“What about your other waitress?” Damon’s tone was mild, his expression deceptively casual when he set the box on the empty work island behind him. “The little one with all the hair.”
Brenda would love that description, Hannah thought, but she was too unsettled to muster a smile. “I still have her.” Brenda was a friend. But, then, she’d thought Carin was becoming one, too.
“Do you want to tell me what else has happened lately?”
Between her conversation with the sheriff, her dwindling receipts and the fact that he’d been the topic du jour all week, she wouldn’t have known where to start. But it wasn’t the question, so much as the oddly offhand way he posed it that made the rock bum a little hotter.
“Nothing,” she assured him, having no intention of burdening him, anyway. “Nothing’s happened. It’s actually been rather—”
“Slow?”
He offered the possibility in the same too-quiet tone, and deliberately stepped closer.
“It’s been a little slow,” she conceded, stepping back. The movement was automatic, instinctive. Like stepping out of the way of a big truck. “But the weather’s been terrible. No one wants to be out in a downpour.”
Frowning faintly at what she’d done, he stayed where he was, studying her over a five-foot stretch of beige linoleum. “People don’t let weather stop them around here. If they did, they’d be in hibernation until summer.”
He watched her cross her arms over her stomach, the frown increasing a degree before he refocused on her face. “Is it slower than it was before I moved in downstairs?”
She didn’t trust the casualness of the question. His whole manner was too certain, too controlled. She had the feeling he already knew the answers to everything he asked. He just wanted to hear her say the words.
She had no idea why he would want that. But he would push until he got what he wanted, and given the week she’d had, she didn’t feel up to pushing back. “Maybe a little.”
It was easier to focus on anything but the gray eyes that slowly turned hard as tempered steel. The utility room door was still open. Turning her attention to it, she closed it with a quiet click, acutely aware of the silence across from her.
Five seconds passed. Then five more. Damon hadn’t moved.
“Are you going to tell me what the sheriff said? I know he talked to you,” he informed her when her surprised glance flew to his. “He paid a little visit to the shop last week to make sure I knew he was keeping an eye on me. He mentioned that he told you the same thing.” His eyes shifted over her face, searching, assessing. “I want to know what else he said.”
Damon’s tone remained deceptively even, his outward calm remarkable for the resentment he must have felt at the sheriff’s uncalled-for intrusion. Anyone else might have believed the incident had no effect on him at all. But, to Hannah, the tension slowly creeping into his body was unmistakable. It was in the subtle tightening of his jaw, the rigid set of his broad shoulders, the faint flare of his nostrils.
He’d suggested that she was sensitive to the electrical charges in the atmosphere. She was also exquisitely sensitive to him. He affected every nerve and cell in her body, and, at the moment, his tension was definitely feeding hers.
“He just wanted to know if it was true that I’d rented the shop to you. And to be sure I understood what I was doing,” she added, considerably understating the man’s warnings. She didn’t want Damon angry over what the sheriff had said to her. That would only make her problems worse. Not that he would get himself involved, she thought, which made her wonder why he was even asking. “That was about it.”
“You mean, he made sure you know what I can do to a woman’s reputation.”
An edge finally entered his tone with that blunt statement. It was matched by the flintlike hardness in his eyes.
“He didn’t get specific, but I imagine that’s what he was getting at.”
“He won’t get that detailed. The last thing he’d want is to remind people that his daughter used to sneak out of her room at night to meet me.”
“Is that why he has it in for you?” she asked, voicing the suspicion she’d harbored ever since Brenda mentioned his involvement with the beautiful Maryanne. “Because you had an affair with his daughter?”
“That,” he tightly agreed, “and the fact that he can’t control me the way he does everyone else. And by the way, it was his underage daughter,” he clarified, wanting to make sure she had the whole picture. “Only I didn’t know she was his daughter when I saw her hanging around the docks, and I sure as hell didn’t know she was only seventeen. She told me she was older.”
“Did the sheriff know that?”
“Do you actually think it would have mattered?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Before Hannah could do much more than open her mouth to ask if he’d even tried to defend himself, Damon had dismissed the question.
“She was just using me to rebel against her old man,” he muttered, sounding as if being used was of no consequence at all. “I was twenty-two, nowhere near good enough for that family and she knew it. Her daddy was scared to death that I’d gotten her pregnant and ruined her chances with a decent man.
“I didn’t give a damn about much of anything back then,” he admitted, his eyes locking on hers, “but the one thing I made sure of was that I didn’t get anyone pregnant. There was no way I could support a kid. I was barely making a living as it was.”
Damon didn’t pull any punches with her. He never had. When he looked at her as he did now, his steady glance full of heat and challenge, it was hard for Hannah to tell if he was recounting his sins to her to push her away, or if it was because, in some indefinable way, he trusted her.
The latter possibility would have been laughable, had she not realized that she might very well trust him, too.
“That was what?” she asked, less stunned by that realization than she probably should have been. “Ten years ago?”
