Hannah And The Hellion (Silhouette Treasury 90s)

by Christine Flynn

  She mimicked his disapproving expression, along with his low, faintly exasperated tone. “Because people wanted to know why I went tearing out the door like my apron strings were on fire. When I told them where I’d thought Mr. Lindstrom was going, they understood. The ones who know him, anyway.” Which was everyone but the truckers and a couple she’d never seen before. Now even they knew about the elderly man’s tendency to get confused and wander off. “Since I’d come back in alone, Bill was concerned about where he had gone, so I had to tell him he was with you.”

  “Had to?”

  “What was I supposed to say? That I’d chained him to my drainpipe?” With a look of supreme indulgence, she nudged the tray toward him. “Did Mr. Lindstrom say why he came to see you?”

  Damon’s exasperation downshifted to puzzlement.

  “Not specifically. But I think he wants to help.” Directing his faint scowl to the tray, he took it from her. “Why would he want to do that?”

  Hannah watched the question settle in his eyes. Why would he want to help me was what he meant.

  “What did you do yesterday after he said you were going about that repair wrong?”

  Damon shrugged, clearly not seeing what that had to do with anything. “I handed him the part and told him to go for it.”

  “What did he do?”

  Again, the shrug. “Broke the seal for me.”

  “Did you have him do anything else?”

  “His hands are kind of arthritic so he can’t handle tools very well anymore, but he cleaned and oiled some parts. And he had plenty of advice. And stories. Man, when he finally gets going, he can really talk.”

  A gentle smile curved her lips. “Then, that’s why he wants to help you. You listened. And you made him feel useful.”

  Four months ago, Damon wouldn’t have had a clue what she was talking about. Now, because of Hannah, because of how she had treated him, he knew exactly what she meant.

  His first reaction was to deny what he’d done, and how it made him feel. But with her eyes smiling into his, he couldn’t resist the feeling any more than he could resist his next breath.

  The knowledge of what she’d helped him do made his heart feel a little tight in his chest. It also humbled him. He’d made an old man feel useful. And feeling useful made a person feel good about himself—the way Hannah had made him feel good about himself when she’d turned to him for help with the old guy that day on the dock, and when she’d told him he was kind.

  The little service bell she kept on the front counter chimed with a syncopated, five-count ring.

  “That’ll be one of my truckers wanting more coffee or to pay his bill. I’ll come get that later,” she said, indicating the tray, then turned to take care of the men who returned her smiles, appreciated her hospitality and didn’t give her anywhere near the grief he did.

  Chapter Nine

  The snow continued to fall, and the holidays, which Hannah knew were taken seriously in Pine Point, were suddenly upon the little town. Thanksgiving was followed by the St. Lucia festival where the fire chief’s granddaughter was elected Queen of Lights. Julafton, the Swedish Christmas Eve celebration, came next. Then Christmas and St. Stephen’s Day, for the animals. Finally, New Year’s and St. Knut’s Day on January 13, the official end of it all. During that time live reindeer were brought in by the Moose Lodge, the Lutheran church hosted the annual lutefisk dinner, complete with crepe-like lefse and pickled herring. Finally, the Santa Claus dog pull, round one of the competition to be completed with February’s Snow Daze, took place down the middle of Main Street.

  With so many people in town for shopping and celebrations, business in the cheerfully decorated café was better than usual. Hannah was grateful for the increase, but mostly she was just happy that the holiday bustle took people’s minds off the man going quietly about his business in the shop below. The seasonal spirit didn’t provide that distraction for her, however. She was always aware of him. Even when she closed down for two days each at Thanksgiving and Christmas to spend them with her family, she spent the entire time wondering if Damon had meant it when he said the holidays mattered little to him. She’d thought about asking him if he wanted to come with her, just so he wouldn’t be alone, but she axed the idea as soon as it formed. As careful as he was to avoid anything personal with her, he’d have backpedaled so fast at the invitation that he’d have been a mere blur.

