Raffling Ryan

She winced as she looked at herself.

Definitely a bra. I mean, she thought, how was I to know the guy would turn catatonic on me, for crying out loud? They’re just nipples. Everybody’s got them. He’s got them, for crying out loud.

Okay, and so maybe her venerable, shrunken sweater also didn’t quite meet the waistband of her jeans. Hadn’t the man ever seen a belly button before, either?

Still…did she look that bad, that terrible? She had pulled her thick, long, unruly mop of redder than red hair up on top of her head, securing it there with a rubber band, so that curls tumbled all over the place—back, front, sides. She always thought she looked like a really, really big chrysanthemum when she wore her hair this way, but it was comfortable, and it kept the mop out of her eyes and…“What?” she exclaimed at last, exasperated, and nearly spilling the coffee. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ryan answered her, taking one of the cups from her and sipping its contents, his gaze now carefully lowered. “What’s this?” he said before taking another sip. “It’s coffee, yes, but there’s something else….”

“They’re French vanilla coffee beans, with a dash of apple cinnamon strudel flavor tossed in,” she told him, sitting down across the table from him. “Like it?”

“First thing in the morning? No. But, since I’ve already had two cups at home, yes, it tastes pretty good. Some special blend?”

“I pick it up at the mall, actually. There’s a gourmet coffee kiosk on the upper level. Every time we’re at the mall, I pick up another flavor. I’ve got a Jamaican blend that would put hair on your fingernails, I swear, but I didn’t think you’d like it. So,” she said, putting down her cup and bracing her elbows on the table, “what do you want to do first?”

His smile did something very strange, setting off a small explosion somewhere in the pit of her stomach. “Do first? Frankly, I’d like to offer you your money back and the services of a first-class handyman. But somehow I don’t think you’d go for that. Or would you?”

She pretended to consider this for a moment, then shook her head, her mop of curls speaking quite eloquently as they bobbed back and forth. “Nope. No deal. We have a bargain, right?”

She’d stick to that answer: a bargain. She wouldn’t mention anything else, couldn’t mention anything else. Not when she didn’t really understand it herself. She only knew she was doing a nice old lady a favor, and she would never renege on her promise.

Especially when her To-Do list was nearly as long as one of Ryan Chandler’s long arms.

Janna picked up the paper, scanned it. “I think you should start with the garage. Zach thinks it’s his private dumping grounds, but I need more storage space for my own stuff. I bought some shelving—you can put shelving together, can’t you?—and after you take everything out of the garage and hose down the floor, we can get everything arranged. Oh, and I’ll help put the shelves together, I promise.”

He looked at her as if she had just told him to climb to the top of Mount Everest and bring her back a tutti-frutti flavored icicle. “You’re kidding, right?”

She looked back at him blankly. “Kidding? Nope. Why would I be kidding?”

He reached up, scratched at a spot behind his left ear. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I thought you’d want to go for a drive, have lunch at some country inn, maybe take in dinner later? Dancing? You know, the sort of thing every other bachelor is probably doing this weekend with the women who bid on them. But clean a garage? Put up shelves?”

“Put together shelves, then put them up. There’s a difference. These are just inexpensive metal thingies, freestanding shelves we sort of smash back against the walls to load my junk onto.” She rolled her eyes at him. “I mean, I wouldn’t ask you to put together real shelves. We have too much else to do to fool with something like that.”

Now he rubbed a hand across his jaw. He really was quite expressive with his hand movements, although he probably didn’t know that. “Got any aspirin, Ms. Monroe?” he asked after a moment.

She got up quickly to get the aspirin bottle down from the cabinet, keeping her eyes on him. Look how he frowned. He was so cute when he frowned. Tall, dark, green-eyed…and really, really cute. Almost cuddly, although she doubted anyone had ever told him that! She nearly dropped the aspirin bottle, realizing that her mind had taken a quantum leap from dirty garages to…well, she’d think about all of that later, wouldn’t she? “You have a headache?” she asked.

“No, but I’m pretty sure I will any minute now,” Ryan said, accepting the two tablets she handed him, swallowing them down with a sip of coffee, and then heading for the back door.

Janna felt the sudden, irresistible need to make a stupid fool of herself, something she could usually do with quite a flourish, especially considering she hadn’t felt foolish about a man—especially a man like Ryan Chandler—in a very, very long time.

“The garage door has one of those electronic openers,” she told him, hands on hips as she felt her tongue begin to run on wheels. “The code is 0000, as it’s easy to remember—and because zero is the lowest number on the keypad and Zachary could reach it by the time he was five and we put it up—and then you press the Enter button and the door goes right up. Sorry if I’m rattling on. I was just giving you a bit of Monroe folklore, or whatever. You don’t mind, do you? No, of course you don’t.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, shaking his head as he pulled the door shut behind him.

Janna put her hands on her hips and stared at the closed door for some moments. The colorful room suddenly seemed drab, now that he’d left it. “The man’s obviously in a daze,” she told herself with false concern and a pot full of ulterior motive. “He’ll forget the code on his own,” she said out loud finally, and went after him.

Three hours, four bandages, and several muttered curse words later, the garage was clean. Hell, it sparkled, if a garage could be said to sparkle.

And, much to Ryan’s surprise, he was beginning to enjoy himself.

Janna had been as good as her word, and had helped screw together the inexpensive, freestanding metal shelves, using an electric screwdriver that had enough attachments to be standard issue on a manned Mars landing-and-recovery module.

As she had put the last bandage on his scraped elbow, a maneuver he couldn’t quite manage himself, she’d kissed the cartoon-covered strip to “make it all better.”

He hadn’t even felt insulted, being lumped into Zachary’s age group, where kissing to make things better must be standard operating procedure.

