Walk in Beauty (2 page)

She wondered with a pang how long it had been.

The hands and mouth were still much too clear in Jessie’s mind. She’d seen them in miniature every single day since Giselle was born and didn’t care to renew her acquaintance with those details.

Wilkes sat down behind his broad desk. “What kind of money are we talking here?” he asked, cutting straight to the chase.

Luke folded his hands loosely. “Half the price you ask for the rug. And we’ll deliver.”

To his credit, Wilkes didn’t erupt in outrage as so many of the gallery owners had done. He absorbed the information for a minute, then looked at Jessie. “And I imagine your presence here signifies a little inducement?”

“You imagine correctly,” she replied and handed him a list. “These are the artists who will pull their work from galleries that refuse to pay a more equitable price for the weavings.”

“Has anyone given any thought to what will happen to all these artists if they can’t display their work?” He gave her a measured stare. “Your paintings, for example, Ms. Callahan. They’ve only been selling well for what—two, three years?”

“There are other methods of displaying our work,” she returned calmly. “And other ways of earning a living.” But he’d struck at her secret terror. What if, after all this was over, she could no longer sell her own work? It was a dream that had been long and hard in coming, and she’d hate to see it die.

“What about all those little old ladies out there weaving on the reservation?” Wilkes asked, leaning back in his chair. “Anybody ask them how they feel about giving up the tidy little sum they’re already getting for a rug? I understand it goes quite a ways out there.”

“In the first place,” Luke said in a deadly quiet voice, “they aren’t little old ladies. They are young women and old women and in-between. Many of them are the primary breadwinners in their families—as they should be with such talents. In the second place, you stand to make a profit of eight to ten thousand dollars on every one of those big rugs. And all you do is put it on your wall.”

Jessie knew she should be concentrating, but Luke’s dark honey voice flowed seductively around her. In the four years they’d spent together, she’d never once heard him raise his voice, except to call a dog. Grimacing in wry amusement, she remembered, too, how alarming that had been to her at first. Her own family had been unable to discuss the weather without a boisterous, loud argument.

She sobered as Luke continued. “Even at the new rates, you’ll make almost obscene profits.”

Wilkes dropped forward, arms on the desk. “I’ll tell you something. There’s no way I’ll pay a dime over twenty percent of my gross on those rugs. And from what I’ve been hearing through the grapevine, I’m not alone.” He gave Jessie a cool glance. “No artist on that list of yours will cause me any real loss of revenue, so you can take all your toys and go play somewhere else.”

Jessie shot Luke a glance. A thin smile curved his lips. “I forgot to mention something else,” Luke said, shifting the weavings on his shoulder. “We’ve taken an option on a shop around the corner here. You’ve got six months, and then we open—just in time for tourist season. When your customers find out they can get the same rug for half of what you charge, I bet I know where they’ll shop.” He stood up and tossed a card from his shirt pocket onto the desk. “You know where to find us.”

Hastily, Jessie scrambled to her feet, gesturing toward Giselle.

Wilkes laughed. “It’s been tried before, you know. It never works.”

“This time it will,” Luke promised quietly, and walked out.

Giselle skipped after him, leaving Jessie behind. Jessie picked up her scarf and purse from the chair. “I hope you’ll give this some thought, Mr. Wilkes,” she said. “It is going to work this time.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Lifting her purse and scarf to her chest like armor, Jessie headed outside—for the second confrontation of the day.

* * *

Luke patted his shirt pocket for the bag of tobacco he kept there, wondering if he had time to roll a cigarette before Jessie reappeared. He could use one.

He decided to try and pulled the makings out—a single thin sheet of paper, a perfect pinch of moist tobacco, a deft roll and quick lick. Done. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

“You shouldn’t smoke, you know,” said the little girl beside him. “My teachers told me it can give you cancer or heart attacks. I convinced my mom to quit.”

Luke pursed his lips, then squatted beside her. Such a beauty, he thought again with a twinge in his chest. His child.

