Twice the Chance
Twice the Chance
Darlene Gardner
Jazz Lenox had her reasons for giving up her babies for adoption. So she can't burst into their lives after eight years. Yet there's no doubt these kids are hers. No one could mistake that unique hair.She knows she should walk away. Especially when she meets the twins' uncle–sexy, shoot-from-the-hip Matt Caminetti. But how does she leave a man who's so persistent…and so ruggedly appealing? Most surprising of all, Matt believes in her. Believes in them. A future together means coming clean about her past. All of it. It's the only way to find out if she really has a second shot at the life she's always wanted….
“That settles it.
You have to go out with me.”
Matt’s gaze was unwavering. “Because we’d be good for each other. And because I can’t stop thinking about you.”
With the pool lights shining down on him, Matt looked as golden as when Jazz had first seen him bathed in sunlight at the park. Now that she’d gotten to know and like him, he was even more handsome. Her heart hammered. “I wish you would.”
“Don’t you think about me?”
“No,” she said instantly.
“Now why do I think you’re not telling the truth?” he asked softly.
It made not one whit of difference if she found him appealing. She needed to operate on the assumption that the twins were the children she’d given up. Honestly, she’d be a lot less likely to run into them if she didn’t hang around their uncle.
Honestly, as far as Matt was concerned, she didn’t think she could stay away.
Dear Reader,
My mother thought she was carrying twins until the moment I was born. “I hear two heartbeats,” the doctor had told her. Instead, she got one big baby.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to stories about twins and why the idea for Twice the Chance came to me fully formed. It’s about a woman who stumbles across a girl and boy with unusually colored hair whom she thinks may be the twins she gave up for adoption.
The story, however, has a twist. Jazz Lenox doesn’t want anyone, especially Matt Caminetti, the man with whom she’s falling in love, to know about her suspicions. That’s because she has another secret of her own….
Until next time,
Darlene Gardner
P.S. Visit me on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.
Twice the Chance
Darlene Gardner
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
While working as a newspaper sportswriter, Darlene Gardner realized she’d rather make up quotes than rely on an athlete to say something interesting. So she quit her job and concentrated on a fiction career that landed her at Harlequin/Silhouette Books, where she wrote for the Temptation, Duets and Intimate Moments lines before finding a home at Superromance. Please visit Darlene on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.
To adoptive mothers
who love their children—and the birth mothers
who gave them the chance.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
THE SOUTH CAROLINA sun bathed the young girl in light, bringing out the unusual color of the long silky hair she wore in a ponytail.
Jazz Lenox forgot about the stitch in her side, the need to watch the packed earth for rocks and exposed roots, and her determination to run two circuits around the trail circling Ashley Greens Park in less than thirty minutes.
The girl was about seven or eight years old and wore black shorts, high blue socks and a bright blue shirt shot through with yellow lightning bolts. She was beneath the crossbar of a soccer net with her back to Jazz, on the balls of her feet, her weight slightly forward. Her ponytail swished back and forth as she moved to catch a ball careening toward her.
Her dark red ponytail.
The shade was unusual but not unique. In the three years since Jazz had moved into her one-bedroom apartment in South Carolina, a few miles outside of Charleston, she’d spotted the hair color a dozen times on people of various ages. A middle-aged man. A teenage boy. A toddler girl.
This Sunday morning was the first time Jazz had stumbled across a redhead who appeared to be the right age. Jazz realized, of course, that she could be overreacting. Maybe this child hadn’t even been a redhead at birth. It could be a coincidence that the girl’s particular shade matched not only the wispy tufts that had been on the newborn, but also Jazz’s grandmother’s hair.
“Good job! You made the stop!” A man’s deep voice cut through the warm August air.
The path of the trail brought Jazz even with the net, which was about thirty feet away. Off to one side of the girl stood a tall man with golden-brown hair wearing a T-shirt and athletic shorts. Probably the girl’s father. He clapped his hands.
“Be warned, Robbie,” he cried. “The girl in goal is a beast!”
“Boys are beasts, not girls!” The girl was dancing in place, making it appear as though the lightning bolts on her shirt were poised to strike.
“Give me the ball, Brooke.” The third voice belonged to a young boy. “I’m scoring on you this time!”
Jazz had been so focused on the girl, she hadn’t noticed the boy. Jazz kept running, putting one foot in front of the other by rote, craning her neck as her progress took her past where the boy stood.
He was about the same age as the girl with the exact shade of dark red hair.
The toe of Jazz’s running shoe caught on something, and she pitched forward. She reached out her arms to break her fall and slammed down hard on her right side. The breath squeezed out of her and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She sucked at the air, finally feeling it reach her lungs.
Pain seared her shoulder and the forearm that had taken the brunt of the fall. It was of little consequence. What mattered were the redheaded boy and girl. Were they the twins she sometimes found herself searching for no matter how determined she was to remain out of their lives?
She’d gotten such a brief look at the boy, she could have been mistaken about how old he was. Even if he were roughly the same size as the girl, that didn’t mean they were twins.
The ground in front of her yielded no answers.
Praying the children and the man hadn’t seen her fall, she got to her feet gingerly. The trio on the soccer field was laughing about something, immersed in their own little world that didn’t include Jazz. The man was now standing in goal beside the boy, who gripped the soccer ball with both hands.
Drawing in a deep breath, Jazz wiped at the dirt on her scraped arm and brushed at the twigs and grass on her running clothes. Thankfully nobody had seen her fall. As it got later in the morning and the August temperatures rose, the trail became less populated.
“Go deep, Robbie!” the man yelled, waving his arm to indicate a point roughly even with Jazz. “Brooke’s got a good punt.”
The man bent his head to say something to the girl, probably instructions. He watched as the girl took three long steps, dropped the ball and punted.
The black-and-white ball arced into the sky and flew down the field. It must have careened off the side of the girl’s foot because it didn’t travel in a straight line, instead landing and bouncing not far from Jazz.
The redheaded boy was running toward the ball, arms and legs pumping. Jazz told herself to resume her workout before the boy closed the distance between them but she craved a better look at him. With her heart hammering, she left the trail and headed for the rolling ball. She bent down, picked it up and raised her eyes.
The boy slowed, then stopped. His cheeks were red, she wasn’t sure whether from exertion or exposure to the sun. Freckles sprinkled his nose. His expression was open and earnest, something about it striking a note of familiarity she both searched for and feared noticing.
“Can I have that?” the boy asked.
Jazz stared at him, her mind a blank.
He pointed. “The ball.”
She looked down at her hands, almost surprised to see what they held. “Oh. Of course.”
Jazz tossed him the ball. He caught it easily, but stood his ground. His eyes dipped. “You’re bleeding.”
She gazed down at herself and saw blood trickling down her right leg from a gash on her knee. “I tripped over a root.”
“It looks like it hurts.”
“It’s nothing.” She felt numb to the injury, her entire focus on the boy. Like the girl, he wore long socks that she now saw covered shin guards. Even at his young age, he had an athletic build, and was wiry rather than muscular. As far as Jazz knew, nobody in her family was an athlete. Was that relevant?
“Well, bye.” The boy pivoted and dashed away.
She opened her mouth to call him back, then closed it. She shouldn’t prolong their encounter. To the boy, she was a stranger who’d happened to retrieve his ball. Maybe that’s all she was. She didn’t know how old the children were, whether they were twins or if they’d been adopted.
She could probably concoct a story, approach their father and get some answers. But what purpose would that serve? Even though she couldn’t help keeping an eye out for redheaded twins wherever she went, she would never consciously search for them. If they were happy, as this boy and girl seemed to be, she had no intention of disrupting their lives.
The boy appeared smaller and smaller as he retreated into the distance, finally stopping next to the man and the girl. The two children were virtually the same size, like twins might be. Jazz’s throat thickened. She tried to swallow but couldn’t manage it.
The boy said something to the man, then extended his arm and pointed to Jazz. The man patted the boy’s shoulder before he took off in a slow jog, heading directly for her. The children followed.
Jazz told herself to move, to rejoin the path and continue her run. Her feet didn’t cooperate, remaining as motionless as if they were glued to the grass. The man kept approaching, growing more substantial with every powerful stride. His coloring was nothing like the children’s, his hair a sun-lightened medium brown, his skin lightly tanned. He reached her a few seconds before the children.
“Hey, are you okay?” the man asked. “Robbie said you were bleeding.”
“She said she fell over a root,” Robbie added helpfully. The boy had come up behind him, arriving a few seconds before the girl. Up close, she looked remarkably like the boy.
The girl made a face. “Oh, gross!”
“Blood isn’t gross, Brooke,” the man said before addressing Jazz. “You look a little pale. You should sit down.”
With Brooke’s hair pulled back from her face and Robbie’s short haircut, it was easy to see their hairlines were identical, down to their widow’s peaks. Also the same were their oval faces, their green eyes and the freckles dotting their noses.
“Did you hear me? You’re not in shock, are you?” The man was talking again. To her. Jazz yanked her gaze from the children and focused on him. She placed him at somewhere around thirty, not much older than she was. With a slightly crooked nose and wide mouth, a combination that worked surprisingly well, he didn’t resemble the children facially, either.
“Sorry.” Her head was still spinning with possibility but she attempted a smile. “No, I’m not in shock. I’m fine.”
He frowned, his brows drawing together. “You should clean that cut so it doesn’t get infected.”
She attempted to rein in her scattered thoughts. “I will when I get home.”
“I have a first-aid kit in my bag,” he offered. “It’s over there by the goal.”
“Oh, no.” She immediately shook her head. “Thanks, but I couldn’t be a bother.”
“No bother,” he said. “Name the injury, and I’ve probably had it. I’m darn near an expert.”
She felt herself wavering. If she went with him, she could find out more about the children. What would it hurt to possibly verify these were the twins she’d given up at birth? She’d know for sure they were healthy and happy, all she could wish for.
“I don’t want to take time away from your kids,” she said, still undecided.
“They’re my niece and nephew,” he said.
“Uncle Matt’s not married,” Robbie added. “He doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”
“Mom says he has lots of girlfriends,” Brooke chimed in. “Nuh-uh,” Robbie said. “I never met one.”
“Not serious girlfriends.” Brooke sounded years older than she was.
“Thanks for sharing, kids, but you’re not helping,” the man said with an exaggerated grimace. He moved close enough to Jazz to extend a hand. “I’m Matt Caminetti. And these blabbermouths are Brooke and Robbie, my sister’s children.”
“I’m Jazz,” she said, deliberately omitting her last name. She had a vague impression of warmth when his hand clasped hers. Her mind whirled even as she greeted the children. Would it be a mistake to spend more time in their presence?
“Come on, Jazz. Let’s get that first-aid kit.” Matt took the decision out of her hands, turning back toward the grassy field and heading for the soccer goal. Brooke and Robbie skipped along beside him. After a moment’s hesitation, Jazz followed.
“Race you!” Robbie called to his sister and took off at a dead run.
“No fair!” Brooke complained even as she raced after him, gaining steadily with every stride.
“Wow,” Jazz said to Matt, “she’s fast.”
“It’s tough on Robbie having a sister who’s so athletic. She could beat him at just about anything if she tried. Except half the time she lets him win.”
Jazz’s heart pounded even faster than it had when she was keeping up her seven-minutes-a-mile pace. “They look a lot alike. Are they twins?”
“Yep,” he said. “Makes the whole competition thing even harder for Robbie.”
She tried to keep her voice from trembling. “How old are they? Seven? Eight?”
“Eight,” he said. Jazz’s heart squeezed. The twins she’d given away would have been eight last month. “I think,” Matt continued. “Or maybe they’re seven. I see them all the time but I lose track.”
Ahead of them, Brooke put on a burst of speed to draw even with Robbie, then slowed down noticeably. Brother and sister ran alongside each other for a few strides before Robbie stumbled, his arms windmilling as he righted himself. Brooke reached the goal inches ahead of her brother.
“You only won because I tripped!” Robbie cried.
Brooke settled her hands on her slim hips in a pose Jazz had seen females use countless times when dealing with a difficult male. “Whatever.”
“Let’s go again!”
“No.”
“What are you?” Robbie got right in her face. “Chicken?”
“Guys, stop! You’ll scare away Jazz,” Matt yelled to them good-naturedly, as though he’d heard it all before.
Matt continued walking to an athletic bag lying behind the goal and crouched down beside it. He looked up at Jazz with eyes that were a light brown instead of green like his niece and nephew’s. “Is Jazz short for Jasmine?”
She wanted to ask the questions, specifically whether his sister had adopted Brooke and Robbie and the exact date of their birth. Except she couldn’t think of a way to work those topics into the conversation.
“It’s just Jazz,” she said. “My mother liked the music.”
“I like the name.” He smiled at her before digging into his bag and pulling out the first-aid kit. “My sister gave this to me for a Christmas present when I started spending lots of time with her kids. She’s kind of overprotective.”
“Is she a redhead, too?” Jazz ventured, although that wouldn’t tell her anything definitive. The gene for red hair was recessive.
“Nope.” He opened the kit and pulled out antiseptic and a cotton swab. “Come closer and I’ll clean that for you. The bleeding’s stopped but this could smart.”
She complied, the sting of the antiseptic barely registering while she tried to figure out how to extract more information. Her head started to pound when nothing occurred to her. She’d make a terrible investigative reporter.
“The cut’s not too bad, but it needs a bandage.” He took one out of his bag, tore off the packaging and positioned it over her skin. “How’s the shoulder? You’re holding it like it hurts.”
She concentrated on his question instead of Brooke and Robbie kicking the soccer ball back and forth a few feet away. The throbbing had subsided to a manageable level. “It’s okay.”
“You should probably see a doctor,” he said. “At the very least, ice it and take some ibuprofen.”
“Are you done yet, Uncle Matt?” Robbie called. “You said we’d work on my corner kicks next.”
“Just a sec,” he called, then peered at Jazz. “Do you need a ride home? My car’s just over there in the parking lot. It’s getting too hot to stay much longer anyway.”
She fought the temptation to accept and gestured vaguely to the trail. “Thanks, but I don’t live far from here.”
He seemed about to protest, but then said, “Okay. Just remember to ice your shoulder. Nice meeting you, Jazz.”
“You, too.” She drank in the sight of the children who might be hers, assuring herself she was doing all of them a favor by cutting off the acquaintance. “Bye, Brooke, Robbie.”
“Bye!” the children said in unison, but Robbie was already picking up the soccer ball and running to his uncle. Brooke was humming a pretty little tune.
Jazz turned away, feeling an ache that had nothing to do with her injuries.
She’d taken maybe ten steps when Matt Caminetti called to her, “Hey, Jazz.”
She whirled.
“We’ll be here Sunday mornings after church until fall soccer starts and probably even after that, too,” he said. “Stop by and say hi.”
She raised a hand in acknowledgment before turning her back and walking out of their lives. She wouldn’t accept his invitation no matter how tempting.
Neither would Matt Caminetti have issued it if he’d known Jazz had given birth to redheaded twins while serving a prison sentence for committing a felony.
CHAPTER TWO
MATT SKIMMED the offerings on the lunch menu on a Monday more than two weeks later while breathing in the maple-syrup-scented air. Pancakes with strawberries. Gingerbread pancakes. Cinnamon pumpkin pancakes. German apple pancakes. The list was virtually endless.
“You two ready to order?” A blonde waitress in her mid-to late-twenties with the name Sadie written on her name tag stood beside their table, order pad in hand. She had a girlish voice and a figure that was anything but juvenile, shown to advantage by a gold uniform that hugged every curve.
“You go first, Matt.” Matt’s sixteen-year-old brother Danny spoke without lifting his dark head from the extensive array of pancake choices.
Matt closed his menu and set it down on the table. “I’ll have a chicken sandwich and unsweetened iced tea.”
Sadie lifted one finely plucked eyebrow. “You sure? We’re not named Pancake Palace for nothing.”
“I’m sure,” Matt said. No point inviting questions by revealing he wasn’t overly fond of pancakes.
He hadn’t heard of the restaurant until he’d noticed the place advertised on Jazz’s T-shirt as the sponsor of a local 10K race. Matt had been at Ashley Greens Park twice with the twins since he’d bandaged her leg, but she hadn’t shown up. That was cool with him. Or so he thought until he’d spotted the Pancake Palace sign from the car and suggested he and Danny stop for lunch.
His impulsiveness hadn’t paid off. The only other waitress moving about the tables and booths was a shorter, rounder version of his mother.
“Whatever you want, I’m happy to oblige.” Sadie held Matt’s gaze a few beats longer than necessary before shifting her attention to Danny. “You want me to come back, hon?”
“No, I’m ready. I’ll take the wild-blueberry pancakes with a double order of pork sausages, a banana-nut muffin and a large chocolate milk.” Danny started to close the menu, then flipped it back open. “And some cinnamon French toast.”
“French toast instead of the pancakes?” the waitress asked. Matt felt a smile coming on.
“Nope,” Danny said. “I want the pancakes, too.”
“Okay.” Sadie concentrated on Matt while she leaned forward to take their menus, providing him with an excellent view of her attributes. “Let me know if you want anything else.”
She left them, her hips swaying from side to side in an exaggerated manner. Danny appeared in danger of straining his neck watching her retreat.
“Did you get a load of that?” Danny asked in a loud whisper. “That waitress was totally coming on to you.”
“She was just being nice.”
“Yeah, right,” Danny drawled. “You gonna get her phone number?”
“No, I’m not, little brother,” he said.
“Little?” Danny straightened in his seat, taking offense as Matt had known he would. “I’m almost as tall as you are.”
“You’ll be a lot wider if you keep eating like a blue whale.”
Danny waved him off with a thin arm. “I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to pack it in. Isn’t that why you’re always feeding me?”
Matt had carved time from his summer schedule at least twice a week to take his much younger brother for driving practice and out to lunch. Finding the time had gotten harder a few weeks ago when Matt had taken over as interim athletic director at Faircrest High. As of tomorrow, the first day of school for students and the start of Danny’s sophomore year at Faircrest, it would be tougher still.
“I’m afraid you’d gnaw my arm off if we didn’t stop for food,” Matt said.
Danny laughed. “Why’d you pick this place, anyway? You don’t even like pancakes.”
Matt wasn’t about to confide in his brother about Jazz, especially because his long shot had misfired. She’d most likely been wearing the T-shirt because she’d run in the race the restaurant sponsored.
“You like pancakes,” Matt said.
Danny grinned. “I like food.”
Danny proved how much when their order came, polishing off his meal in an amazingly short time. Between mouthfuls he kept up a running conversation about family, food and the Faircrest High football team. Practice had started at the beginning of August in preparation for the season opener, which was in a few days.
“I’m busting my butt,” Danny said. “I’m the first one at practice and I work the hardest. Dad says that’s the way to get noticed.”
“Dad knows football.” Matt chewed slowly on his chicken sandwich. Their father had played college ball at Florida State and coached the Faircrest football team before becoming the high school’s athletic director, the job Matt was currently in. Dad was retired now, which gave him more time to indulge his passion. When he wasn’t watching football, he was talking about it.
“I’m getting some time with the first team,” Danny said. “I want to be so good Coach Dougherty has to start me.”
“That’s the attitude,” Matt said. “You can’t reach goals if you don’t set them.”
