The scent of soap and warm, musky male filled her lungs. “I see,” she whispered.
He’d said that the light, feathery sensation could be disturbing if a person wasn’t in the mood for it. But he had altered that mood quite effectively with nothing more than his understanding, and his touch. She felt powerless against that combination. Powerless against him. He was far more perceptive than she could have imagined. Far more sensitive. And every glimpse he allowed her of the man behind the tough facade made it that much harder to deny how drawn she was to him.
Wind rattled the windows. Thunder rolled in the distance. She heard it. Felt it. But she didn’t jump this time. It was as if, simply by touching her, Damon grounded her somehow.
The thought was as compelling as the feel of his skin brushing hers when he lifted his hand to cup her face. Without thinking, she turned her cheek toward his palm. The movement was barely perceptible, and completely instinctive. It was as if something inside her was seeking more of everything he offered and knew no other way to tell him how very much she needed whatever he would share. But the instant she moved, the dark slashes of his eyebrows jammed together like lightning bolts.
As if he’d only now realized what he’d been about to do, Damon dropped his hand and stepped back. A muscle in his jaw bunched when he pushed his fingers through his hair.
“I’ve got to go.” His voice was tight, heavy with self-recrimination. “If I don’t, I’m going to wind up doing something I’ll regret.”
Something far too vulnerable flashed in the depths of Hannah’s eyes. An instant later, she’d lowered her head, but not before Damon saw the color drain from her face. He’d seen her react that way once before, the day he’d told her she didn’t belong in Pine Point. Now, as then, she recovered so quickly he might have thought he’d only imagined how his words had affected her. But he knew exactly what he’d done. Once more, he’d protected himself at her expense.
She stepped back, her eyes avoiding his. “Thanks for the object lesson,” she murmured, and turned to her greenhouse.
A hinge squeaked as she closed a section of lid. A moment later, she was checking the thermostat to make sure the temperature was still set correctly. Her motions were swift, efficient but not as rushed as they could have been. She wasn’t wasting time getting out of there, but she wasn’t going to let him see how deeply his rejection had wounded her, either.
He could see it, anyway, when she stuffed her pail under the table and headed for the stairwell door. Her quiet tone totally belied her guarded expression when she told him to have a good evening, offered him a smile that didn’t quite work and closed the door behind her.
He’d already picked up his jacket. Now the soft leather bunched in his grip.
He hadn’t meant to sound as terse as he had. He hadn’t meant to voice his thoughts aloud at all. But the feel of her soft skin had elicited thoughts of how soft the rest of her body would be, of how that same silkiness would feel under him, wrapped around him, and his own body had grown tight as a fist. That tightness had worked its way into his voice, and the words had come out before he’d considered how they would sound.
He closed his eyes, clamping his hand over the back of his neck as he shook his head. He usually didn’t give a damn if someone misunderstood him. People could think what they wanted. He even had Hannah thinking things that couldn’t have been further from the truth. But he couldn’t let this go. Not with her.
Dropping his hand to his pocket, he reached for his keys, picking out the one she’d left for him for the stairwell door. As he stuck it in the lock, he just hoped he wasn’t about to make things worse.
She wasn’t in the café. Or if she was, she wasn’t answering his knock and neither of the keys he had fit the lock for the café’s inner door. Damon knocked once more, on the possibility that she was on the other side silently wishing he’d drop dead, and called her name again.
“Hannah, come on,” he coaxed, his deep voice echoing off the close white walls. “I need to talk to you.”
“I’m up here.”
He glanced up from where he stood on the landing. In the light of the single bulb illuminating the long stairwell, he saw her at the top of the second flight of stairs. A door stood open behind her.
“I need to explain something.”
“There are some things a woman doesn’t want to hear, Damon. And you don’t need to tell me you have a girlfriend.” Her glance darted toward the side of his neck. “I’ve already figured that out. It’s just nice to know there are still men around who don’t cheat.”
Abject confusion washed over his face. “What?”
“Isn’t that part of why you didn’t...”
“Kiss you?” he suggested, since she couldn’t seem to get it out.
He knew by her silence that was exactly what she meant, and he had no one to blame but himself for the conclusion she’d drawn. It was one he’d allowed, after all. It had served his purpose at the time, created the distance he wanted, needed.
With anyone else, he’d have let the impression stand. With her, he couldn’t. She’d never judged him the way everyone else had.
“May I come up there?”
She didn’t look terribly pleased by the request. Still, she held her hand palm out and motioned him in, then disappeared through the doorway herself. He followed, taking the steps one at a time, buying himself another minute to figure out how to say what he wasn’t totally sure he could explain to himself.
She was on the opposite side of the room when he closed the door behind him.
This was different from walking into the café. The café was hers, but it wasn’t personal. Not like this. This was private space, and it was filled with vibrancy, color and mementos of things she cared about. The end table and mantel held pictures of young people and old. Relatives and friends, he supposed. Every frame was different, as if it had been picked just for the person or people in the photograph. Pillows in lake-country shades of lupine and daffodil were scattered over a deeply cushioned navy blue couch. A yellow-and-white-striped overstuffed chair faced the end of the dark wood coffee table in front of it. Plants, a brass box and ornate vases were tucked among the books in the wide bookcase. Scraps of fabric filled a basket, some of the pieces fitted together in the beginnings of a quilt. It was as black as pitch outside, but the room seemed filled with sunshine.
