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“Like I said before, she’s a teenager.”
Trying to be unobtrusive, Jo edged back into the hall.
“You know it’s more than that.” Tears glittered in the other woman’s blue eyes.
Her brother squeezed her shoulder. “The therapist told you there weren’t any easy answers.”
“Yes, but I thought…” She pressed her lips together. “I hoped…”
“I know,” he said, in a low, quiet rumble.
Kathleen turned almost blindly to Jo. “I’m sorry we keep throwing these scenes. You must wonder about us.”
They were both looking at her now. She couldn’t go hide in her bedroom. “No,” she lied. “I…”
“She has an eating disorder.” Tears wet Kathleen’s cheeks. “I suppose you noticed.”
Jo nodded dumbly.
“I thought my husband was the problem.” For a moment her face contorted before she regained control. “It would seem I was wrong.”
“Emma’s the one with the problem,” Ryan reminded her, in that same deep, soothing way.
“Is she?” Kathleen wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. Her eyes had a blind look again. “Excuse me.” She brushed past Jo and a moment later her bedroom door shut with another note of finality.
This silence was uncomfortable, too. Both spoke at the same time.
Jo began, “If you’d rather not…”
“Makes you glad you live here, doesn’t it?” Ryan said at the same time.
They both laughed, in the embarrassed way of people who don’t really know each other.
“Yeah, I’d still like to go out.” He raised his brows. “If that’s what you were going to say?”
Jo nodded.
“I don’t think we can expect dinner here,” he said wryly.
Jo gave another, less self-conscious laugh. “Actually, it’s Helen’s night. Lucky for her and Ginny.”
His deep chuckle felt pleasantly like a brush of a calloused finger on the skin of her nape. Jo loved his voice.
“Let’s make our getaway,” he said, grasping her elbow and steering her toward the stairs. “Unless you’ve changed your mind.”
“No.”
Masterful men usually irritated her. This one gave a wry smile and she crumpled. Ah, well. She hadn’t been charmed in too long.
She had to scramble to get up in the cab of his long-bed pickup truck. She’d noticed that weekend how spotlessly clean and shiny it was. The interior was as immaculate. Either he’d just bought it, or he loved his truck.
He’d be appalled if he saw the interior of her Honda, with fast-food wrappers spilling out of the garbage sack, books piled on the seats and dust on the dashboard. To her, a car was a convenience, no more, no less. You made sure it had oil changes so it would keep running, not because lavishing care on a heap of metal had any emotional return.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, starting the powerful engine.
She looked around pointedly. “That you’re a very tidy man.”
He shrugged. “I like everything in its place.”
Jo liked to be able to find things when she wanted them. Not the same.
“You and your sister.”
“She’s gotten better.” He sounded apologetic.
“I put away groceries. She rearranges them behind me. Alphabetically.” That had freaked Jo out. Who had time to care whether tomato soup sat to the right or left of cream of mushroom?
“She’s always been…compulsive.” The crease between his brows deepened again. “She and Ian had this showplace. Housecleaning staff. Kathleen made gourmet meals, entertained brilliantly, ran half a dozen charities with one hand tied behind her back. When she does something, it’s perfectly.”
His echo of Emma’s cry had to be deliberate.
“Was she always like that?”
He handled the huge pickup effortlessly on the narrow city streets, lined on each side with parked cars. Porch lights were coming on, although kids still rode skateboards on the sidewalks.
“Yes and no. Kathleen was a hard act to follow.” He glanced at Jo. “She’s two years older. Always straight A’s. The teachers beamed at mention of her, probably groaned once they knew me. She was…ambitious. Dad’s a welder at the shipyards, laid-off half the time, Mom was a waitress. Kathleen wanted better.”
Jo had begun to feel uncomfortable again. Did he think she was criticizing his sister, that he had to explain her?
“I like Kathleen,” she said, not sure if it was true, but feeling obligated.
They were heading south on Roosevelt, a busy one-way street, almost to the University district, which she had yet to explore at any length.
Ryan didn’t seem to read anything into her slightly prickly comment. “I like her, too. Most of the time. I admire her. Sometimes she bugs the hell out of me.”
He turned right a couple of blocks and into a parking lot across the street from a restaurant called Pagliacci’s. A big multiplex movie theater was next door.
“Eaten here?” he asked.
Jo shook her head. “I’ve grabbed lunch a couple of times at places farther down University. Thai or Mongolian.”
“Pagliacci’s has good pizza. For pasta, my favorite is Stella’s over by the Metro or Trattoria Mitchelli’s, down near Pioneer Square. Owned by the same people, I hear.”
“I love pizza,” she confessed. “I haven’t tried to find a good place yet in Seattle.”
As they waited on the sidewalk for a cluster of college students to exit, Ryan asked, “Why Seattle?”
“The UW has a great graduate program in librarianship. It’s supposed to be one of the best. That’s what I wanted.”
He gave her a teasing grin. “You sound like Kathleen.”
“I’m ambitious, too,” Jo admitted. “Just not…”
When she hesitated, he finished for her, “Compulsive?”
“Neat.” Jo laughed up at him as he held open the door for her. “Does that scare you?”
“Would I have to wade across your room?”
She let him steer her to the counter, his hand at her waist.
“Maybe,” she confessed, before slanting a sidelong look at him. “Assuming you had any reason to be walking across my bedroom.”
“You never know,” he murmured, head bent, his breath warm on her ear. “What do you want?”
