What else can you expect from his kind? Thoughtless, nothing but trouble from the day he was born...
Frustration leaked from every pore as Damon headed into the narrow wheelhouse and shut down the engine he’d worked so hard to start. Jamming his keys into the pocket of his jeans, he strode back across the scrubbed planks of the long, wide deck, jumped onto the dock and headed for the shack.
For a moment, Hannah stayed right where she was. Tension radiated from him like sonic waves, seeming to increase in intensity with every step he took. That tension reached back to her even as he moved farther away, sending little shocks along her nerves.
Trying to focus only on the fact that he was helping, she hurried to catch up, then promptly halted on the worn planks when he stopped a few feet from the older man. She wasn’t sure what caused it, but she sensed a sudden wariness in the big fisherman, something that made no sense at all because she couldn’t imagine him being wary of anything. Or anyone. Certainly not a confused old man.
Unless it was the older man’s attire that made him hesitate.
His gray eyes cut to her, then back to what the man was wearing. Mr. Lindstrom looked as if he were prepared to go fishing. Except he didn’t have a pole or a tackle box, and there was a garden trowel and a small spade hanging from the utility loops on his fishing vest.
“You need a hand there?” he asked, sounding oddly defensive.
The elderly gentleman did a side shuffle as he looked up, causing the bigger man to grab his arm to keep him from shuffling himself right into the lake lapping on either side of them. Beneath the brim of a battered fishing hat, complete with brightly colored lures, pale blue eyes narrowed through clear-rimmed bifocals.
The guy from the boat looked as if he fully expected the man he was assisting to jerk away. Perhaps admonishing him in the process. It was that kind of defensiveness she saw in his stony profile as he helped the man gain his balance. But instead of pulling back, the wrinkled old man patted the big hand that supported him and focused his rheumy eyes on the fisherman’s wary expression.
“Who are you?”
Incredibly, at the rusty-voiced question, that wariness eased.
“Just somebody who’s going to take you someplace safer. You shouldn’t be down here alone.”
“I wouldn’t be alone if I hadn’t missed my boat.”
“What boat?”
Mr. Lindstrom lifted his hand, clutching the bowl of a pipe in his fist. Rubbing his ruddy, spider-veined cheek with its stem, he knit his bushy gray eyebrows into a single slash. “The trawler I work on,” he said, as if they should both know that. “I catch it here every morning.”
The man she’d harassed off his boat glanced once more at the garden implements dangling from the fishing vest, then met her eyes with a puzzled frown. Lindstrom was eighty if he was a day, and while he looked to be in excellent physical condition for a man of his years, and he sounded quite coherent, it was apparent that something wasn’t quite right.
All Hannah could do was hold that rather compelling gray gaze and offer a little shrug that said, See what I mean?
The frown, softening slightly, was turned to the old man. “Come on with me. I’ll take you home.”
“No need,” Mr. Lindstrom informed him. “My nephew’s wife will take me.”
“Fine. Where is she?”
“Right there.”
Looking fully prepared to divest himself of the matter, he glanced over his wide shoulder and up the dock. Hannah looked behind her, too, but all she saw were ring-necked gulls perched on pilings.
The instant she turned back, eyes the color of old pewter locked like a laser on hers.
“You?”
Bewildered, Hannah shook her head. “I’m not his nephew’s wife,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen him before.”
Inching closer, he whispered right back. “That’s not what he thinks.”
“I can’t help that.”
The patience he’d exhibited toward the old man vanished like smoke in a stiff breeze. His voice went lower still, its rich, rumbling tones tinged with annoyance. “I’m not the one you need to convince. Tell him. Not me.”
His face was inches from hers, close enough that she could see the flecks of jet in his quicksilver eyes. His dark lashes were ridiculously long for anyone so blatantly male. She could see the individual hairs of what looked like a night’s growth of beard shadowing his stubborn jaw, too, and the sharply defined notch above his upper lip.
