by Janzen, Tara
“I would have done better if you’d printed,” he said, allowing himself to lean forward partway. He rested his forearms on his thighs and folded his hands together so he’d know exactly where they were.
“Hmmm?” she replied.
“If you’d printed, or typed, I would have done better. Cursive always throws me, and yours is worse than most.”
“Oh.” Lila straightened and brushed her cheek with her hand, as if that would ease the heat left by his gaze. She knew how sloppy her handwriting was, more than one student had griped about it.
“Yes, well, if I’d known . . . known that . . .” Her voice trailed off, and the heat returned to her cheeks in full measure.
“Known that I have trouble reading,” he prompted.
“Well, yes, then of course I would have printed.” Lies, all lies. It she’d known how much difficulty he had reading, she wouldn’t have written him a letter, period. The subject was proving to be painful, and she wished he hadn’t brought it up. She wasn’t sure why the subject distressed her, but figured it had a little to do with her guilt and a lot to do with being attracted to him. It somehow seemed more sexual than sensible for an English Professor to be attracted to a man who either didn’t or couldn’t read.
She wished he wasn’t funny, nice, and sexy. She wished she didn’t like him, and Lord knew she was trying hard not to. After all, she thought she had learned her lesson about getting involved with inappropriate men.
Not that he was actually inappropriate, she corrected herself. She hoped she wasn’t that much of a snob. But it did reinforce her belief that she and Jack Hudson had virtually nothing in common.
“Well, yes,” she began, “about the letter . . .” Now she had to tell him not to come back. She took the letter he handed her and snapped it open, as if she needed reminding of what she’d written. “Well, it starts with an apology.” Another lie. She’d put the apology at the end.
“For what?”
“For almost slapping you,” she said, keeping her gaze glued to the page.
“Apology accepted.”
“Then there’s another part . . . hmmm . . .” She let her gaze skim the tersely worded phrases. “It’s about what a nice job you’ve done on the office.”
“Compliment accepted.”
She could feel his grin, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t know why she was embarrassed, and she didn’t know why she was having such a difficult time admitting to what she’d written. It had all made perfect sense at the time.
“Anything else?” he asked.
She made a big show of checking the letter front and back. “Uh . . . no, I don’t think so.”
“Liar.”
Her head snapped up at his softly spoken accusation, her face instantly aflame. “What do you mean?”
“I’m dyslexic, Lila,” he said, reaching out to brush her cheek with his thumb. “Not stupid.”
Her skin burned under his touch. “There are a lot of new teaching methods for—”
“No,” he gently interrupted.
“If you were tested. I mean, dyslexia can be—”
“No.” His thumb slid downward and caressed her mouth, effectively silencing her.
He was going to kiss her, she knew, and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it except wait, and lose herself in the depths of his eyes, growing languid with sensuality. She felt the heat of his body, the warmth of his breath, the unhesitating destination of his thoughts, and her lips parted.
She was sweet anticipation rising to his need, and Jack wanted the moment to last—because it wasn’t going to go any further. He traced her full lower lip with the pad of his thumb, reveling in its softness, well aware of what he was passing up.
When her thick black lashes drifted down to rest on her rose-tinged cheeks, though, his resistance slipped along with intentions. He pressed his mouth against her temple, inhaling her fragrance and feeling her soft sigh blow across his face. Rationalizing that there was a difference between a kiss and a kiss, he decided to explore the limits of the former.
He caressed the side of her face with his mouth, following a lazy trail to the sweet patch of skin between her ear and throat. He lingered there, nuzzling—but not kissing; grazing the tenderness of her lobe with his teeth—but not kissing; tracing the curve of her jaw with his tongue—but not kissing; until he admitted her lie was nothing compared to his own. He could kiss her until he lost his mind and ever once come near her lips.
“You can keep your secrets and your letter, Lila,” he murmured against her cheek. “And the torte.”
Lila felt his smile before he straightened up on his makeshift stool.
“I think call it a night, if that’s okay with you,” he continued, rising to his feet. “I need to help my dad with his barn tomorrow during the day, but I’ll be back tomorrow night to finish the electrical work. I’ll try to get the drywallers in here by the end of the week.”
“I—I won’t be here tomorrow night,” she said, still breathless from whatever it was he’d been doing to her neck.
“Well, it’s a small house.” He grinned. “We’re bound to run into each other sooner or later.”
He was leaving, she thought, which was what she’d wanted. And he was coming back, which hadn’t been in her plan at all. But she’d had her chance to tell him the truth about the letter, and she’d declined.
“Thank you for dinner,” she said. “It was wonderful.”
“Rudi’s makes a helluva pizza,” he agreed.
She’d been talking about his company, but she decided not to tell him that either. In fact, she needed to think before she said anything else. She’d never known a man to turn her around with such ease. She’d had everything planned before he’d shown up, and her everything had been completely flip-flopped, and the only thing that bothered her was that she wasn’t bothered. Stranger things had happened, she was sure, but she couldn’t remember the last time they’d happened to her.