You. Lord, how close she came to saying that out loud! She was especially embarrassed when she realized he’d effortlessly shifted gears from flirtation and was asking what kind of pizza she wanted to order.
“I like plain cheese, veggie or everything. You decide.”
“Veggie is good.” He bought a pitcher of beer and they found a table up a step toward the back, where the space was quieter, more intimate.
Talking to him was easy, listening easier yet. With that voice, he should have been a DJ. Jo had heard of couples having telephone sex during long separations, and never thought the idea had any appeal. With Ryan Grant, it might.
Assuming they got to sex in the first place.
She thought the chances were good they would. Unless it turned out he was hunting for wife number two to bear him two-point-five children.
In which case, alas, it wasn’t to be.
He talked about his business, the personalities among his crews, the irritations of dealing with homeowners who changed their minds every five minutes and couldn’t seem to remember to pay bills.
“But, hey,” he said finally, with a grin, “they let me play with their houses, so who am I to complain?”
Jo could just imagine how Kathleen would react to that attitude. “A man who has bills of his own to pay?” she suggested.
“There is that.” He was silent for a moment, hand cradling a mug of beer. “Why are you aiming to be a librarian?”
“Because I already am one.” She let out a huff of breath. “But without the graduate degree, I wasn’t paid like one, and couldn’t keep advancing.” She told him about starting as a page shelving books, about working nights as a clerk while getting her college degree, about stepping in as acting branch librarian. “Library budgets are always tight. Somehow they just let me stay. I did the job, they saved money. After a while, I resented that. And openings would come up that might have interested me—in outreach, or reference at headquarters, or the step above me, the librarian who oversaw branches—and I, of course, wasn’t eligible. I decided I could stew, or do something about it.”
“How long is the program?”
He listened in turn and encouraged her to talk about her classes, her need for a part-time job, and her decision to rent a room at his sister’s rather than look for an apartment on her own.
“Are you glad? Sorry?” he asked.
“Undecided,” Jo admitted. “They’re both nice women, but I hadn’t bargained for the kids, and I’m used to more privacy than I have now.”
His attention never wavered. “You didn’t have a roommate? Or a significant other?”
She shook her head. “I owned my own condo. I’m afraid the equity is financing my tuition.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Nobody serious.” She didn’t tell him “serious” wasn’t in her game plan. “You?”
Ryan shook his head in turn. “I’ve been divorced less than two years. Most of my spare time until a few months ago was spent with my kids.” A ripple of emotion passed through his eyes. “My ex remarried and this summer they moved to Denver.”
“Can she do that?”
“Regrettably, yeah.” He abruptly stood. “That’s us.”
Us? Jarred, she realized their pizza was ready.
Once they started dishing up and eating, Jo didn’t ask any more about his kids. Obviously, he missed them. But because they lived half a country away, she wouldn’t have to have anything to do with them. Thank God—she couldn’t see herself pretending to have great fun taking someone else’s children to the zoo or the water slides. Maybe this relationship had more promise than she’d feared.
As though tacitly agreeing to avoid subjects too personal, Ryan started in on local politics and the resultant taxes on a small business like his, grumbling about having to help pay for SafeCo Field for the Mariners. “Blowing up the damn King Dome.” He shook his head. “Can you believe it? Perfectly good stadium.”
“Aren’t you a baseball fan?”
“Yeah, sure I am.” He grinned. “I even like SafeCo Field. It’s cool that they can roll back the roof on a sunny day. But they just keep piling on the taxes, and I can’t afford it. I sure as hell don’t make any more money when the Mariners are successful.”
Corralling a long strand of cheese, she said, “No, I suppose not.”
“Hey.” He set down his beer mug. “Want to go to a Mariners game someday?”
Jo couldn’t help laughing. “I’d love to. Although, the Mariners… I don’t know. Maybe they’re an acquired taste. Now, me, I’m an Oakland A’s fan.”
He pretended shock, and they bandied mild insults along with a few stats.
Enjoying herself, Jo was also aware of feeling more self-conscious than she normally would on a casual date like this. It was Ryan, of course, who was responsible for her nervousness. Darn it, he was the sexiest man she’d seen in a long time—okay, forever. Excitement ran under her skin like an electric current, just a tingle that occasionally made her shiver. But she was disquieted by her powerful reaction to him.
Women did dumb things when they fell too hard for a man.
The pizza they hadn’t eaten grew cold on the table while they continued to talk. He was a reader, too, she discovered, and had even written poetry when he was in high school.
“Romantic, tragic crap,” he said with a laugh. His tone became smug. “Girls loved it, though.”
“I’ll bet they did,” Jo said with feeling. “My boyfriend in high school sometimes got really romantic and told me that making it with me was as good as hitting a homer. A real high, he said.”
Ryan threw his head back and gave a hearty laugh. “Did you punch him?”
“Yeah, actually, I think I did.” Jo chuckled, too. “I still remember the look of complete bewilderment on his face. He didn’t understand why I wasn’t clasping my hand to my heart to bestill its pitty-pats.”
Eyes still laughing, Ryan said, “Yeah, well, he’s probably long-married and his wife is damn lucky if once in a while he tells her she’s put on weight but she still has a good ass.”
Jo made a face. “If there’s any justice, she grabs his beer belly and tells him it doesn’t ripple like it used to, but she doesn’t mind love handles.”
“You think he has one?”
