Plain Jane's Secret Life

Hannah tingled all over at the low timbre of Dylan’s voice. With effort Hannah kept her eyes on the road and her hands on the steering wheel. She was not going to let Dylan Hart lead her down that path! She was not! “R. G. Yarborough never said that.”

Dylan smirked. “Trust me.” Dylan lounged in his seat, radiating all the pure male power and sexy masculinity he typically did on the TV screen. He turned to look at her directly. “The way you were coming on to him, he would’ve gotten around to suggesting it before the end of the night,” Dylan predicted darkly.

Hannah knew that was true. The moment she’d walked up to tell her mark why she was there, only to have him suggest the two of them play a game of pool instead, R. G. Yarborough had looked her over like a piece of meat. “And that bothers you?” Hannah asked, completely surprised that Dylan sounded almost…jealous.

Suddenly, it was Dylan’s turn to hedge.

DYLAN WAS PUSHING TOO hard. He knew it. But the curiosity was eating him up inside. He had to know what was going on between Hannah and Cal. Because if it was what it looked like at first glance, Cal and Hannah were both in a heap of trouble. He couldn’t let either of them crash and burn without trying to stop it. “You just don’t seem the type to pick up men in a bar,” Dylan explained finally.

Now he had really hit a sore spot with her. She was taking his observation as an assault on her morality, when that wasn’t what he had meant at all.

“I hope you know you’re buying me one of everything on the menu for that remark,” she said as she turned the minivan into the restaurant parking lot and angled it into one of the slots on either side of the concrete divider. She rolled down the windows and warm August air poured over them.

A waitress on roller skates headed over to the car. She handed them a plastic-coated menu. She told them about the specials, then gave them a few moments to decide. As soon as the waitress skated off, Dylan turned back to Hannah and picked up the conversation where they had left off. “I meant that in the most respectful way,” he said, doing his best to repair the damage.

“Did you now.” Hannah kept her eyes glued on the menu.

It was late, but the place was full of teenagers in cars. All of whom seemed to be having a very good time—unlike he and Hannah.

Oh, to go back to such easy, carefree days…

“I’m concerned about your well-being and safety,” Dylan continued.

Hannah turned back to him. She was about to speak, when the phone clipped to Dylan’s belt began to ring.

Frowning, Dylan picked it up. “Dylan Hart,” he said as the waitress roller-skated past them, balancing a tray filled with food. While he listened to the voice on the other end of the connection, she attached it to the driver-side window on the station wagon beside him. The delicious aromas of onion rings and chili dogs with cheese wafted up around them.

“It happened,” Sasha, the Chicago evening-news anchor, said. “Just like you said it was going to.”

Dylan tensed as Hannah went back to studying her menu. “When?”

“Tonight around six,” Sasha said grimly. “Check your e-mail. The official notification should be there.”

Dylan clamped down on a string of swearwords. “Thanks.”

“No problem. And Dylan…” Sasha paused, empathy in her low voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Same to you,” Dylan replied just as sympathetically. He hung up to find Hannah watching him. “Mind if we take a rain check on dinner?”

Her eyes widened. She couldn’t believe his audacity. “First you interrupt my evening. Now you’re standing me up?”

Sometimes life really bites. “I need to get back to Holly Springs.”

Hannah paused, her indignation fading as fast as it had appeared. She looked at him harder. “Something wrong?”

“A problem with my job,” Dylan muttered, reluctant to tell her anything more until he saw it in print and knew for certain his life was really crashing down around him.

Hannah hesitated, her lips taking on a softer curve. “Anything I can do?” she asked after a moment.

Dylan shrugged, his mood turning grimmer by the minute as he contemplated the days ahead. He was supposed to be in Holly Springs all week, on vacation. “I need to look at my e-mail as soon as possible. Do you have a computer with Internet access that I can use?”

Hannah continued to study him, knowing, as did he, that every single member of his family had computers, at home and at work, yet he wasn’t asking any of them. She had to be asking herself why. Yet, she didn’t ask him.

“Sure.” She shrugged her slender shoulders gracefully.

