An Unexpected Addition

by Terese Ramin

  Jaw taut, he stared at her. She knew nothing about him, but because he was Megan’s father she’d offered him her guesthouse and in a backhanded way entrusted him with her children’s lives. He had to make her understand—as bluntly as possible—that although he was hardly the beast his daughter’s exaggerations had made him out to be, it still wouldn’t be wise to get comfortable with him. The way he felt right now, he could easily turn into the wolf who’d destroy them all.

  “Sex, Kate,” he said, harshly, crudely. “I’m not here to get my rocks off with you.”

  She didn’t flinch. Teenage foster kids often arrived bearing trunks full of emotional baggage and used their verbal skills to shock and rock, to keep her a good stiff arm’s length away. She’d heard worse. None of it hurt like this, of course, but he didn’t need to see that. “I didn’t think you were,” she told him calmly. “I know you’re here because of Megan and only Megan. I know I agreed to rent the guesthouse to you because of Megan alone. I know we’ve never been particularly fond of each other. I’m not sure I understand why it happened, but that kiss had to be a momentary aberration. It’ll never happen again.”

  Hank snorted. “Don’t try to kid yourself or me about that, Kate,” he said tersely. “You looked at me moon eyed most of the day and my shorts have been too tight thinkin’ about you since we shook hands over the rental agreement, so don’t pretend ‘it’ll never’ because you say so. Even Mike and Bele could tell you different.”

  “Could they.” Flat and careful, more challenge than question. A muscle ticked in her cheek.

  “You bet.” Hank nodded. “And if they couldn’t, the older kids sure as hell can.”

  She eyed him oddly in the half-light, flabbergasted. Of all the arrogant, conceited, I-am-God’s-gift baloney she’d ever heard, this had to be the biggest crock.

  “Let me get this straight.” She squared herself to him, arms akimbo, foot tapping. Be afraid, the stance warned him, be very afraid. “Because I’ve developed some sort of high-school crush on you and you’re wearing too tight skivvies and we shared one boffo kiss, you’re telling me I should run screaming any time you get within six feet of me unchaperoned because if I don’t our hormones will turn into rampaging elephants we can’t control, even though you think I’m a goody-two-shoes and I’ve often considered you a pain-in-the-butt sonofagun?”

  Hank swallowed an unwilling grin. Put like that, his assessment of the situation did sound a smidgen melodramatic. Still... He shrugged and let the excruciating throb behind his zipper be his guide. “If the situation arises, it won’t matter what we think of each other, Kate,” he assured her quietly. “Moon eyes and tight shorts are a lethal combination any time, but right now ... you need to know—I have to tell you—that kiss didn’t do anything for me except make keeping my pants zipped around you a lot more painful.”

  Her lungs tightened, her heart pounded high in her throat. She couldn’t catch her breath. “It does?”

  “Yeah,”

  Something unidentifiable jittered up her spine. Nervousness, maybe excitement, probably fear ... and something else. “Really? You’ve, um, been thinking about me?” She’d misheard him. Her ears were full of wax. That had to be it. She probably ought to make an appointment with Dr. Moody to get ’em washed out. Until then, maybe if she rephrased her original question she’d understand the answer better. “You lust after me?”

  “Not by choice,” he said ruefully, running his hands through his hair and wishing she’d shut up and quit doing whatever she was doing, which instead of relieving the itch in his pants, was steadily making it worse, “but yeah. I lust after you. You find that so hard to believe?”

  “Yes...no...it’s just, um ... it’s never, ah...Me?” she repeated, more to herself than him. She looked at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, absolutely.” Hank nodded, amused by her astonishment in spite of the tension coiled inside him. You’d think she’d never heard it before. And the places she’d been, nun or not, body like hers, she had to have heard it plenty. Of course, maybe that was the problem. She’d heard it too often, under questionable circumstances with her hair tucked into a wimple. Maybe she’d never had to believe it in quite the same way before. “I’m sure. And I’m getting more sure by the minute.”

