Raffling Ryan

Ignoring the parrot, Ryan peered closely at the woman’s face. Damn if it wasn’t Janna Monroe, complete with burnished curls. He slowly shook his head. “Remarkable. You’re quite good, you know. A little flaky, maybe, but good.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. The little bit flaky part, especially. Mark, my husband, said being flaky was my most endearing trait.”

“Your husband,” Ryan repeated, surprised to feel so shocked to learn about this man called Mark. Maybe he had thought Zachary had been hatched under a cabbage patch. Maybe he’d thought she’d had a youthful fling. But a husband? Why hadn’t he considered the fact that she might have—or had—a husband?

“Mark, yes,” Janna said evenly. “He’s not in the mural because I couldn’t…well, I couldn’t bring myself to paint his portrait after he died. That was when Zachary was eighteen months old, a few years before we moved here from Soho, in fact. Shall we go upstairs now?”

Ryan followed her to the center hall and the stairs, only vaguely taking in the old but comfortable-looking faded chintz couches in the living room, the round oak pedestal table that sat in the dining room. It was the furniture of castoffs, of well-loved hand-me-downs. The sort of things found in a first apartment, or a newlyweds’ home. And, he thought fleetingly, not the sort of home or furniture that cried out that Janna Monroe had an extra two thousand dollars lying around to fling at a charity, any charity. “Soho? You lived in New York City?”

“We had a loft,” she told him, climbing the stairs ahead of him, giving him a good view of her jean-covered rear. Ryan deliberately looked away. He was much too enthralled with the view not to look away. “Mark was an artist, and quite good. Sculptor, actually. Much better than me. A couple of his works are in parks in New Jersey and Connecticut. But there was no sense staying, not after he was gone, and we’d always wanted Zachary to grow up with grass and trees and Little League. So I finally decided to leave, closed my eyes and stabbed a finger on the map, and we moved here.”

“What if you had ended up with your finger stuck in the middle of Lake Erie, or even the Atlantic Ocean?” Ryan asked, wondering if, just maybe, he’d fallen down a rabbit hole and was now doing his version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The gray-blue-and-orange-mottled feline perched at the top of the steps didn’t look like the Cheshire Cat, but the thing was grinning at him, damn it.

Janna turned at the top of the stairs, looking back at him. “Oh, that wouldn’t have happened,” she told him.

“Why not?” he asked. Then the word that had been chanting in his head off and on for the past two hours chimed out again: hippie. Was it possible Janna was a neo-hippie, if there were such things as neo-hippies, considering most of the real hippies were soon going to be old enough to apply for retirement benefits from the Establishment they’d vowed never to trust. Still, he gave it a shot. “Or do you think it was your karma or something?”

“Karma? Gee, I haven’t heard that one in a while,” she said, turning to lead the way toward the bathroom. “No, it wouldn’t happen because I researched several cities carefully, checked out schools and crime levels and all that stuff, made my choice, then peeked before I poked. But don’t tell Zachary. He thinks I’m brilliant. Besides, it pays to have children believe their parents just might have special powers, or eyes in the backs of their heads. At least until they’re old enough to know better than to touch matches or play with unknown dogs, or take candy from strangers. Right now, I’m omnipotent to Zachary, and he believes everything that comes out of my mouth. Believes and obeys. And that’s the way I’m going to keep it, at least until he’s heading for college.”

“How old is he? Nine? Ten?”

“Nine and three-quarters,” Janna told him, pulling a face. “I’m running out of time, aren’t I? I mean, last week he asked me how he got here.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him, of course, as you should always answer serious questions truthfully, but I didn’t say much—no more than he’d asked. But I won’t say it isn’t hard for a mother and son, especially in situations like that. There are times when I miss Mark so much….”

Then she grinned again, her eyes coming alive once more. “Here we are. How good are you with a caulk gun?”

Ryan didn’t answer for a moment. He was too busy thinking about what Allie had said. What was it? Oh, yes, something about Janna Monroe putting on those bright colors and happy smiles to hide something sad inside her. How he hated when his grandmother was right.

And then there was the fact that he had, without really noticing, somehow walked down the hallway and straight into what could only be Janna’s bedroom.

This room, compared to the other rooms he had seen, seemed plain, almost stark. A virgin room, with a single bed, and no sign of color or froufrou lace he’d come to expect in a woman’s bedroom.

