Free Heather Graham by Down in New Orleans

back her rich, strawberry blond curls, smiling. “You remember this, young lady. You can grow up to be anything you want to be. Anything you’re willing to work hard to be.”
    She smiled, then frowned again. “You look all tired, Grandpa.”
    “I just woke up and took a shower.”
    Brit’s eyes were huge and round with sincerity. “It must have been your soap, Grandpa. Your soap couldn’t have been right. You must have needed to be ‘Zestfully’ clean. Or maybe you needed the ‘Eye Opener.’ I think.”
    “The Eye Opener?”
    Startled, Mark looked past his granddaughter to his son, who stood in the center of the living room. Michael was the spitting image of Mark in his youth. His son shrugged sheepishly. “I believe that one is Coast. I’ve been telling Lucy that Brit’s seeing too much television lately. Our life has become one long commercial. Professional hazard.”
    “Hmm.” He glanced down at Brit. “Honey, I’ll get myself into a store today and get the right stuff. Boy, if I’d only known it was all in the soap!” He brushed her chin with his knuckles, then looked back to his son. “What are you doing here? Since when are ad execs off during the week?”
    “No school and no day care this week and Stephanie had a doctor’s appointment, so I took the morning off. I came over to get Brit’s bathing suit bag—I left it here a couple of weeks ago with all her pool toys and such in it.”
    “You know you’re welcome anytime.”
    “I didn’t mean to startle you. You’re not usually home now.”
    “I know.”
    “Have you had breakfast yet, Grandpa?” Brit asked anxiously. “‘Milk does a body good.’”
    “Oh, boy,” Mark said.
    “Ask Granddad if he wants to go out for late breakfast, Brit. We’ll make him put milk in his coffee.”
    “A quick breakfast,” Mark said. “Really quick. I’ve got to get to work—”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Michael interrupted, smiling. He looked like Mark, but he had his mother’s dimples. “I’ve seen the morning paper. The front page is all about the—” He hesitated, glancing at his daughter’s head. “About the girl. Your name’s all through the story.”
    “My name?” Mark said with a groan.
    “Super-cop. Right on it in seconds. Heading up the investigation, the crime already solved. Put a shirt on. You can read it over coffee in the park.”
    Waking had been bad enough. She’d felt more tired than when she’d finally gone to sleep to begin with. Then she had something of a wine hangover, made worse by the dullness in her heart as she admitted to herself that what had happened last night had been real, and it wasn’t going to go away.
    Next, she had seen the paper. The “journalist” on the story had done a gory job of it, cleanly judging and convicting Jon, and doing macabre comparisons between the artist’s favorite colors in his paintings and his favorite colors in life and death—reds and crimsons. The journalist stated that “reputable” sources had said that Jon Marcel had enjoyed a heated affair with Gina L’Aveau which had erupted in violent arguments before.
    She was grateful once again that Katie was in the Amazon. And even more grateful that Jon probably had not been given a copy of the paper.
    If he had regained consciousness.
    Which he hadn’t, she discovered when she reached the hospital.
    In fact, he had slipped into a coma.
    That news had sunk her into deep depression, despite the doctor’s assurances that although a coma was dangerous, Jon might pull out of it at any time. He sat with her at least twenty minutes, perhaps thirty. She thought that maybe she had lost a part of her own mind because it seemed that for all his talking, she didn’t comprehend one bit of his technical jargon. She’d read a Robin Cook book called Coma . The patients in the book had been used for body parts. There was no way they were going to tell her that a coma was okay.
    She sat by Jon during the afternoon, holding his hand, talking