  As for Louie Lindstrom, she knew he’d spent the holidays with his nephew’s family watching them argue over television programs and eating turkey as dry as moose hide. He’d told her so himself.

  The old ex-sailor, mechanic and stevedore continued to show up at the shop with some regularity after those first unanticipated visits. Hannah knew that, not because she always noticed him when he shuffled around the corner in the snow, but because, for well over a month, she ran into him nearly every time she went down to the freezer or to her herb garden.

  One afternoon, however, she realized Mr. Lindstrom hadn’t arrived as usual. Damon appeared at her door to use her phone to check on him after he had failed to show up three days in a row.

  Damon didn’t want to look concerned about the elderly man’s welfare as he headed for her office. But Hannah knew he was. As soon as he’d told her that Louie had simply stopped coming, she was concerned herself.

  “He said his gout is acting up and he can’t walk this far,” he told her, after he’d hung up. “Said he’ll take his medicine and watch what he eats for a few days, then come back, if I want him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “It’s up to him.”

  The shrug accompanying that flat statement made It appear that Damon didn’t care one way or the other if the guy came back. What it really meant was that he didn’t want to care. Wondering if he knew the difference, suspecting it wouldn’t matter, all she said was, “He shouldn’t be walking alone in this wind, anyway.”

  The weather was particularly blustery. But that January day was merely a harbinger of what came in its wake. Having lived all her life in Minnesota, Hannah was no stranger to cold winters or the dangers that came with their isolation and beauty. There were days when the high never rose above thirty below zero. The wind howled like the wolves in the forests. And the danger of freezing to death was an everyday reality. But the bitter cold was no more remarkable to the people who lived in lake country than the walls of snow that eventually lined shoveled sidewalks, or the mountains of the interminable white stuff the snowplows scraped from the roads and dumped on the frozen lakes and ponds on the far side of the highway. On days when the wind was particularly stiff, people added another layer under their muffin-man clothes and went about their work and play as best they could encased in down.

  When the weather turned bad enough to keep people indoors, the locals simply snuggled in with their crafts and books and projects, then dug themselves back out when it cleared.

  Instead of curling up with a book, what Hannah found herself doing on those days was thawing and feeding tired, stranded travelers and sending them two blocks over to the Shorecrest Motel for lodging. In turn, the motel’s owner sent his hungry, stranded guests back to her café to be fed. For the most part, though, the short days and long nights were quiet and blessedly uneventful—except where Damon was concerned.

  The first clear day after Louie Lindstrom’s attack of gout subsided, the determined old guy was back at the shop. The day after that, Damon started leaving midmorning to pick the man up, and taking him back home in time for his game show. Damon never did say whose idea the arrangement was. When she asked, he just gave her a look that made it clear he didn’t want her reading anything into the gesture, then simply said he could use the man’s expertise. In return, because the old guy had refused his offer of payment, he bought Louie’s lunch. From Hannah. The way Damon saw it, as long as she was bringing one lunch, he might as well get his from her, too. He even specifically requested chowder, sourdough and pie, which she’d once given him, as i
f he’d been thinking about them a lot but had refused to indulge himself.

  The thought that he’d deliberately denied himself something he could have easily had for the asking made her wonder what else he was denying himself. But the thought that he was denying himself her was too absurd to consider. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t come anywhere near her unless he had to. And the only time he really talked to her at all was when Mr. Lindstrom was around. Or if Louie had one of his “spells.”

  Hannah had nearly forgotten how confused Mr. Lindstrom could get until Damon returned alone late one morning in March. He’d gone to pick Louie up, and had found him as disoriented as he’d been the day they had found him on the dock. Mr. Lindstrom hadn’t recognized him and turned him away at the door. The second time it happened, over a month later, Damon talked him into leaving with him, only to spend the day answering the same questions a dozen times and taking him home early because Mr. Lindstrom wanted to take a nap.

