by Terese Ramin
She hated his haircut and he looked like sex.
Eying her father with calculation, Megan set a tray of coffee, juice, bagels and strawberry cream cheese on the large electrical spool Tai had found and Li had cleaned up and painted for use as a table on the front porch.
Peering guardedly back, Hank poured himself his sixth cup of coffee of the morning and wordlessly offered to pour Megan a cup. She shook her head and poured herself some juice instead, offered Hank the plate of bagels and cream cheese. He selected a pair of bagel halves, glopped cream cheese onto each and withdrew. Megan made her own selection, smeared a dainty layer of the pinkish cheese over it and sat in the bamboo chair near her father, the spool table between them.
The air was still and sticky, the sky gray-green with the possibility of tornadoes. Already south-central Michigan was under a six-hour watch with a severe thunderstorm warning in effect. So far this summer, however, the weather had been full of threats without follow-through. Oh, some medium to heavy squalls, but nothing as destructive as the meteorologists predicted. The weather was more like building tension, layer on layer, that petered out just when you thought it would either explode and have done or blow over altogether.
A lot like his relationship with Megan.
“This is nice,” Hank said, although he wasn’t sure whether it was or not. He wanted to ask Megan where she’d been the previous night, but she typically did not respond well to questioning, preferring to volunteer information—if she was going to inform at all, that is.
Watching him, Megan nibbled at her bagel and nodded. She couldn’t, for the life of her, remember why she’d invited him to breakfast-for-just-the-two-of them this morning. Spending time alone with him was always so awkward since her mother had died. She suspected that a large part of the problem was that she and Hank didn’t particularly like each other, although she was aware he loved her. She wasn’t real sure sometimes how she felt about him, but he was what she had.
And damn it to hell and back, this morning when he should have been fit to be tied over her disappearance and the raid from the night before, he looked like freaking sex, sorta the way Zevo did when they’d been doin’ some heavy makin’ out and he’d been tryin’ to get inside her pants and got carried away. Like Zevo’s, her father’s lips were swollen and there was a love-bite bruise at the right corner of his mouth and damned if he didn’t have a hickey on his throat. And for a man who seemed like he wanted to either question his daughter or throttle her for scaring him half to death he looked too pretty stinking satisfied with himself for belief.
He was too old to look so...so...like he’d gotten plenty last night, when common knowledge was that men hit their sexual peak when they were still boys of eighteen and it only went downhill for them from there.
God, it was just entirely too gross to contemplate.
Not to mention that, if he’d really loved her mother he shouldn’t be gettin’ any anything from anywhere but his wife. And dead didn’t matter, loyalty did, and he was her parent for spit’s sake and his betrayal set a bad example for her, didn’t he realize that? He was her father, and fathers—even widowed ones—weren’t supposed to need or want or act dishonorably and they weren’t supposed to...
What they “weren’t supposed to” got a little muddled in Megan’s head from there, but she was pretty certain it made sense—if only she could straighten it out enough to bang that sense into Hank’s head.
Or even her own.
Instead, because confusion, disappointment and pique made her forget anything she might have said that was remotely civilized, she swallowed the bite of bagel she was chewing, swigged a mouthful of juice and said conversationally, “Gee, Dad, you look like you’ve been in a whorehouse, and maybe you shoulda showered before breakfast. Who’d you screw last night, anyway?”
The bite of bagel Hank was about to take fell out of his mouth and into his hand. His eyes narrowed, his mouth thinned. “Pardon?” he asked softly.
Megan shrugged, enjoying the shock on his face—life would hardly be worth living if she couldn’t knock Hank on his heels at least several times a week—and simplified the already coarse language for him. “Was it anyone I know, and did you at least wear a fun bag to the party so I don’t wind up an orphan in a few years?”
She’d made love with Hank Mathison.
And not just once, but several times.
Kate tried to hold it back, but the grin came anyway, uninvited, wide and naughty and joyous. Wow. Double and triple wow. So that was what the fuss was about. No wonder. It was amazing, incredible.
And Hank, himself, was more than she had words to describe.
She’d realized that long before she’d known she would lay with him, but now...she understood more, knew everything she’d already known about him in some deeper part of herself—inside her heart, inside her soul and inside her body as well as inside her mind. He was decent and honorable, funny and wry, possessed of an able-to-laugh-at-himself sense of humor. He was passionate and uninhibited, unrestrained and capable of giving wholly, unconditionally of himself. He was a man of strength, as capable of violence as he was of love, but a man who knew himself well enough to hold violence in check...even as he could not say love.
And that was the thing she knew about him now that she hadn’t realized before. That he had seen and heard important words used too lightly to convey things they didn’t mean. He meant what he said when he said it, but he preferred to “show, not tell,” because the fewer words used, the fewer lies that could be told. He’d seen and done enough lying in his career to know.
She climbed out of the bathtub—tepid to cool water in the morning’s already stifling heat, instead of the hot water Hank had prescribed—and sloughed condensation off the mirror, wondering if the imprint he’d made on her heart showed as plainly on her face as it felt like it did. There was her mouth, plumped out from kisses as though she’d had collagen injections; below her left ear, the sucking print bestowed by teeth and tongue, and there, in the fleshy mound above her right breast a similar but darker brand that named her as his.
