by Janzen, Tara
Piles of books and papers were spread out on the desk she’d moved back into the sitting room. Curriculum notes covered her end tables—British fiction on the one next to the fireplace, myth and Bible on the one between her brocade love seat and chair. Someday she hoped to teach Shakespeare, but she was in no position to make requests. In truth, she was grateful just to have her job. Even with her tenure, the university had been under enormous pressure last year to force her resignation.
She’d been such a blind, stupid fool. She, who’d always prided herself on her intelligence, had fallen for a handsome face and the oldest trick in the book.
With a small sound of disgust she turned away from the window, then whirled back around. It was Jack. Her heart started racing as she watched his truck round the corner into her driveway. Her gaze dropped to the envelope.
Coward, she accused herself, but there was nothing she could do. She didn’t have the courage to face him, and for whatever reasons, she’d dawdled and revised the letter until it was far too late to mail it.
Before she could change her mind, she walked swiftly into the office and laid the letter on the stack of lumber where Jack always put his lunchbox. She’d written plainly and concisely. He couldn’t fail to understand. She’d informed him that their contract, oral as it had been, was terminated. He’d done sufficient work to compensate her loss. She would hire the finish work out and still feel she’d gotten the best of the bargain. His building expertise had far surpassed her expectations. He’d built her office as if it were meant to last a thousand years. Then she’d thanked him and signed off with “sincerely,” and somewhere between the salutation and the closing she’d worked in a brief but heartfelt apology for almost slapping him. She hadn’t mentioned their two “misunderstandings,” and she certainly hadn’t referred to them as kisses.
Kisses . . . The word slipped across her mind like a silent whisper, and her fingers slowly curled into a fist. Lord, the man knew how to kiss . . . remarkably.
The sound of a slamming truck door jerked her out of her reverie, and Lila quickly disappeared back into the main part of the house.
* * *
If the lady won’t go out on a date, bring the date to her, Jack thought, juggling a floppy pizza box, a six-pack of beer, a container of salad, and a smaller container of Rudi’s Pizzeria’s famous thick and creamy gorgonzola dressing. Being a connoisseur of pizza by necessity, he knew Rudi’s was good.
The beer was imported and expensive. But the salad was the piece de resistance: lettuce, tomatoes, cherry peppers, salami, pepperoni, provolone, big chunky croutons, black olives, and the gorgonzola dressing. No woman could resist Rudi’s salad. It had the acceptable cachet of being a salad, but it was richer than sin.
Dessert was richer than double sin, a Kahlua truffle torte that was no torte at all, but a melt-in-your-mouth concoction of bittersweet chocolate and mystery. Irresistible.
He let himself into the office and walked across the cold plywood floor to set the pizza on the space heater. Then he carried the heater closer to the door leading to the rest of the house and knelt down to turn on the heat. If he’d had a fan, he would have used it to waft the tantalizing aroma in her direction. It was all part of his plan.
The lady did not want to be pushed. He’d had all week to figure out and digest that particular piece of information, so he’d decided to pull instead. He would be low key, easygoing, and available. Very available. He’d be there if she needed a friend or a shoulder to lean on. He wouldn’t make any more passes that ended up with him becoming so aroused, he forgot to think and nearly got his face slapped. Yet she’d been so hot and sweet in his arms, even the memory of their kisses sparked a physical reaction in him.
He stood abruptly, ran a hand through his hair, and reminded himself that patience was a virtue. Pizza was the bait that night, not the incredible fireworks they made when their mouths and bodies rubbed up against each other.
Lord knew he was no saint, he’d never claimed to be, but he’d always been discriminating when it came to women, love, and making love. His response to Lila Singer made him wonder if he’d lost the ability to distinguish between lust and longing, love and desire, wanting and needing, between the woman herself and what she did to him with each kiss.
He remembered loving and wanting Jessica Daniels in the eleventh grade until he’d thought his manhood and his heart would both break into a thousand pieces if he didn’t have her. He’d been wrong. Jessica Daniels had never realized he was on the planet. He’d followed her into and flunked out of chemistry for nothing, and he’d remained intact for the next love down the line.