“Mr. Lindstrom,” she began, jerking her attention to the man patting his pockets in search of his tobacco pouch.
“Kirsty,” came the clearly disapproving reply. “You call me mister?”
“Sir, my name’s not Kirsty. It’s Hannah.”
“Hannah?”
“Hannah Davis.” Feeling a tad out of her element, acutely aware of the muscular, tattooed arm inches from hers, she gave a vague nod toward it. “This gentleman,” she explained, priding herself on the fact that she didn’t stumble over the word, “is right. You shouldn’t be down here alone. Let him take you home.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Maybe you just don’t remember him.”
“He’s right,” came the deep voice from beside her. “We’ve never spoken before. We know of each other, is all. This isn’t that big a town.”
Watery blue eyes narrowed on the younger man’s face. “Who’d you say you are?”
He hadn’t given his name when Mr. Lindstrom had asked before. At the time, Hannah thought he just hadn’t considered it important. Now, seeing the muscle in his jaw work, she had the feeling the omission had been quite deliberate.
“Jackson,” he finally said, the word sounding as hard as he looked. “Damon Jackson.”
Shaggy gray eyebrows merged in concentration, but the name didn’t appear to register at all. Oddly, that failure actually relieved the tension in Damon-the-Difficult’s impossibly wide shoulders—something Hannah would have been more curious about had Mr. Lindstrom not balked just then.
Damon had repeated his intention to take the old guy home. Mr. Lindstrom, however, wasn’t having any part of it. He wasn’t actually pouting. At least, Hannah didn’t think he was. But the way his fleshy bottom lip protruded from all the years he’d spent sucking on a pipe did make him look a bit like a four-year-old who wasn’t getting his way. He wanted Hannah, whom he still believed was his nephew’s wife, to take him home herself.
Acutely aware of the impatience in the gray eyes focused on her, she tried to explain that she couldn’t take him because she didn’t have a car. She also needed to stay by Damon’s boat to tell his deckhand where his boss had gone.
Mr. Lindstrom missed the point completely.
“Skipper.” ,
“Pardon?”
The old guy nodded toward Damon. “If he has a deckhand, he’s not a boss. He’s a skipper.”
“His skipper,” she conceded, though it didn’t make any sense to her that he should be so clear on that point when he seemed so confused about nearly everything else. “But I still need to stay here. It really shouldn’t matter who takes you home as long as you get there safely. Right?”
Logic wasn’t going to work. Turning to the man who’d stepped behind her, she glanced up at a solid wall of chest. “Will you try to make him understand?” she asked on a whisper. “You might have better luck than I’m having.”
The request was as unexpected as the quiet plea in her eyes. She was looking to him for help, clearly expecting that he would get through where she couldn’t. Damon couldn’t remember when anyone had looked to him to make something better. People always expected him to make matters worse.
Incredibly, he felt some of his annoyance ease.
Feeling naked without it, not trusting the lapse, he caught Hannah by the arm and tugged her closer. Beneath his fingers, smooth muscles tensed. He ignored her reaction, lowering his head to her ear. He wanted her close enough so she could hear him while he kept an eye on th
e old man who’d propped himself against the bait shack again.
He shouldn’t have leaned quite so close. The way she smelled, like something warm and innocent yet, oddly, inexplicably, erotic, had the jolt hitting again.
“Listen,” Damon grated, his voice a low rasp, “for all we know, this guy’s memory fades in and out as regularly as the tide. If he thinks you’re his nephew’s wife, then that’s who you are for now. If you want me to help you with this, you’re coming along so I won’t be any later than I already am. We can try to reason with him on the way.”
“What about your deckhand?”
He had been ready for her to balk at the idea of going with him. He’d also been ready to tell her that was her only choice, take it or leave it. Though he could definitely see wariness in the delicate contours of her face, he wasn’t prepared for her unabashed concern about his situation. It was as real as her consideration for the old man, and it disconcerted him as much as the way his body kept tightening with every breath he drew.
