But he was surprised by the look on her face. By the expression that crept over her features after Josh had calmed, after the kids had turned back to the pond and started chatting away, after the other adults in the garden stopped paying attention.
She stared down at the sodden, green-tinged fabric, running her hand over the stain. And she looked…
She looked fucking delighted.
“Caitlin from my class said that nowhere is as good as London because London is where the queen is, but Daddy says the queen is not important anyway so I should like it here. But I don’t like it here.” Bethany Davis had been giving Hannah a calm and detailed monologue on the benefits of London versus Nottingham for at least ten minutes, and she didn’t seem to be running out of steam. Hannah almost regretted asking.
Except not really, because she loved hearing kids talk.
“I don’t like Caitlin that much anyway—Caitlin W., I mean. I like Caitlin G., even though she’s not in my class.” Bethany—Beth—hesitated. Her little bottom lip pushed out a bit as she frowned. “Oh. I am not in my class either.”
Beside her, the mostly-silent Josh shredded leaves diligently.
“That’s okay,” Hannah said. “I think you’ll enjoy your new school, once you get settled in.”
Beth scowled. “Why? I don’t like it now.”
“That’s because you’re new. When you’re new, everything stands out too much, and it makes you feel strange. But once you get used to things, you won’t feel strange anymore.”
Wide, blue eyes blinked slowly. Beth appeared to be considering those words. She looked slightly mollified, to Hannah. But she still asked, suspicion in her voice, “How do you know?”
Nate’s sudden arrival saved Hannah from replying. He’d hung back for a while now, letting her play with the kids—who, it turned out, she adored. Zach had called them demons, but he clearly didn’t have much experience with children. Beth and Josh were smart, funny, creative, and headstrong. As far as Hannah was concerned, those were all excellent qualities in a child—even if they did demand a little extra effort from the adults around said children.
As she’d been drawing that conclusion, she’d also been conscious of Nate’s presence in the garden. She felt him like the ocean felt the moon, she supposed. Those pale, piercing eyes tracked her every move. It was sweet how protective he was over his kids. When he finally approached them, it was with an apologetic smile that brought out that damned dimple and made her heart lurch awfully. Ugh. Feelings were so very excessive, and uncomfortable, too. In fact, emotions were the psychological equivalent of walking on a blister.
“Hannah,” Nate said in that smoke-and-gravel voice. He hadn’t sounded like that all those years ago. “Can I drag you away for a second?”
She turned to Beth. “What do you think? Can you and Josh do without me?”
“No,” Josh piped up. The word wasn’t even a whine; he just said it in this calm, reasonable tone, as if he sadly could not spare her and his dad would have to cope with the loss.
Nate’s lips twitched. “Sorry, kiddo. I’ll bring her back soon.”
“Daddy—”
“Soon! Promise!”
Josh huffed and passed his sister another handful of leaves. Nate smoothed a hand over his sullen son’s hair before looking up at Hannah. “I thought you might want to look around.”
He thought right.
They wandered into the kitchen through the open patio doors, and he quipped, “So. Is it too soon to ask you to move in?”
She allowed herself a smile. “I don’t know. You’re coming on kind of strong.”
“Haven’t heard that in a while,” he said wryly. But as they moved deeper into the house, the kids’ high voices fading behind them, he grew serious. In the shadows of the hallway, he paused, and Hannah stopped too.
“Listen,” he said, “this all feels kind of weird—hiring someone to look after my kids. I look after my kids. But I’ve been thinking about it from every angle and I really…” He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, and Hannah noticed for the first time how achingly tired he looked. Beyond the striking handsomeness of his strong bone structure and soft smile, beyond the impact of his dark hair and bright eyes. Those eyes were cradled by plum shadows so deep they almost looked like bruises.
“There’s nothing wrong with needing help,” she said.
He arched a brow. “Right. I bet you ask for help all the time.”
She felt her cheeks heat. He had her there. More than he knew.
“Sorry,” Nate said, squeezing his eyes shut for a second, shaking his head. “I’m kind of all over the place right now. The point is, I have no idea what Ma’s gonna need from day to day, and Zach works full-time. My job is flexible, but it’s not easy. I know this is the right thing to do.”
And she knew exactly why he was saying these words out loud, why he was letting them spill out like some absent stream of consciousness instead of keeping them all bottled up. She’d seen how his gaze flew to Shirley every time she coughed or shivered—and how it slid away again a second later, weighed down with the thick, sticky slime that was guilt.
Yeah; Hannah knew guilt. For some reason, Nate had a lot of it. And it seemed to be fucking with his head.
“I’m just going to be honest,” he said. “I really want to give you this job. You know what you’re doing, the kids like you, I like you, my mother goes to church with your mother… it all seems very neat.” He barely managed a playful smile, but even his weakest effort made her want to smile right back.
Which Hannah didn’t like. She preferred to be in complete control of her own smiles; life was unpredictable enough without bringing errant facial muscles into the equation. But she wouldn’t hold his compelling handsomeness against him. Much.
“I’d love to take the job,” she admitted. “As long as you’re not about to show me a rat-infested attic room with a single-paned window.”
