Goes down easy(20)

“Huh. Seems strange, considering that you can see so much about others.”

“It’s like the cobbler’s own shoes always being in need of repair.” The bedcovers rustled as she shifted to lay her head on his shoulder. “Besides, who purposefully seeks out their own faults?”

“Most of us don’t need to. We face them on a daily basis.”

She was quiet after that, letting several long seconds tick by lost in thought. He wondered if he’d said something wrong. Or if she’d started counting all of his shortcomings and had already lost track.

So when she finally spoke, she caught him off guard. And what she said set his heart to pumping. “It wasn’t your fault that your father was killed. And putting in the hours you do won’t bring him back.”

He breathed in, waited, breathed out, paused. And then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat. “I put in the hours I do because of the scum on the streets. The more I can scrape up, the fewer bricks and broken windows and kidnapped computer gurus to deal with.”

Della sat up, moving behind him to massage his shoulders. He couldn’t relax, couldn’t find the peace of mind to enjoy the soothing touch of her fingers.

He got to his feet before she could “sense” anything else about him, and hunted on the floor for his clothes. The phone rang when he was zipping his pants. Della turned on the bedside lamp and answered.

The conversation was short, and obviously with her niece. He picked up just enough from Della’s side to figure out Perry wanted them to meet her somewhere. As long as Della was up to it, he’d welcome the distraction.

He preferred working in the present, focusing on the here and now. The past was long gone; it couldn’t be changed—even though he wished every day that it could.





THAT KISS to the neck had been a mistake. It was a kiss she had known would never be enough. It was a kiss that should never have happened.

Drake wanted more. Always more. He couldn’t get his fill of her. And getting what she wanted of him had begun to be a problem more than a joy.

Big Bruiser Babin didn’t like the idea of his wife making her way home alone. He liked even less her doing so in the company of another man.

Drake had seen her safely away from the club that first night. He’d walked her through the courtyard and up to her own back door.

Big Bruiser had been in the kitchen. He’d seen them walk up. He’d met them on the stoop. He’d been polite to Drake. He’d been a sweet potato dumpling to her.

And then he’d told her he’d be stopping by the Golden Key every night when she sang to take her home himself. He hadn’t listened to her objections—he was too busy to have to play nursemaid to her—he’d simply put his foot down.

He’d never cottoned to the idea of leaving her there unchaperoned, but he knew what it meant to her to sing. Being the chief of police allowed Big Bruiser Babin the freedom to do just about anything he wanted to do.

It also meant he never worried about his own coming to harm. He considered himself untouchable, higher than the law he upheld, immune to the misfortune that befell the men whose rehabilitation rested on his broad shoulders.

That particularly arrogant trait had first brought him to Sugar’s notice. But it had soon caused her admiration to drift, her affections to drift as well.

After all, when she’d said, “I do,” to Big Bruiser, she hadn’t expected to find herself wed to a man already married to the police department for the city of New Orleans.





DELLA AGREED TO JACK’S request and arranged to meet him later that morning at the warehouse Eckton Computing had once leased. Perry had come along, leaving Sugar Blues in Kachina’s hands, and now sat with Jack in his SUV, the heater running on high while they waited for Book and Della.

The cold had settled in to stay, and Jack had left his bomber jacket at her place. Watching him shiver in his sweatshirt tugged at her heart. He’d obviously packed light before leaving Texas, basing his needs on the unseasonable heat wave rather than the cold snap that had blown in as predicted.

Then again, he’d probably grabbed what was closest and hopefully clean. He didn’t seem concerned with much beyond simplicity. Except when it came to his equipment. Both his laptop and his SUV were tricked out with gadgets she’d never imagined existed.

To break the drive’s uncomfortable silence, she’d asked him about all she could see. He’d told her about Becca, his assistant, and how his Yukon was his office on wheels. But he hadn’t been particularly chatty. And soon she let him be, deciding he’d retreated into his man cave and was feeling the need to brood.

Parked in front of the empty warehouse, one of many in a long, unattended row, they soaked up the heat in a silence broken only by the sports radio station he’d tuned into. It was a distraction more than anything, keeping them from having to talk. Keeping him from having to admit she sat less than three feet away.

Obviously, she’d hit a hot button…or two or three or four…while ferreting out his scars. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the damage inflicted hadn’t all been to his body.

She hated this new tension that had sprung up between them. Tension was supposed to happen before sex, not afterward, making the air when they were together even harder to breathe. Sharing the front seat of his vehicle shouldn’t be as unsettling as waiting for the results of medical tests.

And didn’t that serve her right for thinking his invitation to sit in his lap was about more than sitting in his lap? Why she’d thought Jack would be different, that he’d finally be the one to think about sex with the head on his shoulders, still escaped her.

Men were all the same. They’d take their sports any way they could get them. On the field, the bed, the radio, grrr. She reached over, punched the buttons until she found a song that didn’t make her think about drowning her sorrows in either a bottle of beer or the river.

She turned her head, stared out the window where the water of the Mississippi was as flat and gray as the sky above. And it wasn’t until the one song had finished and the next began that she realized Jack was singing.

Straining to listen, she frowned, then closed her eyes to focus. He didn’t miss a beat. Not the lyrics. Not so much as a single note.

His voice was gruff, deep, a rock star’s voice without the distortion of a mixer or a mike. It was a sexy sound, one that had her squirming in her seat, one that turned up the tension and the heat.

“You can sing,” she finally said, glancing over.

“I can also play bass,” he said, never looking her way.

“You didn’t tell me.”

He shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

“I never had reason to.” She waited, and when he said nothing more, she added, “Until now.”

His mouth twitched, and he gave her a smile. “Does that mean you’re asking?”

She couldn’t believe the relief that came with that smile. “Yes. I’m asking.”

“What exactly do you want to know?”

Why everything with you is a battle, for one thing. “When did you learn? How did you learn?”

“The bass I picked up listening to John Paul Jones, then I played it in band in high school.”

She had no idea who John Paul Jones was and didn’t care enough to ask. “What about the singing? Did you sing in school, too?”

He didn’t say anything for so long that she didn’t think he’d heard her, and she started to ask the question again. His shifting in his seat stopped her.

“No.” He flexed the fingers he’d draped over the steering wheel. “I sang with a band for a while after getting out of the service.”

The way he said it, “getting out”, turned the expression into a statement. One that reminded her of Della’s dismay at his suffering.

“A band I’d know?” she asked, when she didn’t care about that either. What she wanted to know was what had gone on during his years of enlistment. If what Della had seen had happened then, or happened earlier.

“I doubt it. We played a lot of small clubs across the Southwest. Stayed on the west coast for several months.”

“Did you record?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Just gave a lot of drunks music to pass out to.”

Was that really what he thought? “You have a great voice. I’m sure you had fans.”

“If we did, no one told me.”

Or maybe you couldn’t see them because that big chip on your shoulder was in the way. “Do you still play together? You never did tell me the name of the band.”

“No. Our drummer took off on a trip with Mr. Ellis Dee and never came back.” He reached down for the controls to his seat and moved all the way back, stretching his legs. “They called the band Diamond Jack.”

“I’m sorry. For your friend.”

He rolled his shoulders; she took it as a shrug of indifference. “We played together, traveled together. We weren’t die-hard friends.” And then he gave a soft chuckle.

“What?”

“What what?”

“You laughed.”

“It’s nothing. Just thinking about friends I had in high school. The ones I told you about last night. We played together in an ensemble. Now that was a band.” He shook his head. “God, I miss those guys.”