"I'm not hungry," Blair said, catapulting off the sofa and into her bedroom, slamming shut the door behind her.
* * *
Jenna waited until the aftershocks died down before letting out a despondent sigh. Okay, so maybe this wasn't such a hot idea. And maybe she should just march in there and tell Blair the truth already.
But again, she had no right to do that without clueing Hank in first. And she'd already chewed this over in her head a zillion times, each time arriving at the conclusion that telling Blair while she still disliked Hank so much would most likely really blow up in their faces. Not that it was a given that throwing them together was going to change Blair's opinion. Simply because she'd changed her opinion about Hank didn't mean Blair would.
And, oh sweet Lord, she sure had changed her opinion about him, hadn't she?
Jenna opened the small bottle of olive oil she'd bought the other day and drizzled it over the greens, thinking, wow—life sure was screwy, wasn't it? All the women she knew who dated man after man after man, never finding the right one, and here she'd struck gold on practically the first try with Phil. He'd been cute and funny and generous and sexy and had totally mastered the art of being appropriately contrite when he did something stupid, she thought with a smile. She wasn't sure she believed in all that soul mate stuff, but she sure as hell had never doubted that Phil and she had been incredibly good together.
And she sure as hell had never figured she'd ever meet another man who could fire her engines the same way.
No, not the same way. Not the same way at all. Hank Logan and Phil Stanton were no more alike than—she uncorked the balsamic vinegar and splashed it over the salad—oil and vinegar, she supposed. Phil had always made her feel safe. Hank Logan scared the holy bejeebers out of her. But both were good men, solid men, men she could trust.
Men she could…
Oh, no, uh-uh. Yes, she was alone. And yes, sometimes she was even lonely. But alone was safe. Alone was predictable. And most important, she couldn't be left alone if she already was.
Still, she thought as she tossed the salad, mixing the greens and the oil and vinegar until the tastes all blended together and you could no longer tell one component from the other, who would have thought that two men that good, that trustworthy, that able to hike her sex drive to combustible levels, would come along in one lifetime?
And was there some valid reason her thoughts were moseying down this path? Other than the obvious one that stress had finally sent her over the edge?
Jenna removed the casserole from the oven, briefly contemplated calling Blair again, decided against it. When she got hungry enough, she'd surface.
Sure enough, about an hour later Jenna heard Blair's bedroom door open behind her as she sat at the dining table, the galleys spread out in front of her. Without speaking, Blair went into the kitchen. A few seconds later, Jenna heard a plate clattering into the microwave, followed by the telltale hum of nuking in progress.
She just kept on reading, occasionally marking something in red that needed to be changed.
The microwave dinged, followed by sounds of silverware being grabbed from the drainer by the sink, milk being poured, and, finally, the chair in front of her scraping against the wood floor as Blair planted herself and her dinner at the table.
Jenna peered up at her niece through her reading glasses, waiting.
"Can I use the money for anything I want?" Blair finally said, shoveling in her food so fast it was practically a blur.
"Within reason," Jenna said mildly, returning her gaze to the proofs.
"Good," Blair said.
Jenna managed not to smile. Not too broadly, anyway.
* * *
Even though he'd convinced himself he was prepared, Hank still started when he came out of unit 9 after changing the air-conditioning filter to see Blair sitting on the office steps, elbows on knees, her hands bracketing a smushed scowl. Mutt abandoned him immediately, making a beeline for the kid. She did manage a smile for the dog, but Hank could tell her heart wasn't exactly in it. "God, look how big you're getting," she said, wagging his floppy ears. She held off looking up at Hank until the last possible second. When she finally did, she announced, "I just want you to know, I'm here under duress."
His toolbox dangling from one hand, Hank hooked his other thumb in his pocket, keeping his face expressionless. But holy crud, she sure looked like her grandmother with those sewer lid-sized eyes and that determined little chin.
"Oh, yeah?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Because you don't like me very much, you mean."
