Breaking the Rules (29 page)

Hastily, Jessie scrambled to her feet, gesturing toward Giselle.

Wilkes laughed. “It’s been tried before, you know. It never works.”

“This time it will,” Luke promised quietly, and walked out.

Giselle skipped after him, leaving Jessie behind. Jessie picked up her scarf and purse from the chair. “I hope you’ll give this some thought, Mr. Wilkes,” she said. “It is going to work this time.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Lifting her purse and scarf to her chest like armor, Jessie headed outside—for the second confrontation of the day.

* * *

Luke patted his shirt pocket for the bag of tobacco he kept there, wondering if he had time to roll a cigarette before Jessie reappeared. He could use one.

He decided to try and pulled the makings out—a single thin sheet of paper, a perfect pinch of moist tobacco, a deft roll and quick lick. Done. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

“You shouldn’t smoke, you know,” said the little girl beside him. “My teachers told me it can give you cancer or heart attacks. I convinced my mom to quit.”

Luke pursed his lips, then squatted beside her. Such a beauty, he thought again with a twinge in his chest. His child.

“I don’t smoke a whole lot,” he told her. “That’s what’s hard for people to remember—a little tobacco, a little beer, a little cake, they’re all okay. If you smoke a pack a day or drink a bottle of whiskey or eat a whole cake, then you get sick.”

Her enormous topaz eyes rested on his face. “You’re my father, aren’t you?”

Luke held her gaze. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Are you mad at my mother?”

He took a kitchen match from his pocket and scratched the tip with his thumbnail. Mad? He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply before he spoke. “No,” he lied, to spare the child who had nothing to do with anything between her mother and father.

The door swung open and Jessie pushed outside, a swirl of color and glitter and fragrance. Luke saw her spy him and Giselle cozily talking together on the sidewalk; then he watched as she planted her feet and crossed her arms in a fighting posture. Squatting as he was, Luke was at a disadvantage.

There was also the small matter of his breath, which seemed to have deserted him.

Damn. He searched for his fury. She’d hidden from him for eight years, not only herself, but her daughter. There should be nothing but fury in him.

He had loved this woman once with an almost scorching intensity. Seeing her again so suddenly unnerved him, tangled him up inside like a can full of rubber bands.

How could anyone remain so unchanged? She was as beautiful as she had been the first time he’d seen her, almost twelve years ago. It was a beauty as wild and tender as the stubborn roses that grew by the sea in her father’s California garden. Her skin was pale and pure, her hair a rich chestnut that spilled in abundance over her shoulders, catching around the rise of one breast as if in a caress.

But it was her eyes that had bewitched him the first time, so many years ago, the same extraordinary eyes her daughter had inherited—eyes the color of the first golden fingers of morning sunlight. They bewitched him again now.

“Come on, Giselle, let’s go,” she said, and turned.

Luke was on his feet instantly. “Jessie,” he called in a harsh voice.

She whirled, ready to battle. He could see it in her stance, in her fisted hands, in the blaze of her eyes. She was scared stiff and as unsettled as he, but battle she would. “What?”

“You can’t just walk away.”

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “Can’t I?”

That brought his fury rushing back, clean and pure as a mountain stream. “Well,” he said quietly, “I guess you can. You’ve done it before.”

She just looked at him.

He crushed the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his boot, exhaling in an effort to curb his anger. “I’m asking you not to.” He touched Giselle’s hair in wonder, and she looked up at Jessie with hope, a hope and pleading that broke his heart.

Jessie saw it, too. Luke saw her swallow—and for an instant, he felt pity for her. He and Giselle had nothing to lose, everything to gain. For Jessie, quite the opposite was true. “Giselle,” he said quietly, “give me a minute with your mother, all right?”

“I don’t want a moment with you, Luke,” Jessie whispered fiercely, but Giselle had already skipped away.

He set his jaw. “Looks to me like you got caught red-handed, me and her in the same place at the same time.”

She refused to look at him.

“Look, Jessie, we can let sleeping dogs lie or we can have a bloody, screaming fight in the middle of the street. I don’t really give a damn about the past, but you can’t expect me to just walk away from my only child without a second glance.” He crossed his arms. “Be fair.”

“Fair!” She spat the word.

Light glowed like wine in the rippling fall of her hair, danced like moonlight over her nearly translucent skin. Luke could smell her perfume, a deeply exotic mix of frangipani and sandalwood and something he couldn’t name. It made him dizzy. “Well, maybe fair is the wrong word,” he admitted.

Her gaze, frightened and wary, met his. Luke felt the impact as a fist to his gut and he glanced away. “I’m sober now, Jessie,” he said, looking at a piece of mica caught in the sidewalk just beyond the toe of his boot. In his ears, his voice was rough.

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and in the silence between them Luke felt a rush of things spring and whirl like dust devils. “I can see that.”

“Just come with me now for a little while,” he urged. “We’ll get a hamburger or something. You’ve had a long time to know her, Jessie. Give me an hour or two.” He licked his lips. “Please.”

For a moment, he thought she would refuse. Her chin jutted stubbornly toward the mountains. Suddenly, she capitulated. “All right. But only an hour.”

He found his gaze on the curve of her cheek, at once intimately familiar and completely strange to him. A sword of that old, familiar grief stabbed his gut. In a harsh voice, he asked, “You want to go in my truck?”

“We’ll just follow you.”

In the instant before she turned, Luke thought he glimpsed a tear.

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