Marriage had been different in every way. He still missed a lot of things about marriage: having someone sharing his home, someone special, an ally through good times and bad—until things got really bad. And without admitting to being a chauvinist, he missed a woman’s cooking. He missed it a lot. Women cooked differently from men. They put more love and less ego into it, and they actually followed recipes. It was a noticeable difference.
Lila Singer was a noticeable difference too. Being in love with her was out of the question. Love took longer than two kisses, three months of fantasies, and a week of unanswered phone calls. He was definitely fascinated, though, definitely intrigued, and he definitely wanted her. He felt possessive and protective. She touched him in places he hadn’t expected and in ways he hadn’t experienced, and with only her kiss. She’d shown magic for her husband. Without knowing what it was at the time, Jack had felt the remnants of that magic under a harvest moon, and he couldn’t help but want, or need, to bring it back to full power.
He also needed to eat some pizza before the smell drove him crazy. He turned around to drop his gloves on the lumber he’d been using as a makeshift table, noticed the envelope, and his enthusiasm for the evening did a steady nosedive. Letters were not his favorite form of communication, especially when they came from someone he’d been looking forward to seeing all week.
He picked up the envelope and studied the letters looped and swirled across the front. It was his name all right, Jack and Hudson, which was barely a step above Mr. and Hudson. With a short sigh he shoved the envelope into his shirt pocket.
“Dammit.” The word slipped out between his teeth. What was he supposed to do now?
* * *
Pizza? Lila turned her face toward the door of the sitting room and sniffed. Definitely pizza, pepperoni pizza, probably with green peppers and black olives. She checked her watch and wondered if she had any more of those microwave things in the freezer. Of course, even if she did, it wouldn’t be hot, fresh pizza dripping with melted mozzarella and with sizzling slices of pepperoni scattered over the top. Her stomach growled, and she mentally told it to shut up and get ready for one of those frozen microwave things.
Why, tonight of all nights, did he have to bring a pizza to work? Not only was the smell bound to linger and make her own dinner even less appetizing, but as soon as he read the letter he would leave. That great-smelling pizza would be cold by the time he got home or wherever he went—which was no business of hers. The man had an ex-wife and probably a little black book of paramours, and why not? He had a lot of appeal. He was clean-cut, and good-looking in a sexy, outdoorsy kind of way. He ran a successful business with the free, independent streak of the self-employed. He worked hard and maintained high standards. He responded to ethical and moral obligations above and beyond the call of the law. The man was a paragon. There were probably a thousand other things he usually did on Friday nights, things he would prefer to do besides work on her office.
Darn it. She should have ordered her own pizza. Why didn’t she think of these things in advance? And what in the world had she been working on before he’d disrupted her concentration—as he always did. She flipped through her legal pads and darned him again for being the cause of her computerless status. She wished he’d hurry up and read the letter and leave, so she could get on with her own boring dinner and boring eveni
ng.
The unmistakable sound of his hammer halted her in mid-flip. Now what was he doing? she wondered, lifting her head in irritation and letting the page fall back into place. She swiveled her chair around to listen, and her irritation increased. His hammer kept up a steady beat. He’d missed the letter.
After a minute the hammering stopped. Lila held her breath, waiting for the sound of tool gathering and door closing. She waited and waited for a span of eternity before her patience broke.
She pushed out of her chair and headed for the door. That was the worst thing about living alone, she thought. You had to do everything yourself. Now, instead of the quiet civility of a letter, she’d have to confront him with his termination. She’d be darned if she apologize in person for the near slap, though. He could read that part later.
Her steps carried her resolutely to the kitchen, where the intensifying aroma of hot pizza and a weakening will made her falter. She was too hungry for confrontation, or so she told herself, and began to turn around.
The barely audible sound of swearing stopped her. She took a few more steps toward the open doorway and stood in the middle of the kitchen, craning her neck to the left to see into the office.
