by Janzen, Tara
“Who?”
“Dale Smith,” she snapped, wondering what kind of idiot would forget his own partner’s name. The wind picked up and blew across the demolished office and into the kitchen, making her colder and angrier.
“Smitty? Is that you?” Jack slowly rolled to a sitting position on the bed, holding his head with his free hand. He’d worked too late to be able to think at the crack of dawn. “You sound funny.”
“N-no, Mr. Hudson,” Lila said, hating the way her voice was beginning to shake. She wrapped her arm tight around her waist. “This is Dr. Singer. Doc-tor Sing-er,” she repeated a little louder, a little clearer.
The barest gleam of a light bulb clicked on in Jack’s muddled brain. “Lila Singer?”
“Yes!” She got the word out between chattering teeth and huddled her backside up against the wall, hunching her shoulders down. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe anything as outrageously stupid as half her house falling off had happened to her. “I . . . I . . .” Her voice broke again, and she gave up in disgust.
Jack grinned and rubbed a hand over his eyes. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe the woman he’d kissed for no sane reason and hadn’t been able to forget was calling him. Her timing was incredible, beating him to the punch by mere hours. He’d promised himself the luxury of calling her during the holidays, after his workload had eased up a bit.
He’d gone out to her place a couple of times in early October, supposedly to help Smitty. Each time Lila Singer hadn’t been home, though, and each time he hadn’t stayed longer than five minutes. Smitty hadn’t seemed to want his help, and he’d felt foolish hanging around waiting for her. He was too old, he’d told himself, for crazy infatuations.
But he hadn’t forgotten what it was like to kiss Lila Singer. The warmth, and taste, and welcoming softness of her mouth beneath his had felt too good, too right.
“Hi, Lila,” he drawled, his voice still husky with sleep. “It’s good to hear from you.” And it was very good. “Quite a storm we’ve been having. Looks like a white Christmas this year.”
Good to hear from her? Lila repeated silently. She tightened her mouth and shivered inside her flannel robe. He wasn’t listening to her again. Refraining from the rare but succinct cussing on the tip of her tongue, she started to set him straight. “Mr. Hudson—”
“Jack, please,” Jack interrupted with a yawn, all the while fighting an overactive imagination stimulated by her voice. It was damn early, barely six o’clock. She could be wearing anything.
Black lace would be perfect, he thought, with her dark hair and her soft, creamy skin . . . and that mouth. He shifted on the bed, then decided just to get up and head for the shower. Imagining Lila Singer in black lace had a way of taking the chill off the morning in a hurry.
“Mr. Hudson,” she said clearly, “I am instigating legal action against you, and if you are not here in fifteen minutes, I’m going to call the police and have you arrested!”
The phone banged in Jack’s ear. He winced and jerked the receiver away from his head. Arrested? He’d missed something. What had happened to the weather and black lace? He gave his head a slight shake. No, they hadn’t been talking about black lace. He’d been imagining that part. But the weather had been real. A white Christmas, more snow than they’d had in twenty years, a heavy, wet snow, the kind that broke tree limbs and tested roofs, the kind that . . .
He did a mental backtrack and swore softly under his breath. Moving quicker than his brain told him was wise, he reached for his pants and shirt, praying the snowplows had worked all night. She’d only given him fifteen minutes before she called the cops.
* * *
Jack stood outside in the snow; then, without needing to open a door, walked inside to stand in more snow. Disaster was the only word that came to mind. Actually, a couple of other words did come to mind, words like liability, expensive, and damn Smitty. What had he been doing out there for the last three months? And where had all of Lila Singer’s money gone? Certainly not into quality construction. He’d never seen a mess like the one tumbled all over her backyard and through her office.
“Ten thousand dollars,” she muttered, struggling past him with a computer console in her arms. Her full mouth didn’t look the least bit kissable this morning. In fact, the lady looked like a small pot ready to boil over. Her movements were jerky, her muscles tight with anger.