“Dad says that, too.” Danny finished his French toast with gusto. “Did he push you to be the best you could be, too?”
Their father had been more interested in trying to persuade Matt that giving up youth football for soccer was a mistake. Never mind that soccer was the world’s most popular sport, with billions of fans in all corners of the globe. Or that Matt had gone on to earn a full scholarship on the Clemson soccer team.
“Be the best you can be, huh?” Matt said, avoiding his brother’s question. “Seems to me I’ve heard that on a commercial.”
Danny laughed and told him about a senior on the football team who was applying to West Point. By the time Matt paid the bill, his brother had moved on to the subject of the Faircrest High athletic director position.
“So the job’s not yours yet?” Danny asked.
“That’s what interim means,” Matt teased. “This is kind of like a tryout.”
Danny stood, lanky in his maroon Faircrest High football T-shirt and the baggy black athletic shorts that reached almost to his knees. “You’re a lock, man. Things always go your way.”
“They go my way for a reason,” Matt said when they were outside the restaurant. He’d been a full-time assistant A.D. at Faircrest for six years. It was time he moved on to the top job. “You heard what I said about setting goals. Once I set mine, I go after them hard.”
Matt hadn’t achieved today’s goal of running into Jazz, but she probably wasn’t even employed by Pancake Palace. Unless she had the day off, a possibility he had yet to rule out.
“How about meeting me at the car?” he told Danny. “I’ll be there in a couple minutes.”
Without waiting to see if his brother complied, Matt headed back into the restaurant. He spotted Sadie clearing away the dishes at the table where he’d sat with Danny. The older waitress, who reminded him of his mother, was closer, jotting down an order for a family of four.
Matt intercepted the second waitress beside an empty booth while she was en route to the kitchen. Her name was Helen. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, “but does a woman named Jazz work here?”
Helen’s mouth turned downward at the corners and deep lines formed on her forehead. Up close, she looked nothing like Matt’s mother. “Jazz Lenox is one of our short-order cooks.”
That explained why Jazz hadn’t been waiting tables. “What days does she work?” Matt asked.
“She’s in the kitchen now.” Helen’s eyes narrowed, as though she were making up her mind about something. “I’ll tell her you’re out here.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Matt said, but he was speaking to the waitress’s retreating back.
He breathed in the scent of pancakes and syrup, not sure of his game plan. He was good on the fly, though. When an opportunity presented itself, he could make the most of it.
The interior door leading to the kitchen swung open. A woman emerged with a bandana covering her shoulder-length brown hair. Jazz, looking far different than she had at the park. An apron covered her toned limbs, her forehead was damp and her face flushed from the heat of the kitchen. Yet with her clear gray eyes and the freckles dotting her long nose, she had an appeal Matt couldn’t resist.
“Hey, Jazz,” Matt said. “Sorry to bother you at work. You look busy.”
“I am busy,” she confirmed, then went silent.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.” He decided to go with blunt honesty. “I’m wondering that same thing myself.”
Not a great opening but not bad, either, especially because he couldn’t pinpoint why Jazz had made such an impression on him. Unfortunately it didn’t seem as though he’d had the same effect on her.
“Matt Caminetti.” He introduced himself again. “We met at the park. I was with the twins.”
“I remember,” she said.
The same curiosity he’d experienced at the park hit him. Jazz was nothing like the chatty females at the high school. Or any of the women he usually came across, for that matter.
“You were wearing a Pancake Palace T-shirt. That’s how I found you. Not that I was looking exactly.” Matt made a face. “Man, I’m butchering this.”
“Butchering what?” Her voice competed with the hum of conversation in the dining room and the clattering of dishes from the kitchen. She lengthened her vowels like a Southerner but her accent didn’t sound Charlestonian.
“I think I’m asking you out.” He’d checked out her left hand for rings at the park and found none. When she didn’t respond, he checked again. Nope. No ring: wedding, engagement or other. But that didn’t always tell the full story. “Unless you’re dating someone?”
“No,” she said. He wasn’t sure which question she was responding to.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to be getting back to work.” She glanced over her right shoulder toward the kitchen and winced.
“Have you seen a doctor about that shoulder?” Matt asked.
“It’s fine.” She repeated the phrase she’d used at the park, inching backward as she talked. “I really need to go.”
“Of course,” Matt said, taken aback by how eager she was to get away from him. Even so, he felt compelled to ask another question. “So when you said no, that was to the date?”
She nodded. “But thank you very much for asking.”
She disappeared through the swinging kitchen door. He grimaced, feeling as stunned as if the door had hit him in the face. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so summarily dismissed by a woman, if ever.
The people at the nearby tables weren’t paying attention to him. His luck ended there. Danny stood beside the empty hostess stand, his mouth hanging open while he waited for Matt to reach him. “Did you just get shot down?”
Matt frowned at his brother. “Weren’t you supposed to wait in the car?”
Danny ignored the question. “Who was that, anyway?”
“Just some woman.” Matt walked past his brother out of the restaurant and into the sunny August afternoon, where it became glaringly obvious he hadn’t told the truth.
If Jazz Lenox were just another woman, her rejection wouldn’t sting so much and Matt’s goal wouldn’t be to turn her no into a yes.
AN HOUR LATER Jazz slid a plate of chocolate-chip pancakes through the pass-through window, turned back to the griddle and methodically flipped over the apple streusel pancakes arranged in a neat row.
“These are supposed to be cherry, not chocolate chip.” Helen Monroe’s pinched face appeared through the opening in the window. “And where’s the order for table seven? Some of us work for tips, you know.”
“Sorry,” Jazz muttered, grabbing the plate, annoyed at herself for making the mistake. “Table seven’s coming right up, then you’ll have your cherry pancakes.”
“I can only hope,” Helen said before disappearing.
“Don’t be nice to her.” Carl Rodriguez, the other short-order cook, had also done time in prison. He didn’t say much in the course of a shift, but Helen, who had complained to the owner several times about his hiring of ex-cons, was a hot button. “She makes many mistakes.”
Jazz set a couple of plates beside the griddle. “That doesn’t mean I have to.”
“You don’t usually.” In his thirties with dramatic dark hair and eyes, Carl was of medium height with a slender build. He quirked a black eyebrow at her. “You okay?”
Jazz had been fine until Matt Caminetti made his surprise appearance. More than two weeks had passed since she’d met Matt and the twins at Ashley Greens Park. She’d altered her jogging route and schedule, although she’d nearly convinced herself that they couldn’t be her birth children.
Then again, she considered it likely that children were placed for adoption in a different part of the state from where they were born. Jazz had been arrested in Florence and given birth in Columbia.
One thing, however, was certain. If the twins were her biological children, she never wanted them to know they had a mother who’d been locked up.
“I’m kind of tired today.” Misleading, but not a lie. Four nights a week Jazz worked as a telemarketer selling magazine subscriptions. Last night she’d finished at 10:00 p.m., which took a toll considering she hadn’t been sleeping well and her shift at Pancake Palace started at 5:30 a.m. “It makes it tough to concentrate.”
“That’s not why you can’t concentrate,” Sadie Phillips declared. Jazz hadn’t even noticed the waitress enter the kitchen. Sadie’s lips, painted a deep pink, were smiling. Her hands rested on her curvy hips. “It’s because of the hot guy. Who is he?”
Jazz felt heat creep up her neck. “Nobody.”
“Oh, come on, Jazz. Stop being so blasted private,” Sadie said in her thick Southern drawl. “If a man like that was interested in me, you couldn’t get me to shut up about it.”
“It’s not like that,” Jazz said.
“Oh, really? Then why didn’t he look twice when I shook my stuff at him?” Sadie demanded.
“You got good stuff,” Carl said without glancing up from the potatoes he was slicing.
“Why, thank you, Carl.” Sadie sounded pleased by the compliment. “The only reason for a man not to look is if he’s interested in other stuff.”
Carl chuckled softly. Jazz kept her head down, glad she had the excuse of transferring pancakes to plates. In prison, she’d quickly learned that knowledge was power. She wasn’t about to tell Sadie why she had no interest in dating Matt Caminetti. She wouldn’t tell anyone.
Jazz got through the rest of her shift without another mention of Matt. When two o’clock arrived, her mind turned to the lonely night ahead. A legion of short-order cooks had come and gone since she’d started at Pancake Palace three years ago, enabling Jazz to choose a shift that allowed her to take a second job. Too bad she hadn’t been able to find one that gave her more hours.
“Hey, Jazz.” Sadie was waiting for Jazz beside the front door. The waitress’s eyes sparkled. “That man who’s not interested in you? He’s in the parking lot.”
Jazz’s breath snagged before a logical explanation occurred to her. “He probably has some shopping to do.”
Pancake Palace was located in a shopping center a few miles west of historic downtown Charleston, sharing space with a grocery, a drugstore and other assorted businesses.
“We’ll soon find out, won’t we?” Sadie asked.
The waitress opened the door, stepping aside to let Jazz precede her. Matt Caminetti was leaning against a silver coupe. He immediately straightened and walked toward them.
“Told you so,” Sadie said teasingly, her voice a whisper. “I expect to get the whole story on Monday.” She headed away from Jazz, waving and calling, “Bye, Jazz.”
“Bye, Sadie,” Jazz said automatically. She couldn’t seem to get her feet unstuck.
She’d been so focused on the twins at the park that Matt had barely made an impression. That wasn’t the case today. Matt was the sort of man women looked at, not so much because he was drop-dead handsome but because he had an unmistakable energy. Like someone had thrown on a light switch inside him, causing everything about him to seem more vibrant. Even his slight Southern accent was attractive, smooth instead of twangy.
“I promise I’m not stalking you,” Matt said when he stepped onto the sidewalk. He was smiling, his light brown eyes trained on hers. She was five-nine in her bare feet but he was half a head taller. He held out a few sheets of paper along with something red and stretchy. “I brought you some elastic tubing and printouts of isotonic exercises for your shoulder.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Why?”
“Because this is what my orthopedist said to do when I strained my shoulder back in college.” He continued to extend the items to her. One corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “I promise I didn’t attach any strings.”
She uncrossed her arms and took the sheets and the tubing, being very careful not to accidentally touch him. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He held up a hand in farewell and did a slow jog to his car. Halfway there, he turned back and called, “Notice how I didn’t ask you out again?”
“I noticed.”
“Out of curiosity, if I had asked, would the answer still be no?”
“Yes,” she said.
He jumped on her reply. “Yes? You changed your mind?”
“Yes.” She felt her lips curve. “It would still be no.”
He snapped his fingers and shook his head. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
She didn’t let her smile grow until she got behind the wheel of her car. It was a good thing Matt Caminetti was strictly off-limits. Otherwise, he might tempt her to forget that she couldn’t trust her instincts, especially where men were concerned.
THE LARGE BOX SITTING on the carpet in the middle of Jazz’s living room floor didn’t look like anything special. Slightly battered and made of cardboard that was dirty in places, the box had arrived by UPS almost an hour before.
Jazz hadn’t opened it yet because she had the feeling that nothing would be the same once she did. Ridiculous, really, considering she didn’t know what was inside.
She had no basis for foreboding except that she seldom got anything delivered to her at all besides bills and junk mail.
The box probably weighed a good thirty pounds or so. If Jazz hadn’t been religiously doing the shoulder exercises Matt Caminetti had given her two days ago, she might not have been able to lift it without pain.
She frowned. Thinking about how considerate Matt had been represented a different kind of Pandora’s box. It seemed less risky to find out what was inside the package than to open herself to the possibility of dating him.
Jazz got down on her knees beside the box, flipped open her pocketknife, cut through the packing tape and drew back the cardboard flaps. A sheet of white paper lay atop a pile of what looked to be mostly clothes and books.
Jazz picked up the piece of paper, noticing at once the South Carolina Department of Social Services letterhead. She read the few typed paragraphs, then read them again.
It seemed her foster parents had found a box of her belongings in their attic. Instead of trying to find Jazz’s current address and mailing her the box themselves, they’d asked DSS to forward it.
Jazz shouldn’t be surprised. The last time she’d seen or heard from her foster mother was at a holding cell in the county jail the night Jazz was arrested.
A tear dripped down Jazz’s cheek. She angrily dashed it away. She’d learned quickly all those years ago that crying accomplished nothing.
Jazz put the letter aside and turned back to the box, pulling out some skinny jeans and shirts with plunging necklines. The high-heeled black sandals and bangle bracelets she’d been wearing when she was arrested were there, too. So were a black hip-hugging micro miniskirt and a thong bathing suit.
The rest of the box contained more clothes she’d never wear again, a few pieces of cheap costume jewelry, an alarm clock with a dead battery, some Harry Potter paperbacks and a couple of high school yearbooks.
Jazz sat cross-legged on the carpet, her back resting against her love seat, and leafed through the top yearbook. It was from one of the most traumatic times in her life: junior year, after her grandmother died and Jazz was shuffled to foster care. The only image of Jazz was in the class-photo section. She was unsmiling, her hair falling forward in her face, defiance in her eyes.
After flipping her yearbook closed, Jazz picked up the second one. It was black like the first yearbook but the name of the high school on the cover was different. Jazz ran her fingers over the four embossed numbers that formed the year before Jazz was born.
This was her dead mother’s yearbook, not hers.
She’d been so angry at her mother for leaving her the way she did that Jazz had never even looked through it. Jazz had a vague memory of packing the yearbook with the few belongings she’d taken from her grandmother’s home. She wasn’t exactly sure why she’d kept it except she had nothing else of her mother’s.
She held the book without opening it, remembering the chocolate bars her mother would bring when she stopped by every month or so to ask Jazz’s grandmother for drug money.
Jazz’s gratefulness for those scraps of affection had turned into resentment when her mother died of AIDS, although at nine years old Jazz hadn’t fully understood the situation. She still didn’t.
Had her mother been on drugs when she got pregnant with Jazz? Is that why her mother claimed not to know who had fathered Jazz?
Jazz stared down at the yearbook, curious if it would shed any light on who her mother had been. She flipped it open to a page that contained a yellowed newspaper clipping and a snapshot. The article was a glowing review of the high school drama department’s production of The Odd Couple, which heaped praise on Bill Smith, the student who’d played Oscar. Jazz skimmed the article for her mother’s name but didn’t find it.
She picked up the photo, barely recognizing the young, smiling girl as her mother. Next to her, with his arm around her, was the same handsome, dark-haired boy pictured in the newspaper article.
Jazz leafed through the yearbook but found no other newspaper clippings or snapshots. Why had her mother kept only those?
She turned to the section containing the junior-class photos. Like Jazz, her mother hadn’t finished high school. Bill Smith wasn’t pictured among the juniors but Marianne Lenox was, smiling almost as widely as she’d been in the snapshot.
Jazz thumbed through the yearbook pages until she reached the senior-photo section, noticing there were no signatures or messages written in the margins with one exception. Something was written in a bold hand under the photo of William Smith.
Thanks for the good times, M. It was signed Bill.
The caption underneath his photo read: A Man of Many Talents. Then came a listing of extracurricular activities that included drama, track, honors’ society, debate club and jazz band.
Jazz band.
Her heart pounded so hard she could feel the blood pumping in her ears. Jazz stared down at the photo of the dark-haired, dark-eyed Bill Smith, telling herself that what she was thinking was crazy. Jazz saw nothing of herself in him. Why, she looked more like the girl in the photo next to him.
The girl’s name jumped out at Jazz: Belinda Smith. Jazz’s eyes dipped to the caption under Belinda’s name: The Better Half of the Smith Twins.
The page in front of her blurred as Jazz tried to think. She was pretty sure twins ran in families. Jazz didn’t know if it was true but she’d even heard it was common for twins to skip a generation.
It no longer seemed like a wild coincidence that her mother had kept an old newspaper clipping and photo of a boy who’d played in a jazz band.
The irony was that in the same month Jazz had stumbled across twins who could be her biological children, she may have identified the man who fathered her.
CHAPTER THREE
JAZZ MIGHT HAVE TO find another form of exercise.
Running had always helped her think more clearly, but in the week and a half since she’d looked through her mother’s yearbook she still hadn’t decided what to do about Bill Smith.
And now trouble she didn’t need was on her heels, because she was nearly convinced that the man behind her on the park’s running trail was Matt Caminetti.
She stole another glance over her shoulder. Maybe she was wrong. The man was within thirty or forty yards, far enough away that his features were indistinct but close enough to tell he had a lean build and golden-brown hair.
She’d seen dozens of men over the years while running in Ashley Greens Park who were brown-haired and in shape. Her glimpses of the mystery man had been so fleeting he could be anybody.
Besides, Matt had specified that he came to the park with the twins on Sunday mornings. It was Monday morning, a month after she’d met him and two weeks since he’d stopped by the restaurant. Fearing that she’d bump into him every time she went jogging was crazy.
Except it was Labor Day, when people didn’t necessarily stick to their schedules. Jazz would usually be at work on a Monday morning herself, but Pancake Palace was closed for the holiday.
To be on the safe side, she ran faster.
The path left the straightaway to snake through a copse of trees. With her eyes straight ahead, Jazz concentrated on pulling ahead of the man. At the quicker pace, her legs protested, her lungs burned and her breath grew short.
It didn’t make a difference. She soon heard the crunching of footsteps gaining on her.
“Hey, Jazz.” A familiar voice that didn’t even sound winded called from behind her. “I thought that might be you.”
Matt was suddenly running abreast of her, matching his pace to hers. Jazz had a notion to speed up and try to lose him but that was extreme, not to mention impossible. She slowed. He did, too.
“I didn’t…know…you were…a runner.” She could barely catch her breath to form the words.
“I’m not,” he said. “But if I’m going to scrimmage with my kids, I need to stay in shape.”
“Your kids?” She was sure the twins had said he wasn’t married. Was he divorced?
“I coach a youth soccer team of thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds pretty much year-round,” Matt said. “They love to try to get the best of me.”
In running shorts and a T-shirt that left his legs and arms bare, Matt looked like an athlete, with impressive musculature minus the bulk.
“You must really be into soccer.” A rivulet of sweat trickled down the side of her face, but now that she wasn’t running as fast it was easier to talk.
“I’ve played the game almost my whole life.” He had a smooth, even stride, and she got the impression he ran the same way he did everything else—effortlessly. Not only wasn’t he breathing hard, but he was also barely sweating.
Don’t ask about the twins, she told herself.
“Are you trying to turn your niece and nephew into soccer lifers, too?” she heard herself ask.
He laughed. “Robbie’s already got the bug. He begged me to help him, not that he had to try too hard.”
Change the subject.
“How about Brooke?” She tried not to sound too curious. “Is she into soccer, too?”
“Not like her brother but she’s a natural athlete,” Matt said. “Once she understands how good she can be, the love will follow.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Jazz asked.
“It will,” Matt said. “That’s the way it works.”
She took a sidelong glance at him to try to gauge if he found her questions about his niece and nephew suspicious. He wore a pleasant, neutral expression. He’d tell her the date of the twins’ birthday if she asked. She could forget the whole thing if it wasn’t July twenty-fourth.
But what if it was? Would her resolve be strong enough to stay away from the twins if she knew for certain they were her biological children?
“How about you?” he asked.
She’d forgotten what they were talking about. “Excuse me?”
“You ever play soccer? It’s usually the first sport parents sign up their kids for.”
