On a soft, strangled sob, Blair unfolded herself from the sofa and practically catapulted herself into his arms. She was too big to cuddle, her long legs nearly reaching the floor, but Hank wrapped his arms around her and held on tightly as she cried softly into his T-shirt. And as he sat there, holding his daughter in his arms for the first time in his life, fragments of understanding began to piece themselves together. Which was a good thing, since he doubted the child on his lap had a clue about what was making her so confused and unhappy.
He grabbed a tissue from the box by the chair and handed it to her, then leaned back to better adjust all their limbs, nestling his cheek in her soft, girly-smelling hair. "Baby, whatever does or does not happen between me and your aunt has no bearing on how I feel about you. And let me tell you something else—I have never in my life grown tired of the people I really cared about." He thought about his spotty relationships with his brothers over the past decade and smiled. "Might've wanted to stay out of their way on occasion because of my own bad mood, but deep down, I was still glad they were there. Maybe you and I still got a lot of getting acquainted to do, but you're part of me, Blair, part of this family. And nothing in heaven or earth can change that. You got that?"
After about a thousand years, she nodded against his chest, and Hank blew out a sigh that partly stemmed from relief and partly from the effort of making the longest speech in his entire life. Then she straightened and looked at him, her pale brows pulled way down.
"Camping," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"Jenna said we can go camping, but she doesn't know anything about it. Do you?"
Hank smiled. "Enough to keep us from getting eaten by bears. You wanna go camping?"
"Yeah." Then she snuggled down again, resting her head on his chest. "Hank?"
"Yeah, honey?"
"You ever hurt either one of us, I'll never forgive you."
"I'll keep that in mind," he said.
Chapter 13
"You mean to tell me this is your first time?"
"Oh, yeah," Jenna said, watching Hank hammer in the last stake for the smaller of the two tents—she and Blair would sleep in one, Hank in some dinky thing barely large enough to cover the whole man. "Mother wasn't real big on rustic. Let alone self-sufficiency."
Hank grinned over at her, prompting the usual stomach-flipping reaction. Blair had gone off to investigate the nearby lakeshore, leaving her alone with a man who, over the past week, had been making her more confuzzled than ever.
Hank had basically handed over the reins for the motel to Danny so he could spend more time with them. Both of them. They'd gone to dinner, they'd gone to the movies, they'd gone sightseeing all over the county, including to the Will Rogers museum. She wasn't daft enough to think his attentiveness was entirely for Blair's sake, although the kid certainly seemed to be lapping it up. But although he'd been considerate and funny and friendly, he hadn't touched her once. Not even to catch her when she stepped off the curb the wrong way in Claremore and nearly landed on her can. Oh, he'd been solicitious enough. Just from a distance.
Clearly, something was up. Or maybe not, she thought wryly, her gaze drifting to places it shouldn't. Maybe she'd finally put him off, cooled his ardor, gotten the point across. Whatever. Of course, since she was clearly in a contrary mood, Hank's keeping his distance was having exactly the opposite effect on her. If anything, the opportunity to observe him in action just as a human being—and, perhaps more important, as a father—was only making her more…hungry.
She'd gone through two more bags of potato chips, a half gallon of some cheapo rocky road ice cream that wasn't even that good, and she'd lost track of her Chee•tos consumption. She'd tried substituting pretzels, rice cakes, non-fat Pringles, but nope. Nothing but the real fat-saturated goods would suffice.
Her bras were all too tight, her jeans fit her like second skins, and she'd had to abandon at least two pairs of shorts that she couldn't get buttoned.
This was not good.
Hank came over, reaching across her legs to grab a soda out of the cooler, his T-shirted chest barely grazing her jeans-clad thighs. No body contact whatsover, none, and still a shiver raced through her, tightening her nipples. Hank sat up, his face a study in innocence. Except, yeah, she'd noticed where his gaze had lingered before he hauled it up to her face. Damn lightly-lined bras.
"Cold?" he asked.
"Uh-uh."
Chuckling, he got up and went back to his tent. She got up, too, and followed him.
