by Terese Ramin
Behind her the house was dark, all the chicks in residence and tucked up beneath the quiet roar of the attic fan pulling cool dehumidified air out of the basement.
Risto had returned before dark and apologized, shamefaced, for not letting someone know he was taking off to see friends. There had been a quality of evasion to the admission. The fact that he’d assumed mistrust and offered to let her smell his breath, give him whatever drunk test she wanted, made her feel oddly uncomfortable and not the least bit reassured.
Megan had spun into the driveway and parked behind the house about forty-five minutes after Risto’s arrival. She’d alighted from the car dressed like a suburbanite’s idea of a biker chick, and without explaining her absence hesitantly asked if her father was around. Informed that he was out looking for her, her face had taken on a strange tightness; when she kissed Kate good-night her breath was mouthwash sweet, her eyes were iris-less and wild.
Unable to judge simply from Megan’s behavior, Kate couldn’t be sure if the all-pupil look had to do with something the teen had ingested or with the diminishing light level. When Megan had asked if it was okay to spend the night with Li, then asked Kate to tell Hank where she was when he came in, Kate had assented out of uncertainty rather than kindness.
Uncertainty was why she was out in the Ilama pen communing with the girls and her thoughts.
Sitting with the Ilamas was calming, somehow gave clarity to fuzzy situations, made thought easier and enhanced meditation. She didn’t do uncertainty well, had been confronted with indecision only rarely in her life. Not even Tai’s adolescence had thrown her—and he’d been her first. Li, too, was more mature than her age. Dubiously Kate supposed—having heard it suggested by other families who’d adopted children of Asian descent with a similar lack of problems—that ethnic and genetic heritage might be the difference. But it didn’t explain Grisha, Ilya and Jamal, with their entirely different backgrounds.
Of course, Grisha and Ilya weren’t sixteen yet, and Jamal, while he’d spent an awful lot of time with Kate’s family, had just started living with them tonight. For all Kate knew, things would be different once Jamal got used to being here all the time. She hoped they wouldn’t—and even went so far as to doubt they would—but anything was possible.
No, although Tai, Li, Grisha, Ilya, Jamal. Bele and Mike all had their little quirks, Kate had only rarely experienced disquiet over anything to do with them. And even then the disquiet hadn’t lasted more than a moment or two. Nope, it was merely Risto and Megan who left her feeling she didn’t know what to do, or how to handle their...uniquenesses.
Of course, maybe she just didn’t know as much about her kids as she thought she did. For instance, did Tai sleep with Carly? He and Carly were both twenty-one and she supposed whether they did or didn’t was no longer any of her business. But she’d also never wondered before, either. As complete in and of themselves as the couple seemed, Kate imagined the two of them sleeping together was likely, but...yes, thinking about it was awkward for her, made her squirm.
Probably the same reason she’d never wondered...uncomfortable parent things...about Li—other than the fact that Kate always knew where Li was and couldn’t imagine when Li would find the time to do sex, drugs or other harmful things.
She sighed. A parent had to let go of a child sometime, and if Tai hadn’t learned where care and caution were needed, where love was necessary before now, Kate could no longer teach him. And anyway, now besides being her son, he was the senior half of their Christmas-tree partnership and her friend. She trusted him.
Perhaps, she consoled herself—grasping at straws, yes, but every parent was entitled to a little straw grasping now and then, weren’t they?—her lack of conviction in dealing with Risto and Megan lay in the fact that they weren’t really hers to deal with.
So then how, she asked herself dryly, do you account for how uninhibited you are if Jamal needs to be corrected when he’s here. hmm?
That was different, she assured hersetf—earnestly. He came with Ilya, they were a pair. If one got in trouble, the other was usually there with him. Same as Bele and Mike.
But, the devil’s advocate in her brain argued, Megan came with Li. You’ve never had a problem dealing with her before, so why now?
The answer rose unwillingly. Hank. It wasn’t Megan who made her unsure; it was having Hank here with his daughter. It was a sudden caution about stepping on parental toes that were not her own. It was...
Hank himself.
It was standing behind him clipping his hair and brushing up against him and not being sure if she was brushing up against him on purpose because she liked the way he felt, craved the physical sensations that ignited with any unexpected touch. It was the memory of a kiss and a conversation. It was the powerful knowledge he’d given her when he’d told her how much he wanted her. She didn’t remember any man ever wanting her because she was herself and not because she was healthy and buxom and had big breasts.
Not that she had a lot of experience to fall back on there.
It was also because she liked him, Hank the father, Hank the man. Hank, who made her blood boil. Hank. whom she’d discovered it was easy to love on the friendship level and whom she didn’t think she’d mind loving on whatever other levels were left.
Emotionally.
Physically.
Head and heart, soul and body, all the facets that made up her person. And his.
The truth of the matter was that until Hank Mathison had set foot on the farm, she hadn’t known she could feel...
Like this.
Craven. Alone. Lost. Alive. Blossoming.