Looking down at herself, Kate fingered the symbol of Hank’s claim, noted the softened but still distended pout of her breasts and nipples. Even now they ached as much for his touch as they did from it—and that ache was as sweet as the sting between her legs, the awareness that if he asked she would gladly welcome him there again, this instant
Whether he knew it yet or not, he was hers.
And that was the difference she saw in the mirror when she looked this time: a softening around her mouth, the glow in her eyes that proclaimed her not only a woman who’d taken a lover, but a woman who’d chosen a mate, a woman who loved.
“Was it anyone I know, and did you at least wear a fun bag to the party so I don’t wind up an orphan in a few years?”
Two hours later, still reeling from his daughter’s verbal punch in the face, Hank sat in the shade near the equipment shed and stared at the bits of llama halter in his fingers. It hadn’t occurred to him until Megan’s...ill mannered, to say the least...question that he and Kate hadn’t been the least bit careful.
Startled he might be, but Hank couldn’t regret not using protection when he did realize it—well, he could but it wouldn’t do any good now—because, well...regret wasn’t his way. Not to mention that it wasn’t possible for him to regret anything he’d shared with Kate the previous night. Not no way, no how, as Gen’s granddad used to say.
Blood tests wouldn’t be out of the question, of course, but he’d been clean as of his last physical, and sitting behind a desk for the past five years rarely, if ever, put him at risk of accidental exposure to anything except whatever flu was going around the office at any given time. And as for Kate, well...he’d gone with her when she took Bele into the prosthetics unit at University of Michigan Medical for his fitting. While Bele and the prosthetist had gone about deciding whether the boy needed only a new pylon or both pylon and suspension, Kate had gone off to
the lab to donate a pint of blood—a regular routine, according to what Dennis had told him. From the health standpoint, Hank figured they were as safe as conservative, nonrisk behavior could make them.
Which didn’t make Megan’s question any easier to answer.
It wasn’t her crudity that bothered him so much as her attitude. Crudity he understood, had on occasion used himself as a cover for emotions he needed to hold at bay, or to disguise realities that were too vulgar to deal with in any given moment. Crudity buried insecurity, fear, forced attention away from an instant, substituted for boldness, acted as an anchor to peers in the rough seas of adolescence—and, as often as not, adulthood.
No, although it was hardly attractive and certainly didn’t make his daughter more likable, and while he hated both hearing it come out of her mouth too easily and finding himself shocked when it did, the gritty-to-obscene language she used to voice her observations wasn’t the problem. It was the whole way she seemed to look at sex, love and everything else.
He could say, “You won’t be an orphan because of my carelessness.” Or he could go on the offensive and ask her—God. what a thought—what she used.
Or he could sit where he was and feel as if she’d ripped out his heart with her callousness, then jammed her thumb in his eye for good measure.
None of those responses were acceptable when what he had before him was a prime opportunity to talk with his daughter about the differences between love and sex, peer pressure and choice, reckless behavior and commitment.
Still, it was difficult for a father to describe the difference between having sex and making love to his hard-as-nails sixteen-year-old daughter when he wasn’t ready to admit the possibility of love to himself. Harder, yet, to explain the differences between the willingness to make a commitment and a casual fling, emotional experience and inexperience, choice and the acceptance of accountability, whatever the outcome, to someone who was still going out of her way to avoid certain responsibilities and who, because of her lack of years, thought she knew it all. So he didn’t try.
Besides, at this juncture, it was none of Megan’s damned business anyway, and Kate hadn’t said, “Hey, go ahead, spread the news, tell the kids we made love last night and that we’re probably going to again and see how they deal with it.”
He also wasn’t ready to share his new...relationship—for want of a better word—with Kate with anyone else yet, and especially not with Megan.
Despite how...permanent...being with Kate had felt the previous night, they were still way too new to be sure of each other. Whatever he’d felt, she’d felt, might all have been an accident of time, place and circumstance, rather than something lasting. He didn’t think that was the case, but it had been a long time since he’d shared intimacies with a woman and it had been a “never before” for Kate with a man, so what did he know?
Not much sometimes, judging by Megan, that was sure.
Which brought him down to the thing that troubled him, sitting alone in the doorway of the equipment barn repairing a llama halter and watching the ominous sky: what he’d actually said in response to Megan’s provoking question.
“Honey—” He’d risen to lay his palms flat on the table, then leaned forward until he was nose to nose with her; his tone had been scalding. “If I even considered doing anything like you suggest last night or ever, you don’t have the language to describe it. I do not now, did not last night, nor will I ever screw anyone. The only time or way to have sex is when it’s more than sex, when you’re ready to make a commitment to another person and make love, with love. Until you’ve got that figured out you’re not anywhere near old enough to even consider it for yourself, let alone question me about my alleged activities. You got that?”
Then he’d left and Megan had been the one with the fallen bite of bagel in her hand and the shock on her face.
