know that. “Got any aspirin, Ms. Monroe?” he asked after a moment.
She got up quickly to get the aspirin bottle down from the cabinet, keeping her eyes on him. Look how he frowned. He was so cute when he frowned. Tall, dark, green-eyed…and really, really cute. Almost cuddly, although she doubted anyone had ever told him that! She nearly dropped the aspirin bottle, realizing that her mind had taken a quantum leap from dirty garages to…well, she’d think about all of that later, wouldn’t she? “You have a headache?” she asked.
“No, but I’m pretty sure I will any minute now,” Ryan said, accepting the two tablets she handed him, swallowing them down with a sip of coffee, and then heading for the back door.
Janna felt the sudden, irresistible need to make a stupid fool of herself, something she could usually do with quite a flourish, especially considering she hadn’t felt foolish about a man—especially a man like Ryan Chandler—in a very, very long time.
“The garage door has one of those electronic openers,” she told him, hands on hips as she felt her tongue begin to run on wheels. “The code is 0000, as it’s easy to remember—and because zero is the lowest number on the keypad and Zachary could reach it by the time he was five and we put it up—and then you press the Enter button and the door goes right up. Sorry if I’m rattling on. I was just giving you a bit of Monroe folklore, or whatever. You don’t mind, do you? No, of course you don’t.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, shaking his head as he pulled the door shut behind him.
Janna put her hands on her hips and stared at the closed door for some moments. The colorful room suddenly seemed drab, now that he’d left it. “The man’s obviously in a daze,” she told herself with false concern and a pot full of ulterior motive. “He’ll forget the code on his own,” she said out loud finally, and went after him.
Three hours, four bandages, and several muttered curse words later, the garage was clean. Hell, it sparkled, if a garage could be said to sparkle.
And, much to Ryan’s surprise, he was beginning to enjoy himself.
Janna had been as good as her word, and had helped screw together the inexpensive, freestanding metal shelves, using an electric screwdriver that had enough attachments to be standard issue on a manned Mars landing-and-recovery module.
As she had put the last bandage on his scraped elbow, a maneuver he couldn’t quite manage himself, she’d kissed the cartoon-covered strip to “make it all better.”
He hadn’t even felt insulted, being lumped into Zachary’s age group, where kissing to make things better must be standard operating procedure.
Besides, it worked.
“Where to now, boss?” he asked, still feeling pretty good about himself. He was, after all, in very good shape. He worked out three times a week in his own home exercise room—without resorting to Allie’s motivational exercise tapes. He golfed. He played the occasional game of tennis—although never against Allie, who cheated blatantly. “Out” to his grandmother only counted if she called it.
“Where to now? Upstairs, to the main bathroom,” Janna answered, already leading the way.
The trip to the second floor meant that Ryan was going to get a look at her house, which intrigued him mightily. Outside, it was a typical redbrick Cape Cod, although the bright-yellow shutters and woodwork were, to say the least, out of the ordinary. However, once inside her kitchen, he’d known that here lived a woman who was either color blind or in love with color. Bright colors. Sunshiny colors. Happy colors. She’d even painted the interior of her garage a sunny yellow—with blue stripes, no less.
They passed through the kitchen and directly into the dining room. Ryan stopped in his tracks, instantly mesmerized by the hand-painted mural on the wall shared with the kitchen. It was a scene from a park, a Paris park, in fact. He recognized snippets from his art history classes. The tree in the foreground. The lady in the hat, exposing her profile and the bustle of her long skirt.
“Isn’t that Monet?” he asked, pointing to the mural.
Her grin flashed at him, once again nearly blinding him—he’d really have to get used to the fact that she seemed so damned happy all the time. “Nope. It’s a Monroe,” she corrected, idly tracing a finger over the lady’s profile. “See? That’s me under the hat. And the little boy? That’s Zachary, although he was only five then, of course. Oh, it might have started out as a Monet, but I added a few touches of my own. Like the parrot in that tree over there. Like it?”
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,
