“I don’t remember.” His green eyes, a little darker than hers, flashed in the mirror’s reflection. “I think I finished all my math in school, maybe.”
“You did? That’s wonderful!”
His mouth stretched into a thin smile and Joanna’s heart cracked. The child had been tested every which way to Sunday, but there seemed to be no real reason why the very material that came so easily to Matt should be such a struggle for his brother. Joanna knew, even if she didn’t find two or three unfinished papers in his backpack, there was still a good hour to hour and a half of spelling and reading and math fact practice, just so Ryder wouldn’t fall more behind than he already was. It was hard on her, it was even harder on a child who’d already spent six and a half hours at school, but what was hardest of all was seeing the perplexed expression in Ryder’s eyes at his brother’s seemingly effortless success.
From birth, they’d been total opposites. Matt had come out protesting his confinement at the top of his lungs. Ryder had opened his eyes right away, calmly taking it all in, flinching only at his brother’s raucous cries from across the room. Matt had been the first to roll over, the first to crawl and walk and talk, always barreling through life at full throttle. Ryder, however, had to be coaxed to go down the same slide his brother had just rocketed down ten times in a row. And then only if Bobby or Joanna went down with him. He was the one who’d patiently spend ages building the three-foot-tall tower of blocks, his brother the one who’d knock them down.
Academically, however, they’d seemed to be on a par with each other until last year. While Matt continued to gobble up new skills like the hungry little caterpillar, Ryder had begun to struggle. Although quiet and attentive in class, he was now almost a full grade level behind. What got Joanna, though, was that she would have expected the reverse to be true, that the one who’d spent the first five years of his life in perpetual motion, except when he was asleep, would have been the one more prone to learning difficulties, not the quiet, contemplative one.
The quiet, contemplative one whose self-confidence was beginning to leak at an alarming rate, no matter what Joanna did to caulk it.
Both boys were out of the car and into the kitchen before Joanna could close her door and drag her weary butt into the house. Dulcy, her middle-schooler, had already been home for a half hour. What passed for music blared from her room. Cats swarmed Joanna’s ankles, begging her to make it stop.
“Turn it down, Dulce!” Joanna hollered automatically, hanging her car keys on the hook by the back door. The music dimmed from brain-numbing to merely irritating; a second later, the child stomped down the hall in her customary sexless hooded sweatshirt and jeans, brown eyes flashing behind wire-rimmed glasses.
“Okay, which one of you dorks was in my room?”
“Not me!” came out of two crumb-speckled mouths.
“Right.” Dulcy held up The Evidence: a box of colored pencils. “This was brand new and full when I put it in my desk yesterday, and now half the pencils are either gone or broken. And I know one of you did it—”
The phone rang.
“—and now I have to use them for a social studies project and I don’t have them and this like so pisses me off—”
“Dulcy! Hello?” Joanna said into the phone, glaring at her daughter. She couldn’t hear whoever it was for the eruption of “I don’t know where your dumb old pencils are!” behind her.
“Well, one of you does and I’m not leaving this kitchen until I get ’em back!”
“Sorry, hold on,” Jo said into the phone, then slammed it against her sternum. “Kids! Take it elsewhere!”
“But, Mom, what am I going to dooooo? This is due tomorrow!”
“I. Am. On. The. Phone. I will take care of it later. Everybody out.”
The boys trooped into the family room to watch TV; Dulcy thumped back down to her room, wailing about how much her life sucked. Joanna—who at the moment could relate more to her daughter’s lament far more than she’d ever let on—sighed and held the phone back up to her ear.
“I’m sorry. Who is this again?”
“Dale McConnaughy, ma’am. From Playing for Keeps? Just calling to confirm that we’re delivering that play set to your house tomorrow afternoon?”
The boys began arguing about something in the other room, Dulcy cranked up her music again and the dog began to hack up something in the middle of the kitchen floor. And suddenly, because clearly she was closer to losing it than she thought, all she wanted to do was to wrap herself up in that Bourbony Southern accent and never come out again. Because, see, this was the one thing that had changed during the past two weeks.
Whether Joanna liked it or not.
Long-buried images came roaring to the surface of her desexitized brain, of hot bodies and cool sheets and endless orgasms. Preferably hers. Not that she’d ever had endless orgasms, but a girl can dream.
“Ms. Swann? Is everything all right?”
“What? Oh, yes…Sorry. I was…distracted,” she said, her gaze wandering over to the cupboard where she kept the baking stuff. For the past week, in those scant milliseconds when she wasn’t worrying about a kid or a roof or her work or her ex, and sometimes even when she was, thoughts of Dale McConnaughy had stormed her brain like a bargain hunter at K mart the morning after Thanksgiving. She didn’t understand it, she sure as hell didn’t like it, and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing she could do about it. Other than taking the edge off the pain with chocolate. Which was why she was now yanking open her cupboard door, letting out a small sigh of gratitude that she hadn’t been hallucinating the package of chocolate chips. She’d make cookies. Warm, gooey cookies packed chock full of hundreds of little orgasms for the taste buds.
One learned to adapt.
“So…we’re on for tomorrow?”
Joanna ripped open the bag and tilted it to her upended mouth. Cookies, hell. Who had time for foreplay?
“Yes,” she managed to get out around a mouthful of squished chocolate. Maybe not quite as satisfying as when combined with butter and brown sugar and…nuts, but sometimes, you just can’t wait for the, um, full package. “Their…party is at five, so as long as it’s…up by then, that should be fine.”
She stuffed more chips into her mouth.
“No problem.” A pause. “Uh, ma’am? You sure you’re okay? You sound kind of funny.”
“What? Me? No, I’m fine,” she said, and he said okay as though he wasn’t really sure and then they hung up—just as something crashed in the other room.
Joanna knocked back another handful of chips, thought about Dale’s long, slender hands and orgasms for another twenty seconds or so, then went to clean up the dog’s little present.
Chapter 3
Although Dale knew there were some pretty highfalutin homes in Corrales, a small, horsey community flanking the western edge of the Rio Grande on the fringes of Albuquerque proper, he still hadn’t been sure what to expect from the address he’d been given. The mother clearly had money, but he got the feeling Joanna was one of those types determined to make it on her own if it killed her. So when Jose steered the store truck down the dirt road leading to the house, and the spreads kept getting bigger and bigger, he began to wonder just what the heck was going on here.
Especially when the house itself came into view. Like a large, odd-shaped bug hugging the landscape, the traditional earth-toned adobe, with its flat roof and portal stretching across most of the front, looked to be