  “Oh,” Kate murmured. Then, flustered again, she realized what he’d actually said. “Oh!” She viewed him wide-eyed and swallowed. “Well, then.” She swallowed again and jammed a hand in a pocket, came out with something she used to whisk her hair back and tie it out of the way, the nun disappearing into her cowl. She took a deep breath, blew it out and repeated briskly, “Well, then. I guess we’ve spent enough time together for one day, then, haven’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Hank agreed dryly, “I’d say we have.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She edged a few steps toward the door. “I guess all that’s left, then, is to say good-night.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Well, then.” She nodded at him, then opened the door. “Good-night, Mr. Mathison.”

  “Good-night, Kate.”

  For a moment they stared at each other through the screen—Kate wary. Hank hungry—then she scooted into the interior of the hallway, out of the light, and Hank was alone with the fireflies and the unquiet knowledge that neither he nor Kate was as tame as they wanted the world to believe.

  Nor as tame as they’d believed themselves.

  With a grimace and a sigh he descended the porch steps. Such a lot to have learned in a day, and gee, wouldn’t you know, the summer’s dance had barely begun.

  Chapter 6

  July

  Time passed, dragging one moment, like lightning the next.

  Minutes, hours, days winked by, painful on two fronts: the one where Megan continued to do her best to be where Hank wasn’t; and the one where he found it next to impossible to avoid Kate.

  He didn’t want to avoid her.

  Being near her was torture.

  She was a taste on the back of his tongue he couldn’t get rid of, a drum in his veins, a curse calling to the beast within him the way wolves were drawn to howl at the moon. Within the civilized veneer he wore to make pretense look like reality at the office, he could almost feel himself unraveling.

  There was infinitely more to her than he’d ever wanted to imagine.

  She was wry, dry and sarcastic, funny, human and vulnerable. Like him she recognized and abhorred—and too often tried to ignore—her weaknesses, did not deny but reveled joyously in her strengths.

  Something about her fed the part of him that used to get high on drug raids, fueled the adrenaline junkie in him: an element of danger, an undercurrent of risk, a genuine quality of mercy—a serenity and an innocence that underlay the knowing-but-refusing-to-be-cynical exterior, a threat and a promise of passion unexplored and therefore untapped, which beckoned even as it warned him away.

  Unfortunately, he’d never been able to walk away from a puzzle until he solved it.

  Living on a working tree farm and llama ranch meant, of course, exactly that: working. Dawn to dusk. What time the trees, garden, workshop and quadrupeds didn’t require, the kids did.

  They had music lessons, ball games, part-time jobs and early morning twice-weekly trips in to the local farmers’ market to supplement their college funds. They had 4-H club, which meant local, county, then—with tuck—the state-fair competitions to prepare projects for, parades to be in and costumes to create. They had dental appointments and doctors’ appointments and prosthetist’s appointments. Fortunately besides Kate, Tai, Hank and car pools, Li and Megan both drove—and did so willingly.

  Before the day ended, Kate and Tai had office work to attend to: records to keep, wholesale tree buyers to line up for fall, calls to return and would-be llama owners to talk with. A city boy, despite his many treks to and through the jungles of drug-trafficking countries, the amount of work to be done between sunrise and sunset staggered Hank. And Megan’s eagerness to participate in any and all aspects of
Stone House’s enterprises positively floored him.

  For himself, he liked feeling physically bushed at the end of the day, liked the sense of accomplishment, the fact that he could literally see what progress the farm made day-to-day. Liked the grit under his fingernails and the appetite being outside gave him. And he got a kick out of seeing Megan, and sometimes Li, sometimes Bele and Mike, at least once or twice a day when they loaded lunch or a mid-afternoon snack onto a couple of the llamas and packed it out to the tree fields. Loved seeing so much less of the angry side of Megan, glimpsing so much more of the beautiful child she’d been at five—even though she continued to go out of her way to avoid him. He even enjoyed the calluses forming on his hands and the daily muscle aches of physical labor, because stripping down and showering it all away at the end of the day felt like heaven.