Shocking her for a change felt good, but Hank wasn’t certain he’d handled...the details...as well as he might have. Wasn’t sure he’d said all there was to say and was pretty convinced he should have stayed where he was instead of leaving.
Was sure he could have put things in a little more positive light, left room for further discussion instead of closing off potential dialogue quite so...effectively.
Still, whether he let her know it or not, she’d had quite an effect on him. Within thirty minutes of leaving Megan, he’d showered, dressed and taken a run into a pharmacy for condoms. It might be a bit like closing the barn door after the llamas got loose, but the flip view was: better late than never.
Or so he hoped.
Chapter 11
The day progressed in dregs and bits, cranky with humidity and crowded with emotional portent.
With the sky as threatening as the weather report, everyone stayed out of the fields and near the house. As the heat rose, Kate had the older kids rig awnings to extend the cooler areas around the loafing sheds and the surrounding trees. Bele and Mike also helped U run hoses and set up sprinklers and wading pools in the open pens to keep the llamas cool.
The bandanna Kate wore to hide the hickey on her neck did double duty when she wrapped a tube of crushed ice in it and once again tied it under her hair. The chill was heaven amid the temperatures of hell. Hank made sure no one was around to see, then dropped a kiss on her temple when she brought a similar ice-filled bandanna to him. She smiled up at him and drew her finger along his jaw in a gesture of intimacy and familiarity that spoke volumes.
He had trouble letting her go after that, but anything further was inappropriate to the moment so he did—reluctantly. Time was a commodity they both needed and neither could afford, stretched as it was to accommodate more than possible already. Maybe he thought, watching Kate stride across to the house, they could squeeze in dinner together one night, a movie or something.
It was the “or something” that lay closest to the surface of his heart.
Troubled eyes following her father whenever he was in sight, Megan stood in the shade with Harvey and, hardly aware that she was doing it, brushed the patient llama in the same spot until he trod gently on her toe in an attempt to get her to quit or move on. When that failed, he switched his hindquarters around and bumped her into the maple they stood beneath. When she rocked sideways into the tree and eyed him with surprise, Harvey stretched out his neck to sniff noses with her before swinging his head and butting the brush out of her hand. The message was as plain as the body language, “Enough already, knock it off.” Then he touched his nose to hers again, looked around at where her father helped Bele reposition a wading pool, and turned back to her. Harvey’s communication this time was equally—if disconcertingly—clear inside Megan’s head. “It’s been a long time, little one, and he’s not like llamas. All life cycles forward, it doesn’t stop for death. Your father is a lonely man. and a lonely man needs a life mate. Time to grow up, little friend, and get over it. Time to respect your father’s humanness the way you want him to respect yours.”
Having experienced this inexplicable sort of...telepathic communication with Harvey before. Megan was hardly surprised by the gentle rebuke. Kate had long ago matter-of-factly told her that five thousand years of interaction with humans made some sort of communication between their two species probable. She’d suggested Megan consider the contact she shared with Harvey as a bridge to understanding, a far more advanced and enhanced version of the type of communication that existed between humans and house pets such as dogs or cats.
Accepting whatever kind of special rapport existed between herself and the llama, however, didn’t mean Megan was also willing to buy Harvey’s...observations as gospel.
No matter how right he might be.
Hank jumping down her throat this morning when she’d accused him of having indiscriminate sex had been both eyeopening and disturbing. It had never even occurred to her he might fall in love again—nor that, being a man and a seemingly rather obtuse man at that, he would have such romantic notions of what sex should be. If he
wasn’t her father, she might find his attitude cute, but archaic.
Nearby Harvey tossed his head and made hawking and spitting sounds in her general direction. Megan ignored him, refusing to believe the camelid might actually be commenting on her thoughts.
Tai arrived back from his discussion with the extension agent at Krahn’s tree farm, thoughtful and determined. Although the new strain of blight that was attacking Gus’s trees and turning them brown before killing them seemed to be confined to the specific genus of firs he grew and apparently wasn’t spreading to his pines and spruces, Tai knew better than to be complacent simply because Stone House didn’t grow the firs.
Against Kate’s admonishings and in spite of the storm warnings and rising winds, he collected his hand magnifier and headed for the fields on the tractor. He would, he assured his partner—and he stressed the word, separating Kate from her maternal instincts as effectively as possible—take Risto with him and do a fast check of the trees and come back in and, oh, by the way, her bandanna was slipping and she had a bruise on her neck that looked like a hickey and she might just want to cover that up before Dya and his rampant imagination concocted a story about it...
Tai wasn’t the only one who had comments to make Kate think twice about...well, things. Li also had a few things to say—although none of them was directed at Kate per se. But they did strike home.
Hard.
It was early afternoon in a quiet kitchen. Kate was boiling macaroni and preparing raw vegetables for a macaroni-salad supper; Li and Megan were at the table separating the day’s maiL Amid the pile of envelopes were two that were identical, one addressed to each of them. Li quickly slit hers open, while Megan paused first to read the return address.
“Baby shower,” she pronounced scornfully before Li could pull her card loose and tossed the envelope aside unopened.
Li nodded, regarding Megan thoughtfully. “Lynn Deering’s. She must have decided to keep the baby after all.”