“Oh, no, Hannah. This is Ravenswood. The attic room is riddled with genteel field mice.”
She might’ve laughed at that, if it weren’t for the way he’d said her name. Or rather, how it hit her—as if she’d never heard it from his lips before. Which was ridiculous, because she most definitely had. She knew she had.
But as he flashed her a grin and led the way, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d never heard it quite like that.
Hannah put that thought aside for later and followed him up the stairs, trying her best not to look at his arse. But really, it was right there. Directly in front of her face. Taunting her like a smug, juicy peach in black shorts. And holy shit, had she really just used the phrase smug, juicy peach? What the fuck? The force of her own astonished horror smacked Hannah so hard, she almost fell back down the carpeted steps.
“I don’t know if this is a reasonable request,” he said, “but I was hoping you could move in by the end of the week. I mean, I’m not sure where you live—”
“On the other side of the park,” she replied, brushing off the last of her baffled self-disgust. Maybe if she ignored these strange, Nate-related thoughts, they’d go away. “You know, the new flats? I’m in my sister’s, so I don’t have a lease or anything.” She followed him past what looked to be the kids’ bedrooms, stepping over unpacked boxes and strewn-about Lego in the hall. The urge to tidy everything in sight was practically suffocating her, but like the valiant soldier she was, Hannah squashed it. Common sense dictated that she leave all presumptuous cleaning until it was too late for him to get rid of her.
“You live with your sister?” he asked.
“She’s dating her next-door neighbour. Suffice it to say, she’s not exactly using her flat right now.”
She trailed off as he reached a door at the end of the landing and pushed it open to reveal the neatest, blandest, most minimalist little room she’d ever seen in her life. The walls were cream. The floors were pale wood. The furniture was cream and wooden. It held a no-frills double bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a
set of beside drawers.
“It’s not great,” he said ruefully, “but you’d be the only one using this bathroom over here, and I can—”
“It’s perfect,” she said. And meant it. She was quite thoroughly in love.
Nate stared at her for a moment, as if trying to read her. Which, of course, made Hannah so uncomfortable she might actually crawl out of her skin. Whatever. No big deal.
Then he said, “You’re serious.”
“I usually am.”
“You actually like this room.”
She looked over the neutral space again. There was nothing overwhelming or excessive or dark or distracting. This little room looked the way Hannah wished, more than anything, the inside of her head could be. Of course, she’d have to add the colours—always, she needed colours. But that was fine. Because nothing would clash, you see.
“It’s perfect,” she repeated firmly. Despite her commitment to polite distance and tamped-down enthusiasm, Hannah found herself smiling. She was vaguely conscious of Nate watching her with a quiet smile of his own, a sort of pleased disbelief that seemed to say, I don’t understand you one bit, but I still like you.
Which was ridiculous. People didn’t like Hannah. Nate didn’t like Hannah, despite claiming to. He was just… naturally… lovely. Even though, throughout their years growing up together, he’d been almost as antisocial as her prickly little sister. Oh, whatever. Clearly, people changed.
She wandered over to the room’s wide window and looked down into the garden below. The trees at its border made a sort of canopy, so she could barely see the grass—but she saw Shirley swinging on the patio, and Zach chasing a laughing Beth, and Josh carefully plopping grapes into the birdbath.
“Just to check,” she said absently, “are grapes allowed in the birdbath?”
“What?” She heard Nate come up behind her—but it seemed more accurate to say that she felt it. He frowned out of the window, leaning over her shoulder, then sighed. “That kid. How did he even get those out of the fridge? You know what, never mind.” Nate shook his head.
She turned to look at him fully, because the fond exasperation in his voice was just… it was sweet. Sweet and soft like marshmallows, and she wanted to see it reflected in his eyes. Only, just as she turned her head, he looked down at her, and all of a sudden—
Well. All of a sudden, their faces were much closer than she’d planned. Much, much closer. And she could see the tiny, moon-pale scars that littered his skin. There was one over the bridge of his nose, plus a few scattered across his temple in short, sharp slashes. And then there were little circular ones over his eyebrow, and a crease through his lower lip that made her think he’d had some… interesting piercings at one point. Which wouldn’t surprise her.
What did surprise her was the way she felt—as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. As if something hung between them, too heavy and tense to turn away from. As if tearing her eyes from his would shatter it.
So, embarrassingly, it was Nate who broke the silence. Nate who cleared his throat, and blinked a little too slowly—more like a quick squeeze-shut of the eyes—and shook his head. He stepped back once, and then again. For a second, she worried he’d smack into the wall behind him. But he stopped just in time and said, “Well. Well, then. Shall we—I mean, if you like it, let’s…”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “Let’s.” And then she turned and left the room.
For some reason, as he followed her downstairs, Nate’s mind latched on to the fact that earlier—in the garden—Zach had called Hannah Han.
He supposed that was a decent nickname for Hannah. The kids at school used to call her Bunny, or some shit like that. Those same guys were probably kicking themselves, these days, but that was none of his concern. He couldn’t stop thinking about that nickname. Han.
