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From the looks of him, he’d never been that happy in his life, Grace thought. But then, the haggard lines on his face could be mostly from fatigue. Or anger at her for disturbing his peace and quiet.
“Miss Holliday, it’s seven-thirty. My mom is going to be waiting out front.”
Giving herself a mental shake, Grace glanced away from the man to see Albert climbing down from the step-chair where he’d been practicing his violin.
“Excuse me,” she said to Jack. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Jack started to tell her it was time for him to go, too. But he stopped himself short. He’d wanted an opportunity to talk to her. Now that she’d given him one, it would be foolish to pass it up.
Jack listened while she gave Albert instructions on what to practice through the coming week. Eventually the boy’s sheet music and instrument were packed away and with a gentle smile, she led him by the hand out of the backyard.
As Jack watched, he had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that she seemed good with children. Though he’d never had any kids himself, he could easily remember back to when he’d been Albert’s age. Francine, his mother, had been loud and high strung with hardly any time for her son or daughter. She’d never smiled or touched him with the tenderness Grace has just shown Albert. She’d liked her cocktails and the social life that went with being the wife of a highly successful corporate lawyer. She’d seen that Jack and Jillian had the material things they’d needed, but had never given either of them any emotional nurturing.
Francine, having divorced their father shortly before he’d died of a heart attack, had quickly married a wealthy financier on the west coast. Jillian still shed tears when she recalled how their mother had treated them through the years. As for Jack, he didn’t give a damn if he ever saw the woman again.
Pushing the dark thought aside, Jack hitched up his trousers and took a seat on one of the lawn chairs to wait for Grace’s return.
Five minutes passed with no sign of Grace. Jack was getting more than a little restless, wishing he’d held his temper and tongue. He knew from long experience that badgering a person who held information he wanted was not the way to go about business. Honey always caught more flies than vinegar. Trouble was, Jack had almost forgotten how to sweeten his words and still manage to sound sincere. He’d used to be damned good at it, but then, he’d used to want to be a lawyer, too.
“Sorry I was gone so long. But Albert’s mother likes to talk.”
He glanced up to see Grace walking toward him. Quickly he rose to his feet. “Look, Miss Holliday, this whole thing with your students…let’s just forget it. If you’ll be kind enough to let me know when they’ll be around, I’ll try to be gone. That way neither of us will be bothered.”
She searched his face, trying to decide if his olive branch was real. She must have decided he’d passed the test, because after a moment she smiled.
Her teeth were very white against her creamy skin and red lips. A faint dimple dented one of her cheeks and for the first time he noticed there was a tiny freckle just above the top line of her lip. She was perfectly beautiful. If Trent had been involved with her, Jack could certainly see why. Attraction was stirring deep in his gut, making him wonder if he’d gone suddenly crazy. She was pregnant and a good fifteen years or more his junior!
“Please, call me Grace,” she invited. “You’re not one of my violin pupils.”
Clearing his throat, he said, “All right, Grace.”
That he’d conceded to call her by her first name seemed to please her. Her green eyes softened and her lips continued to tilt upward in a provocative smile. “Would you like something to drink. Iced tea? Coffee?”
At the moment he could have used a good shot of Kentucky bourbon, but she didn’t look to be the drinking sort. Actually, if it wasn’t for her pregnant condition, she’d be the perfect sheltered Southern miss.
“It’s hot inside the house,” she went on before he could answer. “But I could bring the drinks out here.”
She sounded almost eager for his company, making the skeptical part of him wonder why. No doubt she had plenty of male friends her own age. Obviously she’d had one in particular.
“There’s no need for you to bother,” he told her. “I just had supper not long ago.”
“Oh, it’s no bother,” she assured him. “You wait here and I’ll be right back.”
Once again Jack took a seat in the lawn chair and as he waited for her to return with the drinks, he made a slow survey of the backyard.
Along with the deep shade offered by the trees, a vine-covered arbor sheltered the brick patio. Potted plants grew in abundance everywhere, lending splashes of bright color to the modest surroundings. From the looks of the house, it needed attention in several places. The paint was particularly weathered and faded from the incessant onslaught of salty sea breeze.
The neglected condition of the house made him wonder what her parents did for a living and why they hadn’t made an effort to do better. But Jack wasn’t going to be too quick to pass judgment on the people. For all he knew, Grace’s parents might be working their butts off to put several more children through high school or college.
Inside the house, Grace momentarily leaned against the kitchen cabinet counter and pressed a paper towel moistened with cold water against her forehead. She was so sick of being hot and tired. So weary of trying to keep putting one foot in front of the other when every inch of her body was screaming to rest.
