In the Midnight Rain (16 page)

"Sure. You want a Coke or something?"

"Anything cold and wet, darlin'," he said, coming in. "It's hot as hell today. I'm dying."

Ellie fetched a can of Dr Pepper and poured it into a glass with ice. He drank deeply, eyes closed, and Ellie allowed herself five seconds to admire him. Even in a T-shirt that had seen better times and after a long day's work in the greenhouses, he managed to look delectable. For one thing, the sleevelessness showed a lot of tanned arm and shoulder. For another, every inch of flesh was dewy with the humid air. For another—

Five seconds were up. She turned back to her salad. "What's going on?"

"Just thought I'd check on you. How is the research coming?"

She nodded without looking at him. "Good. I think I'm finally making some progress. Rosemary may even have tracked down the journal."

"That's great." He leaned on the counter. "I was thinking, if you wanted to come with us, Marcus, Alisha and I are going out to one of the blues clubs tonight. There's a bartender there I reckon would remember Mabel. She sang there once or twice, but more than that, he loved her. Want to?"

"Yes!" She didn't even bother to hide her delight. She grinned at him. "You didn't even have to throw in Mabel, you know. I'd have gone to hear the blues anyway."

He straightened, and moved ever so slightly closer, until there was only a hand's width of space between them. "Yeah?" He lifted an eyebrow. "What about Marcus and Alisha? Did I have to throw them in, too, or would you have gone alone with me?"

Ellie looked up at him, found herself snared by the angle of his tanned cheekbone, the shape of his mouth. "I don't know," she said honestly. "Probably it's better that they're going."

"I made the right call, then." He touched her shoulder with one finger, then stepped back. "I'll come get you around nine-thirty, then." At the door he turned back. "It's a black club, mainly, so you want to break out something fine to wear."

"Thanks for the warning." Ellie grinned. She knew just the thing.

Whistling to himself, Blue drove to Marcus's house. The smell of barbecue scented the air, and Blue went around the house to the tree-shaded back yard. A chow puppy leapt up as he stopped at the gate, barking happily at the visitor. A two-year-old boy, as plump and round as his dog, toddled over with the same cheery eagerness. "Hey, uncle!"

Blue came through the gate and knelt to scrub the puppy's belly, then roared and picked up the child. "Who's been eating all my porridge?" he cried.

James shrieked. "It was Daddy!"

"Yeah, and I ain't afraid of no giant." Marcus lifted his chin in greeting. "Hadn't had enough of me this week?"

"I smelled those steaks all the way down to my house." Blue lifted his eyebrows and put James down. "Tell your mama I need a beer."

"Walk when you bring it out, James. It gets shook up when you run."

Blue leaned against a tree. "What are y'all doing tonight?"

"Got no plans at the moment. What's on your mind?"

"I just told Ellie all of us would be. . . uh. . . going out to Hopkins' tonight."

"Is that right."

Alisha came out on the back step, wearing a filmy yellow sundress that made her look like a flower. The baby, Lena, was on her hip. "Hey, Blue," she said, and kissed his cheek. "You come for dinner?"

"I came to drag you out with me tonight."

"Really?" She perked up. "How about it, Marcus? We haven't been out in months. Your mama will keep the children. She told me earlier this week she hasn't seen them near enough lately."

"Fine by me," he said. "You know who's playing tonight?"

Blue shook his head.

"I can see, as usual, you got everything all planned out."

He lifted a shoulder. "It was one of those impulsive moments, you know. Pretty woman, opportunity, my mouth just opened."

Alisha frowned. "It's not Sheila, is it? That woman drove me crazy with her screechy laugh."

Blue chuckled. "Nope. Ellie wants to see the clubs, for her book."

The long dark eyes went cold. "You are a dog, Blue Reynard, and I like her, okay? So don't be playing any of your tricks. Just be real for once in your life."

"I'm not after her," he said, lifting his hand in a vow. "I swear it. She's just..." He shrugged. "She's a friend. That's all. I like her."

* * *

Ellie knew she wasn't beautiful. And it wasn't the delusional "my mouth is too full/nose too small/eyes too big" kind of not-pretty either, which she found ridiculous. It was her theory that every woman in America, maybe even the world, knew by the age of six who was beautiful and who was not. She was not.

Happily, she also cared very little about it. Her skin was good, her teeth were sound and she didn't have to worry about her weight, which all by itself seemed like a blessing big enough to offset just about any other physical flaw. She liked beer and doughnuts and chicken fried in bacon grease. It would kill her to subsist on what passed for food for most of the women she knew—women who repeatedly told her mournfully that they hated her. But Ellie figured it all evened out. She could eat what she wanted, but then, no man had ever stopped dead in the street to stare at her in longing, either. Her face wasn't beautiful and her hair was too wild and she didn't have the kind of curves that real men liked.

On a day-to-day basis, she didn't think much about how she looked. She wore a little blush to offset her sallowness, but her lipstick ran to Carmex and her wardrobe consisted mainly of wrinkle-resistant cotton-poly blends she could wash and dry at a Laundromat.

But there were times the girly-girl in her came out. A blues club where Mabel might have sung was definitely one of them. She'd learned what to wear to make the most of her admittedly small array of physical gifts—decent legs, good shoulders, and enough breast that she didn't look completely flat-chested in a tight dress.

She put some bad-boy rock and roll on the CD player as she showered and shaved her legs and plucked her eyebrows, singing along happily as she put makeup on her slanted eyes (a plus) and her almost sallow skin (a minus). The dress was as simple as dresses got: a plain black sheath with a nicely dangerous neckline over which her small helping of cleavage showed just a bit. Black stockings. Black high-heeled sandals. Her hair—since it wouldn't do a damned thing in all this humidity—she piled up loose on her head.