Except for the faint chill coming from opposite him.
“What did you want to explain?”
“Can I sit down?”
“Go ahead.”
“Will you?”
He motioned to the sofa. Hannah moved toward it, trying desperately to tell herself that what he said didn’t matter. It was her own fault she felt hurt. For some insane reason, she hadn’t tried all that hard to protect herself with Damon. Or maybe she had tried, but something about him dissolved her defenses before she could get them in place. She’d lived for twenty-eight years without a defensive bone in her body. Not until Greg had she needed one. She obviously needed more practice.
Maybe she should take lessons from Damon.
She thought he’d take the chair, but he sat beside her, much as he had the day on his boat. Resting his forearms on his spread knees, he hung his head, blew a breath that fluttered the dark hair falling over his forehead, then glanced over at her as if it were somehow her fault he’d found himself in this decidedly uncomfortable position.
“This isn’t about any girlfriend,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t have one. And I haven’t been with anyone,” he added, touching the pink scratches on the side of his neck. “I know what you think these are, but they’re not from a woman. They’re from an animal.”
For a moment, Hannah said nothing. She simply studied his profile, while he stared at his hands. He had no reason to lie to her.
Guilt stabbed at her heart. She’d jumped to conclusions about him, much as she’d suspected everyone else did. That he’d deliberately allowed the impression to stand didn’t occ
ur to her until she murmured, “What happened?”
“A raccoon moved into my back porch. He didn’t like the idea of moving out.” His voice dropped to a mutter. “I just wanted to explain that so we don’t confuse the issue.”
“I’m not sure what the issue is, but tell me something before we get into it. Do you do that a lot?” she asked, as confused as she was annoyed by what he’d done. “Let people get the wrong impression and just let it stand?”
He met her annoyance with challenge. “If it suits my purpose.”
“What purpose could giving people the wrong idea possibly serve? That just makes things harder for you.”
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that. I happen to think it makes things easier.” The muscle in his jaw twitched as he looked back at his hands. “Except in this case.”
He stared hard at the stains around his nails, stains all his scrubbing couldn’t touch.
“I don’t want to blow this, Hannah. This arrangement we’ve got,” he clarified. “You said that the thought of losing the café scares you, so maybe you’ll understand why restoring my boat is so important to me. If I don’t get it fixed, I don’t fish next year. That boat has been on Superior every year since my grandfather bought it. He and my dad worked it together, and I worked it with my dad until I left. He never could afford to do more to it than just keep it running, but it meant a lot to him.”
Because it had meant a lot to his father, it meant a lot to Damon. The meaning was there, even if he hadn’t put it in quite those words. She already knew his home was important to him, and she could see his unspoken need to preserve this part of his legacy in the determined set of his features when he met her eyes. But a man who pushed people away as readily as he did wasn’t likely to verbalize such a sentiment. And pushing people away was exactly what he did when he allowed wrong impressions about him to stand.
As if he knew she saw more than he wanted, he glanced away once more.
“Like I said, if I don’t get it fixed, I don’t work. That’s why I’m not willing to risk getting involved with you. All I’d need is for you to decide you don’t want me around after we fall apart, then I’m stuck trying to find someplace else to work in the middle of winter. That’s what I meant when I said I didn’t want to do anything I’d regret.”
He held up his hands, making a space that was scarcely visible between his fingers. “I came this close to kissing you a while ago, and I don’t think you’d have stopped me. But I have a feeling you’re the kind of woman who wants more than just sex from a man. I’m being as honest as I can by telling you that if we got started with anything, that’s what I’d want and that’s all it would be.” His deep voice dropped like a rock in a well. “I’d rather we just keep things the way they are.”
Hannah blinked at his jaw, his arm, his hands, everywhere but his eyes. She didn’t know which she found more revealing. The way he automatically assumed that any relationship they had wouldn’t last, or the surprising sadness she felt because of it. Either way, she supposed a woman had to appreciate honesty like that. Most men would have taken the sex and kept their mouth shut about whether or not it meant anything to them. Not that she’d been offering it. Not that she’d been anywhere close. But he hadn’t read her wrong. She wouldn’t have pushed him away.
She tucked her stocking feet beneath her, trying to look as if she was making herself more comfortable when what she wanted to do was curl up inside herself. Maybe she would feel grateful to him later. At that particular moment, she simply couldn’t. Something about knowing that a man wanted nothing of her except what she could offer physically tended to make her feel a little inadequate, not to mention a tad humiliated. The worst part was that the feelings were so horribly familiar.
“I knew I’d make it worse,” he muttered, and slapped his hands on his knees to push himself up.
Hannah’s hand shot out, catching his arm. Having stilled him, she immediately pulled back.