She didn’t know why in the world she’d invited Jack Barrett to stay for a drink. It wasn’t as if he was a good friend or even a fond acquaintance. But he was her next-door neighbor. And long before he’d died, her grandfather had passed on his Southern upbringing to Grace. Elias would’ve considered it downright rude to not be neighborly and hospitable. Even to a stranger, who wasn’t so friendly himself, she thought grimly.
But she wasn’t going to be too quick to judge Jack Barrett, she promised herself. He might be dealing with a lot of personal problems at the moment. His curt attitude might be hiding a broken heart. He certainly had the look of a man who didn’t have much love in his life. And Grace definitely knew how dark and lonely that could make a person feel.
Only a very short time passed before she reappeared carrying a tray with a tall pitcher and two tumblers filled with crushed ice. As she placed the tray on a small table between them and began to pour the tea, Jack felt a pang of uneasiness, even guilt.
He couldn’t believe she was offering him traditional Southern hospitality after the way he’d talked about her music pupils. But then, she could easily have an ulterior motive for being nice to him, just as he had for wanting to talk to her.
“You shouldn’t have gone to this much trouble. Not for me,” he said, wondering why the hell his conscious had suddenly decided to show its face after all these years.
She handed him one of the glasses, then gestured to the tray. “There’s sugar and lemon, if you like. As for the trouble, I have a motive for keeping you here with a drink.”
Jack’s hand paused in midair as he reached for a lemon wedge. “Oh,” he said guardedly. “What is it?”
“Well, I hope you won’t be offended, but—”
This brought his head up and his gaze connected with hers. A sheepish little smile was on her lips and he feared he was about to learn the true side of Grace Holliday.
“But what?” he pressed.
She shrugged, then let out a sigh. “I guess I might as well not be bashful about it,” she said. “Especially now that I have you here.”
His brows lifted with curiosity, but otherwise he remained quiet. Inside his chest, his heart beat with sluggish dread as he waited for her to continue.
Eventually she spoke. “After you said what you did a while ago about not having family and being here alone, I thought maybe…well, that I might do a little work for you while you’re here.”
Her suggestion jerked him straight up in the chair. Work! Was she crazy?
“Look, Grace, I don’t know what sort of work you have in mind, but I came down here to Biloxi to get out of the office. I only brought one lengthy brief with me and I can manage to type up my own notes.”
She tilted her head back and laughed. Jack was too busy taking in the smooth slender line of her neck and the musical sound slipping past her lips to be insulted by her response.
“I don’t mean legal work! Good Lord, I don’t know a thing about the law. I was talking about cleaning your house. Or maybe doing your cooking or laundry. Any chore of that sort which you might not want to tend to yourself.”
House-cleaning, cooking and laundry, in her condition? It was obscene, as far as Jack was concerned. His feelings must have shown on his face because as she continued to look at him, disappointment fell over her soft features.
“Grace, you obviously have a job with your music pupils. Surely your parents don’t want you taking on more. Especially in your shape.”
Her brows pulled together as a look of total confusion filled her face. “‘My parents’?” she repeated blankly. “Jack, I don’t have any parents. I live here alone.”
Chapter Three
“Alone? You live here—alone?”
The incredulous tone of his voice put a wan smile on Grace’s face. “Yes. I do. I teach violin on Tuesday and Friday evenings. The rest of the week, I go to college. So I need all the work I can get.”
“But you…you’re—” He couldn’t say the word and he knew some of his old law cronies would howl with laughter if they could see him now. Stuttering as though he were as green as grass. Damn it, what was wrong with him? There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen or confronted in his lifetime. Nothing embarrassed him. Nothing really touched him. He was too hard-shell, too used up to let anything get to him.
“Pregnant,” she finished for him. “But that doesn’t make me an invalid. It only makes me need the money more.”
That she wanted money had been in Jack’s mind all along, he’d just never expected her to want to work for it. Even now, he still wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.
“Aren’t your parents helping support you?” he was prompted to ask.
A guarded expression stole over her face as she quickly glanced away from him. “I don’t have any parents,” she said flatly. “Not in the normal way you’re thinking.”
“Are they dead?”
His blunt question didn’t seem to bother her and it made him wonder if deep down, beneath the smiles and gentle words she’d shown her music pupils, she was just as hard as he was. Jack had learned a long time ago that the female gender was expert at deception.
“My father died from a hunting accident when I was very small. As for my mother—she isn’t around.”
“Because she doesn’t approve of your pregnancy?”
Her brows lifted at his question and then a pained little smile curled the corners of her lips. “She doesn’t know about my pregnancy.”
“Why not?” Jack persisted.
She frowned at him as he tilted the glass to his lips.
“Do you always ask personal questions of strangers?”
Jack supposed he had been coming on a bit strong. He told himself it was because of Trent and Jillian that he was so eager to learn about Grace Holliday’s life. Yet somewhere in the deeper part of him, he had to admit he simply wanted to know her, the woman.