Dylan hadn’t expected such kindness. He knew, after the way he had behaved toward her this afternoon and evening, that he certainly hadn’t earned it. “That’s it? That’s all your questions?” He regarded her just as closely.

Hannah shrugged and signaled the waitress that they were finished with the menus. She shook her head in a way that let him know she had weathered her own share of personal crises. “The look on your face is answer enough.”

DYLAN EXPECTED Hannah’s Craftsman-style brownstone to look like every other eighty-year-old house in Holly Springs. Low ceilings, small cramped rooms, outdated everything. Instead, it looked like a demolition zone inside.

“What happened here?” he asked. He had been in her house a few times years ago, when he was a kid, recruiting Hannah for a game of pick-up baseball or soccer. A natural athlete, she had never failed to disappoint.

“When my grandfather died, I had a choice to either sell it or live in it. I decided if I was going to live in it I was going to make it my own. So for the past two years I’ve been remodeling, a little at a time.”

“And then some.” Dylan looked around. The original low ceilings had been completely ripped out, doing away with most of the attic and exposing the house’s sloping fifteen-foot roofline. Three-quarters of the drywall had been redone, the rest was still waiting.

“I tore everything out and hired a contractor to put in new wiring and plumbing to bring it up to code. And built that—” Hannah pointed to the end of the house, away from what was going to be a central downstairs living area.

She led him toward the stairway. He followed her up. On the other side of the waist-high white bead-board wall that ran the length of the loft was a bedroom. Hannah had left the brownstone chimney exposed. A queen-size brass bed with a surprisingly frilly white lace comforter was pushed up against it. Her bridesmaid dress and the bouquet she had carried down the aisle were scattered across it. On one side of the room was a desk, with laptop computer and printer, the other side had a television and stereo. Beyond, he could see a pretty, white and ocean-blue bathroom, with private water closet, a pedestal sink, separate ceramic-tiled shower and clawfoot tub big enough for two. There was also a linen closet and an astonishing number of bath salts and scented lotions, makeup and shampoos. The windows were covered with pleated, ocean-blue-fabric blinds.

“As you can see, this is where I’m doing most of my living.”

“Nice,” Dylan said, meaning it. By putting in the loft, she had added another five hundred or so square feet to the thousand already downstairs.

“It will be when I finish,” Hannah said, already booting up her computer while peering into a walk-in closet that seemed to contain mostly jeans, T-shirts and the one-piece coveralls she wore when working on cars down at the garage. “You know how to access your e-mail from someone else’s computer?” Hannah asked as the home page—some car mechanic’s site—came across the monitor.

Dylan nodded.

“I’ll be downstairs. Yell if you need anything.” She disappeared down the loft stairs.

“Thanks,” Dylan said.

Unfortunately, the news was as bad as Sasha had predicted. Dylan had known it was coming. Still, he was stunned.

Knowing he’d want to read the letter from the TV station later, he printed a copy then shut the computer and printer off. Still feeling as if he had been kicked in the gut, he headed downstairs. Hannah was perched on a sawhorse in the middle of the gutted first floor, a small carton of premium ice cream in hand. She had a plastic spoon in her mouth as she surveyed the unfinished wide-plank floors and partially finished drywall. “I’m painting everything down here white, too,” she told him. “And I’m going to leave the wood natural and protect it with polyurethane.”

“What about your kitchen cabinets?” Dylan asked.

Hannah got up and walked over to the stainless-steel refrigerator. Aside from the microwave, it was the only appliance currently in the house. There wasn’t even a kitchen sink, although there was a half bath with original basin nearby.

“They’re white beadboard, similar in style to what I have upstairs in the master bath. I’ve got ’em in boxes, in the garage, along with the rest of the paint and the wallboard and the kitchen appliances—which I was lucky enough to get at cost a few months ago. Just haven’t had the money to have any of it installed. Yet.”

Was that what she had been doing at the pool hall? Trying to get together enough money to finish the inside of her home? It was a laudable goal, even if the means weren’t to be commended.

She paused, her hand on the handle of the fridge. She studied him curiously. “Get what you needed up there?”

Dylan nodded.