"Okay, buster—what's going on?"
"What do you mean?"
"Are you flirting with me or aren't you?"
"You think I'm putting my neck in that noose, you're nuts. Hand me that support, wouldja?"
She picked up what she hoped he was asking for, only to have to follow him around to the other side of the tent to give it to him. "And if you think you're getting off the hook that easily, you're nuts. A week ago, you couldn't keep your hands off me. Now you won't touch me at all."
Understandably enough, he frowned. "I thought that's what you wanted."
"That's not the point."
"It's not?"
"No. The point is, you're up to something and I know it. I mean, were you not looking at my chest a minute ago?"
"No more than you were looking at my crotch earlier."
Her face flamed. He laughed. "Honey, we've already been over this ground." He threaded the tent doohickey through the sleeve thingy, slipping the end through the metal-ring dooflatchy at the tent's base. "What's not as clear—" he vanished to the other side of the tent "—is what the next step is." Then he popped back in her line of sight. "I do know, however, that you're the one who has to take it."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, it's killing me to keep my hands to myself. But damned if I'm gonna give you the ammunition to say I'm crowding you or pressuring you into decisions you're not ready to make."
"So what you're saying is, you still have the hots for me."
He looked straight into her eyes. "Honey, I want you so bad my eyeballs ache."
Well, that pretty much cleared up the issue, didn't it?
"Tell me something," he then said, "and pardon me for sticking my nose in where it probably doesn't belong, but believe me when I say I'm doing this for your sake—did you and your husband have a good sex life?"
She started, then nodded. "Well, yeah. I thought so."
"On a scale of one to ten…?"
"A nine."
One brow lifted.
"No one's a ten. Sorry."
"Okay, we'll let that go for now. But what made it so good?"
"This is stupid—"
"Just answer the question."
"Because we loved each other, why else?"
The tent now erect, Hank leaned over and yanked out a tab or whatever it was, threading a stake through it and driving it into the ground. "Were you ever physically attracted to another man while you were married?"
"Of course not!"
"And have you been physically attracted to another man since your husband died?"
When she didn't answer, he straightened up, his gaze implacable. "Well, honey, I haven't wanted another woman since Michelle died, either. So maybe we should think about that, huh?
"Hey, sugar," he said with a grin as Blair appeared. Apparently able to switch gears a lot more easily than Jenna, he walked over to the truck and pulled three poles and a tackle box out of the bed. "Time to go catch dinner."
Blair gawked at him as if he'd grown another head. "Hello? I don't eat meat?"
The poles lowered slightly. "Not meat. Fish."
"Which you're going to catch by letting it swallow a hook, then let it die from suffocation by keeping it out of the water. That's horrible."
"Aw, Blair…" The poles still clutched in his hand, he looked over at Jenna, who lifted her hands in a whatcha-gonna-do? gesture. Then he let out a heavy, defeated sigh before dumping everything back in the truck bed. "Fi
ne. No fishing. So what are we going to have for dinner?"
"Oh, I brought portobello mushrooms," Jenna said. "We can grill them over the campfire."
"You have got to be kidding." His nose crinkled. "Mushrooms?"
Blair started to giggle at Hank's woebegone expression. "They're really good, you'll see," she said, only to laugh even harder when Hank sank onto a felled log, dragging his hands down his face until he looked like a basset hound. Then, apparently fueled by his daughter's increasingly hysterical giggles, Hank launched into a truly awful comedy routine—loud, fake crying, clutching his stomach in agony, even collapsing doubled over onto the ground.
Jenna stood there, laughing as well at Hank's silliness, entranced and amazed at the transformation these two people had wrought in each other. Blair hadn't laughed like that since Phil's death, she realized…only to sober when it hit her that neither had she.