Jack nodded in agreement, jotted the figure down on his small notepad, and wished he’d taken the time to fix himself a thermos of coffee. It was going to be a long day, and he didn’t have the guts to ask Dr. Singer for a cup. Neither did he have the nerve to offer his help again, as he had when he’d first arrived. She’d made it clear what his job was, and it didn’t include rescuing her office equipment or any of the hundreds of books scattered in the rubble.
Dr. Singer. He shook his head and continued looking around. More money than brains, and damn little money, had been his erroneous initial summation of her. The lady obviously had plenty of brains.
“Oh, no.” The whispered wail came from behind him. He turned and found her kneeling by a pile of books. She lifted one and gently brushed the snow off its blue cover, revealing a gold-leaf border. “Oh, no,” she repeated, softly to herself, the first bit of softness she’d shown all morning.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and immediately felt stupid. What was wrong was all around him, some of it broken, most of it wet.
She flashed him an icy glance, the tightness returning to her mouth. “Edgar Rice Burroughs, Son of Tarzan, first edition, formerly in immaculate condition.” She rose and wrapped her arms around the book. “Four hundred and fifty dollars.”
Jack watched her stomp through the mess and into the house. “Four hundred and fifty dollars,” he whispered, adding the number to the growing column on his notepad. He looked at the half ton of other books and prayed there weren’t too many more four-hundred-fifty-dollar versions in the wreckage. He’d never heard of such a thing. Four hundred and fifty dollars for a book, and a Tarzan book at that. He’d seen the movies as a kid and thought they were pretty good, but not four hundred dollars worth of good. Maybe the books were better than the movies. He’d heard similar opinions about other movies from friends of his who read a lot.
He spent the next half hour combing through the broken lumber and found nothing to decrease his anger at Smitty. His partner, his best friend, had short-shrifted every aspect of the job. He’d bought third grade lumber and pieced it together into the worst excuse for a framing job Jack had ever seen. There was barely enough wood in the roof to hold up the shingles. There certainly hadn’t been enough to hold up the Colorado snows. The whole damn room had crumbled under the weight.
Hudson and Smith Construction would no doubt crumble under it too. The mess piled around his feet was the result of negligence and fraud. Dr. Singer had paid good money for good construction, and even an unskilled eye could tell that the money had gone someplace else, probably into Smitty’s pocket. They were doomed.
A sudden thought had him swearing. They weren’t doomed. He was doomed all by himself. Smitty had said he needed to get away for a while, and he’d refused to say where he was going or how long he’d be gone. Jack was afraid the answer to the last question was a very long time. Divorce did crazy things to some people, crazy, criminal things.
Even in his anger, though, he felt pity for his friend. Running away never solved anything, and running away with somebody else’s money only made the problem worse.
Well, he certainly wasn’t going to have Smitty tracked down and arrested. Somehow he’d have to make good on the job. He looked at the destruction with a new eye and decided some of the materials were salvageable. With his insurance, a little cash out of his own pocket, and by pulling in some favors, he should be able to fulfill Lila Singer’s wildest dreams of space. All he had to do was talk the lady into giving him a chance.
He turned toward the kitchen, but got no farther than
three steps. The quiet, muffled sounds coming from somewhere in the house were horrifying and unmistakable. She was crying.
Sighing, he cast his eyes toward the blue Colorado sky peeking through the few remaining beams. Now what? he wondered, feeling helplessly in over his head. Tears had never been his forte, and Lila Singer’s tears seemed to be affecting him more than most.
You never should have kissed her, Jack, he told himself, no matter how big the moon was last September. Now, three months later, he felt incredibly foolish. Why hadn’t Smitty told him she was a professor at the university? And an English professor at that.
She certainly hadn’t wasted any time in rattling off her credentials and her connections, when he arrived, all of them first class. She’d taken the high road with him the minute he’d stepped out of his truck. He didn’t blame her. Given the same circumstances, he would have done the same thing. He didn’t have any first-class credentials, though, and the only even remotely intimidating connection he had was his brother-in-law the policeman, whom she thankfully hadn’t called.
