Kasey Michaels - Raffling Ryan

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OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER FOR HUNK NUMBER 22I, the undersigned, agree that Ryan Chandler is to be mine for only one (1) day. According to auction rules, Ryan can expect to:1. Provide tall handyman services.2. Become respectable role model for my nine-going-on-thirty growing boy.3. Provide adequate shelter after aforementioned handyman services cause destruction of household.4. Furnish unforgettable kisses.5. Consider staying for a lifetime….Signed: Janna Monroe

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“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, 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?”

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