Besides, it worked.

“Where to now, boss?” he asked, still feeling pretty good about himself. He was, after all, in very good shape. He worked out three times a week in his own home exercise room—without resorting to Allie’s motivational exercise tapes. He golfed. He played the occasional game of tennis—although never against Allie, who cheated blatantly. “Out” to his grandmother only counted if she called it.

“Where to now? Upstairs, to the main bathroom,” Janna answered, already leading the way.

The trip to the second floor meant that Ryan was going to get a look at her house, which intrigued him mightily. Outside, it was a typical redbrick Cape Cod, although the bright-yellow shutters and woodwork were, to say the least, out of the ordinary. However, once inside her kitchen, he’d known that here lived a woman who was either color blind or in love with color. Bright colors. Sunshiny colors. Happy colors. She’d even painted the interior of her garage a sunny yellow—with blue stripes, no less.

They passed through the kitchen and directly into the dining room. Ryan stopped in his tracks, instantly mesmerized by the hand-painted mural on the wall shared with the kitchen. It was a scene from a park, a Paris park, in fact. He recognized snippets from his art history classes. The tree in the foreground. The lady in the hat, exposing her profile and the bustle of her long skirt.

“Isn’t that Monet?” he asked, pointing to the mural.

Her grin flashed at him, once again nearly blinding him—he’d really have to get used to the fact that she seemed so damned happy all the time. “Nope. It’s a Monroe,” she corrected, idly tracing a finger over the lady’s profile. “See? That’s me under the hat. And the little boy? That’s Zachary, although he was only five then, of course. Oh, it might have started out as a Monet, but I added a few touches of my own. Like the parrot in that tree over there. Like it?”

Ignoring the parrot, Ryan peered closely at the woman’s face. Damn if it wasn’t Janna Monroe, complete with burnished curls. He slowly shook his head. “Remarkable. You’re quite good, you know. A little flaky, maybe, but good.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. The little bit flaky part, especially. Mark, my husband, said being flaky was my most endearing trait.”

“Your husband,” Ryan repeated, surprised to feel so shocked to learn about this man called Mark. Maybe he had thought Zachary had been hatched under a cabbage patch. Maybe he’d thought she’d had a youthful fling. But a husband? Why hadn’t he considered the fact that she might have—or had—a husband?

“Mark, yes,” Janna said evenly. “He’s not in the mural because I couldn’t…well, I couldn’t bring myself to paint his portrait after he died. That was when Zachary was eighteen months old, a few years before we moved here from Soho, in fact. Shall we go upstairs now?”

Ryan followed her to the center hall and the stairs, only vaguely taking in the old but comfortable-looking faded chintz couches in the living room, the round oak pedestal table that sat in the dining room. It was the furniture of castoffs, of well-loved hand-me-downs. The sort of things found in a first apartment, or a newlyweds’ home. And, he thought fleetingly, not the sort of home or furniture that cried out that Janna Monroe had an extra two thousand dollars lying around to fling at a charity, any charity. “Soho? You lived in New York City?”

“We had a loft,” she told him, climbing the stairs ahead of him, giving him a good view of her jean-covered rear. Ryan deliberately looked away. He was much too enthralled with the view not to look away. “Mark was an artist, and quite good. Sculptor, actually. Much better than me. A couple of his works are in parks in New Jersey and Connecticut. But there was no sense staying, not after he was gone, and we’d always wanted Zachary to grow up with grass and trees and Little League. So I finally decided to leave, closed my eyes and stabbed a finger on the map, and we moved here.”

“What if you had ended up with your finger stuck in the middle of Lake Erie, or even the Atlantic Ocean?” Ryan asked, wondering if, just maybe, he’d fallen down a rabbit hole and was now doing his version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The gray-blue-and-orange-mottled feline perched at the top of the steps didn’t look like the Cheshire Cat, but the thing was grinning at him, damn it.

Janna turned at the top of the stairs, looking back at him. “Oh, that wouldn’t have happened,” she told him.

“Why not?” he asked. Then the word that had been chanting in his head off and on for the past two hours chimed out again: hippie. Was it possible Janna was a neo-hippie, if there were such things as neo-hippies, considering most of the real hippies were soon going to be old enough to apply for retirement benefits from the Establishment they’d vowed never to trust. Still, he gave it a shot. “Or do you think it was your karma or something?”

“Karma? Gee, I haven’t heard that one in a while,” she said, turning to lead the way toward the bathroom. “No, it wouldn’t happen because I researched several cities carefully, checked out schools and crime levels and all that stuff, made my choice, then peeked before I poked. But don’t tell Zachary. He thinks I’m brilliant. Besides, it pays to have children believe their parents just might have special powers, or eyes in the backs of their heads. At least until they’re old enough to know better than to touch matches or play with unknown dogs, or take candy from strangers. Right now, I’m omnipotent to Zachary, and he believes everything that comes out of my mouth. Believes and obeys. And that’s the way I’m going to keep it, at least until he’s heading for college.”

“How old is he? Nine? Ten?”

“Nine and three-quarters,” Janna told him, pulling a face. “I’m running out of time, aren’t I? I mean, last week he asked me how he got here.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him, of course, as you should always answer serious questions truthfully, but I didn’t say much—no more than he’d asked. But I won’t say it isn’t hard for a mother and son, especially in situations like that. There are times when I miss Mark so much….”

Then she grinned again, her eyes coming alive once more. “Here we are. How good are you with a caulk gun?”

Ryan didn’t answer for a moment. He was too busy thinking about what Allie had said. What was it? Oh, yes, something about Janna Monroe putting on those bright colors and happy smiles to hide something sad inside her. How he hated when his grandmother was right.