“About that. But it might as well have been ten minutes. Nobody forgets anything around here. Ever. When Jansson sees me now, all he sees is a giant black spot on his family’s reputation. I don’t give a damn about him or his family. I just wish to hell he’d forget about me.” His voice fell, his words becoming barely audible. “And leave you alone.”
He turned away from her, too agitated to stand still any longer. He faced the shiny surface where he’d left what he’d come for, but he didn’t pick up the box. His back to her, he jammed his hands on his hips, pulled a breath that expanded his shoulders and slowly released it.
The dishwasher gave a metallic thunk as it switched from the drain cycle to dry. In the sudden silence, Hannah could hear the gentle patter of rain outside the back door. Without the wind, the sound should have been soothing. Had her thoughts not been so chaotic, it would have been.
She couldn’t believe how easily he’d dismissed what the sheriff’s daughter had done to him. Maryanne had settled down, grown up and gone on to catch her prize in Cleveland—the prosperous lawyer in the pictures the sheriff so proudly shared. But she had used Damon to taunt her father. She didn’t know if Maryanne’s rebellion had been prompted by a desperate need to escape the controlling thumb of her parent or if the girl had just been a spoiled brat. Either way, it didn’t sound as if the sheriffs parenting or Maryanne’s behavior had come under near as much fire as Damon’s actions. But, then, he had come from the wrong side of the tracks, and while hardly an innocent, he was the one who’d been held accountable.
How many other times had he been judged more harshly than he might have been had his family name been different? And when had he first started thinking of himself as not being good enough?
“If you want me to leave, I’d just as soon you tell me before the snows start. It’s easier towing a boat on wet pavement than slick.”
She stared at him in disbelief. He thought she was going to kick him out. It didn’t matter that he was only expecting her do to what she suspected
people routinely did to him. That he thought she was like them was an insult.
“Just because the sheriff talked to me doesn’t make any difference, Damon. I knew about your reputation...about you,” she added, because there were things about him no one else acknowledged, “when I rented the shop to you.”
“You don’t know as much as you think you do.”
“Do you want me to ask you to leave?”
He whirled around, his hard features set in an impenetrable mask. “Of course I don’t. You know I don’t have anyplace else to take that boat.”
“Then, don’t treat me that way. I don’t care about what happened when you were here before.”
“You should.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Seeing the naked plea in her eyes, Damon felt the muscles in his stomach tighten. Years ago, he’d felt the same undirected anger simmering inside and had no idea what drove his need to lash out. That wasn’t the case now. Right now, he knew exactly what was driving him.
He was accustomed to being treated unfairly. But Hannah wasn’t, and she didn’t seem to appreciate at all what kind of trouble she’d just borrowed for herself. She actually seemed to believe what she’d done for him wasn’t that big a deal. To him, it was huge. What she’d failed to realize was the sort of impact her decision to rent to him would have on the locals’ opinion of her. And he knew how badly she wanted to be part of those who would have no part of him.
He just didn’t want it to matter.
He didn’t want her to matter.
“I need to go,” he muttered, hating the ambivalence clawing inside his chest.
He turned away, reaching for the box behind him. Hannah reached for it, too. Before he could pick it up, her hand came down on the nearest end.
“You’re not going to do that to me,” she insisted, refusing to let him slam that invisible door in her face. “This is my home, Damon. All of this.” She motioned around her, including upstairs and down. “And I’m not going to spend the next however many months bumping into that chip on your shoulder.
“You say I don’t know all that much about you? Well, you wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I knew you better than the gossips in town. I’d already heard about you and Maryanne getting caught in the woods, and about how you ran the Olmstead boys off the road just before you hit a tree, and about the row of mailboxes you wiped out, and about how you used to steal fuel when you were a kid.” It hadn’t been right of him to do that, but given how meager his existence had been, she thought she might understand why he’d done it. It was a little like stealing bread. Without fuel, he and his dad couldn’t fish, and if they didn’t fish they didn’t eat. “I’m sure the details aren’t entirely accurate, because people tend to get their facts and their fantasies a little confused around here, but if there’s something else you think I should know, or if any of that isn’t true, then tell me.”
There was more she knew about him. She knew his compassion and his quiet understanding. But he didn’t give her a chance to get to that. As she’d recounted his transgressions, he’d gone quietly still.
“Did you know my father was a drunk?” he asked, his voice the deadly calm of the air before a storm. “Or that my mother ran off with some tourist when I was nine years old and never bothered to call or write or come back?
“Did you know I barely made it through school? That I’d be up all night, patching nets, then fall asleep in class and get sent to the principal’s office for not paying attention and causing a ‘disturbance?’ They kept suspending me, then they’d tell me I didn’t have enough class days so they’d hold me back. By the time I was fifteen, I’d spent so much time on suspension and in detention that the principal called in a social worker to take me from my dad. Did you know that?”
He stepped closer to her with each angry question, crowding her, making her back away. “Did you know that the social worker took one look at me, said there was nothing she could do and walked out.” Damon had been fifteen by then, but he’d already been six feet tall and pushing two hundred pounds. The caseworker had blanched at his size and the surly glare he’d aimed at her and promptly counted him a lost cause.