“Well, good night,” she said.
“Yeah, good night.”
It was another perfect opportunity for a kiss, a classic opportunity, time-tested and practically foolproof, and they both knew it. Lila caught his quick glance at her mouth, and Jack saw her wet lips.
“Yeah, well, good night,” he said again, backing toward the French doors, his voice a shade rougher than it had been.
She waved to him twice before he got into his truck, and once more as he drove down the driveway. All three times, in her private heart of hearts, she wished he weren’t leaving.
Five
Another week, another plan. Lila had decided the only sensible thing left to do was to face her attraction for Jack Hudson head-on. Ignoring it certainly hadn’t worked. She needed to stop thinking of him as an intriguing, unknown quantity in her life and instead put him in a new category, one she’d had years of practice controlling. She needed to make a student out of him, so she decided to teach him how to read.
Of course, she still could have just gotten rid of him. Four things kept her from doing that. She now knew where his unsettling look of defeat had come from the day he’d stood in her sitting room and stared at Danny’s photograph. Dyslexics faced thousands of failures before adulthood, though she had to admit Jack Hudson seemed to have bounced back from them in pretty good shape. She didn’t know exactly what had caused his resigned expression at that moment, but she didn’t want to add to his score sheet of failures.
His blush had definitely swayed her. He hadn’t liked being found out, but neither had he done anything to hide his disability, which led to reason number three—his mixture of courage and confidence. It took both to invite an English professor to eat pizza with you after she’d just found you sounding-out syllables.
Reason number four was self-serving and practical. Jack Hudson was the best carpenter in northern Colorado. Long after the rest of her Victorian farmhouse crumbled into dust, her office would be standing on the edge of the cornfields. She didn’t
doubt it for a minute.
Therefore, she’d compiled a good, solid beginning reading list. She’d take him through some of her childhood favorites, and at the end of each lesson she’d read to him from the classics. She’d give him the world.
It never occurred to her that he might not want to.
* * *
“No.” Jack whacked the nail again, though he’d already sunk it an eighth of an inch past the board. He was standing with his back to her, inside the open framework of a storage closet they’d decided to add to her office.
“No?”
“No.” He set another nail, and his hammer rang out.
Lila dragged her gaze from the curve of his backside, noting how nicely he fit into a pair of softly worn denims, and looked down at her cherished copy of Mother Goose. She admitted he might have a point. Maybe nursery rhymes weren’t the best place to start. She’d thought the easy rhyme scheme would act as a natural prompter, whereas she’d given little thought to the subject matter.
“Okay,” she conceded. “What would you like to read?”
“Nothing.”
For a woman who had spent some of the best hours of her childhood on Treasure Island and bawling her eyes out over The Yearling, his answer bordered on incomprehensible.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
He just kept hammering away, nail after nail, whack after whack. Outside, the wind whipped up flurries of snow in the dark, blowing them off the roof of the milkhouse and scraping them across the icy crust covering the yard.
“Maybe if you told me what you were interested in,” she said, trying a new tack, “a hobby or something, I could get some books on the subject.” Much to her surprise, that worked.
He stopped with his hammer raised. After a long pause he landed one final blow on the last nail, then slowly turned to face her. “I don’t have much going in the hobby area, but over the last few months I have been cultivating a new interest.”
If his smooth drawl and the gleam in his eye hadn’t warned her, his teasing grin should have, but it didn’t.
“Great.” She almost sighed in relief. “What is it?”
“You,” His smile broadened, and he moved a couple of steps closer in a slow, sexy swagger. “So . . . if you’ve got an autobiography lying around somewhere or a diary you’d be willing to share, I can guarantee you my undivided attention.”
He was impossible, she thought. There was no other word for him. Impossibly aggravating, impossibly good-looking, impossibly, seductively appealing.
Deciding to build an office addition onto her house hadn’t seemed like such a big deal last fall. She’d just wanted someplace to set up her computer and put her books, someplace besides the living room, the sitting room, or the kitchen, someplace besides rooms already jam-packed with Danny’s exotic antiques from the four corners of the world. All she’d wanted was a room of her own for her own stuff.
What she’d gotten was Jack Hudson. What she needed was help.
* * *
“You what?” Didi Caldwell’s tortoiseshell glasses slid lower on her nose, giving Lila the full benefit of her blue-eyed stare across the width of a cluttered desk.
“Mother Goose,” Lila admitted for the second time. “But I immediately offered to start with something else, anything else.”
“After you had already offended him,” her friend added with a condemning sigh. Didi sat back in her chair and swiped ineffectually at a multitude of straying, rust-colored tendrils of hair. “Sometimes you’re so smart you’re dumb, Lila.”
“Sometimes,” she was forced to agree.
“But not often,” Didi said. “What can I do to help? Do you want me to find him a real reading tutor? The public library runs a good literacy program. I’m sure they can match him up with someone.”
“No, no, that’s not what I had in mind,” Lila said, not quite meeting Didi’s gaze.