For all the verve, the color, the absolute joy of the rest of the house, this room could have been plucked straight from an eighteenth-century nunnery.

Yes, Ryan told himself. This was a woman who held a few secret sorrows. A widow with a son and a lot of memories she was either trying to banish or hold to herself, cling to by not surrounding herself with womanly things, loverlike things.

“Ryan—yoo-hoo? Caulk guns? Are you familiar with them?”

He looked at the thing Janna was now waving in front of his face. Big. Gray metal. Sort of like a gun, but not like a gun. And totally incomprehensible to him as to how the thing could and should be used.

He gently pushed the caulk gun to one side, so that it was no longer pointed at him, even if it wasn’t loaded. “My mother never allowed me to play with guns,” he said, hoping a little levity—no matter how bad—might defuse this potentially embarrassing situation.

“You don’t know, do you?” Janna asked, but he could tell that it was a rhetorical question, so he didn’t answer. “Do you want to learn?”

“Why don’t you ask me if I want a root canal? That answer might be yes, as it seems more painless. What do you do with that thing?”

Janna proceeded to demonstrate, loading a container of caulk into the gun and then motioning for Ryan to follow her into the bathroom.

“Gun, tub. Caulk, crack. Aim, fire,” she said, each word punctuated by hand movements that certainly brought her point across, but that did nothing to make Ryan feel as if she were Tom Sawyer and he should now be looking longingly at a pail of whitewash and a mile of fence.

“You’re kidding, right?”

Janna tipped back an imaginary cowboy hat with the plastic tip of the caulk insert, then rubbed a hand under her nose as she leaned against the shower stall. “Whatsa matter, bucko? You chicken? Here,” she declared, all but throwing the caulk gun into his hands. “I’ll even hum the theme from High Noon, if that will help.”

Chicken? How dare she…how dare she laugh at him! And look so damn cute while she did it, which only made him angrier than he’d been, and he had been getting pretty peeved at this whole idea. Cleaning a garage was one thing. Not a great thing, but he had felt some stupid sense of accomplishment once the chore had been completed. But to be dared—pretty close to double-dared—into getting down on his hands and knees inside a cramped shower stall and shooting gunk into the cracks between the bright-pink tiles?

Not in this lifetime, he wasn’t!

Yes, he was. Because she had dared him, and the twinkle in her huge brown eyes told him she already knew she’d won.

Janna stepped past him, back into the hall. “I don’t think I can watch this. I’ll be downstairs, starting the grill for lunch. You do like charbroiled hamburgers, don’t you?”

“If I said I was hypoglycemic and needed red meat now, would you let me start the grill and kill the shower stall after lunch?”

Janna tipped her head to one side, considering his offer. “You’re not, are you? Really hypoglycemic, that is? No, of course you’re not. But I have to hand it to you, that was a good excuse. Just don’t ever repeat it around Zach, okay?”

“So I get to start the fire?” Ryan asked, wondering if he sounded as pathetic as he felt. Here he was, a grown man, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to do a simple household repair. But then, why should he? He’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, and had never done any more onerous chores than making up his own bed. He didn’t know if he could justify his lack of mechanical skills, or if he was just plain embarrassed by that lack.

Either way, he figured starting a gas grill won hands down over caulking tub tile.

“Tell you what. You start the fire and I’ll caulk the tiles. Deal?” Janna said, and if she was laughing at him or rescuing him he didn’t know. He just knew he felt a sudden urge to grab her up, kiss her senseless for her compassion.

Still, like a man fighting over a lunch check, he did the polite thing and responded, “No, no. There’s no need. I can fix the tile after lunch. Really.”

“Really?” Janna shot right back at him. “Now, is it my turn to say you shouldn’t be silly, that I’ll do it? Because if it is, you’re plain out of luck, bucko, because you’re on. You can do the job after lunch.” She put down the caulk gun, laying it carefully on a plush rug with a huge pink rose sort of blossoming in the middle of it. “I’m feeling filthy after wading through the dirt in the garage. I think I’ll just go take a shower in the other bathroom, then come downstairs when I smell the burgers cooking.”

Ryan watched her go, tried very hard not to imagine her in the shower. Her wet skin glistening. One of those weird “net” things all soapy as she ran it over her skin.

Down her arm. Across her legs.

Bending to soap her leg.

He closed his eyes tight, tried to banish the image. Shame, shame, shame on him.