“I don’t smoke a whole lot,” he told her. “That’s what’s hard for people to remember—a little tobacco, a little beer, a little cake, they’re all okay. If you smoke a pack a day or drink a bottle of whiskey or eat a whole cake, then you get sick.”

Her enormous topaz eyes rested on his face. “You’re my father, aren’t you?”

Luke held her gaze. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Are you mad at my mother?”

He took a kitchen match from his pocket and scratched the tip with his thumbnail. Mad? He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply before he spoke. “No,” he lied, to spare the child who had nothing to do with anything between her mother and father.

The door swung open and Jessie pushed outside, a swirl of color and glitter and fragrance. Luke saw her spy him and Giselle cozily talking together on the sidewalk; then he watched as she planted her feet and crossed her arms in a fighting posture. Squatting as he was, Luke was at a disadvantage.

There was also the small matter of his breath, which seemed to have deserted him.

Damn. He searched for his fury. She’d hidden from him for eight years, not only herself, but her daughter. There should be nothing but fury in him.

He had loved this woman once with an almost scorching intensity. Seeing her again so suddenly unnerved him, tangled him up inside like a can full of rubber bands.

How could anyone remain so unchanged? She was as beautiful as she had been the first time he’d seen her, almost twelve years ago. It was a beauty as wild and tender as the stubborn roses that grew by the sea in her father’s California garden. Her skin was pale and pure, her hair a rich chestnut that spilled in abundance over her shoulders, catching around the rise of one breast as if in a caress.

But it was her eyes that had bewitched him the first time, so many years ago, the same extraordinary eyes her daughter had inherited—eyes the color of the first golden fingers of morning sunlight. They bewitched him again now.

“Come on, Giselle, let’s go,” she said, and turned.

Luke was on his feet instantly. “Jessie,” he called in a harsh voice.

She whirled, ready to battle. He could see it in her stance, in her fisted hands, in the blaze of her eyes. She was scared stiff and as unsettled as he, but battle she would. “What?”

“You can’t just walk away.”

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “Can’t I?”

That brought his fury rushing back, clean and pure as a mountain stream. “Well,” he said quietly, “I guess you can. You’ve done it before.”

She just looked at him.

He crushed the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his boot, exhaling in an effort to curb his anger. “I’m asking you not to.” He touched Giselle’s hair in wonder, and she looked up at Jessie with hope, a hope and pleading that broke his heart.

Jessie saw it, too. Luke saw her swallow—and for an instant, he felt pity for her. He and Giselle had nothing to lose, everything to gain. For Jessie, quite the opposite was true. “Giselle,” he said quietly, “give me a minute with your mother, all right?”

“I don’t want a moment with you, Luke,” Jessie whispered fiercely, but Giselle had already skipped away.

He set his jaw. “Looks to me like you got caught red-handed, me and her in the same place at the same time.”

She refused to look at him.

“Look, Jessie, we can let sleeping dogs lie or we can have a bloody, screaming fight in the middle of the street. I don’t really give a damn about the past, but you can’t expect me to just walk away from my only child without a second glance.” He crossed his arms. “Be fair.”

“Fair!” She spat the word.

Light glowed like wine in the rippling fall of her hair, danced like moonlight over her nearly translucent skin. Luke could smell her perfume, a deeply exotic mix of frangipani and sandalwood and something he couldn’t name. It made him dizzy. “Well, maybe fair is the wrong word,” he admitted.

Her gaze, frightened and wary, met his. Luke felt the impact as a fist to his gut and he glanced away. “I’m sober now, Jessie,” he said, looking at a piece of mica caught in the sidewalk just beyond the toe of his boot. In his ears, his voice was rough.

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and in the silence between them Luke felt a rush of things spring and whirl like dust devils. “I can see that.”

“Just come with me now for a little while,” he urged. “We’ll get a hamburger or something. You’ve had a long time to know her, Jessie. Give me an hour or two.” He licked his lips. “Please.”

For a moment, he thought she would refuse. Her chin jutted stubbornly toward the mountains. Suddenly, she capitulated. “All right. But only an hour.”

He found his gaze on the curve of her cheek, at once intimately familiar and completely strange to him. A sword of that old, familiar grief stabbed his gut. In a harsh voice, he asked, “You want to go in my truck?”