“That’s what I came from, Hannah. And around here, that’s just not acceptable.” He backed her up another step. “Neither is associating with someone like me.”
She heard the warning in his harsh voice, saw it in his turbulent eyes. He was as bitter as a northern winter, but all she could think about was what she’d glimpsed seconds ago. She recognized the ache of betrayal when she saw it.
“Your mom left when you were nine?”
He clearly didn’t expect her question, and Hannah didn’t expect the pain that shot through his bridled hostility. For an instant, he was totally unguarded, the look in his eyes as bleak as winter. He’d been counted as unsalvageable. And he was still being made to pay for a past people wouldn’t let him forget. He’d learned to live with the animosity he usually managed to keep in check. But having to acknowledge being abandoned by the woman who’d given him birth struck at something that festered far more deeply than all the other slights and insults combined.
“Now you’re getting the idea,” he muttered, jerking his defenses back into place. “I wasn’t worth sticking around for even then.”
He started to turn away. Appalled by the thought of a nine-year-old questioning his own worth, Hannah grabbed for his arm. It was like grabbing rock. Nothing yielded.
“You were a child,” she insisted, trying to imagine the man before her being that young. She couldn’t. It was as if he’d been born with the scars he bore. “The problems were with her. Not you.”
His glance moved to where her hand curved over his forearm, then slowly lifted to her face. The compassion in her eyes nearly undid him. “I don’t blame anyone else for who I am, Hannah. I’ve always known right from wrong. I didn’t always know why I did something. If it was lashing out, getting attention or getting even. But I knew whether it was right or wrong to do whatever it was that I did. There’s plenty that was my fault. I just didn’t care. I still don’t. Got it?”
He wanted to intimidate her, to impress upon her that he wouldn’t tolerate her excusing the man he had become. He was what he chose to be. The scar slashing his eyebrow was a stark reminder that he was no stranger to violence. The distance in his cool gray eyes spoke of a soul that refused to be reached. Only a fool would ignore what he so obviously wanted her to see.
Hannah was no fool. She wasn’t fooled, either. “I got it,” she quietly replied, refusing to count him as irredeemable simply because he wanted her to. “I just don’t believe you’re as tough as you think you are.”
She had done an amazing job of keeping the tremor from her voice. She just couldn’t stop it from shuddering through her when he took the step that backed her against the utility room door.
Flattening his hands on either side of her head, he leaned closer, his eyes glittering hard on her face. “I need you to believe it.”
Hannah could feel the tension in his body snake through hers. He was so near she could feel the heat radiating from his chest. Feeling singed by that heat, she practically swallowed her quiet “Why?”
Damon could think of a half a dozen reasons why he needed to back away. Two seconds ago, he could have counted them off with no trouble at all and thrown in a couple extra just for good measure. He just couldn’t think of a single one of those reasons now. The way she looked at him, her liquid blue eyes pleading to understand, made him feel raw inside. He didn’t want to feel that exposed. Breathing in her scent, he didn’t want to remember why he shouldn’t touch her, either.
Need knotted in his gut when he cupped the back of her neck and drew her toward him. He didn’t want her getting inside his head. He didn’t want her understanding or her compassion. Yet he craved the sense of absolution she offered, and the sweet, mind-numbing pleasures of her body.
His mouth came down on hers and he pulled her against him, moldi
ng her curves to the hard ridges of his body, encouraging a delicate shiver from her when his tongue touched hers. He didn’t expect to shudder himself at the incredible softness of her hands when she slowly slid them along his neck and into his hair—or the wildfire that strafed his gut when she opened to him. He didn’t expect her to kiss him back. But she did. And the knowledge that she wanted his kiss tore a groan from deep within his chest.
Hannah felt that deep rumble radiate from her mouth to her toes. Exquisite sensations bloomed everywhere in her body, filling her breasts, pooling heat low in her abdomen. Damon crushed her to him, imprinting himself on her body, shaping her curves with his hands to lift her against him. The shock of his arousal shimmered through her as he skimmed his hands to her shoulders, then up into her hair.
His big hands cradled her head on either side when, scattered moments later, he slowly eased himself away, his lips clinging to hers until physical distance forced contact to break. His breathing was as erratic as her own.
Closing his eyes, Damon leaned his forehead against hers. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
There was no absolution. And the pleasures of her body were off-limits to him. All he wanted was sex. Honest, straightforward, no-regrets-in-the-morning sex. Even if he hadn’t wanted to avoid lousing up their arrangement, he couldn’t take advantage of her. She was a good woman, compassionate, generous and possessing of a trusting heart that had already been badly bruised. He wasn’t what she needed. Not when being involved with him jeopardized everything she’d come there to find.
He let her go, refusing to torture himself with whatever he would see in her eyes.
“I’ll pick up some more of these in Duluth,” he said, grabbing what he’d come for. “I’m going in the morning, anyway.”
He headed for the stairwell, closing the door quietly behind him. He’d have been far better off if he’d had no idea how she would respond to him. Now that he knew, his nights would be pure agony.
Chapter Eight
Hannah And The Hellion (Silhouette Treasury 90s) Page 15