Jazz’s mother hadn’t stuck around long enough to get Jazz involved in anything. The only game Jazz’s grandmother had taught her was how to beat the welfare system.
“I’m not very athletic,” she said.
“I don’t believe that.” His eyes swept over her. “You look like you’re in great shape.”
She’d never exercised regularly until prison, where she’d done legions of sit-ups and push-ups in her cell. During the hour inmates were let outside twice a day, she’d trampled the grass walking laps around the prison yard. Running had only been allowed on the basketball court.
Jazz didn’t need a psychologist to tell her that was why she’d taken up jogging. She often hit the trails even after standing on her feet all day. It struck her that Bill Smith’s list of high school activities had included track. Could a love of running be hereditary? She shoved the question out of her mind, determined to deal with one problem at a time.
“Thank you,” she said, her chance to ask about the twins’ birthday gone.
They ran side by side in silence with Jazz watching Matt in her peripheral vision. His skin had a healthy glow, as though he spent a lot of time outdoors. His nose went a little wayward in profile and she guessed it had been broken. The imperfection somehow made him more attractive.
She needed to get a grip. It made not one whit of difference if she found him appealing. She needed to operate on the assumption that the twins were the children she’d given up. She’d be a lot less likely to run into them if she didn’t hang around their uncle.
“I need to walk awhile.” The perfect excuse to cut their conversation short.
He stopped running, too.
“Is your shoulder bothering you?” He sounded concerned, the way he had at the restaurant. She couldn’t say for sure why that touched her.
“My shoulder’s fine, thanks.” She’d religiously done the exercises he’d given her, a much cheaper alternative than seeking medical attention. She had health care but could barely afford the co-payment for a doctor’s visit. “I’m just a little winded.”
“Mind if I walk with you?” he asked.
She shrugged instead of stating she’d rather he go ahead without her. What was the matter with her?
“I’ve got a family picnic later,” he said, and she instantly pictured Brooke and Robbie. “How about you? Got any plans?”
“Yes.” She swallowed the ache of loneliness in her throat, wondering where it had come from. Her plans involved finding a quiet spot on nearby Folly Beach where she could gaze at the ocean and read a book. “It’s nice to have an evening off.”
“Don’t you work the day shift?”
“I have a second job.” Now, why had she told him something even her restaurant coworkers didn’t know?
“Does it involve cooking, too?” he asked.
“Telemarketing. I’d love to work for a caterer, but those jobs are hard to come by.” She couldn’t seem to stop confiding in him. At least she hadn’t told him why a caterer would be reluctant to hire her. Or that without two jobs she wouldn’t be able to afford her apartment.
He didn’t say anything for long moments. “What if I offered you a catering job?”
“What?”
“A friend of mine is moving out of state. I’m inviting people to drop by my house Saturday afternoon to say goodbye. I don’t know what to feed them.”
“How about burgers and hot dogs?”
“The party’s in the afternoon and they won’t all be coming at the same time. Some of them will be hungry, some won’t.”
“You could go with finger foods.” As the idea took hold, she elaborated. “Mini quiches, stuffed mushrooms, cocktail meatballs. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds great,” he said. “Then you’ll do it?”
She hesitated, and he named a figure double what she earned on any given night at her telemarketing job. “I’ll pay for the groceries, of course.”
The offer was tantamount to dangling a Godiva in front of a chocoholic. Just the thought of having the freedom to cook something not on the Pancake Palace menu sent her heart beating faster.
Because she wanted to immediately accept, she didn’t. She’d learned in prison that opportunities like this one were seldom as good as they seemed. “I hardly know anything about you.”
“My players will vouch for me.” He slid her a grin. “I don’t only coach youth soccer, I coach the Faircrest High boys’ team, too.”
She hadn’t pegged him for a full-time coach. She would have guessed doctor, lawyer or any of the other professions associated with ambition.
“Is that where Brooke and Robbie will go to high school?” She couldn’t seem to stop digging for more information about them.
“Terry—that’s my sister—sends them to private school. They don’t live in my district, anyway. My brother-in-law inherited a place south of Broad.” He named the most prestigious part of peninsular Charleston, an area so rich in history and beauty that it resembled a living museum.
“Is that where you live, too?” Jazz asked.
“My town house is near Magnolia Plantation,” he said, referring to a popular tourist attraction nestled along the western banks of the Ashley River. “I bought it because it backs up to green space.”
Jazz also lived west of the river but on the less desirable side of Ashley Greens Park, where multi-family housing and strip shopping centers were more common than trendy neighborhoods. Her apartment abutted another apartment.
“Any more questions?” he asked.
Are your niece and nephew my children?
“No,” she said.
“You sure? I want you to feel comfortable when you come over,” he said. “I swear you can trust me.”
She didn’t trust anyone.
“Then give me the run of the kitchen and treat me like an employee.” She hadn’t consciously decided to accept the job until that second.
He saluted her. “Aye aye, captain.”
She felt a grin teasing the corners of her mouth. “How do I get in touch with you?”
“Give me your cell number and I’ll call you,” he said.
“But you don’t have your phone with you, do you?”
“Believe me, I’ll remember the number.” His inflection was jaunty enough that she wouldn’t have been surprised had he winked.
She recited her phone number, and he repeated it just as they reached the offshoot of the path that led to her apartment. She pointed. “Home is that way.”
“I’ll call you,” he said before he resumed his run.
She headed home, sure she was making a mistake but equally certain she’d follow through with the job.
“CAN YOU BELIEVE Matt’s having a goodbye party for Carter? What, if anything, is he thinking?”
Matt paused at the entrance to the teachers’ lounge at Faircrest High School a few days later. The door was ajar, something that volleyball coach and psychology teacher Donna Lee must not have realized, considering the volume of her voice.
Donna sat at the only occupied table, her back to the door. She was flanked by school librarian Fran Van Houten and Tom Dougherty, who’d taught PE and coached football at Faircrest for almost twenty-five years. Fran’s body was angled forward, her mouth slightly agape as she focused on Donna. Tom leaned back in his chair, cradling a cup of coffee in his large hands. He met Matt’s eyes and rolled his.
“If Carter hadn’t given notice,” Donna continued, “the school board would be investigating him as we speak.”
Carter Prioleau was leaving Faircrest after eleven successful years as the athletic director. He’d been instrumental in improving the school’s athletic facilities and helping to build a stable of winning coaches.
Tom cleared his throat and nodded to where Matt stood. Donna kept talking.
“It makes you wonder if Matt’s qualified to run the athletic department,” Donna said. “He should be distancing himself from the whole mess.”
Tom drew a circle in the air with his finger and pointed at Matt. Donna finally turned, her sleek dark hair swinging with the movement. Her face lost color until it was nearly the shade of the white Formica on the tabletop.
“Good morning, Donna.” Matt advanced so he was standing just steps from her. “Am I interrupting?”
She shook her head mutely.
“I thought I heard my name,” Matt said.
Donna mumbled something unintelligible, then rose. “I’ve got to get to class.”
“Me, too.” Fran got up so fast she bumped her knee on the underside of the table. “Except I’m going to the library. That’s where I’ve got to get to.”
The two women hurried off, their heels clicking on the linoleum, leaving Matt alone in the lounge with Tom. The other man was dressed in shorts and a maroon Faircrest High T-shirt, his standard work clothes. At over fifty, with muscle packed onto his short frame, Tom was a walking advertisement for the weight room.
“What was that all about?” Matt asked.
“If you’ve got a couple minutes, I’ll tell you,” Tom said.
Matt mentally went over his schedule and determined there was nothing that couldn’t wait. He started to pull out a chair and sit down.
“Not here.” Tom drained the rest of his coffee. “Somewhere we won’t be interrupted.”
“That leaves out the athletic office,” Matt said. “It’s a beautiful morning. Let’s go outside.”
To get there they needed to navigate a sea of teenagers, most of whom greeted them. When they finally walked through the double doors into the crisp morning air, yellow buses were lining up at the curb. Tom veered around the side of the school building toward a four-hundred-meter running track that Carter had successfully lobbied to have resurfaced.
“It’s quiet out here in the morning,” Tom said as they stepped onto the springy surface of the deserted track. Beyond it was a thicket of woods that separated the school property from a surrounding neighborhood. “Nobody will overhear us.”
“I appreciate that you’ve got my back, T.D.” Matt used the nickname Tom had gotten long ago when his teams started racking up touchdowns. “But I can handle the Donnas of the world.”
“That woman’s got a bigger mouth than a hippopotamus,” Tom said. “But it’s not just her. Everybody’s talking about Carter and that summer school teacher.”
“Carter told me she accused him of sexual harassment.” Matt had worked closely with the A.D. since being hired as his assistant. “He said it was blown way out of proportion.”
“Not according to the gossips,” Tom said. “Donna says it’s why Carter resigned before the school year started.”
“No way!” Matt’s exclamation startled into flight some sparrows foraging for insects in the infield grass.
Tom put up a hand. “Just telling you what I heard.”
“But that’s bull,” Matt said. “Carter had a tough summer, with his marriage breaking up like it did. He’s leaving town because he needs a change of scenery.”
“You can figure out why people think he’s getting a divorce,” Tom said.
It didn’t take much brain power. If the gossips believed Carter was guilty of sexual harassment, it followed they’d think he cheated on his wife.
“School started two weeks ago,” Matt said. “Why didn’t these stories come out then?”
“They did,” Tom said. “Everybody’s talking about it. Teachers. Parents. Students.”
“I haven’t heard much about it,” Matt said.
“That’s because everybody knows Carter recommended you to take over his job,” Tom said.
“Then why did you tell me?”
“Because your dad and me, we go way back. And because I like you.” Tom cleared his throat. “You’ve got to be smart, Matt.”
“What do you mean?”
“That party you’re throwing for Carter, you should think about canceling.”
“I’m not turning my back on Carter because of gossip,” Matt said. Not to mention he’d lose his excuse to see Jazz again, although he could come up with another reason. He’d been working on a plan when he’d had the good luck of running into her at the park on Labor Day.
“Fair enough,” Tom said.
They walked without speaking until they reached the point on the track where they’d started. “You’re coming to the party, right?” Matt asked.
“Can’t. The wife’s got me booked all day.” Tom avoided Matt’s eyes, telling Matt everything he needed to know.
Tom hadn’t only relayed the gossip. He believed it.
JAZZ WHEELED HER grocery cart into a line that was three-deep on Friday afternoon, relieved that for once she didn’t have to mentally add the prices of her items.
Crab. Artichoke. Fruit. Ground beef. Sausage. Spinach. Mushrooms. Eggs.
If Matt hadn’t dropped off an envelope of cash by Pancake Palace, she wouldn’t have had enough money in her checking account to cover the bill.
“Buy whatever you want,” he’d told her when he filled her in on the specifics. Guests were dropping by between two and six o’clock on Saturday, so they wouldn’t expect a full meal. He was anticipating as few as a dozen people and as many as twenty-five. She should err on the side of too much food rather than too little.
The envelope had contained two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, which seemed excessive. She wondered why Matt hadn’t bought some party trays from the super-market’s deli department. He could have added precut fruit and veggies and been all set for much less than he was paying her.
“Hey, Jazz!” Sadie came up behind her, still wearing the Pancake Palace waitress uniform that was a size too tight. “Looks like we had the same idea.”
The grocery store was two doors down from the restaurant, making it a convenient after-work stop.
Sadie held up a green plastic basket filled with groceries. “Benjy wants sloppy joes for dinner.”
Benjy was Sadie’s six-year-old son and the reason the waitress didn’t work nights. The boy already had a deadbeat dad. Sadie refused to saddle him with an absentee mom even if it meant sharing an apartment and child-care duties with another single mother.
Jazz knew all this because Sadie hung out in the kitchen with her and Carl when business was slow, never seeming bothered that Sadie did almost all the talking.
“What are you making for dinner tonight?” Sadie peered into her buggy before Jazz could block the view. “Ooo. Are you having company?”
“No,” Jazz said.
“Then what’s the occasion?” Sadie was smiling, making it impossible for Jazz to take offense at her prying.
“A catering job,” Jazz said.
“That’s great! I didn’t know you did that sort of thing! How long have you been at it?”
Jazz swallowed the urge to tell Sadie it wasn’t any of her business. The other woman was just trying to be friendly, the same as always. “Actually, this is my first time.”
“How exciting! What kind of job? At a country club? A private party? What?”
“The, um, client is throwing a goodbye party for one of his friends.”
“His?” Sadie picked up on the pronoun. “You’re dealing with the guy and not his wife?”
“The client’s not married,” Jazz said.
Sadie placed one hand on her curvy hip. “Then why didn’t he just buy a deli tray and some beer?”
Jazz’s thoughts exactly. Her doubts resurfaced. “I don’t know.”
“He probably wants something real nice.” Sadie laid a hand on Jazz’s upper arm, the deep pink of her fingernails in sharp contrast to Jazz’s tan shirt. “I think it’s great that he hired you.”
A doorbell sounded, loud and urgent. The people in line in front of them looked around to see where the noise was coming from. Sadie giggled, dug in her voluminous purse and pulled out a cell phone. “It’s my text message tone. Isn’t it funny?”
She pressed a button and read the lines of type. Her face crumbled, all the happiness disappearing. Jazz clamped her mouth shut, reminding herself of her long-term policy not to get involved in problems that weren’t hers.
Sadie’s eyes teared up. Oh, damn.
“Are you okay, Sadie?” Jazz asked.
“No. It’s from Ace.” Sadie thrust her cell phone at Jazz so the text was visible. Ace was the guy Sadie had been dating for the past few weeks.
Sorry, babe. Not feeling it anymore. Later.
Sadie sniffed loudly. “I can’t believe he broke up with me by text. What kind of guy does that?”
A guy who isn’t worth crying over.
“I’m sorry.” Jazz thought of how excited Sadie had been whenever she and Ace had a date planned. “Seems like you really cared about him.”
“That’s just it. I didn’t!” Sadie said. “Ace is a jerk. I mean, he nicknamed himself! And he didn’t want to meet Benjy.”
“Then why are you crying?”
Sadie dashed away the tears from under her eyes. “Because everybody I date turns out to be a jerk. I wouldn’t know a nice guy if he fell from the sky and landed in front of me. I’m a loser magnet!”
“We all make mistakes,” Jazz said.
“Have you?” Sadie peered at her through watery blue eyes.
Luke Bennett’s face flashed in Jazz’s mind. One of his eyebrows was cocked and his grin was coaxing, the way he’d looked when he offered to show Jazz a good time on her eighteenth birthday.
She’d been nervous about becoming a legal adult because her foster parents would only house her until the end of the school year. Luke made the landmark seem like an adventure.
“No more kid stuff,” he’d said.
That statement turned out to be prophetic. Since she was eighteen when the crime was committed, she was charged as an adult.
“Oh, yeah,” Jazz said. “I made a whopper.”
Sadie’s tears stopped. “Is that why you wouldn’t go out with that Matt guy?”
“How do you know I wouldn’t go out with him?” Jazz hadn’t shared any information about Matt. After a while, Sadie had given up asking about him.
“You’d be smiling way more if you were dating someone that hot,” Sadie said.
Jazz did smile then. She liked Sadie. The waitress made it impossible not to.
“I’m not looking to date anyone right now,” Jazz said.
“Why not?”
Should Jazz tell her? What would it hurt? “I don’t trust my instincts.”
“You and me both, sister,” Sadie exclaimed. “You and me both.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JAZZ CRACKED THE Crock-Pot lid Saturday afternoon to check on the meatballs, getting a whiff of the pineapple preserves she’d used to make the sauce.
Excellent.
She transferred bite-sized quiche, stuffed mushrooms and mini crab cakes from plastic containers to a tray she could pop in the oven when guests started to arrive.
All of the hors d’oeuvres had passed her taste test. So had the fresh fruit she’d arranged on skewers, purchased earlier today at the local farmer’s market.
“Did you know you’re smiling?”
Jazz looked up from her work to find Matt in the kitchen, leaning against the half wall that led to the rest of the town house. He wore khaki shorts that ended a few inches above the knee and a button-down, short-sleeved cream shirt that contrasted with his thick golden-brown hair. He looked fantastic.
“Nothing’s more satisfying than cooking.” Jazz swept a hand to indicate her surroundings. “Especially in a kitchen like this.”
The rest of his town house was nice, with rich, dark-wood furniture and a color scheme that incorporated shades of navy, forest-greens and burgundy. The kitchen was spectacular. Granite countertops with plenty of space. Top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances. Plentiful cabinets with wood inlays. It was a kitchen fit for a gourmet.
“Then you’re glad you took the job?” he asked. “I got the impression something was holding you back.”
The twins, she thought.
“It was you,” she blurted out. Anything to throw him off track. To soften the abruptness of her accusation, she smiled. “I thought the catering thing might be a scam you use on women who refuse to date you.”
He threw back his head and laughed, a pleasant, rumbling sound. “Then how do you explain the goodbye party for my friend?”
“Tell me, does this mysterious friend have a name?” She injected heavy skepticism into her voice.
Matt was still grinning. “His name is Carter Prioleau.”
“A good Charleston name.” She stroked her chin, nodding in approval. “I couldn’t have made up a better one myself. And why, pray tell, is this Charlestonian leaving God’s country?”
Matt’s expression turned serious. “I wish I could make up a story, but the truth is he’s going through a divorce. It’s been pretty hard on him.”
The doorbell chimed. Matt checked his watch. “That’ll be my proof. Carter’s always on time.”
“Can’t wait to meet your alibi,” Jazz said, eager to see his smile again. He didn’t disappoint her.
She was also smiling when she turned the oven to preheat. Flirting with Matt had been fun, especially because she could tell he was a good guy. More of a go-getter than she was used to, perhaps. But he wouldn’t pursue her if she made it clear she wasn’t interested.
Except, didn’t being flirtatious convey the opposite message? She took a deep breath. There she went again, worrying for nothing. She was hardly a beauty. Heaven knew she wasn’t a catch.
A man as charming, good-natured and—she might as well admit it—hot as Matt could have his pick of women. He didn’t have to chase an ex-con who really needed to make it clear that nothing would happen between them.
A giggle that didn’t sound masculine traveled through the town house.
“It’s so nice of you to do this for Carter.” The low-pitched female voice preceded Matt and his guests into the kitchen. Its owner had luxurious long black hair and a bra size Jazz guessed was double D, and she was probably no older than thirty. Her pale pink sundress wasn’t particularly short or tight but showcased her to voluptuous advantage.
She stood inches away from an average-looking man at least twenty years her senior, his thinning hair parted on the side and swept over his bald spot. The man held his chin high, and a smug smile played about his lips.
Matt’s own smile no longer reached his eyes. “Jazz, this is Carter and Kelly.”
“Her name’s Callie,” Carter corrected.
“Spelled with a C.” The woman formed a semicircle with her thumb and index finger.
“Sorry,” Matt said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll answer to anything, even, ‘Hey, you!’” Callie laughed again. She was nervous, Jazz realized. She was also pretty definitely not Carter’s estranged wife. “I really like your name, Jazz.”
“Thanks,” Jazz said. Matt stood stiffly, saying nothing. “I’m the caterer,” Jazz added.
Matt found his voice. “A friend who happens to be a caterer.”
