by Erin Wright
The world stopped in that moment. He couldn’t hardly breathe, havin’ a pretty lady like Hannah Lambert liking him. Shit like that just didn’t happen to a dummy from the wrong side of the tracks.
He forced himself to pull away. “We should get to cookin’,” he said softly. “Our trip to Franklin and back for no good reason is gonna make this dinner later than normal anyhow.”
“I’m sorr—”
He cut her off, placing a calloused finger on her soft lips. The electricity was sparkin’ so strong between them, it was likely to set his truck on fire if he weren’t careful.
He weren’t real sure he wanted to be careful.
“I shoulda thought of it,” he admitted. “I’m so used to choosin’ based on what Brooksy likes, it didn’t even occur to me.”
Before she could change her mind and tell him that she wanted to just go home after all, he slid out of the truck and over to her side to help her out.
He weren’t about to let Miss Hannah Lambert go home.
Not yet, anyway.
Chapter 18
Hannah
Hannah trailed Elijah slightly as they walked into his house, making it easy for her to catch the slight tightening of his shoulders as they went through the beat-up front door. He looked more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and as she looked around his well-worn home, she was pretty sure she knew why.
He’d cleaned out his truck, knowing she’d be riding in it, but he hadn’t planned on taking her back to his house. He probably didn’t think it was clean enough for her or something.
She put her hand on his arm – a move that took way too much courage but she forced herself to do it anyway – and said, “It looks fine, really. You weren’t expecting me to see it, so of course it didn’t get the spit ‘n shine treatment that the truck did.”
He laughed a little at that. “Don’t be givin’ away my janitor secrets so easily,” he mock-scolded her. “You can’t go ‘round telling everybody that I add a little spit to every cleanin’. They might take over my job and then where would I be?” He laughed derisively at the idea, and she chuckled politely even as she wondered again what he actually wanted to do as a career. He’d started to tell her in the truck but had changed topics mid-sentence, making her sure that there was something there.
Something he wasn’t willing to share with her just yet.
Before she could figure out a discrete way of probing him, though, he led the way into a threadbare kitchen; scuff marks, entrenched dirt, and even a few deep gashes showing the age of the half-century-old orange-and-brown linoleum floors. The drab olive green Formica countertops had seen more than a few hot pans set directly down on it, and no amount of scrubbing was ever going to bring it back to life.
“I was thinkin’ we could—” He stopped when he saw her gaze was focused on the extreme divots in the floor. “It’s a rental,” he said by way of explanation. “The best I could afford on a janitor’s income and my ex suckin’ up every last penny she can.”
“Why don’t you show me what I can do to help with dinner,” she said politely, hoping that understanding was showing in her eyes, and not pity. A man like Elijah wouldn’t want pity. “I’m not the world’s best cook but I do know which end of the knife to hold, so there’s that.”
He laughed and the tension in his shoulders eased just a little. “Sounds like you and me have about the same cookin’ skills,” he said with an endearing grin that was a perfect match to Brooklyn’s. “I ain’t burnt down my kitchen yet, so I figure I’m doin’ good.” He shrugged and they set about cooking.
He had her work on a simple salad while he defrosted two deer steaks. The white wrapping around the meat, along with the stamp proclaiming “Kendall’s Kuts” on the side, made it obvious that it was cut and wrapped down at the local butcher shop.
“You have Kurt Kendall cut and wrap for you?” she asked, a little surprised as she got to work on dicing tomatoes. “I thought he mostly focused on domestic animals, like pig and cow.”
Elijah sent her a shocked look. “You’re right, of course, but he’s a good friend of mine, so he does my deer and elk on the side. I can’t believe you know which butcher in town does which kinda animal.”
It was her turn to laugh. “First off, I taught three of Mr. Kendall’s kids, so I know him and his wife real well. Second of all, my dad liked to hunt and would take me along, both to the hunting part and to the butchering part. He said it would teach me to appreciate my food. Before, you know…” She waved her hand around the general area of her head, hoping she wouldn’t have to say anything more.
At Eli’s confused look he shot her over his shoulder, she finished quietly, a huge lump in her throat. “Before he forgot who I am, and how to turn a key in a lock.”
“He don’t remember how to use a key?” Elijah asked incredulously. He was heating up a cast iron skillet as they chatted, and the fact that he wasn’t looking at her made it a little easier for her to talk. Please don’t look at me. Please don’t look at me. She twisted a lock of her hair around and around in her fingers. She was more relaxed around Elijah than she was any other adult who didn’t belong to the Early Spinster’s Club, but that didn’t mean that she was actually relaxed.
She mostly felt like her stomach was doing its best to trade places with her heart, and her heart wasn’t going along with it.
“That was the first real sign of dementia for him.” She forced herself to pull her fingers out of her hair and focused instead on the head of lettuce Elijah had handed to her. She made sure it came out in even strips, not a cut out of place. “Before that, he’d forget about appointments or would stumble over my name – stupid stuff that everyone does. I was a little worried about him, but I think everyone worries about their parents getting older and being able to take care of themselves. I told myself that I was mother-henning him to death, so I needed to give him space. I had myself convinced that the fact that he sometimes would forget that my mom was gone was practically normal. And then…”
The strips of lettuce were becoming increasingly thinner and more precise, starting to resemble linguini noodles rather than lettuce for a salad but the movement was soothing and she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
Here was something she could control.
