скачать книгу бесплатно
His pal turned toward the doors.
“Want to do something after school?” Sam asked. Almost too eagerly, he realized, when Joey shrugged and looked away. Sam pressed on. “I have to baby-sit Emily till four. We can dunk some balls at my house.”
The week they’d moved in, Sam’s mom had bought a basketball stand for the driveway. Last summer, he and Joey had done a lot of one-on-ones and hung out at each other’s houses, watching movies, playing computer games, roller-blading.
Joey never saw Sam’s deformity as untouchable. In fact, the first time they met, Joe had given Sam’s hand its highest praise ever with his cool “suhweet.”
This last month, though, Joey acted squirmy whenever Sam suggested they do stuff together. When he called Joey’s house, Sam often heard other guys in the background. Twice he’d recognized Cody Huller’s voice. Cody with earrings, nose-ring and orange, half-shaved hair. What Joey saw in Cody was beyond Sam.
Joey said, “After school me’n the guys are hanging on Main.”
The guys. Did he mean Huller? Sam hitched a careless shoulder. “Sure, whatever.”
“Gotta go,” Joey said. “Later, okay?”
“Yeah.” Sam watched his friend push through the doors, toward the warm afternoon sunshine. “Later.”
Walking to class, Sam knew something had changed between them. He couldn’t name it, couldn’t describe it. Joey still looked like Joey, still walked like Joey, still talked like Joey. But there was a difference.
Like Sam was a big waste of time to his friend.
The cranky sputter of a lawnmower unwilling to catch grated on Jon. Tossing the crowbar he’d been using to rip apart the front veranda steps this particular Saturday morning, he considered his options. He could walk into Rianne’s yard and see about the problem, or he could jam in a pair of earplugs and pretend she didn’t exist.
Neither option appealed to his good sense.
But then, good sense had taken a hundred-year hike, so what the hell?
Scowling, he yanked off his battered leather gloves, shoved them into his right hip pocket and headed once more into her backyard. Four days and this would be his third visit. Soon, they’d be attached at the hip.
Was that as good as attracted to her hip—among other things? He scowled harder. “You’re depraved, Tucker.”
Adjusting the brim of his Seahawks cap over his brow, he rounded her road-weary car.
She was in pink cutoffs, bent over the machine.
Jon stopped. Shook his head. Blew a weighted breath. Hightailing it back to his house—or the Pacific—loomed like one grand invitation. The farther from this woman the better.
“Dang thing,” she grumbled, oblivious to all but the mean red machine squatting idle at her feet.
“Troubles?”
Her head jerked up. “Jon.” His name, a silken thread on the warm, sunny air.
He walked over, focused on the mower. “Did you prime it?”
“Yes, and probably flooded it.”
Hunkering beside the mower, he checked the carburetor. The Columbia River was in better condition. “Yup, flooded.”
She expelled air. “The thing’s been acting up ever since I started cutting the grass a couple of weeks ago.”
Grunting in response, he inspected the wire to the ignition. While the machine appeared adequate enough to work, it could do with a cleaning. A second scan and he found the problem. “The spark-plug cap is off.”
“It is?” Her shoulder came level with his chin as she peered at the tiny cup between his fingers. If he leaned sideways a little, he could bury his face in her hair.
“When’s the last time this thing had a tune-up?” he grumped.
“Don’t know. I bought it from a friend. It worked fine until…” She turned her head. Their eyes caught. “Now.”
She had brown lashes. Straight and thick as a baby’s toothbrush.
He shoved the cap on to the spark plug then climbed to his feet.
She moved to the opposite side of the mower.
Okay. You want the machine between us? Well, baby, so do I. He said, “It’ll need to sit ten minutes for the primer to drain before you can try it again.”
Checking the plain-banded watch at her wrist, she frowned.
“Running late?”
“No. Yes.” Exasperated fingers checked the green bandanna around her ponytail. “I had a number of things I wanted to get done this morning, that’s all.” She looked around her small yard. “This could wait, I suppose.” Her brown eyes found his. “Thank you. Again.”
He shifted, awkward with how the softness in her voice, her look, affected him. “Mower isn’t running yet.”
“It will be.”
Once more their eyes held. He looked away, zeroing in on the apple tree covered in white flowers. “If you need a hand, I’m working on my front steps.”
“Jon,” she said when he turned to go. “About the other night—”
“Past.”
Undaunted by his tough tone, she went on. “Nevertheless, I want to explain. When I said I wasn’t used to having company, I meant male company. Since my husband died, I haven’t been much into developing…friendships.”
“Understood.”
“Especially with men.”
Considering his own choice about women and involvements, he accepted her avowal. “I know the feeling. I’m divorced.”.
“Oh.”
For several long seconds, the morning held its quiet. A yellow butterfly flitted over the mower, bent on reaching the apple tree.