Was that how Matt thought of her when they’d only known each other a little more than a month? In the three years she’d been out of prison, Jazz had made a number of acquaintances but nobody she’d call a friend, except possibly Sadie.
“A caterer, huh?” Carter released a low whistle and slapped Matt lightly on the back. “I didn’t know I rated that high.”
“Are you kidding? I owe you.” Matt sounded more like his normal self.
“For what?” Carter retorted.
“The job recommendation.”
Carter snorted. “Bull. You’ll be named A.D. even if I didn’t lobby for you.”
“A.D.? Isn’t that short for athletic director?” Jazz had intended to fade into the anonymity of the catering job but couldn’t let the comment pass. “I thought Matt was the high school soccer coach.”
“He is in the spring. And he’s doing wonderful things with the program,” Carter said. “But Matt’s destined for greater things. Right now he’s the interim A.D. but he’s the favorite for the top job.”
“I learned from the best,” Matt said, turning his head to address Jazz. “Carter just resigned as A.D.”
“I’m leaving the athletic program in good hands.” Carter gave Matt a hearty slap on the back. “Matt’s a golden boy who gets things done. He probably even managed to talk some people into showing up today for my party.”
An uneasy current ran beneath the smooth words. Callie fidgeted, appearing even more uncomfortable. Jazz wondered what was going on.
“Of course people will come,” Matt said.
“People from my golf league,” Carter countered. “Good thinking inviting them.”
“No problem,” Matt said. “If I ever want to join, I’ll have an in.”
“The league doesn’t play in the summer, buddy,” Carter said. “If you get the A.D. job, that’s the only season you’ll have time to breathe.”
“Excuse me.” Jazz didn’t need to stick around and listen to more evidence that Matt was a responsible person. “These hors d’ouevres have to go in the oven.”
That was the truth. Once the guests started arriving, her plan was to provide a steady supply of warm appetizers.
“Hey, Matt. Before I forget, can you show me that new putter you got?” Carter asked. “I’m planning to play a lot of golf in Florida.”
“Sure,” Matt said. “My golf bag’s in the shed out back.”
“I’ll come with you.” Carter turned to Callie. “Honey, will you be okay for a few minutes without me?”
“I guess,” Callie said.
Carter kissed Callie on the lips before heading with Matt for the French doors that led to the backyard. The town house was situated perfectly for a party, with a deck overlooking a good-sized yard flanked by evergreens. The temperature was in the low seventies and the sun was shining; ideal outdoor weather. Yet Callie stayed in the kitchen with Jazz.
“The food looks great,” Callie said in her soft voice when the men were gone. “But if I don’t watch, my butt blows up like a hot-air balloon.”
Jazz laughed. “I doubt that. But there’s fruit, if you want it.”
“Not my thing. Unless the fruit’s covered in chocolate.” Callie sat down on one of the tall stools beside the breakfast bar and Jazz got a whiff of perfume. Callie remained quiet for long moments before drawing an audible breath. “Can I ask you something, Jazz?”
The way Callie phrased the question made Jazz long to say no. She hesitated. “Go ahead.”
“Did it seem like Matt didn’t know about me?”
Oh, yeah.
Jazz lowered the oven temperature. She wanted the food warm, not overdone. “Why do you ask?”
“Carter’s the best boyfriend I ever had.” Callie rolled her eyes. “I mean, moving to Florida’s not costing me a dime. But I had to fuss up a storm before he’d agree to bring me today.”
The doorbell rang again, a timely interruption.
Callie rose from the stool. “I’ll get it.”
Jazz wasn’t about to fight her for the honor. She opened the oven door and removed the cookie sheet. Using a wide spatula, she transferred the food onto the pretty serving trays she’d found at a yard sale, the way she’d acquired most of her better kitchen supplies.
She heard voices, some belonging to children. Brooke and Robbie? Don’t panic, she told herself. The party was for Matt’s friends, not his family. One of the guys from Carter’s golf league probably had children.
“Uncle Matt! Look what Dad bought me!” Robbie dashed into the kitchen carrying a soccer ball draped with netting.
Jazz’s heart thudded so hard she felt nauseous. Inside the house, Robbie’s hair didn’t look as red as it had in the sun but his skin appeared more pale, his eyes greener. His coloring reminded Jazz of a photo her grandmother had kept of herself as a child.
The young boy scanned the kitchen. “Where’s Uncle Matt?”
Brooke followed her brother into the kitchen, humming an unrecognizable tune and doubling the visual punch. Jazz braced a hand on the counter to steady herself.
“Your uncle’s out back with Carter.” Callie had reentered the kitchen, although Jazz hadn’t noticed until she spoke.
Brooke stayed in the kitchen, peering at Jazz. “Aren’t you the lady from the park?”
“What lady?” asked a plump brunette who must have been their mother. Her curly brown hair was pulled back from a round, pretty face. She looked nothing like the children in either coloring or stature.
“I remember you,” Robbie said to Jazz. “You’re the lady who fell!”
“Hi, I’m Terry. Matt’s sister.” Terry’s dark eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled, exactly like her brother’s. “Matt didn’t tell us he was dating anyone.”
“We’re not dating,” Jazz said quickly. “I’m Jazz, the caterer.”
“Then you didn’t meet Matt at the park?” Terry asked.
“Well, yes,” Jazz said.
“After she fell down,” Brooke supplied.
“Is that when you told him you were a caterer?” Terry asked.
“You’re asking too many questions, darlin’.” A man with a wiry build, boyish features and thick blond hair that looked expensively cut joined them. He was dressed in crisp khaki slacks and a shirt with an alligator over the pocket. “I’m Kevin Pinckney, Terry’s husband. I’m sorry she’s freaking you out.”
“I am not,” Terry declared. “Jazz, am I freaking you out?”
Kevin held up a hand, but he was laughing. “Enough. Cut the woman a break, will you, Ter?”
“I’m simply trying to figure it all out,” Terry said. “So, Jazz, are you into my brother or aren’t you?”
Just like that, Callie’s problems took a backseat.
Jazz had enough of her own.
MATT WATCHED Carter line up an imaginary putt and slowly pull back the golf club, stroking through the short blades of grass in the backyard.
“Yep, I could do some damage with this baby.” Carter tossed the club a foot or so into the air and caught it in the middle of the shaft. “I’ll definitely have to get me one.”
“You know it,” Matt said, his mind still on the woman in the kitchen. Not Jazz this time, Callie. How long had Carter been seeing her? The other man had never mentioned her. “But you’re going to do more than golf in Florida. You have a job lined up, right?”
Carter’s face changed, his usually affable expression growing dark. “Yeah. As an assistant A.D. at a private school. I would have taken some time off if the bitch wasn’t being so vindictive.”
“What bitch?” Matt asked.
“Lilly,” Carter growled. “She’s trying to rob me blind.”
Lilly was Carter’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a pleasant woman with a great laugh who’d been married to him for twenty-seven years. Matt had never heard Lilly say an unkind word. Even though the backyard was secluded, Matt looked around to make sure nobody had overheard what Carter had called her.
“That’s pretty strong, Carter,” Matt said.
“Yeah, well, Lilly found out I was seeing Callie before we separated. Except she never uses Callie’s name. She always says that child. She’s jealous, I tell you. Just because I’m fifty doesn’t mean my life is over.”
Matt remembered the good-natured ribbing and gag gifts the coaches at school had given Carter last spring when he’d hit the milestone. The track coach even had a wheelchair waiting in Carter’s office, although Carter hadn’t thought that was funny.
“I almost didn’t bring Callie along today because I know how things get twisted. Look what happened with that teacher.” Carter sounded as though he expected Matt to commiserate with him.
“You never told me the details,” Matt reminded him. “You only said the story wasn’t true.”
“Damn right it’s not true.” A warm wind blew through the yard, wreaking havoc with Carter’s comb-over. “That teacher, who doesn’t even work at Faircrest, came on to me. She emailed me first. Yeah, I emailed back, even met her for a drink. But that was it.”
Matt digested the information, which wasn’t far removed from the gossip. He suddenly had to know the rest of the story. “Everybody’s saying the school board was about to launch an investigation.”
Carter’s hand tightened on the putter. “Only because of the vindictive bitch. Turns out the teacher—her name’s Karen—plays tennis with Lilly. I don’t know exactly how it went down but Lilly must’ve convinced Karen to file a complaint.”
The conversation was moving too fast for Matt. “Why would Lilly do that?”
“Because she found out about Callie!”
“But why would it matter if this Karen filed a complaint if there was no evidence?”
“You’re forgetting the emails.” Carter sounded exasperated. “They came from my work computer. Taken out of context, they don’t look so good.”
The pieces were starting to fit together in a shape Matt didn’t like. “So you did resign because of the investigation?”
“What else could I do?” Carter threw up the hand not holding the putter.
A rabbit dashed across the yard for the woods. Matt wished he could run away too so he didn’t have to hear what Carter would spew next.
“I probably should have gotten a lawyer and fought the whole thing,” Carter said. “That job in Florida is a crap job. I better not have much trouble getting a better one.”
Motion inside the house caught Matt’s eye. He was absurdly grateful to see more guests arriving. Matt had never spent much time with Carter socially. Obviously Matt didn’t know the other man as well as he’d thought he did.
“We should be getting back inside,” Matt suggested.
They walked in silence for a few steps before Carter asked, “You’re not seeing anyone, are you, Matt?”
Matt wondered what that had to do with anything. “Nope.”
“Not even the caterer?”
“Not even her,” Matt said. Yet.
“Then listen up.” Carter sounded like his old self, full of bluster and confidence. “Take a good long look before you leap.”
“Excuse me?”
“Make damn sure you don’t get involved with the wrong woman.”
The French doors opened and Callie stepped out side, the sun shining down on her and highlighting the lines around her eyes. She was older than she’d first appeared, but still substantially younger than Carter.
“Hey, honey.” Carter’s voice softened. “Miss me?”
Tom Dougherty had been on to something at the track the other day, Matt thought. Fair or not, people who dealt with high school students were held to higher standards than others.
Don’t get involved with the wrong woman, Carter had said.
The former A.D. didn’t seem to realize which woman in his life that was.
JAZZ CLOSED HER MOUTH, which meant jaws really must drop. She tried to compose an answer to Matt’s sister’s question about whether she was into Matt.
“Oh, honey. You should see your face.” Terry clapped her hands. “You really just need to tell me to mind my own business. Everybody else does.”
“I can vouch for that,” her husband, Kevin, said.
“My curiosity got the best of me,” Terry said. “I’ve never met one of Matt’s girlfriends before.”
That was an easier topic for Jazz to address than her opinion of Matt.
“You still haven’t. I did meet your brother at the park but I really am the caterer.” Jazz indicated the tray of food. “Here. Try something.”
Terry picked up a stuffed mushroom, took a bite and fluttered her eyelids as though she were in ecstasy. “Okay. You convinced me. These are divine.”
Robbie appeared at his mother’s side and wrinkled his nose. “Mushrooms! Yech!”
“Robbie, mind your manners.” Kevin flashed Jazz a grin. “Sorry about my boy. If it’s not a hot dog or PB and J, he won’t touch it.”
“Hey, that’s not true,” Robbie protested. “I like Pop-Tarts and mac and cheese.”
Kevin ruffled his son’s red hair. Callie had left the kitchen but the room seemed much too small for a caterer and a family of four. Especially this family of four.
“I’ll take this tray of food onto the deck,” Jazz said. “I think that’s where Matt wants everybody.”
“That must be where Carter is,” Kevin said. “I don’t care if it is his going-away party, he owes me money.”
Terry made a face. “Why do you guys have to bet on the golf course?”
“Why is the sky blue?” Kevin asked with a grin. “Why do you like to shop?”
“Smart aleck,” Terry said, but her eyes sparkled with humor.
“I’ll take the tray out there for you, Jazz.” Kevin picked it up, but not before Terry snagged another stuffed mushroom. She winked at Jazz, then followed her husband out of the town house, their two children flanking them.
“Uncle Matt! There you are!” Robbie yelled before disappearing outside.
Jazz sank onto one of the kitchen stools, the heat from the oven enveloping her. How had it happened that she was catering a party attended by children who were quite possibly hers biologically?
Matt hadn’t forced her to accept this job. And it was clear Kevin was in the golf league with Carter, but a part of Jazz must have realized Matt might invite family to a going-away party for a friend. Maybe a chance to see the twins again had even been part of the allure. Jazz’s willpower had certainly let her down before.
The French doors opened. Matt entered the kitchen and spotted her sitting down. His brows creased. “Hey, are you okay?”
She got up from the stool so fast she felt light-headed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Kevin—that’s my brother-in-law—just told me about Terry and all her questions. Sorry about that.”
“No problem.”
He tilted his head. His eyes were almost the exact shade of golden-brown as his hair. A golden boy, Carter had called him.
“You sure you’re okay?” Matt asked. “The way Terry goes on sometimes, I think she misses the interrogation room.”
“Excuse me?”
“She used to be a cop until the kids came along. That’s how she met Kevin. He’s a D.A. They’re good people even if Terry can be kind of scary.” He paused just as the doorbell rang. “Excuse me. I need to get that.”
More guests trickled in over the next few hours, a decent turnout. Jazz kept busy supplying a constant stream of hot finger foods, trying not to think about what Matt had said. It didn’t work.
Ironically, the ex-con’s children had quite possibly ended up with a district attorney and a former cop for parents.
The kitchen window provided a panoramic view of the backyard, where Brooke and Robbie played. The soccer ball covered with netting appeared to be a training tool with a boomerang effect. The twins took turns kicking it under the supervision of their father and uncle.
Jazz was careful to stand far enough back from the window not to be seen. Through the screen she could hear snippets of conversation about this morning’s youth soccer games. She watched Robbie run up to his sister, tag her on the arm and backpedal.
“Bet you can’t catch me!” the boy shouted.
“Maybe I don’t want to catch you,” Brooke retorted just as loudly.
“Chicken!” Robbie taunted.
After a long hesitation, Brooke dropped the soccer ball and dashed after him. Robbie ran in a zigzag pattern, his laughter ringing out. Brooke was about to tag him when she stumbled. She fell down, giggling even before she hit the grass.
Robbie raised both arms to the sky in triumph. “Told you that you couldn’t catch me!” he shouted.
“This is scrumptious. What’s in it? I think I taste eggplant.” Terry walked into the kitchen holding up a cracker slathered with dip.
Jazz slid back from the window, feeling unaccountably guilty. She strived for composure. “Eggplant, sunflower oil, onions, garlic and black pepper,” she said. “It’s called vinetta in Hungarian.”
“Sounds like something your mom used to make,” Terry said. “Was she a good cook, too?”
“I’m not sure,” Jazz answered. “I was mostly raised by my grandma.”
“So your grandmother used to make vinetta?”
She hadn’t, although in a backhanded way Grandma had spurred Jazz’s interest in cooking. If Jazz hadn’t learned her way around the kitchen, she’d have eaten many more sandwiches for dinner.
“No,” Jazz said. “My foster mother did.”
“Really, you grew up in foster care? That must have sucked.”
“It wasn’t so bad.” Jazz hadn’t realized there were worse things than being a ward of the state until she was housed in a prison cell.
“If everything your foster mother made was as tasty as this dip, that must’ve helped.” Terry licked her lips. “Thank the Lord I can’t cook like this. I already snack enough with the kids as it is. Since I quit work, I’ve gained twenty pounds. But anything would be worth it to stay home with them.”
Spoken like a happy stay-at-home mom who was raising well-adjusted kids. If the twins were Jazz’s biological children, she couldn’t have hoped for a more ideal situation.
Terry finished off the cracker. “Do you have any children, Jazz?”
Two children, Jazz thought. Except they’d never really been hers. How could she answer without being untruthful?
“I’ve never been married,” Jazz said.
“Matt hasn’t, either.” Terry’s comment seemed out of context. Before Jazz could say so, Terry added, “Listen, would you be interested in another catering job? We’re having a party for the twins next Sunday in the park. I thought we’d grill but it would be great to have a special cake and some kid-friendly desserts. You do bake, right?”
“I do.” Jazz was once again having a hard time keeping up with Terry. The other woman didn’t have the leisurely Southern drawl that was so prevalent in the Lowcountry. Terry spoke so quickly, her sentences seemed to run together.
A party, Terry had said without naming the occasion. With the school year having started only a few weeks ago and no more holidays on the September calendar, the most logical reason for a celebration was a birthday.
Disappointment cut through Jazz, as sharp as it was unexpected. Robbie and Brooke weren’t her biological children, after all.
Terry kept talking, naming a time and a place as though Jazz had already agreed. And why shouldn’t she now that she no longer needed to avoid Terry, the twins or Matt?
“How does all that sound?” Terry asked.
“Fine.” Jazz didn’t let on that she’d hardly heard a word. “But it would be better if you wrote it all down.”
“You got it.” Terry found a pad on top of the microwave and a pen in a holder by the stove.
Matt came into the kitchen, his eyes zeroing in on his sister and narrowing. “You’re not bothering Jazz again, are you, Terry?”
“For your information,” Terry said haughtily, “I just hired Jazz for the party I’m throwing for the twins.”
“Great!” Matt said, his approval out of proportion to the occasion.
“How old will Brooke and Robbie be?” Jazz didn’t even tense in preparation for the answer.
Terry glanced up from what she was writing on the pad. “Oh, it’s not their birthday. We’re having an adoption-day party.”
CHAPTER FIVE
CLEANING UP WAS taking too long.
Jazz was desperate to be alone in order to sort out her jumbled thoughts now that she knew the twins were adopted. The party guests were gone, but she couldn’t leave until Matt’s kitchen was as spotless as it had been when she arrived.
Matt was outside on the deck dumping plastic cups and plates in a trash bag while Jazz wiped down counters and washed serving trays.
She spied her empty Crock-Pot on the kitchen counter. She usually let the dish soak so it would be easier to clean but that would delay her departure even more.
Matt would soon come inside the town house.
He’d smile at her and flirt with her, which would only complicate matters further. She hadn’t even told Terry she couldn’t work the party for the twins. She’d meant to but an influx of guests had arrived soon after Terry confirmed that Brooke and Robbie had been adopted.
Making up her mind to leave, Jazz balanced the dirty Crock-Pot on top of her serving trays. She picked up the entire stack and took a few steps toward escape.
The door to the deck slid open, and Matt walked into the kitchen carrying a white plastic garbage bag. He looked tall and handsome with his tousled hair shot through with gold and his shirt untucked, a man most women wouldn’t dream of fleeing. Most women would run toward him.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” he asked. “I still need to write you a check.”
How had payment slipped her mind when it had been her main reason to take the job?
“I, uh—” she hoped to think up an excuse “—was just going to take these dishes out to my car.”
“Let me pay you first so you don’t have to make two trips.” Matt tied the garbage bag closed, set it down and picked up a checkbook and a pen from a side table.
He sat down at the kitchen table, wrote out the check and handed it to her. She was forced to put her dishes down on the kitchen counter to take it.
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Darlene Gardner
Jazz Lenox had her reasons for giving up her babies for adoption. So she can't burst into their lives after eight years. Yet there's no doubt these kids are hers. No one could mistake that unique hair.She knows she should walk away. Especially when she meets the twins' uncle–sexy, shoot-from-the-hip Matt Caminetti. But how does she leave a man who's so persistent…and so ruggedly appealing? Most surprising of all, Matt believes in her. Believes in them. A future together means coming clean about her past. All of it. It's the only way to find out if she really has a second shot at the life she's always wanted….