  Liked very much not having to deal with kiss-ass office politics, agency jurisdictions, cowboy special agents and the constant barrage of wallting-a-tightrope paranoia.

  Instead of the daily office routine, the work he did varied by the day; when one job finished, the next began. One day he and Risto restrung electric fencing, the next he was pruning and shearing trees or whacking weeds or learning from Grisha how to use a hand lens to check Christmas tree needles for blight and insect infestation or getting Megan to—grudgingly—teach him to handle llamas. Spare time he spent in the woodshop reacquainting himself with his carpentry skills or sorting out the kids: getting Bele and Ilya to teach him to carve; talking insects and fungus with Grisha-the-budding-naturalist; learning how to train dogs from Mike; clandestinely salting the archaeological dig with Tai; learning that Ilya’s friend Jamal spent almost as much time running away to Stone House as Megan used to; and keeping an eye on Risto.

  He couldn’t name why or how he knew—call it cop’s instinct—but he knew something wasn’t entirely right with the youth. There seemed to be something between the Andens’ exchange student and Megan, an undercurrent of furtiveness and secrets known and kept—unwittingly. But exactly which of them kept whose secrets he couldn’t tell. So he did what he’d learned at Quantico and managed, from experience, to be good at: he watched.

  He also worried.

  But none of what he did to occupy him elsewhere kept him from dreaming about and wanting Kate.

  Tough age, he decided wryly. Both his and Megan’s.

  He knew without doubt that if he were simply here to play a role, was merely here to be Special Agent Mathison undercover, dealing with the escalating complexities of the situation would be easier. The man he became undercover was a straightforward twodimensional individual who lived by simple rules.

  Don’t trust anyone; don’t break cover for any reason.

  You’ve only got yourself in there, so look out for number one.

  Don’t get close; don’t get sentimental. Use people, but don’t make friends.

  Never consider the other guy; especially when he’s probably the bad guy.

  Tuxedo rules, he thought of them; basic black-and-white, custom designed to keep him sane and intact, return him home with the fewest scars possible when the job was done.

  But this was not his job, this was his life, his daughter’s life; no set of tuxedo rules, however frilled the shirt or fancy the studs, had ever been designed to guide him through that. And the hungrier being near Kate made him. the harder it was to concentrate on finding the path that would lead him to Megan.

  Not that his losing sight of the path could ever really be Kate’s fault—no matter how badly he might like to make her the scapegoat.

  He thought of the picture of him and Megan in his wallet. Taken early the previous fall at a department barbecue, it showed him with his arm around his daughter’s shoulders while she laughed at something off camera, her arm linked about his waist. Funny how much a liar a camera could be, how nothing ever looked wrong in snapshots from company picnics, but only seemed to go wrong when the camera was turned away.

  No, he was the one who’d lost sight of the best ways to reach Megan. The simple ways that had brought them together easily when she was a child and he’d return from assignments had long ceased to apply: a quick hug and a toss in the air; a special because-you-had-to-stay-home-while-I-was-gone gift and a tickle contest; an hour or two spent examining and identifying the bugs on the sidewalk and in the sandbox that Mommy was too squeamish to look at. It was enough, Gen used to tell them both flatly, that she no longer killed spiders in the house because Megan had begged her not to after they’d read Charlotte’s Web.

  He remembered that family “discussion” with particular fondness. Megan had giggled over Gen’s arachnid pronouncement and shot her father a conspiratorial glance; Hank had winked at her and congratulated Gen on her forbearance, since having spiders in the house was not only good luck but controlled the presence of less desirable insects as well and was, thereby, a boon to their environment Then he and Megan had gone off and laughed themselves silly over “Mommy’s little insect problem.”

  But Megan had been five then, Gen was still alive and “Father Magic” was a kiss that could equally mend a scraped knee or a broken heart.