Then, because the thought had bugged him for two days he said, “You recognized me that first day on the porch with the cats.”
She smiled. “Yes. Ninth-grade English, how could I forget?”
“Ahh.” He’d wondered if she recalled sitting on her mother’s back step, him explaining Wordsworth and Whitman.
She went on, “And you used to hang with these guys. Once after school, one of them stopped me. He said things…and started handling my hair. It was very long at the time.” She looked to the hedge between their properties. Sunshine fueled flames into that hair now. “He scared me.” Her eyes were steady. “You told him to leave me alone.”
“Gene Hyde.”
“Yes, Gene Hyde.”
Misty River High’s class-A idiot. The guy had wrapped a strand of her hair around his hand—with lewd innuendoes.
“I remember. It was beside the gym and you were…” Wide-eyed and skittish as an alley cat. “Very young.”
“Barely fourteen.”
She’d been Seth’s age. A kid.
And Jon had wondered after all those trips he’d driven her and his little brother home from school—he wondered what she’d be like one day as a woman.
Now, he knew.
Except, now he no longer cared. Or so he told himself. Of course, his conscience wouldn’t allow him to veto his four-day fantasies. She was female—an alluring female—after all.
He bent, checked the primer. Free of gas. Taking hold of the starter cord, he yanked. The engine roared to life.
Rianne grabbed the handle. Her shoulder brushed his arm; her woman’s smell beguiled his nose. “Thank you,” she mouthed over the buzzing motor. A quick smile and she pushed forward, hips swaying with each determined step of her dusty sneakers, following the cutter’s path toward the edge of the yard.
He still had her image, her scent swirling in his head when he rounded the corner of the house and almost bumped into a tall, gangly kid chasing a runaway basketball. The same kid he’d seen the night he’d carried in her groceries.
In one swoop Jon anchored the ball against his body with an elbow. “You Rianne’s boy?”
The kid gave him a cautious look. “Yeah.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Shouldn’t you be helping your mother instead of playing?”
The teenager had the decency to scan the backyard. “You mean like mow the lawn?”
“That’d be a start.”
“Yeah, well, Mom doesn’t want me operating machines.”
“Why not?”
“She’s scared I might hurt myself.”
“Do you think you’ll hurt yourself?”
The boy looked as if Jon had broken a raw egg on his head. “No way. I can handle a stupid mower.”
Jon released a mild snort. Kid had guts, he’d give him that. “Lesson one. No machine is stupid. If you don’t respect it, it won’t respect you. Got it?”
The boy nodded.
“Good. Lesson two. Mothers tend to think their kids stay babies forever.” Jon lifted his eyebrows. “Up to you to choose.”
“Geez. Like that’s hard.”
“Thought so.” Jon handed him the ball. “Sam, right?”
The boy nodded.
“Think you can handle those two lessons, Sam?”
Something shifted in his dark eyes. “I can handle ’em, sir.”
Jon shook his head. “Not sir. Just Jon. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, go help your mother.”
The last thing she wanted, marching out of her house, was to confront Jon Tucker. Brutally masculine, with those polar eyes icing a person in a heartbeat, she suspected he wasn’t a man who would give one hoot about what she had to say.
But say it, she would.
Just as she had, in the end, to Duane.
No one—not now or ever again—would castigate her children or berate her mothering skills. Duane had discovered it the court-induced way. Jon Tucker would learn it in plain jargon.
He worked on a plank supported by a pair of sawhorses several feet from his front steps, marking out a distance with a thick carpenter’s pencil and tape measure. Clad in the same frayed jeans, blue plaid shirt and cumbersome work boots of an hour ago, he had her heart taking another boisterous tumble.
In the last sixty minutes he had rolled his sleeves to his biceps. Bread-brown muscles strained in the sun.
The wolf tattoo glistened within dark hair.
She chanced a furtive study of the man who had kept her spinning silly girlish dreams as a teenager. The harsh-crafted angles of his face, profiled against the bright day, showed an assertive nose, a bold ridge of brow. He’d switched the cap so its visor hid the five-inch bracket of ponytail. Pale skin peeked above the plastic band across his forehead. A silver ear stud flaunted wickedness.
She pressed down a corner of excitement. And guilt because of her mission.
After all, he’d taken time from his work to fix her beat-up, old mower.
At her approach, his long, powerful body unfolded with calm ease. Slowly she was acclimating to the way he didn’t smile, didn’t speak, simply looked at her with that impenetrable, intelligent expression. Acknowledging the latter, she took heart and stepped close enough to speak in a normal tone. “Can we talk?”
He shot a look toward her house. “The mower again?”
“No. My son.”
Those eyes conveyed nothing. Not curiosity, not amusement, not compassion. Two decades ago, a dozen expressions would have skimmed his rebel teenage features in mere seconds.
Why are you so empty, Jon?