Her eyes got even wider at that, and twin dots of color popped out on her cheeks, but she kept her cool. One shoulder jerked. "Not really, no."
"Got any idea why?"
Another shoulder hitch. And a squint, for good measure. "No particular reason."
"Just because, in other words."
"I guess."
Hank wasn't sure whether to commend her for her honesty or take her to task for judging a person based on circumstantial evidence. He decided now was not the time for either. "Then why are you here?"
"Because Jenna made me. And because she said I could spend the money on anything I wanted to. But God. I'm only thirteen. Who the heck makes their kids work at thirteen?"
Smartass, he thought, only to immediately follow it with, Yeah—sound familiar?
"First, I've heard your aunt get on you about saying 'God' like that. So you can't do it around me, either. And secondly, most of the kids around here work. Libby does. So why shouldn't you?"
She flashed him a disgusted look, but all she said was, "Around the farm and taking care of the boys sometimes and stuff. That's different."
"How's that?"
"I don't know. It just is."
Damn. This was like trying to drive in a foreign country where the road signs were all in a different language. Hank didn't have a clue whether to turn right or left, and God knows instinct wasn't going to do him a damn bit of good, since he didn't have any. Hell, he didn't even know when it was okay to get mad at her, because for damn sure if she kept this up, he was going to get mad, sooner or later. Probably sooner. Reining in his temper wasn't something he was real good at. So probably the best thing to do was to simply move past the immediate issue altogether.
"Follow me," he said, turning and taking off down the path toward the cottages. She and the dog followed, one far more willingly than the other.
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see. I need your advice about something."
Her legs were long for a thirteen-year-old, but she still had to sprint to keep up with him. "My advice? About what?"
Despite herself, she hadn't been able to keep from sounding interested, he noticed. Or at least curious. "You'll see," he repeated.
Neither had anything to say to the other as they made their way past all the cottages, then down the path that led to the other house, a shortcut he'd discovered shortly after he'd bought the property. Hank's brain was working overtime, though, thinking about how, when he and Michelle were engaged, he'd naturally assumed they'd have kids. He'd wanted to have kids, imagined himself changing diapers or helping a toddler take his first steps, putting together swing sets and tricycles, going to soccer games and parent nights at school. Now it occurred to him that he'd never imagined any scenarios past when the kids would have been ten or so. He'd certainly never imagined what it might be like to deal with one of these teenaged…things.
His admiration for Jenna—and his parents, and for any human being who'd ever lived with a teenager and come out the other end with their sanity intact—increased a hundredfold.
About ten minutes later they came upon the house, a compact, two-story structure set in a small clearing surrounded by trees and so overrun with Virginia creeper and ivy and weeds, you could hardly tell there had once been actual front and back yards. The only thing Hank could figure, since it seemed an odd place to plunk a house, was that the land
must've at one time been part of a larger farm, and maybe it had been divvied up among the kids or something, or sold off in parcels. But it would suit his purpose just fine. For the time being, anyway.
"What's this?" Blair said.
"My new house," he said, picking his way through all the vines and what-all to get to the front porch. Behind an array of seriously overgrown shrubs, he could see the white paint was peeling badly, that one of the gutters had worked its way loose. But there'd been no rot that he could tell, the last time he'd checked.
Blair followed, cringing when some of the taller weeds slapped at her as she walked. "Why?"
Never had a single word radiated so much disgust. "Because I'm hiring somebody else to help me run the place, and they're gonna live in the apartment. And Mutt needs a real yard." He jiggled the key in the stubborn front-door lock until it gave way. "Why? You don't like it?"
Something flew out when he opened the door. Blair shrieked and ducked.
"What was that?"
"A bat, maybe. You coming inside?"
She backed down the steps, shaking her head. "Uh-uh, no way."
"You're bigger than the bats, Blair."
"I don't care. I am not going in there."
"Mutt did." And he had, nosing his way inside before Hank even had the door all the way open. Dog was either real dumb or real brave.