True, she also hadn’t known until she’d left the convent that she could be anything besides a nun and a missionary; hadn’t known until she’d found Tai and Li that she could be a mother or a tree farmer or raise Ilamas or run a miniatures business. From experience, she’d always assumed that need begot ability. But ability had nothing to do with Hank.
She’d found Stone House because when she left the convent she’d needed someplace to go; the crafts had started as something to do with her hands and as a way to help make ends meet. The tree farm had happened as a means to put college money aside for the kids, when she’d adopted Tai and Li. The Ilamas had arrived accidentally with Mike, inherited from her brother with his son. She’d meant to sell them and never gotten round to it—and now they were a major part of her family’s life as well as income. For better or worse, her life was a series of accidental discoveries that grew out of each other and taught her things she’d never known before. And that was Hank: an accident with unforeseen consequences; an education she’d never expected to have.
She’d always known she was a woman, always appreciated the uniqueness of her gender, but until Hank Mathison she’d never known what it was like to feel...
Like a woman.
To want to be a woman in every sense of the word.
Intensely.
To need to understand the physical subtleties of her body, to covet a knowledge she didn’t possess.
Unconditionally.
To quite simply and emphatically crave Hank and everything he was, everything he would be.
Passionately, unequivocally, irrevocably.
To understand that for more than thirty-five years she’d been missing a piece of herself that she hadn’t even realized existed, and that piece had a name, and its name was Hank.
When in doubt, she thought moodily, take ’em by surprise. Including yourself. It was the motto she lived by.
Lord, why did she have to pick the very moment Megan was in crisis to figure this out and admit it to herself, and who on earth had put Murphy’s law in charge of timing?
Probably some masochist, the imp in her head said.
It was one of those rare occasions Kate agreed with the imp.
A Ilama’s sudden warning clack brought her alert from reverie. The whinnying, crowing call echoed from the females’ pen to the males’ loafing shed. The twenty m
ales and geldings lined their fence, the twenty-five females and their young bunched together. curious and watchful, ears alert. Their attention seemed concentrated toward the front of the house. Sure enough, within moments Kate heard Tai’s truck rattle down the drive. Mind full of cautions, heart full of care, she let herself out of the pen and went to greet Hank.
He was out of the truck by the time she reached it, leaning over his car with his hands flat on the hood. Trying to feel how long it had been there, Kate guessed, whether it was just arrived or had sat a while.
“She came back about an hour after you left,” she volunteered. “Risto got here before she did.”
Hank started, jerked around looking for her. She moved around the truck into his line of vision, and stood against the car’s driverside door. He relaxed slightly, took his hands off the hood, then hooked them into his back pockets.
“She all right?” The question was tight, controlled. Worried.
“She’s fine. Dressed like a biker babe and lookin’ for you—sort of. A little...spooked looking, but none the worse for wear, I guess.”
“Was she—” He swallowed, chasing a dry mouth, hating the question. “Was she...high?”
“I don’t know, Hank.” Kate gave him an unhappy oneshoulder shrug. “Her eyes were all pupil, but the light was bright. She was lucid, she wasn’t wobbly. A little wound up maybe, but not high the way I remember seeing kids hopped up when I was in school—or even when I was working the missions.”
He ran a hand across his face and through what was left of his hair, then nodded tiredly. Gentleness ran through Kate.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I dunno, Kate. She’s here, she wasn’t picked up in the raid, but the kid she dates when she wants to make me crazy was. He said he hasn’t seen her for weeks, but I dunno. I just don’t know.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Nah.” He shrugged, lost. “I don’t think so. Where is she?”
“Upstairs in bed. Asked me if I’d invite you to have breakfast with her. So I am.”
“I should go up, tell her I will.” He looked like he didn’t want to.
“And quiz her?” she queried softly.
“Yeah.” Hank laughed without humor. “How’d you guess?”
“Predictable Parent Response number five seventy-four,” Kate intoned pompously. “When a kid flies off the handle and takes off, question her about it no matter what time it is.”
Hank’s jaw tightened, his mouth forming a hard line. He took a step toward her. “You think I should wait?” There was a hint of challenge and ugliness in his voice, a note of back off, babe, you’re crossing a line.
Kate heard the unspoken message and ignored it. “For what it’s worth.”
“Not much.”
The snap of anger surfaced, aggressive, threatening. His eyes were an occasional glitter in stray moments of light.
A frisson of anticipation ran through Kate, fierce and almost joyous, consolidating the murk of her uncertainties over Risto and Megan, focusing thought, word and action on Hank. On the immediate pleasures of offered battle.
Never formally a soldier, she was nonetheless all warrior at heart.
She inhaled, drawing herself up, taking her own step closer to him, planting her feet. Ready.
“You don’t want to do this,” she warned.
He shifted, wary, but not backing off. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not the person you’re angry with. And I’m on your side. And you’re too smart to alienate an ally.”
His stance relaxed without losing any of the tension. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He regarded her for a long moment, his jaw working. Something in the shadows of his expression altered; intensity and tension proceeded from anger to some other, rawer, less controllable emotion.
He moved another pace toward her and raised a hand...then stopped, his fingers closing tight around a handful of humid night as though to grip something sliding through the sweat of his grasp.
