What the Heart Wants (28 page)

Jeanell Bolton is an active member of the Austin chapter of Romance Writers of America. She has three children, one husband, and one dog. She lives on five glorious wooded acres in the boondocks of Georgetown, Texas. In past lives, she has been a teacher, an activist, an artist, a journalist, and a chorus director, but she is now settled into writing about deep, dark romances that end up happily ever after, which is how it always should be.

Learn more at:

Facebook.com/Jeanell.Bolton

Available Spring 2015

M
oira drove into the asphalt lot across the street from the yellow brick building and swung her six-year-old Toyota into a marked space.

Panic crawled up her spine.

It's just another audition
, she told herself.
You know the routine—you've been auditioning since you were a kid. No big deal. You either get the part or you don't, and if you don't, there's always another audition around the corner.

But this wasn't Hollywood or New York—it was small-town Texas, and she wasn't a kid trying out for a role as the main character's tagalong little sister anymore. She was an adult, twenty-six years old, and she was auditioning on a three-month trial basis to be herself, Moira Miranda Farrar, with no safety net whatsoever. The Bosque Bend Theater Guild had hired her to direct their upcoming production, and if she could pull it off, they'd keep her on permanently.

And if they didn't? No, that wasn't an option. She
had
to keep this job. Everything depended on her success, not only for her, but also for her family, just as it had since she was four years old, when Gramps had discovered she had a freakish memory and a gift for mimicry. With his disability pension stretched to the limit, she'd become the major support of the family, although Kimiko, her mother, occasionally sent a check to help with expenses.

She draped her arms on the steering wheel and stared at the gold building gleaming in the bright October sun. It looked like an old high school, but Pendleton Swaim, her contact with the theater group, had called it the town museum and said the board met there.

She glanced at her stylishly oversized wristwatch. She was early, which gave her time to get the lay of the land before she met with her new employers.

She'd been hired, sight unseen, at the recommendation of Johnny Blue, who'd starred in the last show she'd worked in before she'd met and married Colin all those years ago. Well, it wasn't entirely sight unseen. All of America had watched her grow up as an assortment of third-banana little sisters on TV sitcoms, and then, when she was too old for the bangs-and-pigtails roles, as Johnny's robot assistant. Of course, now that he'd moved on to films, Johnny was on the showbiz A-list, while she wasn't worth a Z.

She rubbed the scar on her upper left arm and compressed her lips into a determined line, then opened the car door, stood up, and smoothed the skirt of her belted safari-style dress. Even now, a member of the theater board might be looking her over from one of those dark windows in the yellow building. She glanced down at her sensible pumps. Was she dressed conservatively enough for a small Texas town?

Just in case, she adjusted her portfolio under her arm, segued into her no-nonsense persona, and, despite there being no traffic, waited for the light to turn before she marched across the street. As she walked up the wide front steps of the yellow building and through the imposing front door, her heart pounded with fear and excitement, just like it always did before a performance. There was no turning back. Now to locate the meeting room before anyone arrived.

According to the directory on the wall beside the stairwell, she was on floor two and the Bosque Bend Theater Guild met on the third floor, in Room 300. She hurried up the stairs, passing a group of schoolchildren wielding plastic branding irons, who were being herded along by a trio of anxious-looking adults.

The door was locked, but she could see through the window in the door that there was an elevated stage at one end of it. She nodded. The room was an appropriate place for a theater guild to meet, and it would be a good place to practice too. The performances, as Pen Swaim had told her, would be in the big auditorium in the center of the building.

Since she had a little extra time, she might as well spend a few minutes checking out the local scene. She walked back down to the second floor, looked around, then wandered into a display room. One wall featured an interactive history of the Indian tribe that had been the area's first settlers, but grimy-looking fossils dug out of the Bosque riverbank dominated the space. Moira moved on to the next room, which featured rotting saddles, wicked-looking branding irons, and ambrotypes of squinty-eyed cowboys, all donated, according to the legend beside the display, by Rafe McAllister of the C Bar M Ranch.

She checked her watch again. Eight minutes till blastoff. A leisurely stroll up the stairs and she'd still be five minutes early, the perfect statement for a new hire who was ahead of the mark.

She turned the corner toward the front of the building and collided with a fast-moving freight train.