His glance slipped from the intriguing chips of green in her deep blue eyes to the lushness of her blush-colored mouth. The thought of burying his hands in that incredible hair and tasting those inviting lips only agitated him more.
“He’ll wait,” he murmured, brushing his thumb over her firm little bicep. “Get your ‘uncle’ and let’s go.”
Hannah’s insides felt as unstable as a falling soufflé when he slowly released her arm. The warmth from his hand lingered, still searing like a brand as his shuttered glance moved over her face. Over the pounding of her pulse in her ears, she heard him tell Mr. Lindstrom that they would both take him home, and for him to be careful walking because the boards would be slick. Not to worry, though. He and Hannah would make sure he didn’t fall.
He was clearly interested only in getting this task over with so he could get back to his job. Since she was now running behind schedule herself, she concentrated only on what they had to do, too. The old gentleman seemed a little steadier on his feet than he had when she’d first come upon him. But she felt as if she held her breath the entire length of the long dock. She wasn’t totally sure which man was actually responsible for that reaction. The one who kept edging her toward the water slapping at the wood, or the muscular mountain who muttered a curse when they topped the rickety wooden steps leading to the graveled parking lot.
With his hand still under Mr. Lindstrom’s elbow, Damon stopped to watch the car coming down the hill.
“Is that your deckhand?” she asked.
The level look he gave her let her know that it was, indeed, the person he’d been waiting for—and that he could have been pulling out on his boat in a matter of minutes if it hadn’t been for her. Considering how valiantly he’d tried to avoid the inconvenience, she actually thought it quite considerate of him to leave the thought unsaid.
“My truck’s right there.” He motioned to the shiny black four-by-four by a power pole a dozen feet away. “I’ll be right back.”
An old beater of a green station wagon with a primer gray front-right quarter panel continued bumping its way down the narrow, dirt-edged street leading down the hill. Spraying gravel, engine sputtering, it cut the turn short and angled into the lot ahead of them. Something loud and screeching from the psychedelic days of rock blared from its radio when it slipped between another pickup and a rusting white van sporting a Fresh Fish logo.
“That engine needs plugs,” Mr. Lindstrom announced as she saw Damon’s no-nonsense strides take him toward the wreck-on-wheels. “And the radio could use adjustment.”
“I think that’s just the music.”
“Yah, Kirsty. And the adjustment I was thinking of is a stick of dynamite.”
His memory might be shaky, but Hannah couldn’t fault his flatly delivered opinion of the music that died just before the driver extricated himself. She told him that, letting the namething go, but most of her attention was on the men ten yards away.
The fair-haired hulk who worked for Damon was nearly the same impressive height, but built more along the lines of a tanker. Hitching up one of the suspenders holding his pants, he listened with a bulldog scowl to whatever his skipper said to him. She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but his response had Damon turning a deadly glare toward the top of the hill. His entire body seemed to grow bigger as something that bore a startling resemblance to fury corded the muscles in his neck. Seconds later, he whipped his billfold from his back pocket, pressed a handful of bills into the other man’s hand and slapped him on the shoulder in a gesture that she could only describe as apologetic. Seconds after that, the big behemoth headed for the boat and Damon was bearing down on his truck as if he could chew the thing up and use the shards for ballast.
The moment she caught the hard glint in his eye, he pulled his glance. He knew she’d been watching him. He didn’t seem too pleased about it, either. But by the time he’d unlocked his truck’s doors, ushered her in and made sure Mr. Lindstrom got in all right, he’d buried his anger so effectively she might have thought she’d only imagined it. All that remained was the compelling, disturbing edge that had been there all along. That, and a rather weary determination when his passenger changed his mind about where he wanted to go.
“I’ll walk from your house, Kirsty.”
“You’re going home,” Damon said, pulling the powerful truck out of the lot.