Go downstairs and light the fire? He wouldn’t even have to turn on the propane. Hell, all he’d have to do was look at the coals and they’d ignite!

Chapter Three

Ryan was still muttering under his breath as he slammed out of the kitchen door and onto the small brick patio. Outfoxed by a woman. Outmaneuvered by a woman who knew darn full well she’d just scored and he’d lost.

He knew that because she laughed—giggled, even—all the way back down the hall, until she turned into the second door on the left, which housed the main bathroom.

Before he’d gotten halfway down the stairs he’d heard the shower turn on, and before he could make himself walk past the dining room mural that still drew him like a magnet, she was singing at the top of her lungs.

She was taking a shower, getting clean. How nice for her.

While he was hot, sweaty, dirty and felt pretty much like he’d been hired out to be on a chain gang. Oppressed. Overworked. Definitely not appreciated.

And, unfortunately, not very well equipped to look good while he was mucking around doing ridiculous chores the rest of the male world could probably complete with one hand tied behind their backs.

He had a huge pull in the front of his brand-new designer shirt, a cartoon bandage on his elbow, smears of dirt all over his khaki slacks and…as he passed by a small mirror in the hall…it would seem that he’d somehow gotten something green stuck in his hair that Janna hadn’t bothered to mention to him.

Yeah. A root canal probably would be more fun.

He could cheerfully strangle the woman, and lay the blame squarely where it belonged—on Allie. There wasn’t a jury in the country that would convict him.

What really bothered him, and what he really wished he wouldn’t be considering, or worrying about, was what a really rotten impression he must be making on Janna Monroe.

Not that he liked her. How could anyone like such an obvious…an obvious—was she really a flake? Could he honestly call her that?

No. No, he couldn’t. She was a widow with a son. She had her own business, although he still didn’t know what that was. He only knew it took reams of paper to run that business, and he knew because he’d loaded about a ton’s worth onto the new shelves in the garage.

She owned a home. She seemed to be a good mother. She knew how to use a caulk gun….

“Damn her,” Ryan said, his heart not in his words enough to raise them much above a whisper. Still, the child heard him.

He hadn’t heard the child, probably because he wasn’t looking at anything besides the old-fashioned barbecue grill he’d just uncovered. He’d planned on turning a switch and starting a propane gas grill. But there was no propane tank. There wasn’t even very much of a grill, just an ancient big kettle on three legs, a bag of charcoal stored under the hood, and some liquid fire starter and long matches.

At least he wouldn’t have to rub two sticks together.

“You’re mad at Mom?” the voice behind Ryan asked, so that he whirled around, the box of matches flying from his hand and opening, spilling all over the bricks. “What’d she do?”

Ryan bit down on yet another “damn,” knowing that little pitchers have big ears, or whatever it was Mrs. Ballantine had said the day her young grandnephew had visited the household and Allie had plucked a few choice words from her vocabulary when the kid had put his foot through her new tennis racket.

“Hi,” he said instead, plastering a wide smile on his face. After that, he was lost, because he’d never been around children much at all, and worried he might not be good with them.

Zachary seemed to sense this, and tipped his head at him the same infuriating way his mother had done earlier, then said, “You don’t know how to light the grill, do you? Want me to do it?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else?” Ryan nearly growled. What had happened to him this morning? Had he suddenly turned transparent, his every flaw, his every lack, able to be seen?

“I would still be at practice, except that Timmy Wetherhold took a header straight into the goal and Coach had to take him to the emergency room. Man, was he ever bloody. It was cool. So, what’s for lunch?”

Bloodthirsty little savage, Ryan thought, then remembered his own youth, and how cool he had thought it the day Parker Soames had run into a lacrosse bat and nearly sliced off his ear. Parker had been fine, but definitely bloody, and Ryan, at the ripe old age of thirteen, still hadn’t figured out that injuries could be serious. That was a good time in life, when a kid believed himself and everyone else to be immortal.

It had been, now that he thought back on it, only about three years before his parents died in that plane crash.

After that, he had understood mortality, and his world had considerably sobered as he’d felt the need to grow up overnight.

He wondered why Zach didn’t feel that way, after losing his father. He was younger than Ryan had been, granted, but life hadn’t exactly been kind to the kid. And yet he was just that—a kid. A happy, extroverted, pretty cool kid.

Janna Monroe must be doing something right.

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