скачать книгу бесплатно
“I dunno. They’re real stretchy.”
“She could use lots and lots of safety pins. My mom’s got a whole big box. She says they’re just as good as sewing.”
Johanna shook her head. “You’re all hopeless. Okay, guys, scram. See you tomorrow.”
At least now the man would leave. Most of the parents congregated out in front of the locker room and chatted while waiting for their swimmers to shower and dress.
Hunter decided not to exit with the rest of the herd of parents who’d come to watch the practice. He wanted to talk to the coach, but he wasn’t quite sure how to approach her. Robby and Karen had not come to blows, verbal or otherwise, with each other. That could only mean they’d been engrossed in what they’d been doing and had had a good time.
This was good.
It was better than good. It was wonderful, unexpected, marvelous. This bit of manna from heaven was courtesy of Johanna, unorthodox though she may be. She had entertained and worn out those two. Any sleep he got tonight was due to this wonderful woman. He owed her. It was only right that he should repay her with maybe a drink or even a meal out, right? It certainly wouldn’t be any strain to go out with her. Hunter would take her someplace decent and see to it she had a good time. He could do that. He was cool. At least he had been until his entire world had caved in. Maybe he’d pick her brain a bit and—see. Karen and Robby took forever in the morning to dress. This would probably be no different. He had time. He could talk to her now.
Oh, God, he wasn’t leaving. Why didn’t he leave? Johanna unbuttoned her shirt and stepped out of her shorts.
Hunter, who’d been about to rise for the umpteen millionth time, froze. Good Lord, she was taking her clothes off. Right there on deck, she was taking them off. What was the woman thinking of? There were young children around. Hell, he was around, and Hunter wasn’t sure his heart was up to the havoc Johanna Durbin’s disrobing was causing his system.
Hunter was both relieved and disappointed when he realized Johanna wore a racing suit under her apparel.
And he’d thought she’d been a looker before, with her petite stature, blond curls and large, soulful eyes.
Competitive swimsuits were notoriously unflattering. They mashed a woman’s breasts flat and hugged the body, unerringly delineating every flaw in a mean-spirited, merciless, unforgiving display. Well, if this was Johanna’s body displayed at its worst, he didn’t even need to see her best. The body her suit outlined was flawless. Really. The woman didn’t have any flab, at least none Hunter could detect. No indeed, Johanna Durbin’s body needed no mercy or forgiveness.
She’d just risen above looker in his estimation and had levitated several degrees to stunner.
Hunter’s mouth actually began to water. How ridiculous. Surely at his age he was beyond all that. He was too urbane, too with it for such an elementary response to a female.
Still, he had to swallow.
Hunter shook his head to clear it. “Get a grip,” he ordered himself. He rose, determined to go and talk to the woman. “Damn the physiological responses,” he mumbled. “Full speed ahead.”
“Oh, God, he’s coming over here,” Johanna whispered. A new and decidedly odd feeling uncurled in the pit of her stomach. This was a dangerous man. Something deep inside of her recognized that fact. Johanna wanted nothing to do with him. He’d introduced himself earlier, but Johanna had evidently blocked his name out, for she couldn’t come up with it right then. It didn’t matter. For her, his name was spelled Trouble. Married, divorced, whatever, he had kids and she was within a few weeks of being done with all responsibility to that particular breed. Footloose and fancy-free. That was going to be her.
Johanna quickly swung around, pretending she hadn’t noticed his approach. Quickly, she stuffed her blond tresses up under her cap and pulled a pair of goggles into place. She dived off the edge.
Hunter stopped and watched her lithe form eat up the water. It was obvious Robby and Karen’s new coach had swum competitively. He didn’t know all that much about swimming, but he knew grace when he saw it. Johanna displayed an economy of form that was beautiful to watch. There were no wasted motions, no twisting, no struggling. She had executed what certainly looked like a beautiful flip turn at the far end of the pool and returned to her starting point in what he was sure was less than half a minute. Johanna flipped again and steamed away.
“Where’s the fire?” Hunter asked her wake.
“Uncle Hunter, what’re you doin’ still here? Everybody else is out in front. Me and Robby was looking and looking for you.”
Hunter reached down and rested a hand on Karen’s still-wet head. “Were you, pumpkin?” Then, recognizing fear when he heard it, Hunter said, “Well, you found me. I’ll always be here for you. Mommy and Daddy would have been, too, if they’d had a choice, sweetie.” His brother and sister-in-law’s death had shaken their children’s little world pretty badly and Hunter knew it would take a lifetime of reassurances to fix the damage.
Karen studied him with a serious eye, before nodding once. “Okay. Hold on, I gotta go tell Robby I found you. Robby!” Karen bellowed, and took off at a run.