  By the time she was eight the hug, the gift and the tickling were still in, but the toss in the air was out and the insect hour had become a couple of hours spent at the roller rink, the batting cage or taking her and her friends to the movies or shopping at the mall while Hank felt guilty about leaving Gen to handle most of the things that required parent participation at school or about not being able to volunteer to coach Megan’s T-ball team or even to make most of her gymnastics meets.

  By the time she hit ten the gift was taken for granted, the hug was accepted if she had time, tickling was a Dad-I’m-not-in-themood thing and the one-on-one father-daughter moments were getting hard to come by. Friends and phone calls took precedence; school and extracurricular activities had increased. When he had time for her, her time for him was gone.

  By the time Gen died he and Megan were nearly strangers, and lost time was a commodity Hank wished he’d invested in when the moments had been available and the price had been closer to his grasp. He missed her company, missed her innocence and cursed himself for the cynicism too often printed on a face that mirrored his—except that Megan had her mother’s eyes. In all the years he’d known her, never once had he seen cynicism in Gen’s eyes.

  No, stubborn, constant optimism and never accepting no for an answer had been Gen’s forte. It was also the sword by which she’d died.

  He missed Gen and Megan most, avoided Kate most, in the evenings when his resistance was down and his druthers were closest to the surface.

  “Morning, boys.”

  Kate’s cheerful voice carried clearly through the open kitchen windows and Hank made a wry face. Kate, on the other hand, refused to avoid anything at all, regardless of what it was. If she had a problem she could identify—or one she couldn’t, for that matter—she didn’t hesitate to confront it. None of this if-weignote-it-it’ ll-go-away nonsense for her, no, sir. She went at a problem head on, pedal to the metaL He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone as willing to face down what bothered her as Kate Anden. And since he was what currently bothered her...

  “Appreciate the offer, but I’ve been handling this sort of thing by myself for a lot of years. Besides, it’s not safe for you to be around me, remember,” she’d told him yesterday when he’d come up on her in the middle of the driveway struggling to remove a stripped fitting from the mower and stopped to help. “You get too close and I might lose my head because you just make me too crazy inside, Mr. Mathison. It’s hard to think around you.”

  The day before it had been something else in a long line of what he could only think of as confrontational flirting. Whatever she said, it was always exasperated—with herself more than him, she’d confessed two days ago—always honest and most often at her own expense rather than his. Unfortunately, instead of making her less desirable, her distracted comments only made her more so. There was
nothing more attractive to a man—or at least nothing more enticing to him—than a woman with a sense of humor, who tartly told him to go away every time she saw him, because “you twiddle my buttons just by looking at me.” He’d gone away wondering what she’d do if he reminded her it wasn’t his buttons she twiddled with her glance.

  He knew it was playing with fire, but in some perverse corner of his mind—if he couldn’t spend the day with Megan—he was half tempted to spend the day with Kate just to see what she might verbally have in store for him today. He wouldn’t, but he was tempted.

  Sighing over lust’s abominable timing, he stepped through the open mud-room door and walked into the kitchen.

  It wasn’t a 4-H morning, so only Kate, Bele, Mike and Jamal were in the room. Kate was at the stove humming something jazzy and making what appeared to be French toast, Jamal was setting the breakfast table and Mike and Bele poured milk and juice and played with the refrigerator door. Intensely curious to know what they were trying to do, Hank stood quietly in the outer kitchen doorway and watched. While one practically stuck his nose against the rubber seal and went cross-eyed, the other slowly shut the refrigerator door. They repeated the process, slow and fast, switching places until Kate finally rolled her eyes and looked at them.

  “It goes out when you shut it,” she said.

  Two pairs of little-boy eyes—one pair brown, the other pair Mack—and one pair of warm mead adult male eyes turned to her. The little-boy eyes were dubious and suspicious, the adult’s curious to know what they might be talking about, but also amused underneath arched brows.

  “How do you know the light in the fridge goes out when you shut the door?” Mike asked. “You can’t see it.”

  “I know because I replace the light bulb if it’s not on when I open the door.”

  “Yes, but,” Bele argued, all reason, “maybe you have to replace the light bulb because it’s on all the time and never goes out until it burns out.”