“Oh. Well, I guess I could offer him as an extra-credit project to one of my grad students. Is he willing to pay an hourly wage?”
“No. I mean, that’s not what I had in mind either.”
Didi leaned forward and pushed her glasses back into place. “Lila honey, I have adolescent literature, grammar, and reading for education majors this semester. There’s no way I can cram an illiterate carpenter into my personal schedule.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m working him into my own schedule. I just need to know what to do. I thought you could give me a few pointers.”
“Why?”
Lila frowned at the blunt question, thinking the answer was obvious. “So I don’t make any more mistakes.”
“That wasn’t the question,” her friend said, giving her a knowing look. When Lila didn’t reply, Didi sighed. “Is there something about this guy I should know that you’re not telling me?”
“He’s a nice man,” Lila hedged.
“And?”
She shifted slightly in her chair, wondering if her students felt as uncomfortable as she suddenly did on the wrong side of the desk. “And he’s doing a lot of extra work on my office, and I’d like to help him out. Isn’t that what teaching is all about?”
“That’s what it’s supposed to be about. That’s what I tell my students it’s about. But you’ve been in this game long enough to know it ain’t necessarily so, especially at the university level. And that, my dear, is the level we are at.” Didi paused long enough for her words to sink in, then asked, “What’s his name?”
“Jack. Jack Hudson.” Lila watched Didi’s eyebrows slowly draw together. “What?”
Didi shrugged. “The name sounds familiar, but I don’t know why. I’ve never hired a carpenter in my life, functionally illiterate or otherwise. Kevin does all our fix-it work.” Kevin was Didi’s husband, an art professor and no handyman, not by anyone’s standards.
“Maybe you’d be better off with a carpenter,” Lila said with a slight smile. “I’ve seen some of Kevin’s carpentry. The next time he gets excited about building onto the deck, call me, and I’ll give you Jack’s number. He’s incredible.”
“Incredible?” Didi’s eyebrows rose above the tortoiseshell frames, and Lila realized there had been more than a trace of enthusiasm in her voice.
“Good,” she amended. “He’s very good at his job.”
“Oh?” Didi’s eyebrows didn’t budge a millimeter. “Are we talking about a good, illiterate, old carpenter, or a good, illiterate, prime-of-manhood carpenter?”
“Actually, he’s dyslexic.”
Didi gasped. “I don’t believe it! You’re seeing a man!”
It was a leap of logic to be sure, but Lila knew how her friend’s mind worked, and she knew Didi would be hard to dissuade. Still, she had to try. She couldn’t let one of her oldest and dearest friends harbor false hopes.
“I said he was dyslexic, Didi. I wasn’t being evasive.”
“You were being evasive, totally evasive. Of course, dyslexia is a whole different problem from functional illiteracy. You should have told me right up front. The library program is no good. Their volunteers aren’t trained to tutor dyslexics. I can’t wait to meet him. He must be very special. Do you know how long it’s been since you had a date?” She paused as if she expected an answer, and when she didn’t get one, she filled in her own blank. “A year ago December.”
“Thank you, Dee,” Lila drawled, “for reminding me of such a pleasant occasion.” Thankfully, Didi missed the sarcasm.
“It was awful!” she exclaimed. “I was there. Remember? But a whole year, Lila? Man does not live by bread alone.”
“And it’s physically impossible to die of embarrassment,” Lila countered, one clichéd phrase for another.
“Hey, wait a minute. You said he couldn’t read the letter you’d written him?”
“Yes,” she said, wary of what Didi was going to ask next.
“Handwritten?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hell, Lila. I can’t read your handwriting, and I have a doct
orate.”
“My handwriting is not that bad.”
“It’s worse,” Didi said succinctly. “Bring him around to the reading lab on Wednesday, and I’ll have him tested. Then we can figure out where to go from there. Okay?”
“No, not okay. He doesn’t want to be tested. I’m not even sure he wants to learn how to read.”
Didi thought about that for a moment, then threw Lila another curve. “Maybe he already knows how and he just doesn’t like to read. It wouldn’t be on the top of a dyslexic’s list of fun things to do.”
Perfect, Lila thought, sinking deep into the chair. She hadn’t fired him because he couldn’t read, and she couldn’t teach him to read because he might already know. She’d ignored him and confronted him, kissed him and offended him, lied with him and to him. She’d be darned if she knew what else to do with him.
* * *
Fortunately, Jack was full of ideas, and he wasn’t shy about pursuing them.
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said that evening. He’d taken a short break from working on the office, helped himself to a cup of coffee in the kitchen, then unerringly wandered into the sitting room, where Lila worked every night.
She swiveled her desk chair around at the sound of his voice, and he wondered anew at the sheer delicacy and beauty of her face. He’d never seen skin so pretty, like cream blushed with rose petals, and he knew she’d be like that all over. It was enough to drive him crazy in the dark hours of the night. He wanted to do all the things to her men did to women who made them feel the way she made him feel.
“About your offer,” he explained at her expectant look.
“You mean the reading?” she asked, and he swore he heard hope and anticipation in her voice.
