Josie Day Is Coming Home (6 page)

“She’s done this kind of thing before?”

“Only on the rare occasion. Only when she felt a reward
seemed particularly warranted,” Ambrose had confided. “Not, of
course, that you heard that tidbit from me.”

“Of course.” They shared a smile.

“In any case, Mrs. Carlyle has decided that you, Miss
Day, deserve better than a shared double-wide trailer to live in. More to the
point, she just happens to have the perfect solution to your housing
dilemma…in your hometown. Quite the coincidence, hmmm?”

Coincidence. Yeah
. Josie had wanted to bolt right
then.

No
way
was she going back to that Aqua Net-soaked,
small-minded gossip haven she’d been raised in. No way. But then the
photographs of the house had come out, and the excitement of feeling like a
lottery winner had taken over. By the time Ambrose had dangled the key over
Josie’s waiting palm, she’d been too filled with a sheer sense of impending
adventure to resist.

Recklessness had always been her downfall.

Or maybe that was rebelliousness.

She shrugged. Either way, in the clear light of today’s
mid-April morning, second thoughts were setting in. Maybe she’d been too hasty
in packing up all her things—not that there’d been that many of them. Her
life’s possessions had fit easily in her Chevy. Depressingly easily. She was
twenty-seven years old. Was a trunkload—and backseat—full of clothes, shoes,
and pink throw pillows all she had to show for her life?

The thought spurred her on. Continuing through the house
with one ear cocked for sounds of Luke, she explored the upstairs bedrooms and
the downstairs second living room. She tugged back musty velvet draperies to
look at the weedy grounds. She closed her eyes and tried to sense if she
belonged there.

Dispiritedly, Josie concluded that for her, Blue Moon was a
pipe dream. She was a showgirl. Showgirls didn’t belong in small-town northern
Arizona, sweeping up pine needles. They belonged someplace where they could
dance—where they could perform and come alive. Not to mention earn a living
doing those things.

Deciding she had nothing to lose by finishing her tour
anyway, she traversed a short hallway. She rounded a corner, opened a pair of
double doors and stepped between them…and everything changed.

Wow. The room before her spanned at least a gymnasium’s
length and width, but it held none of a gymnasium’s sweaty practicality. To
Josie’s surprise, this room held magic.

Painted in pale pink, floored in blond wood with arched
windows along one whole wall, it was easily the most breathtaking in the entire
house. Unlike the rest of Blue Moon, it contained no tarp-covered furniture, no
old landscape paintings, no tumbleweed-size dust bunnies. Only beauty.

And possibility.

“Ahh,” came Luke’s voice from someplace behind
her. “I see you found the ballroom.”

Ballroom
. Of course. Josie breathed in deeply.

“It’s not a ballroom.” She said the words slowly.
Reverently. A few more steps carried her farther inside.

“Not anymore. But once upon a time—”

“No, it’s a dance studio. A dance school.”
Trailing her fingers along the wall, testing her lightest dance steps on the
dust-muted floor, Josie twirled in place. Yes. This could work. “
My
dance school.”

Luke boggled at her. “Dance school.”

“Yes. I’ve just decided it.” This place was a lot
like
she’d
been once. Before she’d headed to Las Vegas to become a
showgirl. Full of potential, but in dire need of polishing. The realization
filled her with a weird sense of affection for Blue Moon—and for this room in
particular. “I’m going to open my own dance school.”

He frowned. “Here?”

To her dismay, he even looked gorgeous while raining on her
parade. He also looked as though he thought she’d gone completely bonkers.
Defiantly, Josie lifted her chin.

“It’ll be a huge success. I’ll teach little girls to
perform perfect pirouettes and little boys to samba like pros. I’ve got the
training, the ambition—and now, the location.” Picturing the place
already, she swooshed her fingers through the air, pretending to unfurl a
gigantic banner. “I can see it now. ‘Dance lessons for all ages.’”

“No.”

“Hmmm. What’ll I call it? I know! Josie’s Dance World.
Dance Time. Dancers ‘R Us.”

“No way in hell.”

“That’s no good. It’ll alienate my students’
parents.”

With a professional’s eye, she examined the room again. A
ballet barre could go along the left wall. A bank of mirrors, behind it. With
the floor buffed and the windows cleaned, the new dance studio would sparkle.
Plenty of room for choreography, for group rehearsals, for a sound system….