* * *
The rustling outside his tent startled Hank awake. Since there was no accompanying snuffling, or the sound of loud, frustrated ransacking, Hank didn't figure the rustling came from something he probably didn't want to meet up with in the dark. He squinted at his watch—just past 2:00 a.m. The sleeping bag didn't want to let go at first, but he finally broke loose and crawled out of his tent into the moonlit night, in time to see Jenna's moonlight-gilded hair disappear behind a crop of rocks, as she headed down to the lake. He shook out his shoes and shoved his feet into them, checked her and Blair's tent to make sure she'd zipped it back up, then went after her. He found her seconds later, sitting in her sweatshirt and jeans on a plastic grocery bag, her hands locked around her knees as she stared out over the gently rippling water.
"I take it you're not a sound sleeper," she said, not looking at him as he approached.
"Not when I've got a pair of inexperienced females under my care. Thought I told you not to go wandering off by yourself? Especially at night?"
"I'm what? Thirty feet from the campsite?"
He sat down beside her. "Your butt'll get wet," she said.
He said, "I'll live," and she chuckled. "So why are you out here?"
"I've always been a lousy sleeper. Since I started writing, though, it's even worse. There's always a story, if not three or four, pinging around inside my head." She glanced over at him. "Don't tell anyone—" she lowered her voice "—but I hear voices."
"I believe it," he said, and she swatted at him. Then she said quietly, "You know, I told her I was setting a book out here. As an excuse for the trip."
"I know. But you're not."
"I wasn't. Now I think maybe I will." She hugged her legs tighter. "This is a great little area of the world you got here."
"But you wouldn't want to live here."
After a moment, she said, very carefully, "I don't know. I've always thought of myself as a city girl. But this is nice. Very nice."
The subject seemed to dry up for the moment, then he said, "You still doing the book signing on Saturday?"
"Uh-huh." She angled her head toward him, her eyes soft and silver in the moonlight. "But you can't come."
He turned away, surprised by how much her refusal cut him. Then her hand landed on his arm, her touch electrifying even through his shirt. "Phil went with me to every book signing I did. So I never had any reason to try to get over my fear, because he was always there to catch me. So what happened the first time I had to do one without him?"
"You freaked."
"Royally," she said, removing her hand and linking it with her other one around her knees again. "So I have to do this on my own. To prove to myself I don't need a backup."
"Okay," he said with a sigh, admiration reluctantly supplanting his hurt feelings. "Can I at least take you and Blair to dinner afterwards?"
"Deal."
"You really love what you do, don't you? The writing, I mean."
She cocked her head, her smile enigmatic. "Let's put it this way—I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing. Who wouldn't get off on being in absolute control of other people's lives?" Then she laughed. "Except when they decide to do something you hadn't counted on. What about you, though?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did you love being a cop?"
"Do I have to answer that right now?"
"No. But someday, I'd like to know." He was mulling over that "someday" business when she said, "But I would like to know what happened with Michelle."
He stiffened. "Why?"
"For many reasons." Her voice might have been gentle, but he could hear the resolve underneath her words. "For Blair's sake."
"What happened that night has nothing to do with Blair."
"Maybe not." She plucked a stone off the ground, reared back and sent it sailing across the water. "But think of it as—" she looked at him "—an investment."
"In what?"
Once again, she focused on the shivering water. "That remains to be seen, doesn't it?"
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying, I want to know what happened."
His breath left his lungs in a long, ragged sigh. To refuse her would be pointless, especially as he knew, sooner or later, he'd tell her anyway.
It took him a minute to figure out where to start. "We'd just gotten engaged," he began. "I'd told Ryan and Cal, but Micky wanted to tell her folks in person. So we decided to do it at Thanksgiving, since they'd already invited us anyway. They lived in one of Dallas's outer suburbs; I was on duty until four, so Micky went on to her folks early to help her mom with dinner. Apparently, they ran out of something right before I was supposed to get there, so Micky ran down to the 7-Eleven a few blocks away.
"I got to her parents' house, they told me where she was, that they'd expected her back by then…and I don't know, I got this sick feeling. I didn't let on, but I said I'd go down to the store and surprise her or something…I don't remember what I said. I remember her mom, though, smiling at me, so damn happy…" He sucked in a breath, shook his head.
