Free Tender Deception: A Novel of Romance by Patti Beckman

evening. The rhythm of jazz music floated out of the bars. Neon tubes glowed around provocative, life-size photographs of bare-legged dancing girls.
    Six nights a week, from ten in the evening until four the next morning, Jimmy led his band at the Sho-Time bar. Tonight would be no different. Tiny would have been sad if it were otherwise. There would be a substitute pianist, but the music would go on.
    The crowd filled the place tonight to drink and listen as usual. Jimmy tapped off the beat of the opening number and raised his golden horn to his lips. Tonight, he played with a special inspiration.
    He made up the improvisation, big and mellow, out of the shadows of smoke and dripping rain and fog on the Mississippi, out of the licorice taste of absinthe and the smell of close-packed bodies and marble vaults wet and cold in the night rain. He made it up and blew it out of his horn, and it made the people laugh and clap, and sometimes it made them shiver.
    They played Bourbon Street Parade good and solid, the way it had been played here in the French Quarter, the Vieux Carré for years. He put himself in it—a message for Tiny, a message for the world that he was Jimmy LaCross, and he had something to say with his horn.
    As he was playing, he opened his eyes a little and saw the young woman through the fog of smoke. She had just come in. Beads of rain glistened in her blonde hair like diamonds and on her cheeks like tears.
    She moved through the crowd. The Sho-Time Bar was a long, narrow room with padded, wine-colored walls, sparkling chandeliers over the bar and a dais behind the bar for the band. The customers sat around the walls at miniature tables or on stools at the bar and watched the musicians perform. She edged her way to a vacant stool at the far end of the bar, and sat there alone, listening intently to the music.
    Something about the young woman disturbed Jimmy. It wasn’t the first time he had seen her. She had been visiting his place nightly for the past week. She always came alone. She usually came about midnight and stayed as long as the band played, carefully nursing along a single drink, much to the scowling displeasure of Alex, the bartender.
    The thing that bothered Jimmy was that there was something vaguely familiar about the blonde. He tried to fit her into the parade of attractive young women who had moved through his life, but he couldn’t place her. Yet the feeling was there that he knew who she was. He’d been planning to speak to her, but at every intermission he’d been cornered by fans wanting his autograph or by the bartender with some new crisis. Jimmy hired bartenders with the understanding that they would handle the operation of the club while Jimmy ran the band. But it never quite worked out that way. Not the least of the problems was the fact that the last bartender he’d hired had stolen him blind.
    So far this week, by the time the problems were solved, the fans were off his back, and the band had played its final tune for the evening and instruments were packed away, the girl had gone. But tonight, at last, he got off the stand after the final number before the young woman left. “Hi,” he said, pausing at her spot near the end of the bar.
    “Hello,” she said quietly, looking directly at him with large, violet-blue eyes.
    “You must like music,” he smiled. “I’ve seen you come in for several nights now.”
    “Yes. You’ve really gotten good since I last heard you, Jimmy.”
    He gazed at her with a puzzled frown. “Do I know you from someplace?”
    She smiled quietly. “Yes, but you don’t remember, do you? I didn’t expect you would.”
    His frown deepened. “Here in New Orleans? That time we played in Baton Rouge? On the riverboat? No?”
    She shook her head. “Much, much further back than that, Jimmy....”
    * * * * * * *
    Each night, Lilly had tried to find the courage to go up to him. But, whenever he stepped down from the bandstand, other people had claimed his