  When Hannah asked Damon if he’d noticed anything unusual with Mr. Lindstrom before the episodes, Damon said he’d seemed fine. He’d been a little achy was all, he’d told her, as if his arthritis was acting up. Or maybe it was his gout. But other than that, he’d noticed nothing unusual.

  Damon was lying under the stopped-up sink in her kitchen when he told her about the third spell. He’d come up to help her after she’d come downstairs to get a pipe wrench.

  “It was really strange,” he said, his deep voice muffled. “We were fitting the seals around the prop shaft and he kept rubbing at his knee. He said he was aching more than usual because the weather is turning. I guess now that we’re warming up, the damp bothers him more than cold,” he added, patting the area by his hip for the tube of putty he’d left there.

  Thinking that warming up was a relative term, though forty above was definitely warm compared to forty below, she handed him what he was groping for.

  “Anyway,” he continued as his hand disappeared, “he took a couple of pills and we kept working, but he was hurting so much that I finally told him to just sit down and rest for a while. He fell asleep in that old chair we brought from his house, and when I woke him up to take him home, he was out of it.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled over the sound of metal pieces being threaded together. “I didn’t ask. He’s got a regular pharmacy in that fishing vest of his.”

  Because his head, shoulders and half of his chest were under her large industrial sink, she could only see him, more or less, from his waist down. One long, jeans-clad leg was stretched out. The other was bent so that his boot was planted by his opposite knee. The view wasn’t bad. It was just distracting. Especially when he would shift positions and his black sweatshirt would ride a little higher above the buckle of his leather belt.

  Leaning against the edge of the sink, she studied a chip in her nail. It seemed preferable to staring at the strip of rock-hard abdomen and the dark hair arrowing beneath the waistband of his jeans. “He takes a lot of medicine?”

  “I guess.”

  The chip failed to hold her interest. Kneeling down by his hip, she deliberately focused on the dark head under the curved pipe. “Maybe you should mention this to him.”

  “Mention what?” he muttered, grunting a little as he turned the wrench and metal squeaked. “He knows he has spells where he gets confused. It’s not as if he isn’t aware of it.” His stomach muscles tightened as he gave the wrench another turn. “I don’t know what one has to do with the other, but he says the only time he gets them is when his joints get to aching bad.”

  “And that’s when he takes those pills?”

  He gave one last turn on the metal ring joining the pipes, then she saw his big body go still. A moment later, he was scooting out and sitting up beside her, the pipe wrench dangling from where his wrist balanced on his upraised knee.

  “You think his medicine makes him weird?”

  “I don’t know. It could be. Or maybe it doesn’t mix well with something else he takes. People have bad reactions to drugs all the time.” She tipped her head, her smooth brow furrowing. “Don’t you think you should mention it to him?”

  She rested on her heels, her small hands curled against her apron and her eyes steady on his. There was nothing but genuine concern in her expression. None of the wariness that so often guarded her manner when they were together. At that moment, she was totally open to him, totally receptive, and that was when Damon always found her the most dangerous.

  His glance skimmed the gentle contours of her face, the delicate wings of her eyebrows, the fullness of her peach-tinted and very kissable mouth.

  He didn’t usually let himself get this close because he simply didn’t trust himself around her. He was restless and edgy enough being cooped up inside the shop so much of the time. What made coping so much harder was being cooped up with her right upstairs, and knowing that all he’d have to do was knock on the door, pull her into the stairwell and he could have her in his arms.

  When he’d get to thinking like that, he’d usually quit early and go ice-fishing with Louie, or drive to Two Bays to take care of errands he’d put off. The one time he’d caved in and climbed upstairs to her apartment, telling himself he was near enough to finishing his boat that getting involved with her now wouldn’t matter, she’d opened the door and he’d found his intentions promptly doused with ice water. Behind her, Brenda and a woman Hannah introduced as Brenda’s sister were curled up on the sofa with scraps of fabric they were all quilting.