As she’d thought, he was reading the letter and didn’t look any too pleased with it. He was sitting in profile to her, huddled over the space heater on a stool he’d obviously just knocked together out of the scrap pile. A trouble light dangled from an open beam, casting him in a halo of illumination—him, the pizza, and the letter that held his utmost attention. He was staring at the piece of paper like a man searching for something he’d never find.
She took two more steps forward, watching in growing curiosity as he set a half-eaten piece of pizza back in the box and used his free hand to follow along with the words she’d written. Her brow furrowed, and she took another step. His action struck a strange chord in her memory. It seemed out of place, somehow wrong—until he began to whisper.
Shock stopped her in her tracks. She knew exactly where she’d seen a similar scene. It had been during one of her education practicums for her bachelor degree. She’d taught in a junior high school, the eighth grade, and a few of the children had been behind in their reading skills. The slowest of them had resorted to mouthing syllables and using his fingers to guide his eyes across the page.
Jack Hudson had the same problem. He couldn’t read.
Four
The conclusion had no sooner registered in Lila’s mind than Jack looked up and caught her staring at him. She blushed, and worse, she thought he did too.
Silence stretched between them, thickening the air with embarrassment and, on her part, guilt. She’d written the letter out of cowardice and had ended up putting both of them in a terribly awkward position. When would she learn to face her problems head-on?
Illiteracy. The word popped into her mind and her blush deepened. She felt ashamed for him and knew she had no right. Illiteracy conjured up conditions like poverty, below-average intelligence, and laziness—none of which applied to the Jack Hudson she knew.
She didn’t know what to do. Turning around and leaving would be incredibly rude, unbearably cowardly, and would get her nowhere. He might or might not figure out that she’d meant him to be the one to leave. But staring at him didn’t seem to be doing them any good either.
“Pizza?” he asked, reaching for the box on the heater, his voice gruff.
“What?” she choked out.
He cleared his throat and looked up at her. “Pizza. I brought a large one, in case you hadn’t had your dinner yet.”
“Oh.”
“Have you?”
“What?”
“Had your dinner?”
“No.” The truth was out before she thought to lie.
“Good.” A grin teased the corner of his mouth. “I hate to eat alone.”
She didn’t know what motivated her more—relief from the overbearing tension, the opportunity to ignore what she’d just seen, the pizza, or the temptation of his smile. Whichever it was, she practically stumbled over herself jumping at his offer. “Should I get a couple of plates?”
“That’d be great. I brought a salad from Rudi’s.”
Her hunger shot up a degree or two, and she couldn’t keep the hopefulness out of her voice. “With gorgonzola dressing?”
His grin broadened. “A pint of it.”
She gave him a hesitant smile of her own, pleased with his choice, but was still feeling rocked by her discovery. Jack Hudson couldn’t read.
All through dinner he kept the conversation going with stories about jobs he and Smitty had done. There was the one about the lady who wanted twenty built-in mannequin heads in her closet to store her wigs. The sight was so eerie, Smitty had refused to go anywhere near the bedroom. Or so Jack had thought, until he went into the huge closet one day and all the heads simultaneously jerked around toward him, their sightless eyes pinning him in front of the pile of cedar drawers he’d been working on.
“I broke two of the drawers and banged the hell out of my head on a shelf trying to get out of that closet. His laughter underscored every word. “Practically gave myself a concussion.”
Lila giggled along with him, wondering if two beers were possibly one too many. She’d brought the plates out to the office, and they were both sitting around the space heater, eating pizza and salad. It was kind of like camping out, and the most unusual thing she’d done in a long time.
He grinned and twisted the top off another bottle of beer for himself. “Damn Smitty. We lost over two hundred dollars on the closet alone, but it was worth every penny. Lord, we must have laughed for a month. Every time I looked at him, he’d jerk his head around and stare at me, wide-eyed.”
Lila chuckled and wiped her eyes with the red bandanna he offered, forgetting, for the moment, her own complaints against Dale Smith.