“Sorry. It’s the lawyer in me, I suppose. Asking questions is akin to breathing to me.” Without looking at her, he swirled the amber liquid in his glass, making the ice tinkle against the sides. “I guess the question was a bit nosy.”
Grace didn’t know what was the matter with her. Normally she never minded personal questions. Even ones that had to do with her flighty mother. But Trent’s desertion had changed her. She no longer trusted men. She took every word, every look, very cautiously. And something about Jack Barrett put her on guard even more.
“Why my mother doesn’t know about my pregnancy is a long story. One I’m sure you’d find boring,” she found herself saying.
He lifted his gaze to her and quickly discovered she was looking at him. The feel of her somber green eyes gliding over his face jerked at something buried between his chest and his gut.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he murmured.
She inhaled a deep breath, then glanced away from him as she let it out. “I can’t believe you thought I was living with my parents.” She turned her gaze back on him. “I’m twenty-three years old.”
She said it as if that was a great old age, as if she had plenty of wisdom to get along in this world alone. Any other time Jack would have snorted at her attitude, but something in her eyes stopped him. Behind her brave stare, there were dark, sad shadows that normally would have taken years to acquire.
He shrugged. “Because you’re single, I just assumed you still lived at home with your family. An honest mistake, don’t you think?”
She grimaced. “I suppose so.”
“Well, since I’ve already offended you I might as well go on and ask you how you manage to get by on your own like this. Is the baby’s father…helping you financially?”
She looked away from him. Jack couldn’t help but watch as she pressed the ice-cold glass against her throat and down the open collar of her blouse where it veed just above the valley between her breasts.
“No.”
As he digested the one word, he could only think that her baby couldn’t belong to Trent. Jillian hadn’t raised the boy to shirk his responsibilities.
“Doesn’t that make you angry?”
“Humph,” she softly snorted. “I don’t expect money from him. Having a man’s child isn’t about money.”
He watched her face keenly as he sipped from his glass. “Have you asked him for financial help?”
Her face suddenly turned stony. “No. And I don’t intend to. He—Trent doesn’t want me or the baby. And I don’t want handouts from him—or anyone else.”
Trent doesn’t want me or the baby. The volunteered information was so unexpected Jack was knocked sideways for a moment. Then doubt swiftly washed in behind the wave of surprise. Even if she did name Trent as the father of her baby, he wasn’t going to be so quick to believe her. She might have been involved with a number of young men, but Trent just happened to be the one with money.
“So this…er, Trent you were calling out for last night is the—father?”
Jack took the faint jerk of her head to be a nod.
Frowning he said, “Maybe the guy doesn’t have enough money to care for himself, much less a wife and baby,” he suggested.
She placed her glass on the table between them, then wearily rubbed her hands against the small of her back. “Trent has plenty of money,” she told him. “He spent more in the casinos than I make teaching violin all year.”
Jack didn’t doubt that. He could see she lived meagerly compared to the standards he and his nephew were accustomed to.
“Is that what drew you to him? His money?”
She scowled at him as she continued to push at her back. The movement thrust her breast forward and, although Jack told himself not to look, he couldn’t pull his eyes away from her lush, womanly body.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” she asked. “Do you have a fixation for money or something? You sure do mention it a lot.”
Her suggestion pulled him up short. Jack had never considered himself as having an obsession for money. He’d been born into wealth and as a grown man he’d acquired an even heftier sum of his own. It was something he’d never had to do without. Nor ever would. But Grace was right. He’d mentioned money several times to her in the past few minutes. Did he place too much importance on the stuff?
“No,” he answered out loud. “But I—I was just wondering what you’d seen in this guy in the first place. He sounds like a jerk to me. Are you…sure he’s the father of your baby?”
She stared at him and Jack knew he’d gone too far as he watched her jaw drop and hot color fill her cheeks.
“I’ve never met anyone so insulting in my life!” Rising to her feet, she picked up the tray. “Don’t bother to bring your glass to the door when you’ve finished. I’ll get it later.”
She turned and headed toward the house. Before Jack had time to consider his actions, he jumped from the chair and caught up to her on the shaded patio.
As she reached to open the door he caught her by the shoulder. “I’m sorry, Grace. I was out of line.”
The touch of his hand, more than his words, brought her head around and she glanced pointedly down at his long fingers.
“You’re not sorry. You were just being yourself. But that doesn’t mean I have to sit around and take it. I’m not one of your witnesses. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do.”
He released his fingers as though she’d scorched him, then jammed both his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers. “You’re mad at me,” he said, stunned that it should matter to him.
“No. Disappointed is more like it.”
Minute by minute this woman was turning out to be anything than what he’d first imagined her to be, and he didn’t know what to think or do next.