Dancing a little in the tiny bathroom, she added the final touch. The one really good feature she had was her mouth, and tonight she painted it scarlet. It did what it always did, made her eyes look smoky green and kind of mysterious, and her mouth downright dangerous. Pleased, she thought of Blue.

Which required walking into the kitchen to get a beer to calm her nerves and get her defenses back up. She was crazy to be going out with him, crazy to be primping to get his attention, but there it was. The reason she'd been so delighted at his invitation this afternoon was because she wanted him to see her, and dressing up was the only way she could do it without making an idiot of herself.

She'd gotten ready a little too soon. Nervous and keyed up, she jumped up, picked another CD at random and threw it in the player, then paced in time to the music.

Damn. At least be honest, Connor, she told herself. You want him bad. Stop pretending and just get it right out in the open. You want him because he's big and bad and gorgeous and maybe even partly because he's completely unattainable and everybody else wants him, too.

She sipped her beer, paced to the kitchen, then to the door. April, sensing her disturbance, lifted her head. "It's all right, baby," she said, pausing to pat her head—but carefully, so as not to get a slew of dog hair on her dress. "You got fixed when you were little, so you don't have to deal with any of this."

So just sleep with him already.

The voice belonged to the devil. Ellie knew it by the way it sounded so reasonable, so obvious. Just sleep with him. Have a nice fling and be done with it.

She took a breath, paced to the door and back, waiting for the angel voice, which would say something inane about virtue she could happily override. It never spoke up and after a moment, Ellie decided she'd killed the angel through neglect. Not that lust ever listened to the angel anyway.

But logic could work. Reasons to sleep with him: obvious. Numerous. Way too many to start thinking about ten minutes before she was going somewhere with him.

"Reasons
not
to, Ellie," she said aloud. Okay. Reason number one: He was wounded, somewhere deep, and she had a talent for falling in love with men like that. Falling in love with Blue Reynard would be a complete disaster. Not just because he'd love her and leave her, either, although that was a given.

But it would ruin the friendship between them, which was reason number two. She'd fall in love and then he'd start feeling trapped, then she'd get clingy and he'd have to duck out, and they'd never be able to sit on a porch in the dark again, or trade E-mails in the middle of the night.

She stopped pacing. The jangling tenseness of nerves along the back of her neck eased a little, and let in a picture of him laughing ruefully in the darkness, comfortable with her. Somewhere in the past year, she'd grown to value his companionship, his brilliant posts and wry attitudes. She had to admit she'd found it easier to be with him on-line, when she'd imagined him to be a burned-out Keith Richards look-alike, but that was life. He couldn't help how he looked, either.

His knock startled her enough that she spilled beer on her thumb. Licking it off, she called out, "Come in!" and put the beer down on the counter and picked up her purse.

The door opened. Ellie turned.

He filled up the whole doorway, looking clean and dangerous and sexy in a pair of jeans and a simple, plain white shirt he'd dressed up with a silver bolo tie. He stared at her, his eyes that pulsing, electric blue that was always a little startling. Winded, Ellie simply stared back, drinking in the sight of him.

"I'm sorry," he said at last. "I came to get Ellie. You know where she is?"

It was exactly the right reaction. Ellie laughed and spread her arms. "I guess that means you like it."

He lifted one eyebrow and looked at her, very slowly, from head to toe, lingering with proper appreciativeness at her neck and hem and legs. "Oh, yeah," he said, and put in just the right note of husky pleasure.

"You look pretty good yourself."

He winked. "It's a curse."

Ellie grinned. He let her pass, and she paused on the step to wait for him. He looked at her again, and shook his head. "I really can't believe how different you look."

"You don't have to flirt the entire evening, Dr. Reynard."

"Well, that's where you're wrong, Miss Ellie." He reached out a hand and wrapped one loose curl from her neck around his finger. "If I don't flirt, I might just have to act."

The very tips of his fingers brushed her nape, and Ellie had to fight to repress a shiver of reaction. "Bad idea," she said quietly.

He dropped his hand. "You're right. Let's go."

9

H
opkins' Juke Box sat amid a stand of pines near a bend in the river. It had been there since 1922, when an enterprising young man by the name of Lucas Hopkins decided it was time for his folks to have something of their own. He and his four brothers built it out of native pine, just one big, open room with windows to let in the breezes off the river and overhead fans to cool those inclined to dance or get hot over their blues.

What it lacked in decor, it made up for in atmosphere. Through the roaring twenties, it got a name for appreciative and generous audiences, and even big names stopped in for a jam session or simple night of communing with their roots. Through Prohibition, it thrived on bathtub gin and corn liquor, and came into its own in the forties and fifties, and now enjoyed the status of one of the oldest continually operated blues clubs in the region.

The parking lot tonight was already crowded to hear a local boy turned star who was dropping in for an evening.

Blue held open the door for Ellie, taking another deep breath of her perfume as she passed close by him. It afforded him a sweet view of the low neckline of her dress and the gleam of light over her shoulders, and then a particularly pleasant and lingering admiration of her rear end.

He liked women. Liked everything about them. The way they smelled and the way they moved, the look of their arms swinging when they danced, the shape of legs and hips and breasts, and the way they laughed and the little looks they threw.

He also knew he liked Ellie, but he'd originally been attracted to her mind more than her looks, although he'd grown to appreciate those, too. Tonight, she looked a whole lot different. He couldn't quite get over how different.

When they came up to the table where Marcus and Alisha were already seated, Marcus stood up and let go of a long, low whistle. "Baby, you do look good."

Alisha gave a little cry. "Ellie! You clean up like a diamond!"

Ellie, who had obviously been through this surprising transformation more than once, smiled serenely. "Thanks."