Playing For Keeps

Chapter 2

The laughter had roared up from inside Joanna like floodwaters breaching a dam. And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to staunch it, even though her sides were killing her and she was perilously close to wetting her pants. Then she caught her mother’s and this stranger’s flummoxed expressions and collapsed cross-legged onto the floor, her howls now punctuated with the occasional snort.

An instant later she was sobbing.

Oh, Lord, just take me now, Joanna thought, vaguely aware of her mother’s pleas to get hold of herself, for God’s sake, before somebody else came into the store, and of the man’s apparent decision to flee.

And Joanna tried, she really did. But no dice. Between Bobby’s news and the gallery owner changing her mind and the generally crappy state of her life, she must have been more fried than she’d thought if all it took to send her over the edge was a gyrating rodent in a grass skirt.

She started laughing all over again.

Eventually the storm passed, both the sobs and the laughter subsided, and a paper cup filled with water appeared in front of her.

“Here,” crooned a whisky-smooth, Southern-accented baritone beside her. She glanced up into a pair of eyes so blue and cool and clean she got shivers. Except then she remembered the way her face swelled up when she cried and she ducked her head, for once in her life grateful for her curtain of hair. She took the proffered cup and gulped the water in three swallows, thinking all she needed now was to choke.

“You okay now?”

“I…yeah. I th-think so.” Joanna scrambled to her feet, dusting off her backside before digging a tissue out of her handbag, which gave her a convenient excuse for avoiding the man’s gaze as he rose with her. “I’m so sorry—” She blew loudly into the tissue, figuring at this point a little honking was hardly going to hurt her image. “It’s just—”

“No need to explain, ma’am. Sounded to me like you needed to get that out of your system. Here—you dropped this.”

Joanna glanced down to see her comb gleaming in the palm of his hand. A nice hand. Strong-looking. Graceful fingers, for a man.

She was an artist. She was supposed to notice these things.

She was also supposed to remember she had a mother. Somewhere.

“The lady who came in with you’s over in the back of the store, having a look-see,” he said, as if reading her mind.

“That’s no lady,” she said, blowing her nose again. “That’s my mother. Who’s not real comfortable around melt…downs…”

Joanna had turned toward the back of the store and was now struck dumb at the child’s wonderland before her eyes. Somehow wedged in among shelves of toys that reached clear to the ceiling of the tiny shop were any number of hands-on play areas—low tables overflowing with building sets and construction toys and tiny dishes set up for an impromptu tea party; an open closet burgeoning with flashes of shiny fabrics, feathers, jewels, shoes, hats; bins of stuffed animals and puppets, and easels and paints, and rocking horses and miniature drum sets and lions and tigers and bears.

Oh, my.

A chuckle, soft and sexy, winnowed through her entrancement and finally pulled her gaze to his. The hamster chapeau was gone, but now her attention glommed onto a grin blooming across a pleasant—very pleasant—face. Lean. Tanned. Just asymmetrical enough to be interesting but not worrisome, couple of dimples, a strong jaw. Laugh lines. A face that had ripened and sharpened well with age, even if she could have done without the surfer dude hairstyle—a little too blond, a little too long. Still, way down low, she felt a tiny prickle of something that definitely was worrisome. Like not knowing you were hungry until you smelled the French fries.

Still grinning down at her, he slid his hands into his jeans’ pockets. “Actually, for a while there, it sounded like you were having a high old time. And I bet you feel a lot better now, don’t you?”

“Other than the residual mortification?”

He shrugged underneath a bright red T-shirt with a glittering Playing For Keeps emblazoned across the front. “Didn’t bother me any. Why should it you?” While Joanna stood there trying to think of a witty comeback, he retrieved the Santas, then glanced up, his eyes touching hers just long enough to set off a zing. A tiny one, nothing major. Along the lines of what you might get when you test a battery to see if it’s still alive.

Well, hell. Where were the Pheromone Alert! signs?

“You make these?”

“What? Oh. Yes.” Joanna stepped back, mentally shaking off all those pheromones clinging to her like burrs. “Clarence. And Stanley.” At his questioning expression, she added, “Each one is unique. Well, I recycle the clothing patterns, but each face is carved freehand so no two are alike….”

She’d never been attracted to total strangers, no matter how appealing their laugh lines were. So it had to be her apparently fragile emotional state causing this current brain blip. Still, as she watched him take in Clarence’s chubby, dimpled face, his curly white hair and beard, watched him finger the Santa’s velvet robe decorated with dozens of pearl buttons and miniature metallic braid, she had to admit something about the man was making her blood…hum.

How totally bizarre.

The blue eyes met hers, clearly impressed. And clearly—whoa—interested. “You’re good.” Then he grinned in that way men do—or at least did back in the Dark Ages when she’d last dated—that sets off alarms.

“Is that a come-on?”

Which she wouldn’t have said it if hadn’t been for that Dark Ages business.

However his expression didn’t change one iota. Well, except for the merest hitch of one eyebrow. “You want it to be?”

“No.” She was almost positive she meant it, too.

“Then it isn’t. And even if it was, that’s got nothing to do with the fact that I think you’re one helluva talented lady.”

Okay, so that won the guy a point. Or two. “Thanks.”

Still holding Clarence, he seemed to hesitate a moment, then offered his hand. “Name’s Dale McConnaughy. The store’s mine.”

His handshake was the kind to make her really question that no of a second ago. Almost. “Joanna Swann.”

“You were trying to sell these next door?” Dale went on, now appraising Stanley, a Santa in denim overalls and a red-and-green-plaid workshirt. Striped stockings ended in open-backed bedroom slippers on his feet; through a minuscule pair of wire-rimmed glasses, he frowned down at a tiny teddy bear in his hands.

“More or less. They’d said they’d take two on consignment.” Joanna stuffed her hands into the pockets on the front of her dress. “Then this morning the owner said she didn’t have room.”

“I’ll take them.”

“What?”

“I’ll take them,” he repeated. “I mean, I’ll buy them from you.”

She frowned. “Look, just because I broke down—”

“I don’t want them because I feel sorry for you, okay? I want ’em because you do freakin’ unbelievable work and because I’ve got customers who’d go nuts for something like this. So what’s your price?”

Well, hmm. Certainly a change from Ms. Hoity-Toity-we-don’t-really-have-much-call-for-crafts next door. However…

“Oh, that’s really nice of you, but, see, I don’t really have a wholesale price. Because I put so much work into them? I mean, the gallery would’ve taken a percentage, but—”

“How. Much.”

She felt her skin warm. “Three hundred. Each. Including stands.”

The little boy sparkle reasserted itself in his eyes. “Thank you. And you say no two are alike? Can you get me more?”

Joanna waited out the short surge of dizziness, then said, “Uh…yeah. Although I’m pretty booked up between now and Christmas with special orders—”

“You think you could do six more by Thanksgiving? I’ll prepay,” he said when she hesitated.