Josie’s enthusiasm built. For the first time in weeks, she
felt excited about her future. Energized by it. This would be perfect! It was
the answer to all her dissatisfaction. How had Tallulah known this was what she
needed?

“It’s a fantastic idea,” she announced.

“It’s a stupid idea. You can’t do it.”

Now he’d done it. Josie narrowed her eyes, fixing him with
her most determined gaze. If he’d known her better, he’d have known that look
didn’t bode well for him.

“
Nobody
tells me I can’t do something.”

“I just did.”

In emphasis, Luke folded his arms. His biceps bulged, making
his cryptic black tattoos flex. His T-shirt flattened against his perfectly
taut abs. He really had a spectacular body. Too bad he was such a buzzkill.

“No,” he added. “No, no, no.”

That clinched it. If she hadn’t been invested in the idea
before, now she was. “Yes,” she said blithely. “Yes, yes, yes.
I’m doing it. And nothing you say can stop me.”

“Oh, yeah?” He stepped nearer, disrupting her
cha-cha-cha across the intoxicatingly wide span of dance space. “Try this
one on for size. You show me your proof you own this place, and we’ll take it
from there.”

Chapter Four

Josie hadn’t had proof. Only promises.

But those—slapped together with her unstoppable zeal
and
her determination not to leave Blue Moon—were enough to change Luke’s mind
about her. Obviously, he should never have allowed her to gallivant on to his
property in the first place. But now it was too late. Josie was fully invested
in her va-va-voom lady of the manor impression. And he was fully screwed.

It was possible she was crazy. Seriously. Anybody who could
look at his house’s dilapidated old ballroom and see a dance studio had a shaky
grip on reality. Hell, anybody who thought one living soul in Donovan’s Corner
wanted to
samba
had a shaky grip on reality.

He’d started out humoring her. Not wanting to burst her
bubble, for whatever idiotic reason. Now he was stuck. Stuck with a loony
redhead in his house and a problem he didn’t have time to mess around with. Not
if his plans were going to go forward.

“Damn it, Ambrose. Pick
up
, you old
codger,” he muttered, pacing the short length of the phone alcove at
Frank’s Diner. He didn’t have phone service at Blue Moon. And he’d hurled his
cell phone into the pine trees during his first week in town, sick of hearing
it ring with calls from Donovan & Sons. So now he was stuck using the phone
at the prime eatery in Donovan’s Corner. “I want answers.”

He’d gotten nowhere phoning Winkler, Young, and Dodge,
Ambrose’s law firm. The bubbleheaded secretary had informed him that “Mr.
Dodge is out of the office indefinitely. I’m sorry, sir.” Then she’d
accidentally connected him to a conference call full of Japanese businessmen,
leaving Luke more aggravated than he’d started out.

“Dodge residence. Barbara speaking.”

Finally. The voice of reason.

“Barb, it’s Luke.” He took a few minutes to trade
small talk with Ambrose’s personal assistant. Then, “Listen, is Ambrose
around? I need to—”

“Oh, sorry, Luke,” Barb interrupted. “He’s
officially incommunicado. Headed out on a cruise with Tallulah. They left a
couple of days ago. Something about investing in a new line of luxury ocean
liners?”

It figured. Tallulah was always stirring up trouble
somewhere. Cradling the phone between his chin and shoulder, Luke listened to
Barb describe his aunt’s latest venture.

As Barb nattered on about fleet-wide capacities, cruising
speeds, stateroom specifications, and exotic ports of call, he motioned for the
waitress to heat up his coffee. Through the diner’s plate glass windows, Main
Street hunkered down, as different from the world Barb was describing as his
was from his father’s.

A mishmash of dive bars, the hardware store, a beauty shop,
and a couple of fancy-schmancy southwestern art galleries all crowded into
sight. The street was a perfect slice of Donovan’s Corner. Half small town,
half tourist trap. His Harley, parked at the curb, was the only sign the
twenty-first century had meandered to this part of the state at all.

“Fine. Thanks, Barb.” He’d heard all he needed to.
“Did Ambrose take his cell phone? Because I’ve been calling his cell
number, and—”

“Nope,” she chirped. “It’s right here on his
home office credenza. I reminded him, but…you know Ambrose.”