Slice…slice…slice…
Elijah wasn’t talking and for once, silence was actually bothering Hannah, and so she filled the void.
“I stopped by one day to check on him, and found him on the front porch, upset as could be. It took a while to figure out what was going on, because of course he didn’t know what was going on, only that he couldn’t get into his house. I kept telling him to put the key in the lock and it was like he didn’t understand the English language anymore. The words had no meaning to him.”
Her throat closed up and she swallowed hard, trying to push down the panic she’d felt that day when she’d finally been forced to realize that her father, the strongest man she knew, was sliding into a deep, dark hole that she couldn’t help him out of.
“I showed him…” The world was going wavy around her and her eyes were hot and she was trying not to cry; trying not to show how her whole world had fallen to pieces in an instant.
She wasn’t weak; she was strong.
She had to be. For her dad.
“I showed him how,” she started again, past the grapefruit-sized lump in her throat, “to put the key into the lock and turn it, and he kept shaking his head and saying it was too hard. He couldn’t do it. Locks were the first thing to go, but he quickly lost other abilities, too, like how to run a microwave or how to put on a belt. They were simple, stupid, stupid things and he just…couldn’t.”
The lettuce was a mushy mess in front of her and still she was slicing, and then Eli’s hand was on her shoulder and he was pulling her into his arms, wrapping them snuggly around her, holding her and shielding her from the world where she had to be the parent and her dad was the child. She sobbed into
his shirt, the sound of her heart rushing in her ears and she couldn’t breathe or think but only cry and then cry some more.
After an eternity or two, the pain began to subside along with the tide of tears, and she pulled back with a watery smile. “I bet you’ve never had a date bawl on you like that before,” she said ruefully, swiping at her eyes, trying to keep from smearing her makeup even more than she already had. All of Carla’s hard work, destroyed in an instant.
The thought made her confront the fact that she’d made a real fool out of herself. She felt her cheeks stain red as she pulled further away, embarrassed as a teen caught making out with her boyfriend, and she felt a different panic well up inside of her. She’d not had much experience dating guys – none worth speaking about, anyway – but even she knew that bawling like a baby and smearing makeup everywhere wasn’t exactly the way to ensure a second date.
She began blindly stumbling away, in search of a bathroom where she could splash cold water on her face and clean off her destroyed makeup, when she felt Elijah’s hand on her. “Hold still,” he said soothingly, tilting her head up to look him straight in the eye as he began to wipe her face with a Kleenex. She couldn’t bear to keep eye contact with him while he did such an embarrassing task, so she settled on keeping her eyes closed and letting him clean her up like he would a small child.
“Did you learn how to do this with Brooklyn?” she asked, keeping her eyes closed, hoping that the ostrich method of dealing with embarrassing events really did work.
“Yeah,” he said softly, turning her face gently in the palm of his calloused, work-roughened hand. “You can’t raise a 10-year-old girl without more than a few breakdowns. As a fifth grade teacher, I’m sure you know just what I’m talkin’ about.”
She cringed inwardly. “It’s true,” she said with an embarrassed chuckle. She began to wonder if crawling underneath his bed and hiding for the rest of the night was an option or not. “Although boys tend to work things out with their fists, they have more than their fair share of crying bouts, too.”
“Lookin’ good,” Elijah said softly, and she forced her eyes open to look up at him. She didn’t want to – Lord knew she didn’t – but somehow, she was just sure that was what he was waiting for, and he wouldn’t move an inch until she did.
“You’re one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen,” he whispered. “What’re you doin’ with an idiot like me?”
And then he was kissing her, his mouth moving hungrily over hers, pressing and probing his tongue against the seam of her lips, seeking entry into her mouth. She didn’t know what she was doing – the list of men who’d ever kissed her only had one man on it, and she definitely didn’t want to compare Elijah to him – but she did her best to follow his lead by opening up. He groaned against her lips as his tongue swept inside, setting parts of her ablaze that she hadn’t paid attention to in a very long time. She instinctively dug her fingers into his muscular shoulders, trying to regain her balance in a suddenly tilting world.
No, this definitely wasn’t like the other time she’d been kissed. Not at all. This was glorious, amazing, gravity-defying—
It was the burning smell that brought them back to reality.
One moment, she was lost in a world that she never knew existed and never wanted to leave, and the next, her nose was twitching, and so was his. They pulled back and stared at each other for a second going onto a millennium before they both spun towards the stove. There, smoking, were the deer steaks, little tendrils curling up from them like miniature smoke signals.
“Shit!” Elijah roared as he grabbed a hot pad and yanked the cast iron pan off the gas burner, staring down at the ruined meat with a look of total horror.
Hannah looked down at the meat and suddenly, giggles overtook her. She shouldn’t be laughing – she knew she shouldn’t – but she just couldn’t help herself.