A flame-haired man the size of a building, who was holding a strawberry blonde child by the hand, steadied her with a light touch on the arm, his eyes twinkling. “Didn't mean to mow you down, ma'am. We're makin' an emergency run for the ladies' room.”

Ma'am?
He was calling her
ma'am
? Like John Wayne and Gary Cooper in the old westerns? Did small-town Texans really do that, address all unknown females as
ma'am
? Holy Hollywood! Did Red have a horse hitched up to a parking meter outside?

Moira tried to smile back—her real smile, not the clenched-teeth grin she'd been taught to use for character shots—but Big Red was halfway down the hall before her lip muscles could get themselves coordinated. She stared after him in awe and wonder. Maybe there was more to Bosque Bend than a last-ditch job and a boringly tame history museum after all. Red had the most beautiful eyes she'd ever seen.

Red and the little girl stopped in the middle of the hall.

“Come with me, Daddy. I don't want to go in there by myself. It's big and dark and honks like an angry elephant.” The child was dancing with purpose, and the high pitch of her voice echoed off the hard walls.

Red bent down to her. “Delilah, Daddy can't go in there. It's only for girls.”

“Then I'll go with you to the daddies' bathroom, like when I was little.”

“That's not gonna fly, baby. Tell you what. Daddy will stand right here by the door, and if you yell, he'll come a-chargin' in and rescue you.”

Moira approached them, making sure her smile was properly adjusted this time. “May I help? I was just about to use the restroom myself.” She turned to the child. “Delilah, my name is Moira.”

The little girl gave her a hard stare, then broke into her own smile. “Okay. I like you. You're pretty.”

Which made Moira want to suggest that Red hustle his daughter off to an ophthalmologist ASAP. Having grown up on the Hollywood scene, she knew what
pretty
meant—tall and willowy, blond and busty, languid and lovely—none of which she was. On the other hand, while short, small-breasted, and hardworking might not win any beauty contests, it was very good at opening restroom doors. Delilah charged into the nearest stall, talking the whole time.

“I have three aunts and three uncles. Aunt Rocky comes to our house to take care of things, but she really lives with Uncle Travis in his house. Aunt TexAnn and Uncle Wayne live in Austin most of the time because she makes laws that tell people what to do. Aunt Alice and Uncle Chub don't talk to us 'cause they're mad at Daddy. Oh—I have Aunt Sissy too, but she's not a real aunt. She works for Daddy in his office.”

“Um. That's nice.” Moira had no idea how many aunts or uncles—make that half aunts or half uncles—she herself had. The only siblings she knew of were her half sister, Isis; and her half brother, Arne, but there were probably more in the woodpile. Her mother's exes did tend to get around.

Delilah flushed the toilet and scurried out of the stall as the pipes trumpeted. It sounded just as she had said, like an elephant on the rampage. Moira helped her wash her hands, then escorted her back to her father.

Red shot her a slow, sexy smile. “Thanks, ma'am. Delilah's not happy with the restroom, but it came with the buildin'. This place used to be Bosque Bend High School before they built Eisenhower Consolidated to pull in all the kids at this end of the county so we could play in the Interscholastic League A-division.”

She looked at him blankly.

He laughed, a rumbling basso. “It's football, ma'am. Bosque Bend lives for football, like all the rest of Texas.”

His drawl was getting deeper. “Ma'am” was two syllables now, and the first syllable of “football” rhymed with
boot
. “Like” was pronounced
lahk
, and the
o
in “town” sounded like the
a
in
cat
. Her old vocal coach would have had a field day with Big Red.

Delilah wound her arms around his leg. “Daddy, I'm tired. Can we go home now?”

The overhead light sparkled off the gold wedding band on Red's left hand as he lifted his daughter into his arms. “I've got to stay in town to take care of some business, sweetheart, so I'll have to take you over to Aunt Sissy's. You can play with Baby Zoey and take a nap.”

Delilah pulled away from her father, and her lower lip pushed out. “Don't wanna stay with Aunt Sissy and play with Zoey! Wanna stay with the pretty lady!”

Red looked at Moira and raised an eyebrow briefly, like the reverse of a wink, and his deep voice turned to velvet. “Honey, I'd like to stay with the pretty lady too, but I can't stay with either of you right now. Got some work to do.” His gorgeous eyes focused on Moira, and his voice took on a warm lilt. “Maybe the pretty lady could meet up with me later this evenin' over drinks and we could get better acquainted.”