And she was crying.
Jack lowered his chin to his chest and allowed himself another deep sigh. He felt like hell. He didn’t want to face her tears and her four-hundred-fifty-dollar Tarzan book. He didn’t want to face her Ph.D., and most of all he didn’t want to face her big brown eyes and try to fast-talk her into giving him a chance.
But business was business, and a guy had to eat and keep a roof over his head. His glance strayed back up to the sky. Which was more than Hudson and Smith had done for Lila Singer.
Lila heard Jack Hudson call her name, and she hastily wiped the tears from her cheeks. Damn the man, did he have to invade the privacy of her sitting room? She’d made it clear where his place was, out there in the destruction of her office, not in here, where her heart was breaking every time she looked at Danny’s book. A wave of guilt rolled over her sadness, sharpening both feelings. Another tear ran down her face.
She’d been so angry, and so concerned about her damned computer, she hadn’t remembered his prized first edition until she’d stumbled over it. She’d wanted to forget the pain of Danny’s death, but not him, not the things he’d held dear.
Her fingers trailed over the blue cover. Damp stains marred the cloth and loosened pieces of the gilt edging, ruining the perfection that once had been. If she’d only remembered sooner, before she’d wasted her time threatening Jack Hudson and crying on the phone to her mother, she might have saved the book.
She was going to forget that damn kiss and sue his pants off. She was going to take his business, his home, his truck, his—
“Dr. Singer?”
She stiffened at the sound of his voice behind her.
“What?” She laid the book on a small, ornately carved table and wiped her cheeks again, discreetly using an edge of her cuff and keeping her back to him. Her position on the floor in front of a matched pair of antique chairs helped to hide the action.
“I’ve looked the office over,” he said, “and it’s not as bad as it seemed at first. You didn’t have your floor covering down yet, so that’s going to save a lot. I’ve got a line on some bigger windows than the ones you lost, more like what you had in mind in the beginning.” That’s right, Jack, keep talking, he told himself. He ran his pencil down his list of figures and notes, trying to ignore how vulnerable she looked sitting on the rug with her legs beneath her. “I can have the walls and the roof back up by New Year’s Eve, personally guaranteed work done by me. I’ll call my window supplier today. I don’t think he’ll want to see me on Christmas, but I’ll drive down to Denver the day after. My liability insurance should cover any personal item losses, and if it doesn’t, I will.”
As he talked, Lila slowly turned her head to look over her shoulder at him. It seemed the least amount of consideration she needed to expend on a man she was going to ruin. Sniffling, she gazed disdainfully at him.
“If you’d rather sue me than let me try to make it right,” he continued, “I’ll understand, no hard feelings. But I’d really like the chance to fix this, to build you the room we talked about last fall, to put some space into your house and the Rockies right in your lap.”
He’d remembered, Lila thought, her disdain slipping a little. He’d remembered about the mountains. She shifted to one side and gave him more of her attention, maybe too much more. There was something innately masculine about him, standing there in his work boots and faded jeans, wearing an unpressed white shirt and a rumpled tie obviously meant to impress her. She wasn’t accustomed to having strange men in her house, and his presence made her feel awkward in a way she hadn’t felt in years. He’d had no business kissing her last fall—no matter how wondrous that kiss remained in her memory. It had gotten their relationship off to a bad start, especially since she was now being forced to sue him.
“I’ve got a few ideas you won’t find in any store-bought plans,” he went on, “and I’ll give them to you at cost of materials, free labor, no bull.” His boots were wet, she noticed, but he was careful not to stand on her imported Turkish rug. That was hardly the consummate sign of gentility, but it was a point in his favor. “By Valentine’s Day,” he said, “I can have you sitting in two hundred square feet of the office of your dreams.”
“You’ve already had that chance,” she informed him, working a trace of coolness into her tone.