“No. You didn’t... No,” she concluded, forcing herself to separate what Damon was doing from what Greg had done. The man tensely watching her now was nothing like her ex-husband. Damon surrounded himself with a fortress of walls, but he was being as upfront as he could be. After all, knocking the wind out of a person’s sails before she left the harbor was far kinder than ripping a hole in the bottom of the boat once she got to sea.
It took integrity for a man to say what Damon had—even if he hadn’t been terribly sensitive about it.
“You don’t need to worry about the shop. We made a deal and I’ll stick to it. As for the other...” She cut herself off, hugging a blue throw pillow to herself. “Let’s just say that I’m no more interested in a relationship than you are. I’ve sworn off for the duration.”
“I’m trying to do something right here, Hannah.”
“I know that. I’m just being as honest with you as you were with me.”
Damon’s glance narrowed. For a moment, he’d thought her declaration nothing more than tit for tat. You don’t want me, I don’t want you. But there was nothing in her expression to back up that conclusion. She hadn’t even sounded defensive. If anything, curled up as she was and hugging that pillow like a shield, she looked almost defenseless.
He’d bet his boat she had no idea how vulnerable she looked.
“I take it that your ex got the restaurant.”
He posed the premise flatly, more conclusion than question. It was that unerringly accurate insight that relaxed Hannah’s unconscious stranglehold on the pillow and sharpened her glance.
“How did you know that?”
“I didn’t until now. But it wasn’t too hard to figure out. The day I helped you with your shutters, you told me you’d owned a restaurant with your ex. A little while ago, you said the thing that scares you most is losing this place. Now you’re saying you’ve sworn off men.” He shrugged, the muscles in his broad shoulders shifting beneath midnight blue fleece. “It just adds up.”
The man seriously underestimated his powers of deduction. His perceptions where she was concerned were amazingly accurate—and more than a little unnerving.
“He got the restaurant,” she confirmed. “And the house,” she added, because Damon seemed to be waiting for her to go on. She’d worked so hard to make that house a home, and to make the restaurant a success. And she had. The home had been lovely. The restaurant had been four-star. “He bought out my interests in both.”
“Why didn’t you buy him out?”
She liked that he thought she could have done that. “Because it was all a lie.” Her voice grew softer. Not with hurt. It felt more like bewilderment now. As if she couldn’t believe she’d been so malleable. “When I look back on it, it’s so easy to see it was all a facade. I didn’t even realize how much of myself had ceased to exist. We did everything Greg’s way. We used his ideas in the restaurant. His tastes in the house. We associated with his friends. His family.
“It wasn’t as if he kept me from my family,” she added, plucking at a thread. “Greg just always managed to be busy when it was time to celebrate an occasion at my parents’ home, or when they came to visit. He couldn’t be bothered.”
“No wonder you divorced him.”
“I didn’t. He divorced me.” She set the pillow aside, propping it against its yellow mate. “He left me a note one morning saying that he’d made a mistake. He didn’t love me. He never had.” She toyed with the thread, pulling it through her fingers, rolling it into a little ball. “When we talked later that day, he told me he’d married me on the rebound. It seemed his old girlfriend was back and that she wanted another chance with him. There was nothing for me to do but leave.
“I bought the café,” she continued, knowing Damon would understand, “because I wanted something that was truly mine. A place I felt I belonged in, and that no one could take from me.” A sardonic little smile tugged at her mouth. “So this is where I work and this is my home, and I like things the way they are just fine.”
>
From the corner of her eye, she saw him glance toward her.
“Sounds good,” he said, watching the nervous movements of her hands. “But which one of us are you trying to convince?”
Her hands went still. The mild question threw her, but not nearly as much as the sympathy in his tone.
“I don’t know how we got onto this,” she murmured, disconcerted by the notion that she might actually have more in common with him than she did with anyone else in town. She couldn’t imagine that he was all that happy with the life he’d created for himself. Not as lonely as it seemed to be. “It’s not what you came up here to discuss.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not. But before you kick me out of here, you might as well know that I think your ex is a jerk.”
The sentiment made her smile.
“So,” he said, forcing his glance from her mouth, “I suppose I’d better get going.” The muscles in his thighs bunched as he rose in one powerful move. As he towered over her, his glance grazed her upturned face before he stepped to the side and pointedly stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I want to pick up something to eat before the hamburger place on Fourth Street closes.”
Hannah rose more slowly, aware of his size, and the way the subtle tension he radiated filled the room. The rain still drummed on the roof, louder here than anywhere else in the building. He’d said he didn’t want to mess up their arrangement, and he was trying now to put their situation back on an even keel. She did her best to reciprocate.
“You don’t have to go there.”
“Sure, I do. There’s nothing in my refrigerator but a six-pack and a bottle of ketchup, and I’m starving. I was thinking about getting takeout from you, but you’re closed.”
“Just because the cafe is closed doesn’t mean I can’t fix you dinner.”
He gave her a look that clearly said he wanted no favors. “You don’t have to do that.”
She matched his expression perfectly. “You don’t have to put up my storm windows, either.”
Hannah And The Hellion (Silhouette Treasury 90s) Page 13