  The sight of those women, the homey atmosphere Hannah always created and her soft smile immediately jerked him back to reality. He’d been thinking with his body instead of what was sitting on his shoulders, and he’d forgotten that getting involved with him would do her far more harm than good. So he’d muttered something about wanting to know if she needed anything from Duluth, then headed out to his truck wondering if he should stuff snow in his pants or his head into a snowbank.

  He did go to Duluth that night, too, fully intending to find a bar and a woman and spend a couple of days getting Hannah out of his head. He’d found the bar. He’d found a willing distraction. But all he’d been able to think about was the woman who refused to see him the way everyone else did, whose voice could soothe and arouse in the same instant, whose smile touched the heart he swore he didn’t have, and he’d headed back to Pine Point feeling frustrated as hell and praying for an early thaw. Once he moved the boat out of the shop and he was away from her, he would forget her. Right now, she was like some virus he just couldn’t quite shake.

  “Will you?” she repeated, the wariness he hated growing evident with his silence.

  Shades of fire glinted in her hair. Her scent surrounded him. With her lake blue eyes seeking an answer in his, the desire to reach for her was like a living thing inside him.

  “I’ll talk to him,” he murmured, and stuffed himself back under the sink.

  “When?”

  “I have to drive to Two Harbors for oil and more sealer. I’ll stop in the morning and see if he’s up to going with me.”

  “Why don’t you take the day off and go fishing with him instead? You work too hard, Damon.”

  “I need to get the boat finished.”

  She knew that. Damon was obsessed with getting his boat put back together by the end of the month. The ice in the inlet was already breaking up. But she’d thought the outing might be good for both him and Mr. Lindstrom. As hard as they’d worked all winter, they seemed to work even harder now. But, working or relaxing, Damon seemed to enjoy the older man’s company as much as Mr. Lindstrom enjoyed his—even though Damon still insisted he was only picking the guy’s brain because he knew so much about boats.

  The claim didn’t fool Hannah in the least. The friendship that had grown between the two men was as obvious to her as the melting snowdrifts piled around every building and tree in northern Minnesota. In a way, they were two of a kind. Louie had family, but the
y didn’t seem to want him around. Damon had no one, but no one wanted him around, either. They were indeed an odd couple, the old man and the reclusive hellion, but they were good for each other. At least, that was what Hannah thought. But not everyone saw it that way.

  “Afternoon, Neil.” Sam Thorson wrapped a stout fist around his coffee mug and raised it toward the man shrugging out of his raincoat by the café’s front door. At Sam’s elbow, Ellen, Sam’s wife of thirty-two years, dabbed soup from her mouth and smiled, too. “Bit damp out there, I’d say.”

  Neil’s affable, golden-boy features were red from the cold. “Sure is,” he agreed, chafing his hands and knocking slush from his boots. “Miserable time of year, but have to get through it to get to summer now, don’t we?”

  Neil gave Sam a friendly slap on the back as he headed for his usual table by the front window. On the way, he popped Grady Olson, who was sitting at the counter, on the shoulder and nodded to Dorothy Yont and one of her daughters-in-law at the table ahead of him. He didn’t know the two other customers occupying a table by the side window, but he smiled at them, too, just in case they knew who he was. As one of the town’s most prominent citizens, in his estimation, anyway, he took his roll of representative quite seriously.

  He was meeting Gunnar Erickson for lunch. Gun was already at the table, rubbing the wheat-colored, walruslike mustache that hid his overbite as he scrutinized Hannah’s pared-down winter menu. Bracing himself when Neil approached, he received a whack, too, and determinedly suffered the jarring sensation that undoubtedly rattled his back teeth. Men always got the enthusiastic, good-old-boy slap; women, the conciliatory nod and toothy smile.

  Hannah had often wondered if the once-almost-pro hockey player didn’t realize his strength, or if he used the greeting as a way to prove how macho he still was. As for the smile, its wattage had dimmed considerably lately when she was on the receiving end of it.