Hunter gave one last lingering look to the pool and its sole occupant and slowly followed in Karen’s wake.
Several more adults showed up for adult lap time and Johanna wove her way through them, pushing herself hard for the next hour. By the time she pulled herself out of the pool, body exhausted but her mind still revved, her almost-eighteen-year-old brother Charlie had long since stopped by and taken home Aubrey and three more siblings; ten-year-old Stephen and nine-year-old William, who’d been swimming with the nine-and ten-year-old group, along with thirteen-year-old Grace, who’d worked with a third even older group. Johanna headed for the locker room, showered the chlorine off, dressed and drove herself home. Tucking her car into the garage for the night, she lovingly patted its hood as she passed in front of it. Her eyes started scanning the moment she left the garage.
“Good. Christopher took me seriously about doing a better job cutting the grass,” she acknowledged to herself as she passed through the yard and entered the house through the back door.
“Looks like the dishes are done and it’s possible the floor may have been swept.” Johanna opened the refrigerator door. “Lunches made.” She closed the door, went to the bottom of the steps to the second floor and yelled, “Homework check! Bring your assignment notebooks and matching papers down to the kitchen! Aubrey?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you practice?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh-huh. Anybody hear you practice that would be willing to bear witness?”
“William said I had to say he’d practiced, too, otherwise he was gonna say I didn’t, either, but I really did. You can even ask.”
“Charlie?” Johanna yelled.
“All right, okay, I’ll turn it off. Man, you have radar ears. How’d you even know I had the television on while I studied?”
She hadn’t. “I know all and see all. Did Aubrey practice?”
“Yeah.”
“For more than five minutes?”
Charlie didn’t respond right away. Evidently he had to think about it. “Maybe,” he finally responded.
“Close enough,” Johanna muttered, too tired to pursue it any further. She went out to the kitchen table and began to check homework assignments. After a few minutes, she sat back and eyed her four youngest siblings, who stood waiting for her to finish.
“Pretty good, guys. William, this one paper needs to be rewritten more neatly, but other than that, you all did a great job.”
Johanna glanced around the kitchen, noted the cookie sheet in the sink. “Did Chris bake the cookies?”
They all nodded.
“Peanut butter. But he wouldn’t let us have none,” Aubrey complained. “Said he was keeping them all for hisself.”
“He was teasing, honey. They’re for lunches. But you know, you all did such a great job at swimming and getting your work done I think we should break out the milk and all have a cookie.”
“Yes!” Grace pumped her fist and raced for the milk, Stephen got the glasses and Aubrey climbed on a chair to reach the cookie tin while William hurriedly rewrote his paper in better handwriting. Johanna knew for a fact it still wasn’t his personal best, but decided not to push it. She was too tired and the end of the school year was too close.
Sixteen-year-old Christopher ambled in during their treat. “Where’s Mom?” he asked, snagging a cookie.
“I was gonna have that one,” William immediately complained.
“Then you should have been quicker,” Chris informed Will while holding the cookie out of his reach. “Besides, I’m the one who made them.” He bit into it.
Johanna shook her head. “Mom had a late meeting,” she explained. “Probably will every night this week. She’s got a big deal cooking.”
Chris snorted. “What else is new? She’s never home.”
“Be grateful,” Johanna said. “Things could have gotten really rocky after Dad died if she hadn’t been able to make a success of herself. And she’s a whole lot tougher than me. Why, I remember when I was your age…”
Aubrey edged closer to her big sister. “Jo?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“Those two new kids at swim practice? They came to school today, too. One of them is going to be in my class. I kinda liked them.”
“Did you? Good. Me, too. And it’s hard to be the new kid, so they’ll need you to be nice to them.”
“Yeah, only know what?”
“What?”
“That guy?”
“What guy?”
“The guy what brought them.”
“Their dad? What about him?”
“He looked like a dad, only he wasn’t.”
Johanna’s ears perked up. “He wasn’t their dad?”
“Nuh-uh. They kept calling him Uncle Hunter, so I asked Karen why and they said it was ’cuz that’s what he was. Their uncle.”
Aubrey now had Johanna’s total attention. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Everybody was yelling and stuff in the locker room and I still had some water in my ears so I couldn’t hear too good what she was saying, but it was something about their parents going someplace and them staying with their uncle.”
Well, well, well, wouldn’t it be nice if her instincts had been off base? Easily over six feet with dark, dark hair and piercing blue eyes, this particular man fit her definition of the quintessential male. In fact, you could probably look up the word male in the dictionary and find Hunter Pace listed as the definition. “So he only has the kids temporarily,” Johanna murmured out loud.