“That settles it.
You have to go out with me.”
Matt’s gaze was unwavering. “Because we’d be good for each other. And because I can’t stop thinking about you.”
With the pool lights shining down on him, Matt looked as golden as when Jazz had first seen him bathed in sunlight at the park. Now that she’d gotten to know and like him, he was even more handsome. Her heart hammered. “I wish you would.”
“Don’t you think about me?”
“No,” she said instantly.
“Now why do I think you’re not telling the truth?” he asked softly.
It made not one whit of difference if she found him appealing. She needed to operate on the assumption that the twins were the children she’d given up. Honestly, she’d be a lot less likely to run into them if she didn’t hang around their uncle.
Honestly, as far as Matt was concerned, she didn’t think she could stay away.
Dear Reader,
My mother thought she was carrying twins until the moment I was born. “I hear two heartbeats,” the doctor had told her. Instead, she got one big baby.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to stories about twins and why the idea for Twice the Chance came to me fully formed. It’s about a woman who stumbles across a girl and boy with unusually colored hair whom she thinks may be the twins she gave up for adoption.
The story, however, has a twist. Jazz Lenox doesn’t want anyone, especially Matt Caminetti, the man with whom she’s falling in love, to know about her suspicions. That’s because she has another secret of her own….
Until next time,
Darlene Gardner
P.S. Visit me on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.
Twice the Chance
Darlene Gardner
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
While working as a newspaper sportswriter, Darlene Gardner realized she’d rather make up quotes than rely on an athlete to say something interesting. So she quit her job and concentrated on a fiction career that landed her at Harlequin/Silhouette Books, where she wrote for the Temptation, Duets and Intimate Moments lines before finding a home at Superromance. Please visit Darlene on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.
To adoptive mothers
who love their children—and the birth mothers
who gave them the chance.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
THE SOUTH CAROLINA sun bathed the young girl in light, bringing out the unusual color of the long silky hair she wore in a ponytail.
Jazz Lenox forgot about the stitch in her side, the need to watch the packed earth for rocks and exposed roots, and her determination to run two circuits around the trail circling Ashley Greens Park in less than thirty minutes.
The girl was about seven or eight years old and wore black shorts, high blue socks and a bright blue shirt shot through with yellow lightning bolts. She was beneath the crossbar of a soccer net with her back to Jazz, on the balls of her feet, her weight slightly forward. Her ponytail swished back and forth as she moved to catch a ball careening toward her.
Her dark red ponytail.
The shade was unusual but not unique. In the three years since Jazz had moved into her one-bedroom apartment in South Carolina, a few miles outside of Charleston, she’d spotted the hair color a dozen times on people of various ages. A middle-aged man. A teenage boy. A toddler girl.
This Sunday morning was the first time Jazz had stumbled across a redhead who appeared to be the right age. Jazz realized, of course, that she could be overreacting. Maybe this child hadn’t even been a redhead at birth. It could be a coincidence that the girl’s particular shade matched not only the wispy tufts that had been on the newborn, but also Jazz’s grandmother’s hair.
“Good job! You made the stop!” A man’s deep voice cut through the warm August air.
The path of the trail brought Jazz even with the net, which was about thirty feet away. Off to one side of the girl stood a tall man with golden-brown hair wearing a T-shirt and athletic shorts. Probably the girl’s father. He clapped his hands.
“Be warned, Robbie,” he cried. “The girl in goal is a beast!”
“Boys are beasts, not girls!” The girl was dancing in place, making it appear as though the lightning bolts on her shirt were poised to strike.
“Give me the ball, Brooke.” The third voice belonged to a young boy. “I’m scoring on you this time!”
Jazz had been so focused on the girl, she hadn’t noticed the boy. Jazz kept running, putting one foot in front of the other by rote, craning her neck as her progress took her past where the boy stood.
He was about the same age as the girl with the exact shade of dark red hair.
The toe of Jazz’s running shoe caught on something, and she pitched forward. She reached out her arms to break her fall and slammed down hard on her right side. The breath squeezed out of her and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She sucked at the air, finally feeling it reach her lungs.
Pain seared her shoulder and the forearm that had taken the brunt of the fall. It was of little consequence. What mattered were the redheaded boy and girl. Were they the twins she sometimes found herself searching for no matter how determined she was to remain out of their lives?
She’d gotten such a brief look at the boy, she could have been mistaken about how old he was. Even if he were roughly the same size as the girl, that didn’t mean they were twins.
The ground in front of her yielded no answers.
Praying the children and the man hadn’t seen her fall, she got to her feet gingerly. The trio on the soccer field was laughing about something, immersed in their own little world that didn’t include Jazz. The man was now standing in goal beside the boy, who gripped the soccer ball with both hands.
Drawing in a deep breath, Jazz wiped at the dirt on her scraped arm and brushed at the twigs and grass on her running clothes. Thankfully nobody had seen her fall. As it got later in the morning and the August temperatures rose, the trail became less populated.
“Go deep, Robbie!” the man yelled, waving his arm to indicate a point roughly even with Jazz. “Brooke’s got a good punt.”
The man bent his head to say something to the girl, probably instructions. He watched as the girl took three long steps, dropped the ball and punted.
The black-and-white ball arced into the sky and flew down the field. It must have careened off the side of the girl’s foot because it didn’t travel in a straight line, instead landing and bouncing not far from Jazz.
The redheaded boy was running toward the ball, arms and legs pumping. Jazz told herself to resume her workout before the boy closed the distance between them but she craved a better look at him. With her heart hammering, she left the trail and headed for the rolling ball. She bent down, picked it up and raised her eyes.
The boy slowed, then stopped. His cheeks were red, she wasn’t sure whether from exertion or exposure to the sun. Freckles sprinkled his nose. His expression was open and earnest, something about it striking a note of familiarity she both searched for and feared noticing.
“Can I have that?” the boy asked.
Jazz stared at him, her mind a blank.
He pointed. “The ball.”
She looked down at her hands, almost surprised to see what they held. “Oh. Of course.”
Jazz tossed him the ball. He caught it easily, but stood his ground. His eyes dipped. “You’re bleeding.”
She gazed down at herself and saw blood trickling down her right leg from a gash on her knee. “I tripped over a root.”
“It looks like it hurts.”
“It’s nothing.” She felt numb to the injury, her entire focus on the boy. Like the girl, he wore long socks that she now saw covered shin guards. Even at his young age, he had an athletic build, and was wiry rather than muscular. As far as Jazz knew, nobody in her family was an athlete. Was that relevant?
“Well, bye.” The boy pivoted and dashed away.
She opened her mouth to call him back, then closed it. She shouldn’t prolong their encounter. To the boy, she was a stranger who’d happened to retrieve his ball. Maybe that’s all she was. She didn’t know how old the children were, whether they were twins or if they’d been adopted.
She could probably concoct a story, approach their father and get some answers. But what purpose would that serve? Even though she couldn’t help keeping an eye out for redheaded twins wherever she went, she would never consciously search for them. If they were happy, as this boy and girl seemed to be, she had no intention of disrupting their lives.
The boy appeared smaller and smaller as he retreated into the distance, finally stopping next to the man and the girl. The two children were virtually the same size, like twins might be. Jazz’s throat thickened. She tried to swallow but couldn’t manage it.
The boy said something to the man, then extended his arm and pointed to Jazz. The man patted the boy’s shoulder before he took off in a slow jog, heading directly for her. The children followed.
Jazz told herself to move, to rejoin the path and continue her run. Her feet didn’t cooperate, remaining as motionless as if they were glued to the grass. The man kept approaching, growing more substantial with every powerful stride. His coloring was nothing like the children’s, his hair a sun-lightened medium brown, his skin lightly tanned. He reached her a few seconds before the children.
“Hey, are you okay?” the man asked. “Robbie said you were bleeding.”
“She said she fell over a root,” Robbie added helpfully. The boy had come up behind him, arriving a few seconds before the girl. Up close, she looked remarkably like the boy.
The girl made a face. “Oh, gross!”
“Blood isn’t gross, Brooke,” the man said before addressing Jazz. “You look a little pale. You should sit down.”
With Brooke’s hair pulled back from her face and Robbie’s short haircut, it was easy to see their hairlines were identical, down to their widow’s peaks. Also the same were their oval faces, their green eyes and the freckles dotting their noses.
“Did you hear me? You’re not in shock, are you?” The man was talking again. To her. Jazz yanked her gaze from the children and focused on him. She placed him at somewhere around thirty, not much older than she was. With a slightly crooked nose and wide mouth, a combination that worked surprisingly well, he didn’t resemble the children facially, either.
“Sorry.” Her head was still spinning with possibility but she attempted a smile. “No, I’m not in shock. I’m fine.”
He frowned, his brows drawing together. “You should clean that cut so it doesn’t get infected.”
She attempted to rein in her scattered thoughts. “I will when I get home.”
“I have a first-aid kit in my bag,” he offered. “It’s over there by the goal.”
“Oh, no.” She immediately shook her head. “Thanks, but I couldn’t be a bother.”
“No bother,” he said. “Name the injury, and I’ve probably had it. I’m darn near an expert.”
She felt herself wavering. If she went with him, she could find out more about the children. What would it hurt to possibly verify these were the twins she’d given up at birth? She’d know for sure they were healthy and happy, all she could wish for.
“I don’t want to take time away from your kids,” she said, still undecided.
“They’re my niece and nephew,” he said.
“Uncle Matt’s not married,” Robbie added. “He doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”
“Mom says he has lots of girlfriends,” Brooke chimed in. “Nuh-uh,” Robbie said. “I never met one.”
“Not serious girlfriends.” Brooke sounded years older than she was.
“Thanks for sharing, kids, but you’re not helping,” the man said with an exaggerated grimace. He moved close enough to Jazz to extend a hand. “I’m Matt Caminetti. And these blabbermouths are Brooke and Robbie, my sister’s children.”
“I’m Jazz,” she said, deliberately omitting her last name. She had a vague impression of warmth when his hand clasped hers. Her mind whirled even as she greeted the children. Would it be a mistake to spend more time in their presence?
“Come on, Jazz. Let’s get that first-aid kit.” Matt took the decision out of her hands, turning back toward the grassy field and heading for the soccer goal. Brooke and Robbie skipped along beside him. After a moment’s hesitation, Jazz followed.
“Race you!” Robbie called to his sister and took off at a dead run.
“No fair!” Brooke complained even as she raced after him, gaining steadily with every stride.
“Wow,” Jazz said to Matt, “she’s fast.”
“It’s tough on Robbie having a sister who’s so athletic. She could beat him at just about anything if she tried. Except half the time she lets him win.”
Jazz’s heart pounded even faster than it had when she was keeping up her seven-minutes-a-mile pace. “They look a lot alike. Are they twins?”
“Yep,” he said. “Makes the whole competition thing even harder for Robbie.”
She tried to keep her voice from trembling. “How old are they? Seven? Eight?”
“Eight,” he said. Jazz’s heart squeezed. The twins she’d given away would have been eight last month. “I think,” Matt continued. “Or maybe they’re seven. I see them all the time but I lose track.”
Ahead of them, Brooke put on a burst of speed to draw even with Robbie, then slowed down noticeably. Brother and sister ran alongside each other for a few strides before Robbie stumbled, his arms windmilling as he righted himself. Brooke reached the goal inches ahead of her brother.
“You only won because I tripped!” Robbie cried.
Brooke settled her hands on her slim hips in a pose Jazz had seen females use countless times when dealing with a difficult male. “Whatever.”
“Let’s go again!”
“No.”
“What are you?” Robbie got right in her face. “Chicken?”
“Guys, stop! You’ll scare away Jazz,” Matt yelled to them good-naturedly, as though he’d heard it all before.
Matt continued walking to an athletic bag lying behind the goal and crouched down beside it. He looked up at Jazz with eyes that were a light brown instead of green like his niece and nephew’s. “Is Jazz short for Jasmine?”
She wanted to ask the questions, specifically whether his sister had adopted Brooke and Robbie and the exact date of their birth. Except she couldn’t think of a way to work those topics into the conversation.
“It’s just Jazz,” she said. “My mother liked the music.”
“I like the name.” He smiled at her before digging into his bag and pulling out the first-aid kit. “My sister gave this to me for a Christmas present when I started spending lots of time with her kids. She’s kind of overprotective.”
“Is she a redhead, too?” Jazz ventured, although that wouldn’t tell her anything definitive. The gene for red hair was recessive.
“Nope.” He opened the kit and pulled out antiseptic and a cotton swab. “Come closer and I’ll clean that for you. The bleeding’s stopped but this could smart.”
She complied, the sting of the antiseptic barely registering while she tried to figure out how to extract more information. Her head started to pound when nothing occurred to her. She’d make a terrible investigative reporter.
“The cut’s not too bad, but it needs a bandage.” He took one out of his bag, tore off the packaging and positioned it over her skin. “How’s the shoulder? You’re holding it like it hurts.”
She concentrated on his question instead of Brooke and Robbie kicking the soccer ball back and forth a few feet away. The throbbing had subsided to a manageable level. “It’s okay.”
“You should probably see a doctor,” he said. “At the very least, ice it and take some ibuprofen.”
“Are you done yet, Uncle Matt?” Robbie called. “You said we’d work on my corner kicks next.”
“Just a sec,” he called, then peered at Jazz. “Do you need a ride home? My car’s just over there in the parking lot. It’s getting too hot to stay much longer anyway.”
She fought the temptation to accept and gestured vaguely to the trail. “Thanks, but I don’t live far from here.”
He seemed about to protest, but then said, “Okay. Just remember to ice your shoulder. Nice meeting you, Jazz.”
“You, too.” She drank in the sight of the children who might be hers, assuring herself she was doing all of them a favor by cutting off the acquaintance. “Bye, Brooke, Robbie.”
“Bye!” the children said in unison, but Robbie was already picking up the soccer ball and running to his uncle. Brooke was humming a pretty little tune.
Jazz turned away, feeling an ache that had nothing to do with her injuries.
She’d taken maybe ten steps when Matt Caminetti called to her, “Hey, Jazz.”
She whirled.
“We’ll be here Sunday mornings after church until fall soccer starts and probably even after that, too,” he said. “Stop by and say hi.”
She raised a hand in acknowledgment before turning her back and walking out of their lives. She wouldn’t accept his invitation no matter how tempting.
Neither would Matt Caminetti have issued it if he’d known Jazz had given birth to redheaded twins while serving a prison sentence for committing a felony.
CHAPTER TWO
MATT SKIMMED the offerings on the lunch menu on a Monday more than two weeks later while breathing in the maple-syrup-scented air. Pancakes with strawberries. Gingerbread pancakes. Cinnamon pumpkin pancakes. German apple pancakes. The list was virtually endless.
“You two ready to order?” A blonde waitress in her mid-to late-twenties with the name Sadie written on her name tag stood beside their table, order pad in hand. She had a girlish voice and a figure that was anything but juvenile, shown to advantage by a gold uniform that hugged every curve.
“You go first, Matt.” Matt’s sixteen-year-old brother Danny spoke without lifting his dark head from the extensive array of pancake choices.
Matt closed his menu and set it down on the table. “I’ll have a chicken sandwich and unsweetened iced tea.”
Sadie lifted one finely plucked eyebrow. “You sure? We’re not named Pancake Palace for nothing.”
“I’m sure,” Matt said. No point inviting questions by revealing he wasn’t overly fond of pancakes.
He hadn’t heard of the restaurant until he’d noticed the place advertised on Jazz’s T-shirt as the sponsor of a local 10K race. Matt had been at Ashley Greens Park twice with the twins since he’d bandaged her leg, but she hadn’t shown up. That was cool with him. Or so he thought until he’d spotted the Pancake Palace sign from the car and suggested he and Danny stop for lunch.
His impulsiveness hadn’t paid off. The only other waitress moving about the tables and booths was a shorter, rounder version of his mother.
“Whatever you want, I’m happy to oblige.” Sadie held Matt’s gaze a few beats longer than necessary before shifting her attention to Danny. “You want me to come back, hon?”
“No, I’m ready. I’ll take the wild-blueberry pancakes with a double order of pork sausages, a banana-nut muffin and a large chocolate milk.” Danny started to close the menu, then flipped it back open. “And some cinnamon French toast.”
“French toast instead of the pancakes?” the waitress asked. Matt felt a smile coming on.
“Nope,” Danny said. “I want the pancakes, too.”
“Okay.” Sadie concentrated on Matt while she leaned forward to take their menus, providing him with an excellent view of her attributes. “Let me know if you want anything else.”
She left them, her hips swaying from side to side in an exaggerated manner. Danny appeared in danger of straining his neck watching her retreat.
“Did you get a load of that?” Danny asked in a loud whisper. “That waitress was totally coming on to you.”
“She was just being nice.”
“Yeah, right,” Danny drawled. “You gonna get her phone number?”
“No, I’m not, little brother,” he said.
“Little?” Danny straightened in his seat, taking offense as Matt had known he would. “I’m almost as tall as you are.”
“You’ll be a lot wider if you keep eating like a blue whale.”
Danny waved him off with a thin arm. “I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to pack it in. Isn’t that why you’re always feeding me?”
Matt had carved time from his summer schedule at least twice a week to take his much younger brother for driving practice and out to lunch. Finding the time had gotten harder a few weeks ago when Matt had taken over as interim athletic director at Faircrest High. As of tomorrow, the first day of school for students and the start of Danny’s sophomore year at Faircrest, it would be tougher still.
“I’m afraid you’d gnaw my arm off if we didn’t stop for food,” Matt said.
Danny laughed. “Why’d you pick this place, anyway? You don’t even like pancakes.”
Matt wasn’t about to confide in his brother about Jazz, especially because his long shot had misfired. She’d most likely been wearing the T-shirt because she’d run in the race the restaurant sponsored.
“You like pancakes,” Matt said.
Danny grinned. “I like food.”
Danny proved how much when their order came, polishing off his meal in an amazingly short time. Between mouthfuls he kept up a running conversation about family, food and the Faircrest High football team. Practice had started at the beginning of August in preparation for the season opener, which was in a few days.
“I’m busting my butt,” Danny said. “I’m the first one at practice and I work the hardest. Dad says that’s the way to get noticed.”
“Dad knows football.” Matt chewed slowly on his chicken sandwich. Their father had played college ball at Florida State and coached the Faircrest football team before becoming the high school’s athletic director, the job Matt was currently in. Dad was retired now, which gave him more time to indulge his passion. When he wasn’t watching football, he was talking about it.
“I’m getting some time with the first team,” Danny said. “I want to be so good Coach Dougherty has to start me.”
“That’s the attitude,” Matt said. “You can’t reach goals if you don’t set them.”
“Dad says that, too.” Danny finished his French toast with gusto. “Did he push you to be the best you could be, too?”
Their father had been more interested in trying to persuade Matt that giving up youth football for soccer was a mistake. Never mind that soccer was the world’s most popular sport, with billions of fans in all corners of the globe. Or that Matt had gone on to earn a full scholarship on the Clemson soccer team.