“We’ll just follow you.”

In the instant before she turned, Luke thought he glimpsed a tear.

J
essie had experienced some very strange moments in her life, but the first half hour sitting with Luke and his newly acquired daughter in the worn booth of a downtown Colorado Springs café counted among the strangest.

There were, after all, few guidelines for her to follow. Dear Miss Manners, she imagined writing.

I wonder if you might offer a few rules of etiquette for coping with the unexpected reappearance of the love of one’s life who’s also the father of one’s child—a child he didn’t know existed, by the way—after an eight-year separation.

She stabbed a french fry into a pool of ketchup. Miss Manners would no doubt urge civility and ordinary courtesy. Unfortunately, Jessie thought, chewing the dredged fry, civil was pretty far down on the list of the things she felt.

It seemed a rather cruel trick of fate to send him at this late date. The life she had built from the ruins of her relationship with Luke Bernali was a peaceful one, free of the wild peaks and valleys she had known with him.

She’d finally forgotten him, if not forgiven. She had finally stopped dreaming of him, except once in a great long while. She had finally come to believe there might be a chance that someday, somehow, she might love another man.

One glance at him in the middle of the gallery had been enough to show her how foolish her illusions had been. One glance, and there was a quick humming in her veins...something strong and lusty and full of sex, but deeper than that, too. It was a lyrical sound, a song in her soul. As if she had known him always, as if—

She set her jaw and grabbed the ketchup bottle. Get real, she warned herself. Luke Bernali was just that kind of a man. Sleek and lean, with those rich, deep eyes. Eyes that promised he knew all there was to know about women—and he liked every single bit of it. No woman in her right mind could fail to respond to those signals.

The ketchup bottle, fairly cooperative a moment before, refused to release its contents. Aggravated, Jessie shook it. Three small drops fell from the mouth.

Across the table, Luke chuckled softly.

Maybe she could punch him. A good solid left to the jaw would probably do wonders for her mood.

Giselle seemed to be having no trouble with the rules of a first encounter with her father. Nor did Luke seem at all handicapped. They dove headfirst into the apparently unequaled joy of acquainting themselves. Giselle chattered about her second-grade class and her reading, divulged her preference for dogs over cats and the fact that she had just completed her first beadwork project. In his turn, Luke told Giselle about his carpentry business and his sister, Marcia, who was Giselle’s aunt.

After their hamburgers were finished, Giselle asked for quarters to play pinball. Jessie had taken a breath to tell her no when Luke passed a dollar bill over the table.

“We really do need to be going,” Jessie protested. “I need to talk to you,” he said. Seeing Jessie’s rebellious glare, he added, “About the project.”

“Fine,” she said to Giselle, who bounced away. As if Giselle had provided the strings of the surreal puppet show being staged, the conversation abruptly collapsed with her departure. From the window, cold gray light spilled between them. Jessie looked outside to watch fat snowflakes drift down toward earth, unable to bear the painful reality of Luke’s harsh and beautiful face.

“I can’t believe you kept her away from me all these years, Jessie.”

Sudden tightness clutched Jessie’s throat. If she let him lead her back to the past, she would be lost. “I thought we were going to talk about the project.”

A flash of anger tightened his mouth. “God knows we wouldn’t want to have three minutes to talk about all this.”

“God knows.” She lifted her chin defiantly.

He stared at her, his eyes filled with seething emotion. Then his jaw went hard and he shifted his gaze away, toward the light snow falling beyond the window.

Jessie wanted this over with. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with the project?”

“All right.” He looked at her. “I took Daniel’s place today because he was poisoned.”

“Poisoned? Like food poisoning?”

“Strychnine.” He slipped a toothpick into the corner of his mouth—an old habit that stirred up curiously painful associations. “He was lucky—he only ate half his meal. While he was eating, a snake spooked one of his horses and he went to check it out. The dog got his supper.” He looked at her. “The dog died.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jessie said. “Is he all right?”

“My sister said he was pretty sick, but he’ll live.”