Jack felt the ice and warmed to the challenge. “I know up to this point Hudson and Smith have been about the worst thing to happen to you, but it’s just Hudson Construction now, and I can guarantee you won’t find a better man to clean up the mess and get those walls back where they belong, and in record time. You don’t owe me anything, but I owe you, and if we’ve got our assets all tied up in a lawsuit, it’s going to be pretty tough for either one of us to get what we want.”
There were a few too many “wes” flying around the room to suit Lila. “You’re the one with the problem, Mr. Hudson.”
“I know that. Jack.”
“What?” She shot him a quizzical look.
“Jack. My name is Jack.”
“I know your name, Mr. Hudson,” she said, dropping her gaze and absently smoothing her gray tweed slacks. She hoped she wouldn’t have to get any ruder to make her point. He was starting to unnerve her. She should have called her lawyer and let him deal with Jack Hudson.
When he didn’t respond, she hazarded another quick glance at him. He didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by her discourtesy. In fact, she didn’t think he’d heard her little riposte. He stood quiet and still, his gaze riveted to a place somewhere beyond and above her head. Even before she turned, she knew exactly what had captured his attention.
It wasn’t black lace at all, Jack thought, staring at the life-size photograph hanging between two high windows. It was white gauze, streamers of it, as sheer and light as threads could be and still hold together as cloth. They swirled around her body, caressing ivory satin skin, barely covering the peaks of her breasts, catching on the lowest curve of her hip, exposing a midriff a man could believe in.
Jack believed. He’d been on the verge of conversion months before under a harvest moon, and the photograph of her looking more like his fantasies than even his own imagination could conjure up brought him completely into the fold.
Silver glitter graced her shoulders. Her riotous tumble of ebony curls was windblown and dappled with moonbeams. She was poised on tiptoe in profile, bending slightly forward at the waist, holding a wand of rainbow light to chase away the night mists and bestow her favors.
She was magic. The photographer had known it; the photographer had known her, intimately. Jack had no doubts of that. Anyone might have captured the texture of her skin. Anyone might have dreamed up the lighting effects that made her shine in the mysterious darkness of the woodland setting. No one but a lover, though, brought such a look to a woman’s face. He felt like a voyeur, and still he couldn’t look away.
A flood of embarrassment pooled i
n Lila’s cheeks and spread across her face. Thousands of people had seen Danny’s photograph of her—it had been on exhibit in New York just last year in a retrospective of his work—but she didn’t recall anyone taking such a sensual interest in it. Or maybe she was misinterpreting the intensity she saw in Jack Hudson’s clear hazel eyes. Or maybe she wasn’t. She wasn’t sure, except of the intensity itself,
“Yes, well . . . Jack,” she said, pushing herself off the floor. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out.” The strangeness of the words brought her up short. Damn, she thought. He had her on the run, on the defensive when all the facts were stacked in her favor.
Jack had seen enough. He was some kind of fool all right. He’d fantasized about Lila Singer for three months, and all the while she’d been with some guy who could make her look like that. It was starting out to be a real lousy Christmas. If her Ph.D. and the construction fiasco hadn’t convinced him to forget his romantic intentions, the look on her face in the photograph came damn close. But some dreams died hard.
Lila stopped herself from retracting her words, a subtle change in Jack’s gaze giving her pause. Defeat lingered there, a thoughtful defeat, a carefully weighed and accepted defeat, and despite her anger at him, she was surprised. Nothing in their encounters had led her to believe he was a man who knew much about defeat. On the contrary, he’d come across as one of the most arrogant, confident men she’d ever met.
She knew the smart move was to get rid of him, yet she hesitated.
Jack knew he might as well leave, yet he didn’t.
“I—”
“I—”
They both spoke at once, but Jack was the first to grin. What the hell? he thought. He couldn’t lose what he’d never had.
“I’d like you to give me a chance,” he said. “One week. If you don’t like the work at that point, you’re welcome to sue me.”