"Anyway, I knew a block before I got there what had happened. Don't ask how, I just did. I was the first on the scene. The perp had split, the guy behind the counter was dead, and Micky…"
Jenna reached over, slipped her hand around his.
"She was still alive," he said on a shuddering breath. "Unconscious, but alive. She died two hours later, in surgery. She never knew I was there."
Jenna squeezed his hand, then took it back, propping her cheek on her folded arms. "I wouldn't be so sure of that," she said softly. Then, after a good minute, maybe more, had passed, she asked, "How'd you two meet?"
"What? Oh. She was a grade-school teacher. My partner was supposed to go talk to the kids for Career Day, but his wife went into labor with their third kid. So I went instead." He shook his head, marveling at how the memory didn't sting anymore. "I was a goner from the moment she said, 'Hi.'"
Jenna chuckled, the sound reassuringly normal. "Are you still in touch with her parents?"
"Not much. It's too hard. She was their only child."
He heard a soft, sympathetic sigh. "And they never caught who did it?"
"No. There'd been no rash of previous robberies in the area, and oddly enough, nothing after. No witnesses, no leads, nothing. For all we know, it could've been somebody just passing through, some punk with enough sense to use gloves and bury the weapon where nobody could find it."
"And it made you nuts, didn't it? Not being able to find him?"
"Hell, it still does. Not constantly, not the way it did at first, but not a day goes by that it doesn't cross my mind." He turned to her. "Does that make a difference? To you?"
"To us, you mean?"
"All right. To us."
"There is no us, Hank."
"Yet."
The soft hoo-hoo of an owl filtered across the lake. "Do you really think an 'us' would work?" she asked.
Not a flat-out an us wouldn't work, Hank noted. "I have no idea."
"But you'd like to try."
After a moment
, he nodded.
She brushed her hair out of her face, looking out over the water again. "I don't know." He could barely see her smile in the half-light. "Between the two of us, we have an awful lot of baggage for one relationship, don't you think?"
"That's what attics are for, honey."
Her laugh sang out into the night. And dammit, his hand just reached right out of its own volition and cupped her jaw—
"Please. No," she whispered, her words skimming over his mouth.
"Why not?" he said, returning the favor, thumbing her lower lip and taking great pleasure in her trembling response. "Or am I just imagining that you're on the fence?"
"No. You're not imagining it." She pulled away, but not without a great struggle on her part, he didn't think. "But I'd really rather not be pushed off—"
"Hey!" They both turned at the sound of Blair's worried voice. The kid stood about ten feet away, hugging herself. "What are you two doing out here?"
"Talking," Jenna said, doing a so-so job of masking the slight tremor in her voice. She patted the space beside her. "Come join us."
"No way," Blair said, clearly shivering. "It's all cold and icky. I just wondered where you were, that's all. When I woke up and you weren't there."
"I'm sorry, sweetie. I didn't mean to worry you." Jenna got to her feet, slowly, as if her joints ached her a little. Hank stood as well, not even bothering to hide his irritation. Fortunately, it was dark enough that Blair wouldn't notice. "C'mon," Jenna said, approaching her niece and slipping an arm around her waist. "I'll walk back with you. I gather we're going to need all the rest we can get for the hike your father's planning for tomorrow."
She glanced over her shoulder, giving him a smile that told him absolutely nothing. So maybe it was just as well that Blair had shown up when she had. Because, he thought as he trailed them back to the campsite, this letting Jenna make the next move business was like to kill him.
Especially as he had the sinking feeling she never would.
By the time the camping trip was over, Jenna had the sinking feeling she was fighting a losing battle.
After she and Hank had dropped Blair off at April Gundersen's the following evening—and don't think glances didn't ping around the Gundersen living room at that—her hand was all but on the white flag. Boy, it was getting uncomfortable up there on that fence. Especially in the vicinity of the particular body part where fence railings were likely to chafe. A body part that, as Hank had brought to her attention, didn't tingle for just anybody.
Fathers and Other Strangers Page 20