"Good for him."
Okay, he was beginning to get provoked. Maybe he wasn't supposed to, but that was too bad. The gal's stubbornness was really beginning to get on his nerves.
Until he glanced over and saw her hugging herself, her lower lip quivering. Oh, hell—she was really scared. All thoughts of bullying her into submission went right up in smoke.
"Okay," he said as gently as he knew how. "How about I run a bat recon, holler out if it's all clear? 'Cause I really do need your advice about something."
"What?"
The dog popped back out, grinning and covered in cobwebs. Hank shook his head, then said over Mutt's sneezing fit, "Paint colors. Whole place needs to be painted, see. But I don't know squat about stuff like that."
"What makes you think I do?"
"Girls are just good at this kind of thing?"
She scowled. "That's called gender bias."
"Hey. Around here, women do the pretty stuff, men sit back and enjoy it." Although, come to think of it, one of his old high-school girlfriends had painted her room dark purple. With orange trim. And God knows, his mother had been too busy giving piano lessons and holding half the folks in the county's lives together to be bothered with domesticity. So maybe Blair had a point.
"You're weird," she said, her arms crossed over a shirt big enough for three more girls.
"Then we should get on like gangbusters."
She rolled her eyes. Teenaged girls really did that. Amazing. "It's your house," she said. "Paint it anything you like."
"Fine," Hank said, tamping down the spurt of irritation. "But you're gonna get real tired of white."
After a brief Mexican standoff, Blair huffed a sigh—teenaged girls really did that, too—and said, "Okay, I'll pick out colors. But not until you swear the bats are gone."
It was going to be a very long morning.
Chapter 8
On the way to Claremore to get paint and supplies at the Wal-Mart, Blair hadn't seemed any too interested in talking. Since Hank was never interested in talking—that was his baby brother's province—this made his two or three attempts to get a dialogue going—which he only did because clairvoyance was not a real reliable method of getting to know somebody—downright painful. Once they got to the store, though, she seemed to loosen up some, especially when he let her buy a pair of little blue sparkly earstuds, even though he could pretty much imagine what Jenna's reaction would be to that.
But seeing as Jenna'd basically left him to his own devices, he didn't figure she had much room to complain. In fact, he supposed it was really something, wasn't it, her trusting him like this? In any case, by the time they'd picked out the paint, which was right next to the sporting goods section—Hank had not only caught Blair looking longingly at one of those portable basketball hoops but had also been smart enough to grab the opportunity to find out she loved to play. This information allowed them to sustain something like a conversation for a half-dozen or so volleys, even if Blair's responses were mostly "I guess," "I s'pose," or "Whatever."
Then, on their way out, he noticed her watching a father and daughter having a laughing argument about something or other, the exchange punctuated with lots of giggling "Da-ads." Blair got real quiet again after that. Wasn't until they got back to the truck that it dawned on Hank what was bugging her.
"You still miss your uncle, don't you?" he asked, putting the truck in gear and backing carefully out of the space—he'd rather deal with I-44 in an icestorm and with bald tires than dodge the crazies in this parking lot.
"What makes you say that?"
"The way you looked at that guy and his kid back there."
"Oh." Twisting her hair around her forefinger, she stared out the windshield for a long moment until she finally nodded.
And Hank heard himself say, "You wanna talk about it?"
Just like that, the floodgates opened. And for the next half hour it was Uncle Phil used to do this and Uncle Phil said that, her memories pouring out of her like she'd been about to burst with wanting to talk to somebody about her feelings. Hank just listened, which was fine with him since it meant he didn't have to talk, other than asking a question now and again when a little clarification was needed.
Then the tirade ceased as abruptly as it had begun, with a long sigh that Hank couldn't decide was more sad or relieved. Blair glanced over at him, a sheepish expression mingling with all those freckles before she refocused in front of her. "I can't talk about Uncle Phil with Jenna."
"How come?"
