Love Is Nuts (3 Tales) (8 page)

“I just came out ’cause I heard my honey,” Faye announced. “How you doin’, handsome? Saw you pull in this morning and been waitin’ for a visit all day. How long you gonna be home?”

Before he could escape, Slo was crushed in a big bosomed, heavily floured hug. Faye had been baking, but he hoped it hadn’t been for him. Her eyesight was failing, and she kept mistaking the iodine bottle for the vanilla extract.

“Jus…just till the end of the month,” he coughed out. “Sooner, if I can get the house packed up before then. I’m moving Gran to Houston.”

Faye backed off and squinted long and hard at him. “So I hear. Ina Lorene just called and blistered my ear with the news. She’s madder’n a wet hen. And she wants you to eat all them vegetables you mashed, before they spoil.”

“What? They’re already spoiled. Most of them weren’t even ripe to begin with.”

“She says that’s your problem. You mash it, you eat it.” Faye shrugged, sending a puff of flour into the air. “You know how your grandma hates to waste food.”

Yeah, he knew. Slo groaned. He also knew he’d be up all night with indigestion.

“You sure you’re doin’ the right thing, honey?”

Uh-oh. Faye was going serious on him. Slo hated it when she did that. The woman was a walking, talking
Poor Richard’s Almanac
, stuffed to the gills with quaint country sayings and outdated advice.

“Real sure. She’ll love her new place once I get her settled in. The complex has all kinds of organized activities. There’ll be so much for her to do, it’ll give her a whole new lease on life,” he said to derail the feared lecture.

But Faye was already stoked and ready to roll. “Your grandma don’t want a new life, honey. She’s happy with the life she’s got, and she has plenty to do right here.”

Too much.
Gardening, preserving, cooking, cleaning, house repairs… She insisted on doing it all herself – had more energy than a person her age had a right to – and refused to quit.

“I appreciate your concern, ma’am, but Gran has worked hard her whole life. It’s time for her to relax and have some fun now.”

“But that’s the point, ain’t it? Work is all she knows. It’s too late to shift her now. It’d be like tryin’ to transplant an old tree. Her roots are too deep. A move might kill her.”

Slo’s teeth gritted, but he kept his voice level. “Gran’s not a tree, and I’m certainly not trying to kill her.” Quite the opposite. Slo had lost both parents when he was small. His mother’s mother had raised him, and she was eighty-seven now. She drove him crazy, but he loved her like crazy, too – couldn’t stand the thought of losing her. He wanted her to last for years, but couldn’t see that happening at her current pace. “She’s going run herself ragged here. I just want her to slow down a little.”

Faye squinted at him a moment more, then sighed in surrender. “Well, I always did say you were as stubborn as Ina Lorene. If anyone can dig her outta Star, I guess you can.”

“If she’s started taking her rifle to bed, I’d say she’s ready to leave. I don’t think I’ll have to dig too deep.”

“Oh, she ain’t really scared, just bein’ cautious. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Faye quoted. “Your grandma thinks somethin’ funny might be happening next door at the Jones house.”

So what else was new?

The Joneses were Yankee transplants from New Jersey. They had moved to Star after Slo had escaped it. Actually
moved
here. A deliberate choice on their part. And if that didn’t tell you something about them, nothing would. The whole family was nuts.

“Something funny is
always
happening at the Jones’s,” he said.

“This is…different.” Faye lowered her gaze.

Slo felt a weird tingle down his spine. “How different?”

“I…I don’t know exactly. Ina Lorene won’t say. But it’s just been the last few weeks or so – since that new girl moved in. Roxy Sinclair. She’s Lydia Jones’s niece.”

Roxy?

Slo felt another tingle – a warm one, deep in his abdomen. There was something about the name that tickled his fancy, fired his imagination. Maybe because it rhymed so smoothly with
foxy
. And if the girl belonged to the Joneses, the adjective might be very appropriate, too. All the Jones women were eye candy. It was the family’s one redeeming virtue.

Foxy Roxy…

Staying at the house next to his grandmother’s.

Maybe the next two weeks wouldn’t be so boring after all.

Chapter 2

Star…

Such a perfect name, full of sparkle and hope. People often wished on stars, but in this case the star itself was the answer to a wish.

Roxanne Sinclair’s mother had died when Roxanne was an infant, and the wealthy father who’d provided for her had been a supercilious, cold man who felt he’d sired a freak and treated her accordingly. He had given her the best care money could buy, but not in
his
house. For years Roxanne had wished for a real home. Now she had one. Here.

She loved the town and the Jones family she’d recently joined. A big family that currently consisted of Roxanne’s Aunt Lydia and Lydia’s grown children: Jileana and her new husband Jack, the twins Sam and Delilah, and the triplets Muffy, Buffy, and Duffy (twins
and
triplets – imagine). The latter were musicians, a professional jazz trio, and Delilah was a professional dancer with her own troupe. They all spent a good deal of time on the road, touring, and were gone at present, but they used their mother’s home as a base camp. Jileana and Jack were away, too, on their honeymoon. Sam was an artist who lived in this building here on the main street of town, a few blocks from Lydia’s house, while Roxanne now lived with Lydia.

The Joneses had always been her family, of course, her mother having been Lydia Jones’s sister, but Roxanne had never had any contact with them while her father lived. He hadn’t liked his wife’s relatives, apparently, and had cut all ties with them after her death. For sure he’d never spoken of them to Roxanne – never spoken to her much about anything. He hadn’t liked her either. Not that she could blame him. It must have been difficult for him having a daughter like her – must have been hell – even though Sam insisted her father had been wrong to think so.

If only she could believe Sam on that.

Her cousin was so clever about everything else. It was amazing what he’d done with some sawhorses and plywood, a few carefully angled planks, and a long swath of sky blue satin.