“Be the best you can be, huh?” Matt said, avoiding his brother’s question. “Seems to me I’ve heard that on a commercial.”
Danny laughed and told him about a senior on the football team who was applying to West Point. By the time Matt paid the bill, his brother had moved on to the subject of the Faircrest High athletic director position.
“So the job’s not yours yet?” Danny asked.
“That’s what interim means,” Matt teased. “This is kind of like a tryout.”
Danny stood, lanky in his maroon Faircrest High football T-shirt and the baggy black athletic shorts that reached almost to his knees. “You’re a lock, man. Things always go your way.”
“They go my way for a reason,” Matt said when they were outside the restaurant. He’d been a full-time assistant A.D. at Faircrest for six years. It was time he moved on to the top job. “You heard what I said about setting goals. Once I set mine, I go after them hard.”
Matt hadn’t achieved today’s goal of running into Jazz, but she probably wasn’t even employed by Pancake Palace. Unless she had the day off, a possibility he had yet to rule out.
“How about meeting me at the car?” he told Danny. “I’ll be there in a couple minutes.”
Without waiting to see if his brother complied, Matt headed back into the restaurant. He spotted Sadie clearing away the dishes at the table where he’d sat with Danny. The older waitress, who reminded him of his mother, was closer, jotting down an order for a family of four.
Matt intercepted the second waitress beside an empty booth while she was en route to the kitchen. Her name was Helen. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, “but does a woman named Jazz work here?”
Helen’s mouth turned downward at the corners and deep lines formed on her forehead. Up close, she looked nothing like Matt’s mother. “Jazz Lenox is one of our short-order cooks.”
That explained why Jazz hadn’t been waiting tables. “What days does she work?” Matt asked.
“She’s in the kitchen now.” Helen’s eyes narrowed, as though she were making up her mind about something. “I’ll tell her you’re out here.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Matt said, but he was speaking to the waitress’s retreating back.
He breathed in the scent of pancakes and syrup, not sure of his game plan. He was good on the fly, though. When an opportunity presented itself, he could make the most of it.
The interior door leading to the kitchen swung open. A woman emerged with a bandana covering her shoulder-length brown hair. Jazz, looking far different than she had at the park. An apron covered her toned limbs, her forehead was damp and her face flushed from the heat of the kitchen. Yet with her clear gray eyes and the freckles dotting her long nose, she had an appeal Matt couldn’t resist.
“Hey, Jazz,” Matt said. “Sorry to bother you at work. You look busy.”
“I am busy,” she confirmed, then went silent.
“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.” He decided to go with blunt honesty. “I’m wondering that same thing myself.”
Not a great opening but not bad, either, especially because he couldn’t pinpoint why Jazz had made such an impression on him. Unfortunately it didn’t seem as though he’d had the same effect on her.
“Matt Caminetti.” He introduced himself again. “We met at the park. I was with the twins.”
“I remember,” she said.
The same curiosity he’d experienced at the park hit him. Jazz was nothing like the chatty females at the high school. Or any of the women he usually came across, for that matter.
“You were wearing a Pancake Palace T-shirt. That’s how I found you. Not that I was looking exactly.” Matt made a face. “Man, I’m butchering this.”
“Butchering what?” Her voice competed with the hum of conversation in the dining room and the clattering of dishes from the kitchen. She lengthened her vowels like a Southerner but her accent didn’t sound Charlestonian.
“I think I’m asking you out.” He’d checked out her left hand for rings at the park and found none. When she didn’t respond, he checked again. Nope. No ring: wedding, engagement or other. But that didn’t always tell the full story. “Unless you’re dating someone?”
“No,” she said. He wasn’t sure which question she was responding to.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to be getting back to work.” She glanced over her right shoulder toward the kitchen and winced.
“Have you seen a doctor about that shoulder?” Matt asked.
“It’s fine.” She repeated the phrase she’d used at the park, inching backward as she talked. “I really need to go.”
“Of course,” Matt said, taken aback by how eager she was to get away from him. Even so, he felt compelled to ask another question. “So when you said no, that was to the date?”
She nodded. “But thank you very much for asking.”
She disappeared through the swinging kitchen door. He grimaced, feeling as stunned as if the door had hit him in the face. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so summarily dismissed by a woman, if ever.
The people at the nearby tables weren’t paying attention to him. His luck ended there. Danny stood beside the empty hostess stand, his mouth hanging open while he waited for Matt to reach him. “Did you just get shot down?”
Matt frowned at his brother. “Weren’t you supposed to wait in the car?”
Danny ignored the question. “Who was that, anyway?”
“Just some woman.” Matt walked past his brother out of the restaurant and into the sunny August afternoon, where it became glaringly obvious he hadn’t told the truth.
If Jazz Lenox were just another woman, her rejection wouldn’t sting so much and Matt’s goal wouldn’t be to turn her no into a yes.
AN HOUR LATER Jazz slid a plate of chocolate-chip pancakes through the pass-through window, turned back to the griddle and methodically flipped over the apple streusel pancakes arranged in a neat row.
“These are supposed to be cherry, not chocolate chip.” Helen Monroe’s pinched face appeared through the opening in the window. “And where’s the order for table seven? Some of us work for tips, you know.”
“Sorry,” Jazz muttered, grabbing the plate, annoyed at herself for making the mistake. “Table seven’s coming right up, then you’ll have your cherry pancakes.”
“I can only hope,” Helen said before disappearing.
“Don’t be nice to her.” Carl Rodriguez, the other short-order cook, had also done time in prison. He didn’t say much in the course of a shift, but Helen, who had complained to the owner several times about his hiring of ex-cons, was a hot button. “She makes many mistakes.”
Jazz set a couple of plates beside the griddle. “That doesn’t mean I have to.”
“You don’t usually.” In his thirties with dramatic dark hair and eyes, Carl was of medium height with a slender build. He quirked a black eyebrow at her. “You okay?”
Jazz had been fine until Matt Caminetti made his surprise appearance. More than two weeks had passed since she’d met Matt and the twins at Ashley Greens Park. She’d altered her jogging route and schedule, although she’d nearly convinced herself that they couldn’t be her birth children.
Then again, she considered it likely that children were placed for adoption in a different part of the state from where they were born. Jazz had been arrested in Florence and given birth in Columbia.
One thing, however, was certain. If the twins were her biological children, she never wanted them to know they had a mother who’d been locked up.
“I’m kind of tired today.” Misleading, but not a lie. Four nights a week Jazz worked as a telemarketer selling magazine subscriptions. Last night she’d finished at 10:00 p.m., which took a toll considering she hadn’t been sleeping well and her shift at Pancake Palace started at 5:30 a.m. “It makes it tough to concentrate.”
“That’s not why you can’t concentrate,” Sadie Phillips declared. Jazz hadn’t even noticed the waitress enter the kitchen. Sadie’s lips, painted a deep pink, were smiling. Her hands rested on her curvy hips. “It’s because of the hot guy. Who is he?”
Jazz felt heat creep up her neck. “Nobody.”
“Oh, come on, Jazz. Stop being so blasted private,” Sadie said in her thick Southern drawl. “If a man like that was interested in me, you couldn’t get me to shut up about it.”
“It’s not like that,” Jazz said.
“Oh, really? Then why didn’t he look twice when I shook my stuff at him?” Sadie demanded.
“You got good stuff,” Carl said without glancing up from the potatoes he was slicing.
“Why, thank you, Carl.” Sadie sounded pleased by the compliment. “The only reason for a man not to look is if he’s interested in other stuff.”
Carl chuckled softly. Jazz kept her head down, glad she had the excuse of transferring pancakes to plates. In prison, she’d quickly learned that knowledge was power. She wasn’t about to tell Sadie why she had no interest in dating Matt Caminetti. She wouldn’t tell anyone.
Jazz got through the rest of her shift without another mention of Matt. When two o’clock arrived, her mind turned to the lonely night ahead. A legion of short-order cooks had come and gone since she’d started at Pancake Palace three years ago, enabling Jazz to choose a shift that allowed her to take a second job. Too bad she hadn’t been able to find one that gave her more hours.
“Hey, Jazz.” Sadie was waiting for Jazz beside the front door. The waitress’s eyes sparkled. “That man who’s not interested in you? He’s in the parking lot.”
Jazz’s breath snagged before a logical explanation occurred to her. “He probably has some shopping to do.”
Pancake Palace was located in a shopping center a few miles west of historic downtown Charleston, sharing space with a grocery, a drugstore and other assorted businesses.
“We’ll soon find out, won’t we?” Sadie asked.
The waitress opened the door, stepping aside to let Jazz precede her. Matt Caminetti was leaning against a silver coupe. He immediately straightened and walked toward them.
“Told you so,” Sadie said teasingly, her voice a whisper. “I expect to get the whole story on Monday.” She headed away from Jazz, waving and calling, “Bye, Jazz.”
“Bye, Sadie,” Jazz said automatically. She couldn’t seem to get her feet unstuck.
She’d been so focused on the twins at the park that Matt had barely made an impression. That wasn’t the case today. Matt was the sort of man women looked at, not so much because he was drop-dead handsome but because he had an unmistakable energy. Like someone had thrown on a light switch inside him, causing everything about him to seem more vibrant. Even his slight Southern accent was attractive, smooth instead of twangy.
“I promise I’m not stalking you,” Matt said when he stepped onto the sidewalk. He was smiling, his light brown eyes trained on hers. She was five-nine in her bare feet but he was half a head taller. He held out a few sheets of paper along with something red and stretchy. “I brought you some elastic tubing and printouts of isotonic exercises for your shoulder.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Why?”
“Because this is what my orthopedist said to do when I strained my shoulder back in college.” He continued to extend the items to her. One corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “I promise I didn’t attach any strings.”
She uncrossed her arms and took the sheets and the tubing, being very careful not to accidentally touch him. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He held up a hand in farewell and did a slow jog to his car. Halfway there, he turned back and called, “Notice how I didn’t ask you out again?”
“I noticed.”
“Out of curiosity, if I had asked, would the answer still be no?”
“Yes,” she said.
He jumped on her reply. “Yes? You changed your mind?”
“Yes.” She felt her lips curve. “It would still be no.”
He snapped his fingers and shook his head. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
She didn’t let her smile grow until she got behind the wheel of her car. It was a good thing Matt Caminetti was strictly off-limits. Otherwise, he might tempt her to forget that she couldn’t trust her instincts, especially where men were concerned.
THE LARGE BOX SITTING on the carpet in the middle of Jazz’s living room floor didn’t look like anything special. Slightly battered and made of cardboard that was dirty in places, the box had arrived by UPS almost an hour before.
Jazz hadn’t opened it yet because she had the feeling that nothing would be the same once she did. Ridiculous, really, considering she didn’t know what was inside.
She had no basis for foreboding except that she seldom got anything delivered to her at all besides bills and junk mail.
The box probably weighed a good thirty pounds or so. If Jazz hadn’t been religiously doing the shoulder exercises Matt Caminetti had given her two days ago, she might not have been able to lift it without pain.
She frowned. Thinking about how considerate Matt had been represented a different kind of Pandora’s box. It seemed less risky to find out what was inside the package than to open herself to the possibility of dating him.
Jazz got down on her knees beside the box, flipped open her pocketknife, cut through the packing tape and drew back the cardboard flaps. A sheet of white paper lay atop a pile of what looked to be mostly clothes and books.
Jazz picked up the piece of paper, noticing at once the South Carolina Department of Social Services letterhead. She read the few typed paragraphs, then read them again.
It seemed her foster parents had found a box of her belongings in their attic. Instead of trying to find Jazz’s current address and mailing her the box themselves, they’d asked DSS to forward it.
Jazz shouldn’t be surprised. The last time she’d seen or heard from her foster mother was at a holding cell in the county jail the night Jazz was arrested.
A tear dripped down Jazz’s cheek. She angrily dashed it away. She’d learned quickly all those years ago that crying accomplished nothing.
Jazz put the letter aside and turned back to the box, pulling out some skinny jeans and shirts with plunging necklines. The high-heeled black sandals and bangle bracelets she’d been wearing when she was arrested were there, too. So were a black hip-hugging micro miniskirt and a thong bathing suit.
The rest of the box contained more clothes she’d never wear again, a few pieces of cheap costume jewelry, an alarm clock with a dead battery, some Harry Potter paperbacks and a couple of high school yearbooks.
Jazz sat cross-legged on the carpet, her back resting against her love seat, and leafed through the top yearbook. It was from one of the most traumatic times in her life: junior year, after her grandmother died and Jazz was shuffled to foster care. The only image of Jazz was in the class-photo section. She was unsmiling, her hair falling forward in her face, defiance in her eyes.
After flipping her yearbook closed, Jazz picked up the second one. It was black like the first yearbook but the name of the high school on the cover was different. Jazz ran her fingers over the four embossed numbers that formed the year before Jazz was born.
This was her dead mother’s yearbook, not hers.
She’d been so angry at her mother for leaving her the way she did that Jazz had never even looked through it. Jazz had a vague memory of packing the yearbook with the few belongings she’d taken from her grandmother’s home. She wasn’t exactly sure why she’d kept it except she had nothing else of her mother’s.
She held the book without opening it, remembering the chocolate bars her mother would bring when she stopped by every month or so to ask Jazz’s grandmother for drug money.
Jazz’s gratefulness for those scraps of affection had turned into resentment when her mother died of AIDS, although at nine years old Jazz hadn’t fully understood the situation. She still didn’t.
Had her mother been on drugs when she got pregnant with Jazz? Is that why her mother claimed not to know who had fathered Jazz?
Jazz stared down at the yearbook, curious if it would shed any light on who her mother had been. She flipped it open to a page that contained a yellowed newspaper clipping and a snapshot. The article was a glowing review of the high school drama department’s production of The Odd Couple, which heaped praise on Bill Smith, the student who’d played Oscar. Jazz skimmed the article for her mother’s name but didn’t find it.
She picked up the photo, barely recognizing the young, smiling girl as her mother. Next to her, with his arm around her, was the same handsome, dark-haired boy pictured in the newspaper article.
Jazz leafed through the yearbook but found no other newspaper clippings or snapshots. Why had her mother kept only those?
She turned to the section containing the junior-class photos. Like Jazz, her mother hadn’t finished high school. Bill Smith wasn’t pictured among the juniors but Marianne Lenox was, smiling almost as widely as she’d been in the snapshot.
Jazz thumbed through the yearbook pages until she reached the senior-photo section, noticing there were no signatures or messages written in the margins with one exception. Something was written in a bold hand under the photo of William Smith.
Thanks for the good times, M. It was signed Bill.
The caption underneath his photo read: A Man of Many Talents. Then came a listing of extracurricular activities that included drama, track, honors’ society, debate club and jazz band.
Jazz band.
Her heart pounded so hard she could feel the blood pumping in her ears. Jazz stared down at the photo of the dark-haired, dark-eyed Bill Smith, telling herself that what she was thinking was crazy. Jazz saw nothing of herself in him. Why, she looked more like the girl in the photo next to him.
The girl’s name jumped out at Jazz: Belinda Smith. Jazz’s eyes dipped to the caption under Belinda’s name: The Better Half of the Smith Twins.
The page in front of her blurred as Jazz tried to think. She was pretty sure twins ran in families. Jazz didn’t know if it was true but she’d even heard it was common for twins to skip a generation.
It no longer seemed like a wild coincidence that her mother had kept an old newspaper clipping and photo of a boy who’d played in a jazz band.
The irony was that in the same month Jazz had stumbled across twins who could be her biological children, she may have identified the man who fathered her.
CHAPTER THREE
JAZZ MIGHT HAVE TO find another form of exercise.
Running had always helped her think more clearly, but in the week and a half since she’d looked through her mother’s yearbook she still hadn’t decided what to do about Bill Smith.
And now trouble she didn’t need was on her heels, because she was nearly convinced that the man behind her on the park’s running trail was Matt Caminetti.
She stole another glance over her shoulder. Maybe she was wrong. The man was within thirty or forty yards, far enough away that his features were indistinct but close enough to tell he had a lean build and golden-brown hair.
She’d seen dozens of men over the years while running in Ashley Greens Park who were brown-haired and in shape. Her glimpses of the mystery man had been so fleeting he could be anybody.
Besides, Matt had specified that he came to the park with the twins on Sunday mornings. It was Monday morning, a month after she’d met him and two weeks since he’d stopped by the restaurant. Fearing that she’d bump into him every time she went jogging was crazy.
Except it was Labor Day, when people didn’t necessarily stick to their schedules. Jazz would usually be at work on a Monday morning herself, but Pancake Palace was closed for the holiday.
To be on the safe side, she ran faster.
The path left the straightaway to snake through a copse of trees. With her eyes straight ahead, Jazz concentrated on pulling ahead of the man. At the quicker pace, her legs protested, her lungs burned and her breath grew short.
It didn’t make a difference. She soon heard the crunching of footsteps gaining on her.
“Hey, Jazz.” A familiar voice that didn’t even sound winded called from behind her. “I thought that might be you.”
Matt was suddenly running abreast of her, matching his pace to hers. Jazz had a notion to speed up and try to lose him but that was extreme, not to mention impossible. She slowed. He did, too.
“I didn’t…know…you were…a runner.” She could barely catch her breath to form the words.
“I’m not,” he said. “But if I’m going to scrimmage with my kids, I need to stay in shape.”
“Your kids?” She was sure the twins had said he wasn’t married. Was he divorced?
“I coach a youth soccer team of thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds pretty much year-round,” Matt said. “They love to try to get the best of me.”
In running shorts and a T-shirt that left his legs and arms bare, Matt looked like an athlete, with impressive musculature minus the bulk.
“You must really be into soccer.” A rivulet of sweat trickled down the side of her face, but now that she wasn’t running as fast it was easier to talk.
“I’ve played the game almost my whole life.” He had a smooth, even stride, and she got the impression he ran the same way he did everything else—effortlessly. Not only wasn’t he breathing hard, but he was also barely sweating.
Don’t ask about the twins, she told herself.
“Are you trying to turn your niece and nephew into soccer lifers, too?” she heard herself ask.
He laughed. “Robbie’s already got the bug. He begged me to help him, not that he had to try too hard.”
Change the subject.
“How about Brooke?” She tried not to sound too curious. “Is she into soccer, too?”
“Not like her brother but she’s a natural athlete,” Matt said. “Once she understands how good she can be, the love will follow.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Jazz asked.
“It will,” Matt said. “That’s the way it works.”
She took a sidelong glance at him to try to gauge if he found her questions about his niece and nephew suspicious. He wore a pleasant, neutral expression. He’d tell her the date of the twins’ birthday if she asked. She could forget the whole thing if it wasn’t July twenty-fourth.
But what if it was? Would her resolve be strong enough to stay away from the twins if she knew for certain they were her biological children?
“How about you?” he asked.
She’d forgotten what they were talking about. “Excuse me?”
“You ever play soccer? It’s usually the first sport parents sign up their kids for.”
Jazz’s mother hadn’t stuck around long enough to get Jazz involved in anything. The only game Jazz’s grandmother had taught her was how to beat the welfare system.
“I’m not very athletic,” she said.
“I don’t believe that.” His eyes swept over her. “You look like you’re in great shape.”