Yeah, Luke knew Ambrose. He knew Ambrose only ever did what
Tallulah told him to do—like bequeath the family’s oldest and most overlooked
estate in Arizona to every Tom, Dick, and Josie who crossed Tallulah’s path.

Already his aunt had given Blue Moon to two other charity
cases this year—one, a concierge who’d tracked down Tallulah’s missing shih
tzu, Crackers, at the Four Seasons Chicago; the other, an Atlanta psychic who’d
supposedly put Tallulah in touch with her husband Ernest’s spirit for two
“glorious” minutes. Both the concierge and the psychic had required
legal wrangling and an eye-opening tour of the house and grounds before they’d
given up their claims.

There was a reason, after all, Luke had left the estate on
the edge of falling apart for the past three months.

Not that Josie had been discouraged that easily.

“All right. I’ll try Tallulah.” After a few
minutes’ conversation, Luke had the rest of the information he needed—including
the name of the cruise line and the particular ship his aunt and Ambrose had
taken. “Thanks, Barb.”

Luke said his good-byes, then hung up. He needed to talk to
Tallulah next. To make a shore-to-ship phone call, to send her a
telegram—whatever a person did to contact someone who was at sea. But for one
long minute, he left his hand on the receiver, in no hurry to embroil himself
in another battle with his forgetful aunt.

The truth was, he worried about her. Her forgetfulness, her
grouchiness, her recklessness…. They’d all gotten worse since Ernest had died
last year. Blue Moon was only a case in point. Tallulah kept forgetting the
place wasn’t one of Ernest’s dozens of properties, hers to fritter away. It was
a family legacy—
Luke’s legacy
. He had to make his aunt understand that
she couldn’t keep giving it away to strangers. No matter how damn much she
liked them.

On the other hand, it wasn’t as though Luke couldn’t handle
one pesky, long-legged redhead on his own.

If he knew women—and, let’s face it, he did—Josie would bolt
the minute she heard the second floor mice scratching their way through
tonight’s midnight snack attack. If she did gut it out until morning, a girlie
girl like her would never survive Donovan’s Corner.

His certainty growing, Luke glanced outside. What he saw
there confirmed his suspicions. The dearth of neon, the proliferation of pickup
trucks, the stick-in-the-mud residents…. No doubt about it. She’d bail out
before the weekend was through.

He’d seen the Enchanté boxes Josie’s stuff was packed in.
And the Nevada plates on her heap of a car. He was dealing with Las Vegas
Barbie here. There was no way she was going to embrace small town life—no
matter how staunchly she insisted that she couldn’t wait for Ambrose to FedEx
the finished paperwork and the deed, which was supposed to happen any day now.
None of that would matter in the end. Blue Moon belonged to Luke.

His decision made, Luke loosened his grasp on the phone.
Wrangling with his aunt could come later. For now, he’d deal with Josie on his
own. It was only a matter of time before she gave up on Blue Moon and accepted
Tallulah’s inevitable consolation prize—a different estate. All he had to do
was wait Josie out.

That was going to be no problem. Hell, he figured as he
returned to his coffee and ordered a celebratory slice of cherry pie, it was
going to be easy.

Nothing in this town was ever easy. Josie had forgotten that
about Donovan’s Corner. The stoplights were all timed funny, because no one was
ever in a hurry to get anywhere. The residents were hard to deal with, because
at least ten percent of them hadn’t bothered to turn on their hearing aids. And
if you wanted something done, you had to make nice with the one person who could
do it for you. Because unlike in the big city, there was usually only one
source for everything.

Except beer, bait, and cigarettes, of course.

That point was driven painfully home to Josie as she stood
at the counter of Copies 2 Go (“We Sell Lottery Tickets!”), trying to
get permission to use one of the ancient photocopiers.

“It’s just a flyer, see?” She waved the
8-1/2-by-11 sheet she’d written, trying to make the permed-haired female clerk
behind the counter understand. “I need about fifty of them.”

“I don’t care how many you need. Unless you have a
local address, you can’t use the copy machines.”

“I do have a local address. I just don’t remember what
it is. It’s that big house about a half mile outside of town. You know, the old
one with the chimneys and the stonework and the gigantic yard?”

“Have you got a utility bill?”