Janice Johnson - Taking a Chance

Feeling as if she’d just been criticized, Jo reddened. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should have done that part of the floor…”

Kathleen laid a hand on her arm. “Don’t be silly. You’re a miracle worker. I’m just whining. I got up in the middle of the night last night and fell down the last three stairs. Ms. Graceful.”

Behind Jo, Emma laughed, the tone jeering and unkind.

Kathleen flinched.

“That’s not very nice,” Ryan said. “Laughing at your mother having hurt herself.”

“She was a cheerleader. And homecoming queen. You don’t think it’s funny that she fell down the stairs?”

“No. Any more than I’d think it was funny if you had.”

“But I do things like that all the time,” Emma said resentfully. “She never does.”

Rather than angry, Jo saw with interest, Kathleen looked stricken.

“I don’t cut myself with a table saw, either.” Ryan kept his voice calm. “Would it be funny if I did?”

His niece stared at him. Her voice rose. “That’s different! You know it is!”

He didn’t let her off the hook. “Why?”

Color staining her cheeks, Emma cried, “Because…because you don’t think you’re perfect!” With that, she whirled and ran down the hall. Her bedroom door slammed.

The adults stood in silence for a painfully long moment. Jo wanted to be anywhere else.

Ryan and Kathleen looked at each other. He had a troubled line between his brows, while her face looked pinched.

“She’s been impossible lately.” Hysteria threaded Kathleen’s voice.

“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?”