Ignoring the edict of his driver, Mr. Lindstrom repeated his intention to Hannah, who occupied the bench seat between them. She could practically feel the scowl coming from her left, but she was more concerned at the moment with Mr. Lindstrom’s request. She’d been prepared to go along with being his nephew’s wife if it would help get him safely home, but with him wanting to go to her house, it became necessary to explain why that wasn’t possible.
“You’re confusing me with someone else,” she told him, as gently as she could. “I don’t even know where your nephew’s house is. My name is Hannah,” she emphasized. “Not Kirsty. I own the café. That one right there.” She pointed toward the top of the hill as they approached it. “I was just out for a walk this morning. I try to do that between the breakfast and lunch rush,” she explained, “if I get the chance.”
His pale blue eyes blinked at her, confusion clearly visible in the craggy lines of his face.
“Lilly Sieverson owns the café,” he insisted, though he seemed to be searching his memory even as he spoke. “She has for years.”
“She used to own it,” Hannah replied, watching him peer toward the sea green building that anchored the left corner at the top of the hill. “Lilly retired and moved to Minneapolis to be near her daughter. I bought the place from her about a month ago.”
The discrepancy between what he thought and what he was being told clearly agitated him. Looking worried, he glanced from her in a way that almost made her think he was embarrassed, and stared down at the pipe he clutched in one gnarled fist.
His hands were freckled with age, the joints of his knuckles rounded, and his skin as thin as wet parchment. Blue veins stood out like rivers on a map. She didn’t know the man from Adam, but that didn’t stop her from placing her hand over his just because he looked as if he could use the contact.
She looked up as they reached the stop sign on Main, her glance moving to her left to check on her little establishment. Damon’s dark head had turned toward it, too, and she could see the reflection of the black truck in the big, ruffle-curtained side window of the rustic Pine Café.
Damon said nothing, but when he glanced back, his eyebrows were bolted together. Giving her a quick, totally unreadable glance, he noted her hand resting on the gnarled old one, then eased through the pedestrian tourist traffic weaving in and out of the busy thoroughfare. She wasn’t sure why, but she could have sworn she felt the tension in his big body escalate.
Just past the Moose Lodge, Mr. Lindstrom’s confusion turned to distress. “Then you are not my nephew’s wife?”
She opened her mout
h, but it was Damon who spoke.
“Your nephew’s wife is blond, Mr. Lindstrom. She’s older, too, and not nearly as—” his voice trailed off, his glance totally impersonal as it raked the slender woman between them from the gentle swell of her breasts to her knees “—skinny.”
Hannah’s eyebrow shot up as she glanced toward him. Damon lifted his eyebrow to match hers, only where her expression questioned his conclusion, his challenged her to call him on it.
“So,” he continued, pointedly turning his attention to his other passenger. “That trawler you said you missed. What kind were you talking about?”
The man was not only rude, he possessed the sensitivity of stone. His charming compliment to her aside, the gentleman they were escorting was more in need of reassurance than conversation about a flight of imagination. She’d have told him that, too, if Mr. Lindstrom hadn’t been sitting right there.
The best she could do was aim a glare at his perfectly carved profile.
The look Damon shot back at her said he didn’t care what she thought. Yet, within a minute, as Damon prodded for an answer by asking more questions, she could feel the hand beneath hers relax. Some of the strain even left Mr. Lindstrom’s voice when he started talking about how long the vessel was and how much tonnage it held. Damon then hit him with questions about the type of nets he’d used, and the two proceeded to discuss the pros and cons of trap versus gill.
The debate sounded like a legal case to her rather than methods of netting fish, and she was quite obviously omitted from the conversation. But all she cared about was that the elderly man’s distress had eased considerably—and that she had greatly misjudged Damon Jackson.
He wasn’t being insensitive at all. He’d simply changed the subject to one he knew the man could remember, using something Mr. Lindstrom was familiar with to calm him down and, maybe, assure him that not all of his memory was as faulty as it appeared to be.
As rough as he was, as rude and difficult as he’d been, she never would have dreamed he possessed such perception.
Hannah And The Hellion (Silhouette Treasury 90s) Page 2