Excitement fingered Kate’s skin, trickled with perspiration through the fine sensory hairs standing alert on her arms. With an effort Hank drew a harsh breath, then sighed it away.
“Okay,” he agreed abruptly, pivoted and left.
Almost before Kate realized he was going, he was gone, long strides taking him past the Ilama yards, the workshop and equipment barn, and out beyond the wolf oak that dominated the grassy knoll separating house grounds from the male Ilamas’ knobby day fields. When surprise abated, resolve firmed and she followed him without thinking.
Caution told her to let him go.
Neither instinct nor her heart was familiar with caution.
“Hank,” she called softly. “Hank.”
“For the love of God, woman, stay away from me.” His voice was rough with strain, ragged with invisible exertion. “I can’t let you near me right now. Do you understand that? I can’t”
“And I can’t let you go off alone like this.”
He lengthened his stride, outdistancing her again. “Go away, Kate.” It was both plea and demand. “It’d be better for both of us if you did.”
“Why is it only better for both of us when you decide it is, not when I do?” she wondered aloud, hustling to stay in easy earshot.
“Because I’m bigger’n you and the mood I’m in I could hurt you and I doubt you could do me any real damage.”
“Wanna bet? I’ve been around a lot more dangerous people than you, Hank Mathison, and nobody’s managed to maim me yet. I may have been a nun, but that doesn’t mean I’m a pacifist or that I don’t know how to take care of myself.”
“Oh, man.” Hank stopped short among the trees at the west edge of the llamas’ meadow and spun to face her. “Lady, that is such a crock. You don’t know jack about takin’ care of yourself in a situation like this. If you did, you’d be on the other side of a door with a deadbolt right now, not out here challenging me, away from anyone who could help you.”
“I’m not here to challenge you, Hank.” She came to a stop in front of him, put out a hand. “I’m here to help, if I can.”
“You can’t—” Her fingers touched his arm; he jerked violently away. “Don’t.”
Her hand stayed where it was, poised where he’d left it in the air. She moved toward him again. He watched her come, his breathing unsteady.
“Don’t what?” she asked.
“Don’t touch...” Air hissed savagely between his teeth, sucked hard into his lungs when she laid her hand on his. His muscles were hard and knotted with restraint; he twitched backward a step, but didn’t pull away. “Judas, woman.” Each word was an explosion, contained only by force of will. “I’m hanging onto sanity by my fingernails here. Do you know what you’re doin’?”
She shook her head and worked her fingers into the fist he made. She didn’t know for sure what she was doing, but she wanted to.
Real bad.
Eyes intent on the shadows that were his face, she stepped forward, reclaiming the space he’d put between them. “What am I doing?”
His fingers clenched around hers, drew her hand toward him. “Making it hard to breathe.” He swallowed. She was too close; he could almost taste the texture of her skin on his breath. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but want. Her. Need her. “Making it hard, period.” He exhaled, a rough sound. “Everything.” He looked down at her, drew a fast breath of courage and opened her hand, flattened it against the bulge in his fly. Fought himself to simply hold her fingers there when she flinched in surprise and tried to draw away. “Everything,” he repeated.
Gulping air, Kate stared down at where she could see the outline of her hand, pancaked under his like a child’s game of handon-hand, light against the darkness of his jeans. Sensation was intense, detail clear and mesmerizing.
The denim was soft and worn from a thousand washings, the ridge beneath it fascinatingly bone-like. Of their own volition her fingers flexed along that
stiff outcropping, causing it to pulse tauter, eliciting a painful hiss from Hank. His fist clamped with crushing force around the contours of her hand and it was as though a savage had replaced what was left of this civilized man. She raised her face to see him, understanding with sudden clarity how important it was to take advantage of time rather than letting time take more advantage of her than it already had.
“You follow me now?” he asked tightly.
“I think so.”
She spoke so softly, he couldn’t tell if there was loathing or something else in her voice. She didn’t try to take back her hand and he didn’t think he could let her go to save his life. It had been so long.
So long... and nobody else he wanted to share this with.
Only Kate.
The wind chose this moment to shove aside the clouds and loose the moon. Light slanted in to join them beneath the trees, revealing what shadows concealed. Hank saw not loathing on Kate’s face but curiosity and gentleness, passion and empathy in almost equal measures. Her free hand lifted; the side of her forefinger defined the shape of his cheek and jaw, chin and throat. He stood very still, feeling the pulse in her fingertips, the willingness and longing in her touch, and forgot everything he was, including his name, in the fullness of her.
“Kate.” A single breath, that was all he could catch.
Looking at him, seeing him in a way she hadn’t before, Kate felt something inside her clutch and give way. Lungs tight, she touched the side of his face with the flat of her palm. He shuddered. Power flowed through her, innately feminine; knowledge uniquely female made her smile. Her palm relaxed against his face, traced down to cup his jaw, drew him within reach. She leaned forward and his breath murmured roughly across her lips.
“Kate.” He was floundering. Fumbling to hold onto the boundaries he’d set around them for reasons he could no longer remember.
Trembling.