could see beneath the sheer fabric. Sitting so close to her, he found it impossible. Beneath the loose fitting sheer, her round shoulders and arms were delectably female, and the dark slip beneath caressed her breasts in a way that conjured up distinctly erotic visions.

And yet, there was no way the dress could be thought of as anything but feminine and lovely.

“Alexander? Will that be all right?”

He looked at her. To hell with routines—a man would be insane to resist a goddess fallen into his midst. “Why don’t you have dinner with me on Friday, and bring it to me then?”

A slow smile bloomed on her lips, and a sleepily pleased look flared in her dark eyes. It was an echo of the demure sexuality of her dress. “I’d like that,” she said.

“Good,” he said firmly and forced himself to straighten, shake off the heat in his loins and act like the gentleman he’d been raised to be. “I’ll be by to pick you up at seven.”

T
he next week whirled by in the blur that seemed to mark early summer for Esther. Daniel passed with stellar grades from first grade to second and happily put aside scholarly pursuits for the heartier pleasures of bike riding and baiting his little brother. She planted her vegetable garden with tomatoes, peppers, garlic and onions, along with basil, sage and bay leaves, all for the spaghetti sauce she made each year to sell in the shop. It was amazing what people would pay for one jar of “one hundred percent organically grown homemade pasta and spaghetti sauce.”

She took her children on picnics and swimming, and set aside a plot for each of them to grow what they chose. Daniel planted enormous sunflowers, filling his whole space with them. Jeremy chose watermelon and popcorn.

In between the other activities, she found herself daydreaming about the elusive Alexander. All week she was alternately delighted and sick about the idea of going out to dinner with him. It was the first date she’d had in a long, long time, for one thing. Her divorce had left her wary of men, particularly when it seemed most of them were interested primarily in a tumble in the hay.

And what did she really know about Alexander? Aside from the fact that he had a riveting, lean body and changeable, intriguing eyes, of course. That sort of physical attraction could be put down to hormones—not a very reliable barometer of a man’s possibilities as far as she was concerned.

But it had been a long time since she’d even felt a quickening in a man’s presence. She’d forgotten how delicious it was to imagine kisses. Particularly when the mouth she imagined kissing was sensual and firm and surrounded with a silky-looking beard and mustache.

As she stood on her dining-room table Friday afternoon to replace a burned-out light bulb, her thoughts were still chasing themselves in circles, and she blew out an aggravated breath. Facts.

Only one should matter to her: the fact that he was a man who had experienced enough tragedy that it had turned his beard prematurely silver. That alone ought to set the warning bells ringing in her mind.

“Mommy!” called Daniel, slamming through the front door. “Daddy’s here.”

“Tell him to come in!” she yelled in return.

“I can hear you!” John yelled from beside the table, imitating her bellow.

She laughed. “Sorry. I’ll be done in a minute.”

John crossed his arms. “You must spend a fortune on light bulbs. Every time I come over, you’re changing that one.”

“Hardly.” She replaced the glass covering and jumped down from the table, and as she did, she remembered that she had been changing this very bulb the last time he had come to get the kids. “We spend a lot of time in here,” she said, more to herself than to John.

“It’s the only room with heat, right?” he said, tongue-in-cheek.

Esther rolled her eyes, declining to respond to the barb. “I’ll call Jeremy. They’ve already got their things together.”

He picked up the used light bulb and followed her into the kitchen. Just then, Jeremy bounded in. “Daddy!”

John hugged him hard, kissing the rosy cheek. Esther admired the picture they made, her dark little son and his tall, reed-thin father.

But as she looked at her former husband, she realized she didn’t think he was handsome anymore. Once he’d looked like the devil himself in her eyes. Now he looked like the rake that he was, and it amazed her that she hadn’t seen it then.

He playfully spanked Jeremy and put him down. “You ready to go fishing, little buddy?”

“Fishing?” Esther repeated with narrowed eyes. “Where are you going to go fishing?”

He gave her a look of impatience. “Just in the creek, Esther. I’m not takin’ them on a boat or anything like that. Are you ever going to learn to trust me with these kids?”

“Maybe when you’re a hundred.” Then she smiled in apology. For all his failings as a faithful husband, he was a thoughtful, careful father. It was one of the things that had kept her hanging on as long as she had. “So I worry,” she said, waving her hands. “What mother doesn’t?”

John grinned back. “No good mom.” He looked at Jeremy. “You go get your stuff and put it into the car.” When the boy had raced off to do his bidding, John looked at Esther more seriously. “Have you given any more thought to letting me take them to the ranch?”

Esther took a deep breath. “I don’t know. It’s such a long trip.”

“My dad is dying, Esther. He isn’t gonna be around next summer.”

“But won’t two little boys be too much noise and bustle for an emphysema patient?” She caught his skeptical gaze. “Okay, I know. Not on a ranch. Are you going to teach them to ride horses?”

“I thought about it.” He lifted his eyebrows and wryly asked, “You want me to get some helmets?”

Esther laughed. “Okay, I give. If they want to go, I guess I don’t have any objections.”

“Thanks, babe.” He hugged her quickly. “I’ll talk to them about it.”

Their departure, amid hugs and kisses and forgotten stuffed animals, left the house quiet and empty. Esther wandered around, picking up. It was too bad, she thought as she carried a load of toys upstairs, that she and John had been unable to work things out. She had liked being married, having a family and people to take care of. It had been wonderful when John would come home and they all sat down to supper together, talking about the day.

And it was hard to be a single parent. She hated sending the boys off every other weekend. The rules at Daddy’s house weren’t quite the same as at Mommy’s.

Hearing the self-pitying tone of her thoughts, she shook her head. What she had now was a hundred times better than what she’d had with John and she knew it.

Dumping the toys into the children’s closet, she went to her own bedroom. A breeze lifted the lace curtains lightly, cool and sweet. As Esther settled by the window, she admired her flowers and the rich green of her lawn. None of it had been there when they had reclaimed the house four years ago. Her grandmother had spent the last years of her life in a nursing home, a period in which the house had been lackadaisically rented out to a series of tenants. Esther had been living in Denver and the problems with her marriage had necessarily drawn her attention away from anything outside herself. No one else had cared much about the lawns around the old house, and the management company hired by her grandmother had been remiss in repairs. As a result, there had been no yard left and the already deteriorating house had fallen into even deeper disrepair.

She smiled. Now the naked ladies and irises her grandmother had loved were springing up in the backyard. Pincushion flowers and larkspur lined the front walk. Even the house itself was coming along. Last winter, she had torn up the aging carpets in the front two rooms that comprised her shop and buffed the hardwood floors below. Door by door, threshold by threshold, she was redoing the woodwork.