Moira gave him her best arctic stare. “I don't think so.” Pivoting on the heels of her sensible black pumps, she marched back down the hall.

What a creep! Making a pass at her in front of his innocent child. She wouldn't want to be his wife!

Cool it, Moira. It doesn't matter.
According to Google, Bosque Bend had a population of almost twelve thousand, so the odds were that she'd never see Big Red again.

She walked up the stairs, and glanced toward the auditorium doors across from Room 300. Pendleton Swaim had told her they were kept locked, but he'd get her a key. It didn't matter. The stage wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, and Pendleton Swaim had written the new show for this particular venue, which meant there shouldn't be any wicked surprises.

“The holiday season is our big moneymaker,” he'd told her when he interviewed her by phone. “Everyone wanted to do a musical, so I wrote one. Lots of singing and dancing. Lots of kiddos too. We try to get the whole community involved. Little actors grow up to be big contributors.”

“What's the plot?”

“Well, I've always been partial to O. Henry because he's a distant relative, so I decided to base the play on his most famous short story, ‘The Gift of the Magi.' It's the one about the husband pawning his watch to give the wife a comb for her hair and her selling her hair to give him a fob for his watch. O. Henry was living in Texas at the time, but I never thought the story had a Texas feel to it, so I switched it to London, which allowed me to use a lot of kids in the play—guttersnipes, bootblacks, flower girls, and the like. Never did like the way it ended, so I expanded the story to two acts, wrote a libretto, and gave it a happy ending.”

“Sounds good to me.” She was all for happy endings. In fact, she was in search of one of her own. God knows, she'd seen enough of the other side of the coin.

Moira paused outside the door of the Room 300 and murmured a few calming
om
s, then smoothed down the skirt of her dress again and fluffed up her new, short hairdo.

Costuming makes the character, as the wardrobe mistress of
The Clancy Family
had told Moira when she'd rebelled against the pink-and-white dresses Nancy Clancy always got stuck with, and now she wanted to look like a competent, complete professional. No pink and white, no ragged jeans, no resemblance to the scatterbrained Nancy Clancy, smart-mouthed Twinky Applejack, or any of the myriad other roles she'd played. That part of her life was over. She was herself now, Moira Miranda Farrar, and she'd be the one directing not only the show, but her own life as well.

Setting her jaw, she turned the doorknob.

An awkward, white-haired Ichabod Crane of a man rose in old-fashioned courtesy and pulled out the chair next to him. “Come sit by me, Moira. I'm Pendleton Swaim.”

Moira gave the assemblage a confident smile, then walked briskly to the table and took her seat.
Pretend like you've done this a million times before.

Pen beamed at her. “So nice to meet you in person. I must confess that I never watched
The Clancy Family
, but I hope I redeem myself by saying I did catch a couple of episodes of Johnny's sci-fi show.”

“
Quark Kent, MD
.” Johnny had been a teenage Martian doctor with comic-book-hero powers, and she'd played his mechanical assistant. It was the nadir of her acting career, clanking around in a tin suit and pretending to have a robotic crush on Johnny, but she kept the smile pasted on her face.

“I had a wonderful time as a child actor, but as an adult, I prefer being behind the scenes.” What choice did she have? Her acting career was down the drain.

Pen nodded. “Johnny said you would be perfect for us. I understand that, as well as years of practical experience, you have a drama degree from UCLA.”

“Yes, when Johnny left
Quark Kent
, I decided to take a break from acting and go to college.” Theater seemed the logical choice of major.

A short-necked, muscular woman with over-rouged cheeks and unbelievably black hair leaned across the table. “I'm Xandra Fontaine, and we're so happy to have you with us, Mrs. Sanger.”

Moira gave Xandra her best fake smile. “Farrar, please. I've reverted to my maiden name—for professional purposes, of course.” As if she'd ever get a role again. She'd turned down the right roles at the wrong time after marrying Colin, and her acting career had wilted and died on the vine. Giving up her career hadn't helped her marriage, and in the end, Colin had passed away a few years ago. “And I don't want to trade on Colin's name.”