She’d never exercised regularly until prison, where she’d done legions of sit-ups and push-ups in her cell. During the hour inmates were let outside twice a day, she’d trampled the grass walking laps around the prison yard. Running had only been allowed on the basketball court.
Jazz didn’t need a psychologist to tell her that was why she’d taken up jogging. She often hit the trails even after standing on her feet all day. It struck her that Bill Smith’s list of high school activities had included track. Could a love of running be hereditary? She shoved the question out of her mind, determined to deal with one problem at a time.
“Thank you,” she said, her chance to ask about the twins’ birthday gone.
They ran side by side in silence with Jazz watching Matt in her peripheral vision. His skin had a healthy glow, as though he spent a lot of time outdoors. His nose went a little wayward in profile and she guessed it had been broken. The imperfection somehow made him more attractive.
She needed to get a grip. It made not one whit of difference if she found him appealing. She needed to operate on the assumption that the twins were the children she’d given up. She’d be a lot less likely to run into them if she didn’t hang around their uncle.
“I need to walk awhile.” The perfect excuse to cut their conversation short.
He stopped running, too.
“Is your shoulder bothering you?” He sounded concerned, the way he had at the restaurant. She couldn’t say for sure why that touched her.
“My shoulder’s fine, thanks.” She’d religiously done the exercises he’d given her, a much cheaper alternative than seeking medical attention. She had health care but could barely afford the co-payment for a doctor’s visit. “I’m just a little winded.”
“Mind if I walk with you?” he asked.
She shrugged instead of stating she’d rather he go ahead without her. What was the matter with her?
“I’ve got a family picnic later,” he said, and she instantly pictured Brooke and Robbie. “How about you? Got any plans?”
“Yes.” She swallowed the ache of loneliness in her throat, wondering where it had come from. Her plans involved finding a quiet spot on nearby Folly Beach where she could gaze at the ocean and read a book. “It’s nice to have an evening off.”
“Don’t you work the day shift?”
“I have a second job.” Now, why had she told him something even her restaurant coworkers didn’t know?
“Does it involve cooking, too?” he asked.
“Telemarketing. I’d love to work for a caterer, but those jobs are hard to come by.” She couldn’t seem to stop confiding in him. At least she hadn’t told him why a caterer would be reluctant to hire her. Or that without two jobs she wouldn’t be able to afford her apartment.
He didn’t say anything for long moments. “What if I offered you a catering job?”
“What?”
“A friend of mine is moving out of state. I’m inviting people to drop by my house Saturday afternoon to say goodbye. I don’t know what to feed them.”
“How about burgers and hot dogs?”
“The party’s in the afternoon and they won’t all be coming at the same time. Some of them will be hungry, some won’t.”
“You could go with finger foods.” As the idea took hold, she elaborated. “Mini quiches, stuffed mushrooms, cocktail meatballs. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds great,” he said. “Then you’ll do it?”
She hesitated, and he named a figure double what she earned on any given night at her telemarketing job. “I’ll pay for the groceries, of course.”
The offer was tantamount to dangling a Godiva in front of a chocoholic. Just the thought of having the freedom to cook something not on the Pancake Palace menu sent her heart beating faster.
Because she wanted to immediately accept, she didn’t. She’d learned in prison that opportunities like this one were seldom as good as they seemed. “I hardly know anything about you.”
“My players will vouch for me.” He slid her a grin. “I don’t only coach youth soccer, I coach the Faircrest High boys’ team, too.”
She hadn’t pegged him for a full-time coach. She would have guessed doctor, lawyer or any of the other professions associated with ambition.
“Is that where Brooke and Robbie will go to high school?” She couldn’t seem to stop digging for more information about them.
“Terry—that’s my sister—sends them to private school. They don’t live in my district, anyway. My brother-in-law inherited a place south of Broad.” He named the most prestigious part of peninsular Charleston, an area so rich in history and beauty that it resembled a living museum.
“Is that where you live, too?” Jazz asked.
“My town house is near Magnolia Plantation,” he said, referring to a popular tourist attraction nestled along the western banks of the Ashley River. “I bought it because it backs up to green space.”
Jazz also lived west of the river but on the less desirable side of Ashley Greens Park, where multi-family housing and strip shopping centers were more common than trendy neighborhoods. Her apartment abutted another apartment.
“Any more questions?” he asked.
Are your niece and nephew my children?
“No,” she said.
“You sure? I want you to feel comfortable when you come over,” he said. “I swear you can trust me.”
She didn’t trust anyone.
“Then give me the run of the kitchen and treat me like an employee.” She hadn’t consciously decided to accept the job until that second.
He saluted her. “Aye aye, captain.”
She felt a grin teasing the corners of her mouth. “How do I get in touch with you?”
“Give me your cell number and I’ll call you,” he said.
“But you don’t have your phone with you, do you?”
“Believe me, I’ll remember the number.” His inflection was jaunty enough that she wouldn’t have been surprised had he winked.
She recited her phone number, and he repeated it just as they reached the offshoot of the path that led to her apartment. She pointed. “Home is that way.”
“I’ll call you,” he said before he resumed his run.
She headed home, sure she was making a mistake but equally certain she’d follow through with the job.
“CAN YOU BELIEVE Matt’s having a goodbye party for Carter? What, if anything, is he thinking?”
Matt paused at the entrance to the teachers’ lounge at Faircrest High School a few days later. The door was ajar, something that volleyball coach and psychology teacher Donna Lee must not have realized, considering the volume of her voice.
Donna sat at the only occupied table, her back to the door. She was flanked by school librarian Fran Van Houten and Tom Dougherty, who’d taught PE and coached football at Faircrest for almost twenty-five years. Fran’s body was angled forward, her mouth slightly agape as she focused on Donna. Tom leaned back in his chair, cradling a cup of coffee in his large hands. He met Matt’s eyes and rolled his.
“If Carter hadn’t given notice,” Donna continued, “the school board would be investigating him as we speak.”
Carter Prioleau was leaving Faircrest after eleven successful years as the athletic director. He’d been instrumental in improving the school’s athletic facilities and helping to build a stable of winning coaches.
Tom cleared his throat and nodded to where Matt stood. Donna kept talking.
“It makes you wonder if Matt’s qualified to run the athletic department,” Donna said. “He should be distancing himself from the whole mess.”
Tom drew a circle in the air with his finger and pointed at Matt. Donna finally turned, her sleek dark hair swinging with the movement. Her face lost color until it was nearly the shade of the white Formica on the tabletop.
“Good morning, Donna.” Matt advanced so he was standing just steps from her. “Am I interrupting?”
She shook her head mutely.
“I thought I heard my name,” Matt said.
Donna mumbled something unintelligible, then rose. “I’ve got to get to class.”
“Me, too.” Fran got up so fast she bumped her knee on the underside of the table. “Except I’m going to the library. That’s where I’ve got to get to.”
The two women hurried off, their heels clicking on the linoleum, leaving Matt alone in the lounge with Tom. The other man was dressed in shorts and a maroon Faircrest High T-shirt, his standard work clothes. At over fifty, with muscle packed onto his short frame, Tom was a walking advertisement for the weight room.
“What was that all about?” Matt asked.
“If you’ve got a couple minutes, I’ll tell you,” Tom said.
Matt mentally went over his schedule and determined there was nothing that couldn’t wait. He started to pull out a chair and sit down.
“Not here.” Tom drained the rest of his coffee. “Somewhere we won’t be interrupted.”
“That leaves out the athletic office,” Matt said. “It’s a beautiful morning. Let’s go outside.”
To get there they needed to navigate a sea of teenagers, most of whom greeted them. When they finally walked through the double doors into the crisp morning air, yellow buses were lining up at the curb. Tom veered around the side of the school building toward a four-hundred-meter running track that Carter had successfully lobbied to have resurfaced.
“It’s quiet out here in the morning,” Tom said as they stepped onto the springy surface of the deserted track. Beyond it was a thicket of woods that separated the school property from a surrounding neighborhood. “Nobody will overhear us.”
“I appreciate that you’ve got my back, T.D.” Matt used the nickname Tom had gotten long ago when his teams started racking up touchdowns. “But I can handle the Donnas of the world.”
“That woman’s got a bigger mouth than a hippopotamus,” Tom said. “But it’s not just her. Everybody’s talking about Carter and that summer school teacher.”
“Carter told me she accused him of sexual harassment.” Matt had worked closely with the A.D. since being hired as his assistant. “He said it was blown way out of proportion.”
“Not according to the gossips,” Tom said. “Donna says it’s why Carter resigned before the school year started.”
“No way!” Matt’s exclamation startled into flight some sparrows foraging for insects in the infield grass.
Tom put up a hand. “Just telling you what I heard.”
“But that’s bull,” Matt said. “Carter had a tough summer, with his marriage breaking up like it did. He’s leaving town because he needs a change of scenery.”
“You can figure out why people think he’s getting a divorce,” Tom said.
It didn’t take much brain power. If the gossips believed Carter was guilty of sexual harassment, it followed they’d think he cheated on his wife.
“School started two weeks ago,” Matt said. “Why didn’t these stories come out then?”
“They did,” Tom said. “Everybody’s talking about it. Teachers. Parents. Students.”
“I haven’t heard much about it,” Matt said.
“That’s because everybody knows Carter recommended you to take over his job,” Tom said.
“Then why did you tell me?”
“Because your dad and me, we go way back. And because I like you.” Tom cleared his throat. “You’ve got to be smart, Matt.”
“What do you mean?”
“That party you’re throwing for Carter, you should think about canceling.”
“I’m not turning my back on Carter because of gossip,” Matt said. Not to mention he’d lose his excuse to see Jazz again, although he could come up with another reason. He’d been working on a plan when he’d had the good luck of running into her at the park on Labor Day.
“Fair enough,” Tom said.
They walked without speaking until they reached the point on the track where they’d started. “You’re coming to the party, right?” Matt asked.
“Can’t. The wife’s got me booked all day.” Tom avoided Matt’s eyes, telling Matt everything he needed to know.
Tom hadn’t only relayed the gossip. He believed it.
JAZZ WHEELED HER grocery cart into a line that was three-deep on Friday afternoon, relieved that for once she didn’t have to mentally add the prices of her items.
Crab. Artichoke. Fruit. Ground beef. Sausage. Spinach. Mushrooms. Eggs.
If Matt hadn’t dropped off an envelope of cash by Pancake Palace, she wouldn’t have had enough money in her checking account to cover the bill.
“Buy whatever you want,” he’d told her when he filled her in on the specifics. Guests were dropping by between two and six o’clock on Saturday, so they wouldn’t expect a full meal. He was anticipating as few as a dozen people and as many as twenty-five. She should err on the side of too much food rather than too little.
The envelope had contained two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, which seemed excessive. She wondered why Matt hadn’t bought some party trays from the super-market’s deli department. He could have added precut fruit and veggies and been all set for much less than he was paying her.
“Hey, Jazz!” Sadie came up behind her, still wearing the Pancake Palace waitress uniform that was a size too tight. “Looks like we had the same idea.”
The grocery store was two doors down from the restaurant, making it a convenient after-work stop.
Sadie held up a green plastic basket filled with groceries. “Benjy wants sloppy joes for dinner.”
Benjy was Sadie’s six-year-old son and the reason the waitress didn’t work nights. The boy already had a deadbeat dad. Sadie refused to saddle him with an absentee mom even if it meant sharing an apartment and child-care duties with another single mother.
Jazz knew all this because Sadie hung out in the kitchen with her and Carl when business was slow, never seeming bothered that Sadie did almost all the talking.
“What are you making for dinner tonight?” Sadie peered into her buggy before Jazz could block the view. “Ooo. Are you having company?”
“No,” Jazz said.
“Then what’s the occasion?” Sadie was smiling, making it impossible for Jazz to take offense at her prying.
“A catering job,” Jazz said.
“That’s great! I didn’t know you did that sort of thing! How long have you been at it?”
Jazz swallowed the urge to tell Sadie it wasn’t any of her business. The other woman was just trying to be friendly, the same as always. “Actually, this is my first time.”
“How exciting! What kind of job? At a country club? A private party? What?”
“The, um, client is throwing a goodbye party for one of his friends.”
“His?” Sadie picked up on the pronoun. “You’re dealing with the guy and not his wife?”
“The client’s not married,” Jazz said.
Sadie placed one hand on her curvy hip. “Then why didn’t he just buy a deli tray and some beer?”
Jazz’s thoughts exactly. Her doubts resurfaced. “I don’t know.”
“He probably wants something real nice.” Sadie laid a hand on Jazz’s upper arm, the deep pink of her fingernails in sharp contrast to Jazz’s tan shirt. “I think it’s great that he hired you.”
A doorbell sounded, loud and urgent. The people in line in front of them looked around to see where the noise was coming from. Sadie giggled, dug in her voluminous purse and pulled out a cell phone. “It’s my text message tone. Isn’t it funny?”
She pressed a button and read the lines of type. Her face crumbled, all the happiness disappearing. Jazz clamped her mouth shut, reminding herself of her long-term policy not to get involved in problems that weren’t hers.
Sadie’s eyes teared up. Oh, damn.
“Are you okay, Sadie?” Jazz asked.
“No. It’s from Ace.” Sadie thrust her cell phone at Jazz so the text was visible. Ace was the guy Sadie had been dating for the past few weeks.
Sorry, babe. Not feeling it anymore. Later.
Sadie sniffed loudly. “I can’t believe he broke up with me by text. What kind of guy does that?”
A guy who isn’t worth crying over.
“I’m sorry.” Jazz thought of how excited Sadie had been whenever she and Ace had a date planned. “Seems like you really cared about him.”
“That’s just it. I didn’t!” Sadie said. “Ace is a jerk. I mean, he nicknamed himself! And he didn’t want to meet Benjy.”
“Then why are you crying?”
Sadie dashed away the tears from under her eyes. “Because everybody I date turns out to be a jerk. I wouldn’t know a nice guy if he fell from the sky and landed in front of me. I’m a loser magnet!”
“We all make mistakes,” Jazz said.
“Have you?” Sadie peered at her through watery blue eyes.
Luke Bennett’s face flashed in Jazz’s mind. One of his eyebrows was cocked and his grin was coaxing, the way he’d looked when he offered to show Jazz a good time on her eighteenth birthday.
She’d been nervous about becoming a legal adult because her foster parents would only house her until the end of the school year. Luke made the landmark seem like an adventure.
“No more kid stuff,” he’d said.
That statement turned out to be prophetic. Since she was eighteen when the crime was committed, she was charged as an adult.
“Oh, yeah,” Jazz said. “I made a whopper.”
Sadie’s tears stopped. “Is that why you wouldn’t go out with that Matt guy?”
“How do you know I wouldn’t go out with him?” Jazz hadn’t shared any information about Matt. After a while, Sadie had given up asking about him.
“You’d be smiling way more if you were dating someone that hot,” Sadie said.
Jazz did smile then. She liked Sadie. The waitress made it impossible not to.
“I’m not looking to date anyone right now,” Jazz said.
“Why not?”
Should Jazz tell her? What would it hurt? “I don’t trust my instincts.”
“You and me both, sister,” Sadie exclaimed. “You and me both.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JAZZ CRACKED THE Crock-Pot lid Saturday afternoon to check on the meatballs, getting a whiff of the pineapple preserves she’d used to make the sauce.
Excellent.
She transferred bite-sized quiche, stuffed mushrooms and mini crab cakes from plastic containers to a tray she could pop in the oven when guests started to arrive.
All of the hors d’oeuvres had passed her taste test. So had the fresh fruit she’d arranged on skewers, purchased earlier today at the local farmer’s market.
“Did you know you’re smiling?”
Jazz looked up from her work to find Matt in the kitchen, leaning against the half wall that led to the rest of the town house. He wore khaki shorts that ended a few inches above the knee and a button-down, short-sleeved cream shirt that contrasted with his thick golden-brown hair. He looked fantastic.
“Nothing’s more satisfying than cooking.” Jazz swept a hand to indicate her surroundings. “Especially in a kitchen like this.”
The rest of his town house was nice, with rich, dark-wood furniture and a color scheme that incorporated shades of navy, forest-greens and burgundy. The kitchen was spectacular. Granite countertops with plenty of space. Top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances. Plentiful cabinets with wood inlays. It was a kitchen fit for a gourmet.
“Then you’re glad you took the job?” he asked. “I got the impression something was holding you back.”
The twins, she thought.
“It was you,” she blurted out. Anything to throw him off track. To soften the abruptness of her accusation, she smiled. “I thought the catering thing might be a scam you use on women who refuse to date you.”
He threw back his head and laughed, a pleasant, rumbling sound. “Then how do you explain the goodbye party for my friend?”
“Tell me, does this mysterious friend have a name?” She injected heavy skepticism into her voice.
Matt was still grinning. “His name is Carter Prioleau.”
“A good Charleston name.” She stroked her chin, nodding in approval. “I couldn’t have made up a better one myself. And why, pray tell, is this Charlestonian leaving God’s country?”
Matt’s expression turned serious. “I wish I could make up a story, but the truth is he’s going through a divorce. It’s been pretty hard on him.”
The doorbell chimed. Matt checked his watch. “That’ll be my proof. Carter’s always on time.”
“Can’t wait to meet your alibi,” Jazz said, eager to see his smile again. He didn’t disappoint her.
She was also smiling when she turned the oven to preheat. Flirting with Matt had been fun, especially because she could tell he was a good guy. More of a go-getter than she was used to, perhaps. But he wouldn’t pursue her if she made it clear she wasn’t interested.
Except, didn’t being flirtatious convey the opposite message? She took a deep breath. There she went again, worrying for nothing. She was hardly a beauty. Heaven knew she wasn’t a catch.
A man as charming, good-natured and—she might as well admit it—hot as Matt could have his pick of women. He didn’t have to chase an ex-con who really needed to make it clear that nothing would happen between them.
A giggle that didn’t sound masculine traveled through the town house.
“It’s so nice of you to do this for Carter.” The low-pitched female voice preceded Matt and his guests into the kitchen. Its owner had luxurious long black hair and a bra size Jazz guessed was double D, and she was probably no older than thirty. Her pale pink sundress wasn’t particularly short or tight but showcased her to voluptuous advantage.
She stood inches away from an average-looking man at least twenty years her senior, his thinning hair parted on the side and swept over his bald spot. The man held his chin high, and a smug smile played about his lips.
Matt’s own smile no longer reached his eyes. “Jazz, this is Carter and Kelly.”
“Her name’s Callie,” Carter corrected.
“Spelled with a C.” The woman formed a semicircle with her thumb and index finger.
“Sorry,” Matt said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll answer to anything, even, ‘Hey, you!’” Callie laughed again. She was nervous, Jazz realized. She was also pretty definitely not Carter’s estranged wife. “I really like your name, Jazz.”
“Thanks,” Jazz said. Matt stood stiffly, saying nothing. “I’m the caterer,” Jazz added.
Matt found his voice. “A friend who happens to be a caterer.”
Was that how Matt thought of her when they’d only known each other a little more than a month? In the three years she’d been out of prison, Jazz had made a number of acquaintances but nobody she’d call a friend, except possibly Sadie.
“A caterer, huh?” Carter released a low whistle and slapped Matt lightly on the back. “I didn’t know I rated that high.”