Nate wondered when, exactly, his little brother had grown close enough to a woman like Hannah Kabbah to casually shorten her name. He had this idea that if he ever shortened Hannah’s name, she’d short-circuit like a robot under the sheer weight of all her horrified disgust. Around Nate, she seemed to vacillate between painfully uptight and reluctantly open; like any smiles or jokes or laughs she threw at him were a charitable endeavour she regretted almost immediately. But she’d spent the afternoon smiling at Zach without hesitation.
Yes; this was what his mind chose to focus on. Not that odd moment upstairs when, for a second, he’d looked at her and found himself unable to move. Unable to pull away from the soft, vanilla scent that hovered around her, from the velvet texture of her skin or the amber flecks in her dark eyes. He saw no reason to think about that incident at all.
She waited for him by the front door, standing arrow straight, mouth set in a plastic smile. Her skirt was covered in grass stains and there were little white ovals that might be daisy petals caught in her hair. But none of that mattered when she held herself so stiffly and watched him so distantly. She seemed almost alien in her perfection, removed from his reality, as bright and untouchable as a star in the sky.
And lonely, too. He didn’t mind the perfection, but he didn’t like that loneliness. He’d been lonely before.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll be in touch, I suppose? About moving.”
She nodded politely.
“I know it’s kind of fast, but obviously I can help, so—”
She gave a little huff that might’ve been a snort. “If you don’t think I can organise moving house within a week, I’ve severely misrepresented myself.”
“Fair enough,” he said wryly.
“Wonderful.” She clapped her hands together like a judge banging a gavel, and that, he supposed, was that.
Except he didn’t want it to be. Because something about her still seemed so… sad. He had no idea what, or why; he just wanted it to stop.
Maybe he was losing his mind. That would explain why, instead of saying something sensible like Goodbye, he blurted out, “You’re kind of bossy, you know that?”
She arched a brow. “I am thirty years old. If I had gone this long without identifying my key character traits, I would be suffering from a sad lack of self-awareness.”
He grinned, leaning back against the hallway wall. “So you do know that you’re bossy.”
“Of course.” She cocked her head. “Are you waiting for me to apologise?”
“Now why would I want that?” he murmured. He was genuinely confused, actually. “Is that what people usually want? For you to apologise?”
She sucked in her cheeks for a moment, her jaw shifting, eyes narrowed, suspicion clear. She was so electric, so brimming with energy, and yet she seemed so determined to contain it. He wondered if she realised how utterly she failed. It was kind of cute.
He arched a brow and waited.
She arched two brows, as if they were in some sort of eyebrow-raising competition. If they were, she’d just won. Nate did not have three eyebrows.
“Hannah,” he said, his voice almost sing-song. He was enjoying this far too much. “Are you going to answer me?”
She flicked him a disgusted look. She was damned good at it, too, and she really took her time. Her dark gaze raked over every inch of him—twice, as if to be sure—before turning away dismissively. It reminded him of the way she’d been at school, sitting alone at the front of every class and glaring at anyone who mocked her. Had it always been so intoxicating, that look?
No. No it fucking hadn’t.
“I don’t know what you’re leaning for,” she finally muttered.
“Leaning?”
“Against the wall.” She glared at him again, or maybe at the wall. “You look like an oversized teenager.”
Why was he so very pleased to hear her insult him?
Nate grinned and shoved his hands in his pockets. He was almost tempted to slouch, just to piss her off even more. “I had no idea you cared so much about posture.” Lie. Anyone who’d ever set eyes on her would know she cared about posture.
She snorted as if to say the same thing. But her lips twitched, just a bit, like she was actually fighting a smile. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“Oh, I haven’t?”
“No,” she said dryly. “You always did strut around in your black clothes thinking you were cool—”
“I was cool.”
This time she actually smiled outright, even as she ignored his interruption. “—with your cigarettes and your dyed hair—”
Nate rolled his eyes. “I have never dyed my hair. I don’t know who started that rumour.”
“People just assumed,” she smirked. “Because it’s rather…”
“I think the word you’re looking for is black.”
“Thank you so much,” she said dryly. “I would’ve been lost without you.”
“Ah, don’t sell yourself short. You’d get there eventually.”
She smirked. Everything about her was relaxing inch by inch, and that sharp little smile grew wider. He was really, really glad he’d pushed. Needling her produced excellent results. He’d have to bear that in mind.
Bear that in mind for what? Your longstanding professional relationship?
For a moment, Nate came to his senses and asked himself what the hell he was doing, trying to make Hannah Kabbah smile. Then she spoke again, and his brain put up a Do Not Disturb sign and went off for a nap.
“You don’t still smoke, do you?” she asked.
“Nah. Ellie hated it. My wife, I mean.”
She wouldn’t ask about Ellie. No-one in Ravenswood asked about Ellie. He’d be relieved about that fact, if it didn’t make him wonder what they thought they knew.
It wasn’t like his wife’s death was some big secret: it had been nothing more scandalous than a car accident. The problem was that, his whole life, he’d felt this gut-wrenching disgust at the thought of anyone thinking they knew him. The thought of people watching him, discussing him, making assumptions about him—he felt it like spiders’ legs creeping over his face in the dark. It was why he’d left this town in the first place.
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