Bourbon Street Blues Read Online Free Page B

Holly took a breath and blew it out in a rush. “You know, he’s even more handsome in person than he is in the papers.”
    “Is he now?” She turned on the faucet and ran a stream of hot water into the sink.
    “He seems…lonely, though.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Holly frowned, popped open a pea pod andscooped the tiny round peas into a blue ceramic bowl. “He says his wife is trying to ruin his business.”
    “That right?” Shana squirted dishwashing liquid into the water and bubbles erupted.
    “He likes my singing.”
    Shana laughed at that. “Well, why wouldn’t he, honey?”
    Holly grinned. “You’re prejudiced. You love me.”
    “That I do,” Shana said, turning around to lean back against the counter. Folding her arms across her chest, she crossed her feet at the ankles, tipped her head to one side and said, “You seem awful taken with this man.”
    “I didn’t say that,” Holly hedged, though heaven knew she had been thinking about him nonstop since leaving the hotel that afternoon. “Besides, I just met him.”
    Shana shook her head. “Doesn’t take long sometimes. One look at my Tommy and I knew down to the bone that he was the one for me.”
    “This wasn’t like that,” Holly said firmly. Taken with Parker? What would be the point? No, this was more like flipping through a magazine, spotting a handsome celebrity and imagining yourself as part of his life.
    Parker James was just as far removed from herworld as any of those celebrities were. The James family was royalty in New Orleans. And Holly Carlyle was just another nobody.
    She didn’t even know who her parents had been. She was only two when she’d entered the foster system, and when she’d gotten older, she had tried to learn something about her parents and had come up against a brick wall. All she’d learned was that someone had left her sitting on the steps of a police station and then just walked away.
    Holly had spent the next fourteen years bouncing around from one foster-care facility to another. Once, she’d even had a foster family. When she was six, for nearly a year, she’d been part of a family. She’d belonged. But then the couple and their real children had moved to Florida and Holly had once again been left behind.
    After that, she’d learned not to get her hopes up. By seven, she had come to count only on herself. Most of the people in the system meant well, but they had too many kids to worry about. Too many demands and too little time. Holly had run off as soon as she was old enough to risk being on her own.
    Wryly, she grabbed another pea pod and broke it open. No, she wasn’t anything like the kind of crowd Parker James moved in. But then, he hadn’tfound happiness, had he? A more lonely, miserable-looking man she’d never run across.
    “I didn’t say I was interested in him,” she finally murmured.
    “You didn’t have to, honey,” Shana said. “It’s written clear across your face for anyone to see.”
    “Great.” She ducked her head, pulled another pod out of the colander and concentrated on shucking the peas.
    She heard rather than saw Shana cross the kitchen. She pulled out the chair beside Holly and plopped down onto it, then took one of Holly’s hands in hers and gave it a pat. “Honey, you know I love you like you were one of my own.”
    “I know,” Holly said, smiling into Shana’s worried eyes.
    Tommy and his wife and kids were the only real family Holly had ever known. At one of her first professional gigs, she’d been hired to sing at a college graduation party. The piano player had been Tommy Hayes. They’d worked together seamlessly, as if they’d been destined to perform together. That day was the luckiest of her life. Scared and alone at sixteen, she’d tried to pretend that she had everything under control. But Tommy hadn’t been fooled. When the gig was over, he’d taken her home for a good meal.
    She’d never really left.
    She had her own place now, a second-story apartment