He glowered at her darkly, clearly not seeing the humor in the situation. “You have to admit,” she said around another bout of laughter, “that this is a dandy of a compliment.” She gestured towards the smoking, ruined deer steaks.
“Compliment?” He stared at her like she’d lost her mind.
And maybe she had. Tonight’s date had been anything but dull. Maybe the stress of it all was causing her to go a little nuts in the head.
“Well,” she said slowly, not wanting to admit to insanity quite yet, “I like to think that kissing me was such an amazing experience, you completely lost track of where you were and what you were doing. That’s a heck of a kiss, right?”
First, one side of his mouth twitched, and then the other side twitched. His eyes started glowing, and then the laughter came roaring out. “I like how you think!” he said, wiping at his eyes when he was finally done laughing. “That kind of optimism…I sure could use a dose or two of it in my life.”
She batted her eyelashes at him. “I do my best,” she told him mock seriously.
Honestly, she tended to be more of a realist than an optimist. Life could be downright crappy at times, and she just didn’t have it in her to always look for the bright side of every awful event.
But two burnt steaks? It wasn’t hard to find the humor in that.
“So,” he said, growing serious and staring down at the massacred slabs of meat, “that were my idea for dinner. I’m striking out all over the place.”
She shrugged. “You have easy kid food, right? Canned soup and bread to make grilled sandwiches?”
“But, we’re on a date,” he protested.
“And a wise man once told me that all that mattered was being with each other,” she said with a wink. She couldn’t believe that she had the cojones to tease a guy like this, but there was something endearing and not too terribly intimidating about Elijah Morland, even if he was a guy, and even if he was handsome as sin.
He grinned at her. “He does sound like an awfully wise guy,” he said with a laugh. “We oughta listen to him.”
“My thoughts exactly. Now, where is the canned soup hiding?”
Chapter 19
Elijah
After they sat down to the most childish, least inspiring meal ever served on a date – Campbell’s soup and grilled cheese sandwiches weren’t exactly gonna set anyone’s hair on fire with delight – Elijah tried to think of somethin’ to talk about.
Teaching. Everyone likes talkin’ about their careers.
Everyone who has a career, that is.
He pushed that thought away.
“What made you decide to be a teacher?” he asked, watching her neatly cut her sandwich into two triangles and then dip one of the corners into the soup. Awkwardly, he picked up his knife and cut his sandwich too. He didn’t tend to dip his sandwiches, but if Hannah were doin’ it…
She bit her lower lip as she thought about the question. Watching her bite her lip had to be the sexiest thing he’d ever seen a woman do when she weren’t meanin’ to actually be sexy. His dick hardened in response, and he swallowed a groan, cursing at himself.
He was not gonna get a hard-on over his daughter’s teacher thinkin’ about teachin’.
“I love helping others,” she said quietly, her full lips pursed to blow on the hot soup.
Is she tryin’ to drive me insane?
No, Hannah Lambert was just that innocent. She had an air about her that practically screamed her innocence from the rooftop.
“Ever since I was a child,” she said after taking a sip of the soup, “I knew I’d be a teacher. It’s what I was meant to be, you know? Michelle Winthrop – you know her? Works down at the pound as the city animal control officer?”
He nodded, listening and wondering where this was going. Of course he knew Michelle – she was also older than him, but she had the kind of forceful personality that meant she stood out in every crowd. She were on the larger side, which Elijah figured was a big help when she had to wrestle stray animals into submission.
He didn’t want to come up against her in an arm wrestling co
ntest, that was for damn sure.
“She’s always loved animals,” Hannah continued, “but she’d never planned on being the city animal control officer. Her first love is horses, and she’d wanted to race them, but…anyway, so she’s still working with animals and she’s a great advocate for them, but I think she could take it or leave it at the city.”
Hannah let out a long sigh, like the weight of the world was on her shoulders.
“Me? This is all I want to do; all I’ll ever do; and I’m happy there. Some classes are harder than others, and the paperwork end of things is only getting worse by the year. Some days, I spend more time filling out paperwork than I do actually teaching children, and that drives me crazy. The pay…don’t even get me started on how pathetic teacher pay is, and on top of it all, I buy things for my classroom out of my own pocket all the time.” Her jaw tightened up a little and he wondered if bein’ poor made her life as miserable as his was. “But,” she finally said, shrugging, “teaching is my passion, so I take the lumps with it.”
And with that, she went as quiet as a church mouse, the curtain droppin’ over her, blocking out the world, and him along with it. She dipped the last of her sandwich into her soup and popped it into her mouth, chewin' and starin’ over his shoulder into the kitchen, not meetin’ his gaze.
He openly stared at her, trying to figure out what was going on in that gorgeous redhead of hers. She’d been talkin’ endlessly, and then…nothing. He figured that trying to drag words out of her when she was like this would be like trying to take a cat on a walk – it weren’t gonna work real well and they’d both be pissed off by the end.
But somehow, he felt compelled to take the damn cat on a walk.
“Why do you just shut down on me sometimes?” he asked bluntly.
“Shut down?” she repeated, glancing at him so hurriedly, he didn’t even think she’d met his gaze, and then her eyes were pinned on her soup, like it held the secret to eternal life or somethin’.