Aubrey scrunched her thin little shoulders. “I guess. Know what else? They got two more in their family. Aaron and Mikie. Karen says it’s no fair ’cuz she’s the only girl.”
Johanna watched Christopher finish off the milk directly from the gallon container. Boys were so…primitive. “I can see her point. Rinse that out and put it in the recycling container, Chris,” she directed her brother, and sat back in her chair. “I wonder why they changed schools and everything?” she mused out loud, then shrugged. “Maybe they took a job overseas or something and are going to be gone for months.”
“Wouldn’t they have taken their kids with them?” Grace asked.
“Not necessarily,” Chris responded as he stepped on the milk carton to crush it. “Some parts of the near East, for example, aren’t all that safe, but the money’s probably too good to pass up. I mean, the real father could be an engineer or something who works in oil. Heck, for all we know the mom could be an industrial or chemical engineer.”
Aubrey’s eyes widened. “Wow. That’s what I’ll be. A engineer. I want to make lots of money, too, just like Karen’s mom.”
Johanna laughed. “Chris was just guessing, honey. For all we know Karen and Robby’s dad could be an elephant hunter and their mom a hula dancer.”
“For real?”
She laughed again. “I’m teasing, although I guess they could be. We’ll never know unless Karen or Robby tells us. I’m just surprised they didn’t send the kids to boarding school or something. It must be hard on their uncle to suddenly have four young kids living with him, but who knows, maybe the family is close and he’s used to it.”
The three youngest lost interest after that and fell into a discussion on whether Alexander Snyder was the dorkiest kid in school or not.
“He reads the encyclopedia at the bus stop.”
“Yeah, he’s up to F already.”
“F for fathead,” Stephen giggled.
“Why does he do that?” Johanna wondered. Any kind of intellectual display in front of preadolescents or adolescents, either one, was asking for trouble. “Did you ask him?”
“He says he hungers for knowledge,” Will snorted. “Ty told him he was a dorkhead and beat him up after that,” he reported matter-of-factly.
“You three better not be part of that,” Charlie said on his way through the room, giving Johanna much hope for his future. “You know what Johanna and Mom say all the time.”
“You don’t have to marry them, but you do have to be kind,” they all chorused together.
“That’s right,” Charlie nodded. “And you better not forget it or when I’m in charge after Jo leaves there may be serious rear end damage done around here. You think she’s tough, wait’ll you get a load of me.”
“Jo won’t let you spank us,” Aubrey said in her best nah-nah-nah voice.
“Jo won’t be here.”
Before things escalated out of control, Johanna got the four youngest up the stairs and into the bathroom to brush teeth and prepare for bed. She made a mental note to talk to Charlie some time before she moved out about not letting authority go to his head, and prepared for bed herself. She and her mother shared a bedroom. Cognizant of both their needs for privacy, they had put back-to-back shelving units partway down the center of the room. It was an imperfect solution, but provided more storage in a house crammed full of people and their paraphernalia and it gave Johanna the illusion of a space of her own.
Johanna put her bedside light on and climbed into the twin-size bed. Propping up the pillows against the wall behind her bed and settling back against them, she picked up the psychology book she’d been reading from her nightstand and found her place.
Twenty minutes later she snapped it shut, unable to concentrate. Her insides practically bubbled with impatience.
“A few more weeks,” she whispered to herself, and got out of bed. Johanna roamed the hall, checking under the doors for patches of light. Charlie and Chris were still up, naturally, and probably would be for a while. Charlie was almost eighteen, so his sleep patterns were his problem, and she was trying to lighten up on sixteen-year-old Chris as well. She wouldn’t say anything just yet.
The strip under Stephen and Will’s door was dark, but light shone out from under the girls’ door. Johanna opened it quietly and peeked in. Aubrey lay sprawled on her stomach, a green-stuffed rabbit clutched close, sound asleep. Grace sat up in bed, reading a laminated, numbered paperback.
“Whole class reading that one?” Johanna whispered as she nodded at the book in Grace’s hand.
“Yeah. Mr. Woodley says it’s a classic, but it really stinks. I mean, who’s gonna take the time to knit the names of people you want dead into your socks?”
“I thought it was a scarf.”
“Whatever.”
“I can’t say I ever cared much for Dickens, either. Twenty more minutes, max, then lights out, okay?”
“This is so boring I’ll probably be asleep long before then.”
Johanna shut the door.
What was the matter with her? Why was she so restless? Okay, she’d finally be out on her own, working a real job, using her hard-won education in a couple of weeks. It’s not as though it was happening tomorrow.
So what was the deal?