“Are you kidding? I owe you.” Matt sounded more like his normal self.
“For what?” Carter retorted.
“The job recommendation.”
Carter snorted. “Bull. You’ll be named A.D. even if I didn’t lobby for you.”
“A.D.? Isn’t that short for athletic director?” Jazz had intended to fade into the anonymity of the catering job but couldn’t let the comment pass. “I thought Matt was the high school soccer coach.”
“He is in the spring. And he’s doing wonderful things with the program,” Carter said. “But Matt’s destined for greater things. Right now he’s the interim A.D. but he’s the favorite for the top job.”
“I learned from the best,” Matt said, turning his head to address Jazz. “Carter just resigned as A.D.”
“I’m leaving the athletic program in good hands.” Carter gave Matt a hearty slap on the back. “Matt’s a golden boy who gets things done. He probably even managed to talk some people into showing up today for my party.”
An uneasy current ran beneath the smooth words. Callie fidgeted, appearing even more uncomfortable. Jazz wondered what was going on.
“Of course people will come,” Matt said.
“People from my golf league,” Carter countered. “Good thinking inviting them.”
“No problem,” Matt said. “If I ever want to join, I’ll have an in.”
“The league doesn’t play in the summer, buddy,” Carter said. “If you get the A.D. job, that’s the only season you’ll have time to breathe.”
“Excuse me.” Jazz didn’t need to stick around and listen to more evidence that Matt was a responsible person. “These hors d’ouevres have to go in the oven.”
That was the truth. Once the guests started arriving, her plan was to provide a steady supply of warm appetizers.
“Hey, Matt. Before I forget, can you show me that new putter you got?” Carter asked. “I’m planning to play a lot of golf in Florida.”
“Sure,” Matt said. “My golf bag’s in the shed out back.”
“I’ll come with you.” Carter turned to Callie. “Honey, will you be okay for a few minutes without me?”
“I guess,” Callie said.
Carter kissed Callie on the lips before heading with Matt for the French doors that led to the backyard. The town house was situated perfectly for a party, with a deck overlooking a good-sized yard flanked by evergreens. The temperature was in the low seventies and the sun was shining; ideal outdoor weather. Yet Callie stayed in the kitchen with Jazz.
“The food looks great,” Callie said in her soft voice when the men were gone. “But if I don’t watch, my butt blows up like a hot-air balloon.”
Jazz laughed. “I doubt that. But there’s fruit, if you want it.”
“Not my thing. Unless the fruit’s covered in chocolate.” Callie sat down on one of the tall stools beside the breakfast bar and Jazz got a whiff of perfume. Callie remained quiet for long moments before drawing an audible breath. “Can I ask you something, Jazz?”
The way Callie phrased the question made Jazz long to say no. She hesitated. “Go ahead.”
“Did it seem like Matt didn’t know about me?”
Oh, yeah.
Jazz lowered the oven temperature. She wanted the food warm, not overdone. “Why do you ask?”
“Carter’s the best boyfriend I ever had.” Callie rolled her eyes. “I mean, moving to Florida’s not costing me a dime. But I had to fuss up a storm before he’d agree to bring me today.”
The doorbell rang again, a timely interruption.
Callie rose from the stool. “I’ll get it.”
Jazz wasn’t about to fight her for the honor. She opened the oven door and removed the cookie sheet. Using a wide spatula, she transferred the food onto the pretty serving trays she’d found at a yard sale, the way she’d acquired most of her better kitchen supplies.
She heard voices, some belonging to children. Brooke and Robbie? Don’t panic, she told herself. The party was for Matt’s friends, not his family. One of the guys from Carter’s golf league probably had children.
“Uncle Matt! Look what Dad bought me!” Robbie dashed into the kitchen carrying a soccer ball draped with netting.
Jazz’s heart thudded so hard she felt nauseous. Inside the house, Robbie’s hair didn’t look as red as it had in the sun but his skin appeared more pale, his eyes greener. His coloring reminded Jazz of a photo her grandmother had kept of herself as a child.
The young boy scanned the kitchen. “Where’s Uncle Matt?”
Brooke followed her brother into the kitchen, humming an unrecognizable tune and doubling the visual punch. Jazz braced a hand on the counter to steady herself.
“Your uncle’s out back with Carter.” Callie had reentered the kitchen, although Jazz hadn’t noticed until she spoke.
Brooke stayed in the kitchen, peering at Jazz. “Aren’t you the lady from the park?”
“What lady?” asked a plump brunette who must have been their mother. Her curly brown hair was pulled back from a round, pretty face. She looked nothing like the children in either coloring or stature.
“I remember you,” Robbie said to Jazz. “You’re the lady who fell!”
“Hi, I’m Terry. Matt’s sister.” Terry’s dark eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled, exactly like her brother’s. “Matt didn’t tell us he was dating anyone.”
“We’re not dating,” Jazz said quickly. “I’m Jazz, the caterer.”
“Then you didn’t meet Matt at the park?” Terry asked.
“Well, yes,” Jazz said.
“After she fell down,” Brooke supplied.
“Is that when you told him you were a caterer?” Terry asked.
“You’re asking too many questions, darlin’.” A man with a wiry build, boyish features and thick blond hair that looked expensively cut joined them. He was dressed in crisp khaki slacks and a shirt with an alligator over the pocket. “I’m Kevin Pinckney, Terry’s husband. I’m sorry she’s freaking you out.”
“I am not,” Terry declared. “Jazz, am I freaking you out?”
Kevin held up a hand, but he was laughing. “Enough. Cut the woman a break, will you, Ter?”
“I’m simply trying to figure it all out,” Terry said. “So, Jazz, are you into my brother or aren’t you?”
Just like that, Callie’s problems took a backseat.
Jazz had enough of her own.
MATT WATCHED Carter line up an imaginary putt and slowly pull back the golf club, stroking through the short blades of grass in the backyard.
“Yep, I could do some damage with this baby.” Carter tossed the club a foot or so into the air and caught it in the middle of the shaft. “I’ll definitely have to get me one.”
“You know it,” Matt said, his mind still on the woman in the kitchen. Not Jazz this time, Callie. How long had Carter been seeing her? The other man had never mentioned her. “But you’re going to do more than golf in Florida. You have a job lined up, right?”
Carter’s face changed, his usually affable expression growing dark. “Yeah. As an assistant A.D. at a private school. I would have taken some time off if the bitch wasn’t being so vindictive.”
“What bitch?” Matt asked.
“Lilly,” Carter growled. “She’s trying to rob me blind.”
Lilly was Carter’s soon-to-be ex-wife, a pleasant woman with a great laugh who’d been married to him for twenty-seven years. Matt had never heard Lilly say an unkind word. Even though the backyard was secluded, Matt looked around to make sure nobody had overheard what Carter had called her.
“That’s pretty strong, Carter,” Matt said.
“Yeah, well, Lilly found out I was seeing Callie before we separated. Except she never uses Callie’s name. She always says that child. She’s jealous, I tell you. Just because I’m fifty doesn’t mean my life is over.”
Matt remembered the good-natured ribbing and gag gifts the coaches at school had given Carter last spring when he’d hit the milestone. The track coach even had a wheelchair waiting in Carter’s office, although Carter hadn’t thought that was funny.
“I almost didn’t bring Callie along today because I know how things get twisted. Look what happened with that teacher.” Carter sounded as though he expected Matt to commiserate with him.
“You never told me the details,” Matt reminded him. “You only said the story wasn’t true.”
“Damn right it’s not true.” A warm wind blew through the yard, wreaking havoc with Carter’s comb-over. “That teacher, who doesn’t even work at Faircrest, came on to me. She emailed me first. Yeah, I emailed back, even met her for a drink. But that was it.”
Matt digested the information, which wasn’t far removed from the gossip. He suddenly had to know the rest of the story. “Everybody’s saying the school board was about to launch an investigation.”
Carter’s hand tightened on the putter. “Only because of the vindictive bitch. Turns out the teacher—her name’s Karen—plays tennis with Lilly. I don’t know exactly how it went down but Lilly must’ve convinced Karen to file a complaint.”
The conversation was moving too fast for Matt. “Why would Lilly do that?”
“Because she found out about Callie!”
“But why would it matter if this Karen filed a complaint if there was no evidence?”
“You’re forgetting the emails.” Carter sounded exasperated. “They came from my work computer. Taken out of context, they don’t look so good.”
The pieces were starting to fit together in a shape Matt didn’t like. “So you did resign because of the investigation?”
“What else could I do?” Carter threw up the hand not holding the putter.
A rabbit dashed across the yard for the woods. Matt wished he could run away too so he didn’t have to hear what Carter would spew next.
“I probably should have gotten a lawyer and fought the whole thing,” Carter said. “That job in Florida is a crap job. I better not have much trouble getting a better one.”
Motion inside the house caught Matt’s eye. He was absurdly grateful to see more guests arriving. Matt had never spent much time with Carter socially. Obviously Matt didn’t know the other man as well as he’d thought he did.
“We should be getting back inside,” Matt suggested.
They walked in silence for a few steps before Carter asked, “You’re not seeing anyone, are you, Matt?”
Matt wondered what that had to do with anything. “Nope.”
“Not even the caterer?”
“Not even her,” Matt said. Yet.
“Then listen up.” Carter sounded like his old self, full of bluster and confidence. “Take a good long look before you leap.”
“Excuse me?”
“Make damn sure you don’t get involved with the wrong woman.”
The French doors opened and Callie stepped out side, the sun shining down on her and highlighting the lines around her eyes. She was older than she’d first appeared, but still substantially younger than Carter.
“Hey, honey.” Carter’s voice softened. “Miss me?”
Tom Dougherty had been on to something at the track the other day, Matt thought. Fair or not, people who dealt with high school students were held to higher standards than others.
Don’t get involved with the wrong woman, Carter had said.
The former A.D. didn’t seem to realize which woman in his life that was.
JAZZ CLOSED HER MOUTH, which meant jaws really must drop. She tried to compose an answer to Matt’s sister’s question about whether she was into Matt.
“Oh, honey. You should see your face.” Terry clapped her hands. “You really just need to tell me to mind my own business. Everybody else does.”
“I can vouch for that,” her husband, Kevin, said.
“My curiosity got the best of me,” Terry said. “I’ve never met one of Matt’s girlfriends before.”
That was an easier topic for Jazz to address than her opinion of Matt.
“You still haven’t. I did meet your brother at the park but I really am the caterer.” Jazz indicated the tray of food. “Here. Try something.”
Terry picked up a stuffed mushroom, took a bite and fluttered her eyelids as though she were in ecstasy. “Okay. You convinced me. These are divine.”
Robbie appeared at his mother’s side and wrinkled his nose. “Mushrooms! Yech!”
“Robbie, mind your manners.” Kevin flashed Jazz a grin. “Sorry about my boy. If it’s not a hot dog or PB and J, he won’t touch it.”
“Hey, that’s not true,” Robbie protested. “I like Pop-Tarts and mac and cheese.”
Kevin ruffled his son’s red hair. Callie had left the kitchen but the room seemed much too small for a caterer and a family of four. Especially this family of four.
“I’ll take this tray of food onto the deck,” Jazz said. “I think that’s where Matt wants everybody.”
“That must be where Carter is,” Kevin said. “I don’t care if it is his going-away party, he owes me money.”
Terry made a face. “Why do you guys have to bet on the golf course?”
“Why is the sky blue?” Kevin asked with a grin. “Why do you like to shop?”
“Smart aleck,” Terry said, but her eyes sparkled with humor.
“I’ll take the tray out there for you, Jazz.” Kevin picked it up, but not before Terry snagged another stuffed mushroom. She winked at Jazz, then followed her husband out of the town house, their two children flanking them.
“Uncle Matt! There you are!” Robbie yelled before disappearing outside.
Jazz sank onto one of the kitchen stools, the heat from the oven enveloping her. How had it happened that she was catering a party attended by children who were quite possibly hers biologically?
Matt hadn’t forced her to accept this job. And it was clear Kevin was in the golf league with Carter, but a part of Jazz must have realized Matt might invite family to a going-away party for a friend. Maybe a chance to see the twins again had even been part of the allure. Jazz’s willpower had certainly let her down before.
The French doors opened. Matt entered the kitchen and spotted her sitting down. His brows creased. “Hey, are you okay?”
She got up from the stool so fast she felt light-headed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Kevin—that’s my brother-in-law—just told me about Terry and all her questions. Sorry about that.”
“No problem.”
He tilted his head. His eyes were almost the exact shade of golden-brown as his hair. A golden boy, Carter had called him.
“You sure you’re okay?” Matt asked. “The way Terry goes on sometimes, I think she misses the interrogation room.”
“Excuse me?”
“She used to be a cop until the kids came along. That’s how she met Kevin. He’s a D.A. They’re good people even if Terry can be kind of scary.” He paused just as the doorbell rang. “Excuse me. I need to get that.”
More guests trickled in over the next few hours, a decent turnout. Jazz kept busy supplying a constant stream of hot finger foods, trying not to think about what Matt had said. It didn’t work.
Ironically, the ex-con’s children had quite possibly ended up with a district attorney and a former cop for parents.
The kitchen window provided a panoramic view of the backyard, where Brooke and Robbie played. The soccer ball covered with netting appeared to be a training tool with a boomerang effect. The twins took turns kicking it under the supervision of their father and uncle.
Jazz was careful to stand far enough back from the window not to be seen. Through the screen she could hear snippets of conversation about this morning’s youth soccer games. She watched Robbie run up to his sister, tag her on the arm and backpedal.
“Bet you can’t catch me!” the boy shouted.
“Maybe I don’t want to catch you,” Brooke retorted just as loudly.
“Chicken!” Robbie taunted.
After a long hesitation, Brooke dropped the soccer ball and dashed after him. Robbie ran in a zigzag pattern, his laughter ringing out. Brooke was about to tag him when she stumbled. She fell down, giggling even before she hit the grass.
Robbie raised both arms to the sky in triumph. “Told you that you couldn’t catch me!” he shouted.
“This is scrumptious. What’s in it? I think I taste eggplant.” Terry walked into the kitchen holding up a cracker slathered with dip.
Jazz slid back from the window, feeling unaccountably guilty. She strived for composure. “Eggplant, sunflower oil, onions, garlic and black pepper,” she said. “It’s called vinetta in Hungarian.”
“Sounds like something your mom used to make,” Terry said. “Was she a good cook, too?”
“I’m not sure,” Jazz answered. “I was mostly raised by my grandma.”
“So your grandmother used to make vinetta?”
She hadn’t, although in a backhanded way Grandma had spurred Jazz’s interest in cooking. If Jazz hadn’t learned her way around the kitchen, she’d have eaten many more sandwiches for dinner.
“No,” Jazz said. “My foster mother did.”
“Really, you grew up in foster care? That must have sucked.”
“It wasn’t so bad.” Jazz hadn’t realized there were worse things than being a ward of the state until she was housed in a prison cell.
“If everything your foster mother made was as tasty as this dip, that must’ve helped.” Terry licked her lips. “Thank the Lord I can’t cook like this. I already snack enough with the kids as it is. Since I quit work, I’ve gained twenty pounds. But anything would be worth it to stay home with them.”
Spoken like a happy stay-at-home mom who was raising well-adjusted kids. If the twins were Jazz’s biological children, she couldn’t have hoped for a more ideal situation.
Terry finished off the cracker. “Do you have any children, Jazz?”
Two children, Jazz thought. Except they’d never really been hers. How could she answer without being untruthful?
“I’ve never been married,” Jazz said.
“Matt hasn’t, either.” Terry’s comment seemed out of context. Before Jazz could say so, Terry added, “Listen, would you be interested in another catering job? We’re having a party for the twins next Sunday in the park. I thought we’d grill but it would be great to have a special cake and some kid-friendly desserts. You do bake, right?”
“I do.” Jazz was once again having a hard time keeping up with Terry. The other woman didn’t have the leisurely Southern drawl that was so prevalent in the Lowcountry. Terry spoke so quickly, her sentences seemed to run together.
A party, Terry had said without naming the occasion. With the school year having started only a few weeks ago and no more holidays on the September calendar, the most logical reason for a celebration was a birthday.
Disappointment cut through Jazz, as sharp as it was unexpected. Robbie and Brooke weren’t her biological children, after all.
Terry kept talking, naming a time and a place as though Jazz had already agreed. And why shouldn’t she now that she no longer needed to avoid Terry, the twins or Matt?
“How does all that sound?” Terry asked.
“Fine.” Jazz didn’t let on that she’d hardly heard a word. “But it would be better if you wrote it all down.”
“You got it.” Terry found a pad on top of the microwave and a pen in a holder by the stove.
Matt came into the kitchen, his eyes zeroing in on his sister and narrowing. “You’re not bothering Jazz again, are you, Terry?”
“For your information,” Terry said haughtily, “I just hired Jazz for the party I’m throwing for the twins.”
“Great!” Matt said, his approval out of proportion to the occasion.
“How old will Brooke and Robbie be?” Jazz didn’t even tense in preparation for the answer.
Terry glanced up from what she was writing on the pad. “Oh, it’s not their birthday. We’re having an adoption-day party.”
CHAPTER FIVE
CLEANING UP WAS taking too long.
Jazz was desperate to be alone in order to sort out her jumbled thoughts now that she knew the twins were adopted. The party guests were gone, but she couldn’t leave until Matt’s kitchen was as spotless as it had been when she arrived.
Matt was outside on the deck dumping plastic cups and plates in a trash bag while Jazz wiped down counters and washed serving trays.
She spied her empty Crock-Pot on the kitchen counter. She usually let the dish soak so it would be easier to clean but that would delay her departure even more.
Matt would soon come inside the town house.
He’d smile at her and flirt with her, which would only complicate matters further. She hadn’t even told Terry she couldn’t work the party for the twins. She’d meant to but an influx of guests had arrived soon after Terry confirmed that Brooke and Robbie had been adopted.
Making up her mind to leave, Jazz balanced the dirty Crock-Pot on top of her serving trays. She picked up the entire stack and took a few steps toward escape.
The door to the deck slid open, and Matt walked into the kitchen carrying a white plastic garbage bag. He looked tall and handsome with his tousled hair shot through with gold and his shirt untucked, a man most women wouldn’t dream of fleeing. Most women would run toward him.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” he asked. “I still need to write you a check.”
How had payment slipped her mind when it had been her main reason to take the job?
“I, uh—” she hoped to think up an excuse “—was just going to take these dishes out to my car.”
“Let me pay you first so you don’t have to make two trips.” Matt tied the garbage bag closed, set it down and picked up a checkbook and a pen from a side table.
He sat down at the kitchen table, wrote out the check and handed it to her. She was forced to put her dishes down on the kitchen counter to take it.
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Darlene Gardner
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Jazz Lenox had her reasons for giving up her babies for adoption. So she can′t burst into their lives after eight years. Yet there′s no doubt these kids are hers. No one could mistake that unique hair.She knows she should walk away. Especially when she meets the twins′ uncle–sexy, shoot-from-the-hip Matt Caminetti. But how does she leave a man who′s so persistent…and so ruggedly appealing? Most surprising of all, Matt believes in her. Believes in them. A future together means coming clean about her past. All of it. It′s the only way to find out if she really has a second shot at the life she′s always wanted….