"'Cause she gets too sad."
Hank felt something tighten in his chest. "She doesn't talk about him?"
"She did at first, right after he died. But not for a while."
"So you haven't talked about him, either."
Thin shoulders shrugged under that baggy shirt. "It's okay. It's just I don't wanna forget him, you know? I think…"
"What?" Hank prompted when the pause grew too long.
Those big blue eyes turned to him. "I think sometimes Jenna would rather ignore something than deal with it," she said, and Hank thought, Whoa—this kid is thirteen? Then Blair said, "Like this thing she has about book signings—you know she's a writer?"
"Yeah, she told me. What thing about book signings?"
"She won't do them. Or at least, she hasn't since this book signing at a big Barnes and Noble back home, and there were like a million people there, and she totally freaked. See, she's real shy, and sometimes she has these panic attacks? Not a lot, just sometimes? But this one was real bad. I mean, I was so scared, I didn't know if she was losing it or what."
"When was this?" Hank asked, although he had a feeling he already knew the answer.
"A couple months after Uncle Phil died. It had been scheduled for a long time, so she thought she should do it even though she didn't really want to."
Oh, yeah. He'd been down that road. Maybe not with panic attacks, but he hadn't exactly been Mr. Congeniality after Michelle's death, either. Even after all this time, his grief still clung to him like bits of ground glass that hadn't worked its way out yet, sparking those damn nightmares—
He realized Blair was looking at him. He glanced over to see she had a funny look on her face. "What is it?"
She shook her head, like she wasn't going to tell him, except then she twisted around as far as the seatbelt would let her. "When Jenna told me I had to come work for you? I got real mad. And I thought, if I had to do this, then she had to do something, too, 'cause we've done this thing ever since I was little where we traded doing stuff we didn't like, or made a bargain so I'd get something for giving her something she needed, like tim
e to get a book done? Anyway, her editor asked if she'd do a book signing in Tulsa in a couple weeks, since she was here, and Jenna didn't want to. So I said if I came to work for you, then…" Her voice dropped. "Then she had to do the book signing."
The only thing that kept Hank from lighting into her was the guilty look on her face. Still, where'd she get off, making a "deal" with Jenna like that? One had nothing to do with the other, far as he could tell. One thing was for sure, though—Jenna's off-and-on nervousness suddenly made a lot more sense. Lord above—what kind of inner strength had it taken for her to even come here to begin with? And then the way he'd ambushed her, demanding answers before she'd had a chance to figure out how to break the news herself…Damn. Damn. She must've been scared half to death.
But she'd stood up to him, hadn't she?
"You weren't exactly playing fair, were you?" he said at last.
She shook her head.
"So what'd she say?"
"She said okay." But there wasn't a trace of triumph in her words. "Which like totally blew me away."
Hank felt a surprise smile tug at his lips. "Because you thought she'd say 'no' and you'd be off the hook about working with me."
"Yeah," Blair said with a sigh. She twisted back around, her arms crossed.
"You could let her off the hook." He glanced over at her, back out the windshield. "Since you know what you did was wrong."
"Actually, I tried. But you know…" A thin hand streaked up to shove her hair behind her ear. "She hasn't had an attack for a long time. And she teaches and stuff and she's been fine. So, yeah, I probably shouldn't've been pushy and all, but I'm not sure it would be such a bad thing if she did it, anyway. I mean, after Uncle Phil died, I didn't want to go anywhere or see anybody, either, not at first. But I got over it. Jenna, though…God. All she does is write and take care of me. What kind of life is that?"
"Don't say 'God,'" Hank said automatically, then added over the girl's huff of annoyance, "and maybe that's the life she wants." He hesitated, then said, "I went through something similar, a couple years back. Losing somebody close to me. So I kinda know what your aunt's feeling. And I can tell you from experience, you can't force somebody to get back to normal. Especially since their definition of normal probably isn't what it used to be."
Fathers and Other Strangers Page 12