“Of course, I got him back,” Jack said.
“Of course.” She hiccuped.
“I found this old stuffed cobra one day down in Denver. It was all coiled up, the hood flattened out, and it was kind of wobbly. So I brought it home, and the next day, just before quitting time, I put it in the front seat of Smitty’s pickup.”
Lila started laughing again, and he joined in.
“I wish I’d had a camera when he opened up his truck. The look on his face. And talk about lightning reflexes. Man, he slammed that door shut so fast and so hard, he broke all the glass in the window.”
Her sides were going to split; she was sure of it. His stories were crazy, absurd, and the funniest things she’d heard since she didn’t know when. Imagine, mannequins coming to life and cobras on the plains of Colorado. She barely got herself under control when he added, “I’ve still got the snake.” She burst out laughing all over again.
He rose to his feet and brushed a light kiss on the top of her head. “If you’ll make some coffee, I’ll get dessert.”
His action surprised her, warmed her, and squelched her laughter in the blink of an eye. “Okay,” she managed to say, and stood up too.
The coffee was beginning to drip when he came into the kitchen with a gold box tied with a black ribbon. The name Justine Chocolatier was inscribed across the top in black ink. Lila took one look at the box, one look at him, and said in a disbelieving voice, “You bought a whole torte?” Justine’s desserts were famous over half of northern Colorado.
“The whole thing,” he said. “Kahlua truffle.”
“Wow,” she said softly. The thought of so much decadence was a little overwhelming.
He sliced them each a generous piece, and Lila poured the coffee into two deep mugs. At his request they returned to the office, which Lila had to admit was acquiring a cozy ambience. The space heater glowed and emitted enough warmth to take the bite but not the adventure out of the air. Jack had folded his ski jacket and put it on a low stack of lumber for her to sit on, and the expanse of windows revealed a new snowstorm rolling in over the mountains.
�
��I’ll never be able to eat all this,” she said after three glorious bites.
“I know,” he said with a sly twinkle in his eye. “I planned on making the ultimate sacrifice and finishing your piece after mine. That’s why I made the pieces so big.”
She almost asked him where it all went. Justine’s Kahlua truffle torte had about one million five hundred calories per cubic inch, and he had no discernible extra weight on his tall, broad-shouldered body—his perfectly proportioned, quintessentially masculine, tall, broad-shouldered body. But on second thought, she decided such a question was far too personal and probably flirtatious. She took a sip of coffee instead and sat back to watch him eat her dessert.
He was solid. She remembered that from when he’d held her. Solid, and hard, and strong. She liked the way he smelled too. No cologne, just an enticing scent of man and sawdust. Another thought brought a private flush to her cheeks. She liked the way he tasted. She liked it a lot.
It was kind of musky, very real, and definitely erotic, especially when he cupped her face in his palm and turned her deeper into his kiss. She couldn’t forget how that had felt, or the flavor he’d left in her mouth, or the textures of his tongue and teeth. The memories had kept her awake most every night of the week.
“Second to the last bite,” he said, lifting his fork.
She opened her mouth and took the offered confection. It was rich and bittersweet, smooth and heavy, divine even, but it wasn’t as good as Jack Hudson’s kiss.
He slowly withdrew the fork from her mouth and ate the last bite, all the while watching her until she felt a rise in her body temperature. For a moment she was afraid she might do something terrible, or wonderful, like lean closer and kiss him. She didn’t think he’d mind, not when he looked at her as if he thought she, too, would taste better than Justine’s Kahlua truffle torte.
When Lila gazed at him like that, Jack knew he had to get out of there before he did something he might not be able to control, like lean over and kiss her. But his curiosity insisted on knowing what was in the letter before he left. He didn’t want to go home alone and struggle with her scrunched-up loops and waves, and he didn’t feel like driving over to his sister’s and having her read whatever Lila had written to him. That was assuming, of course, that even his sister could decipher the lady’s scrawl.