Balanced on the balls of her feet on the platform, her back arched and braced against one of the satin covered planks, and her arms spread wide, Roxanne didn’t feel like she was flying. She felt like a crucifixion victim, every muscle tensed and aching from the strain of holding the pose. But when Sam’s painting was finished, she would look like she was soaring effortlessly above the clouds on wings of feathery flame. She would be a
fire angel
. That was art for you.

The thought made her frown slightly. What was the difference between art and life anyway? She knew so little about either, but she suspected the distinction was more nebulous than many people presumed.

“Roxy? Everything okay? We can call it quits for the day if you’re tired.”

Damn, he’d caught the frown. She’d have to watch that.

Glancing down at the tall blond poised behind his easel, she flashed him a smile. “I’m fine. Just thinking too hard, I guess.”

“Ah, and I’ve warned you about that. No heavy thoughts in here, angel. They’ll pull you through the clouds, and you’ll crash.” Sam spoke sternly, but his expression was pure devilment.

Roxanne loved it when his eyes sparkled like that. But then those blue eyes of his were always sparkling, weren’t they?

“I want you to think only light, airy, frivolous things,” he instructed.

Her smile soured. “I don’t know any light, airy things.”

“Sure you do. You know feathers, don’t you? Haven’t you ever gotten a feather stuck up your nose?”

Roxanne felt a giggle building, but bit it back. “No.”

“No nose feathers, huh? Too bad.” His brow furrowed in thought. “What about marshmallows then? Ever dump out a big bag of fluffy marshmallows and walk around on them so they squish between your toes?”

The giggle erupted. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Sure is.” Sam grinned. “It’s also much better.” His gaze moved back and forth from her to the canvas – studying, comparing – then he squeezed a few new blobs of color onto his palette and plunged back into the business of creating a masterpiece.

Terribly impressed, and proud of her own contribution to the artistic process, Roxanne scrutinized the expert way he worked. Not that she had ever seen an artist in action before Sam, but he certainly seemed to know what he was doing. Samson Jones was one talented guy whose paintings hung in collections the world over and sold for thousands of dollars.

Roxanne had been raised in luxury, but ironically never had a dime of her own until her father’s investment firm crashed, leaving him destitute and dead of a heart attack from the shock. With no more funds to keep Roxanne where she had been living, the owners of the place had searched for a new place to dump her and located Cousin Sam, who’d been happy to claim her – who’d given her a
life
– and acted as though
she
were doing
him
a favor. He was paying her to model, for godssake, but still worried about the difficulty of the pose. Like she was supposed to
care
if her muscles cramped or went numb? Hell, she’d have cheerfully lain on nails or hung upside-down in a snake pit if he’d asked her. She owed him everything!

“No, you don’t,” Sam said, never missing a beat with his brush. “You don’t owe anyone anything. This is what family is for. You never should have been in that place to begin with. If I’d had any idea what was going on, you’d have been out of there years ago.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. Precious few people knew that Sam and his twin were psychic, but Roxanne had sensed it right off the bat, and they had debated it a lot since then – had speculated the trait came from their mothers’ family. A very mixed bag, heredity.

“Sammy, are you reading my mind?”

“Didn’t have to. Your expression was an open book. As long as we’re on the subject though, let me offer a little advice. The trick with telepathy isn’t knowing how to read minds, but how
not
to, otherwise you’ll drown in brainwaves.”

“I don’t have that problem. I’m not
that
telepathic. I just get little snatches of things here and there, but never much and never for long.”

“So we’ve discussed,” Sam said carefully. “But you have other gifts.”

Gift? It was a
curse
. But they’d discussed that, too, and talking about it didn’t help.

Sam reached for a palette knife and rag to begin the work of scraping and wiping his palette, then cleaning his brushes.

“Time to land, fire angel. The light’s shifted. I can’t paint anymore today. Need a hand getting down?”

“No, thanks, I can manage.” Slowly, so as not to jar herself, Roxanne lowered her arms and relaxed her arched spine. She’d been holding the pose for twenty-minute stretches with ten-minute breaks in between, but after three hours of this regime felt stiffer than the plywood she stood on. Modeling was hard physical labor, harder than ditch digging, she mused. She’d never be able to look at a figure painting or sculpture again without wondering what the model had suffered while posing for it.

Sinking to a sitting position, she rested a moment before climbing off the platform and reaching for her clothes, navy blue sweatpants and a drab gray T-shirt – loose fit and nice cool colors, the kind she always wore. The only kind she
could
wear. With tawny hair and a fair complexion, Roxanne might have looked better in something brighter, but bright warm colors were dangerous. Anything warm was dangerous. Her life was devoted to keeping cool, and baggy, plain garments seemed to help.

Only not now. Having tied the drawstring of her sweatpants, she was pulling the T-shirt over her head when a hot flash hit. A red alert. She stiffened to attention, like a buck private caught goldbricking by the company commander. Sam stiffened, too. As fast as Roxanne had tried to block the heat, he had sensed it. It would have been impossible not to. The air of the studio had literally crackled for an instant, as though the electrical system had short-circuited.

“Roxy? Are you all right?”

No. She was trembling and suddenly sweating.

“A…a man. I felt his thoughts,” she stammered. “He’s coming down the street to Jileana’s shop…coming
here
.”

Sam leapt back in overblown horror, his expression aghast, his hands flying to his head. “A
man
? God, no! Not a man! Not here!”

Roxanne glowered.

Sam sobered. “Anyway, hon,
you
are the one who’s minding Jil’s shop while she and Jack are away, so don’t you think you’d better unlock the door? I know her regular customers usually call for appointments first, but there’s always room for new business. Never pass up the chance for a sale.”