Unexpected Father

His eyes met hers and held. “Shall I come over there and move you?” he asked quietly.

His voice was too low for anyone else to hear, but the heat climbed her face, anyway. The arrogant egotist would probably love an excuse to touch her. No doubt he thought she would fall all over him again.

Lifting her chin, Hannah stepped to the side, then bent and grasped the end of the board. With one last look at her, Jordan did the same.

“Is it too heavy?” he asked solicitously, and she grunted negatively, determined not to give him any more response than absolutely necessary.

When they had deposited the last of the boards on the ground by the foundation, Hannah put her hands on her lower back and stretched. She wasn’t badly out of shape, but it had been a long time since Kevin had been light enough for her to lift him with any frequency. That was the trouble with babies; they eventually grew up. It seemed that every day they presented their mothers with a new set of problems and a new set of delights. She gently touched the locket at her neck. It still saddened Hannah that Marybeth never got to see her son turn into such a wonderful kid.

“Are you all right?” Jordan asked carefully, and Hannah focused on him, realizing that she had been staring off into the distance.

“Yes,” she said with resignation. She had learned how to be all nght no matter what happened. She supposed she had inherited from her father the ability to put one foot in front of the other and soldier on despite any difficulty. Not that it was always easy; there were more than enough times when she nearly wondered aloud why she was bothering. But a Brewster didn’t stop to ask pointless questions when there was work to be done.

Jake had finished attaching the metal strip to the foundation and was moving the first sill board into place. Ronnie appeared by Hannah’s side and with an encouraging smile handed her a hammer. Jordan didn’t miss the fact that Ronnie’s fingers brushed Hannah’s Turning her back on Jordan, Hannah bent to pick up some nails.

Jordan studied her while his brothers drilled holes for the anchor bolts. He vaguely remembered the restaurant where he’d taken her to dinner a long time ago. What he remembered vividly was the sensation of her, of Hannah Brewster. There was a vitality in her, a warmth that made a man feel good all over just looking at her or listening to her talk.

He marveled that he could remember that evening so clearly. He had tugged her toward his bedroom when they had reached his apartment, and she had gone willingly. He could still see the smile on her face as she put her arms around his neck. He had taken her glasses off for her and then unfastened her hair, letting it fan out across the pillow. She had been nervous, fumbling with his buttons until he had to undo his shirt himself. But she had been so sweet in his bed.

He still hadn’t quite figured out the parameters of her relationship with Ronnie, but maybe it was one of those steadfast, quiet love affairs devoid of overt displays of affection. He couldn’t imagine why else she would be here—carpentry skills or not—unless there was something between her and the red-haired electronics prodigy.

Jordan realized that he was thinking. at least on a subconscious level, of taking her to bed again. She had grown into a beautiful woman since he had last seen her. Not that she hadn’t been attractive before—she just hadn’t known it then. She had a quiet confidence about her now. Still, something was missing.

Her smile—that was it. It was what had first drawn him to her. And he had yet to see it today.

He supposed she smiled for Ronnie. Resolutely he sat down on the ground by the pile of tools, rummaging for another hammer. He told himself to stop thinking about Hannah Brewster. She was treating him with all the welcome of a spitting cat. It was plain that she didn’t want anything to do with him.

Which made her all the more intriguing.

“I need the nails,” she said stoically, and he glanced up to see her silhouetted in the sun, her hands on her hips.

“What nails?” he asked stupidly, so lost in thinking about her that he was unsure for a moment if he was looking at her or a memory.

“The nine-gauge,” she said in the calm, efficient tone she’d apparently adopted just for him. “You’re sitting on them,” she added pointedly.

Jordan frowned, looking around the grass where he was sitting. “I think I’d know if I was sitting on nails,” he assured her.

“Maybe your jeans have cut off the circulation to your brain,” she suggested with a slight curve of her mouth, letting him know just where she thought he kept his brain.

“Hannah,” he began impatiently, wondering just what it was he wanted to say to her now that he’d started.

“Ah!” she said suddenly, diving down and scooping up a paper bag. “See, I told you,” she said, straightening with the bag of nails.

She was giving him back as good as he’d given her when she had been standing on the board, and it took him by surprise. Few women argued with him, much less provoked him.

“I wasn’t sitting on them,” he insisted. He shifted his weight forward, intent on standing so he could have this argument face-to-face, when his thigh came down on something sharp. “Ow,” he muttered, reaching down and closing his hand around metal. He held up a hasp. “That’s what I was sitting on,” he said.

For a moment she almost smiled, but in the next instant the smile was gone before it really materialized, leaving him bereft. He wondered why it mattered so much to him that she wouldn’t smile for him. And why it aggravated him so.

Hannah knew she was getting on his nerves. She could see it in his puzzled frown and in the set of his mouth. She found that she rather liked getting on his nerves. It was something that she would never have thought to do seven years ago.

“Carpenters!” Jake called out. “We need some carpenters with hammers over here!”

Hannah and Jordan both turned at once, Hannah scrambling toward Jake and John, unable to stop herself from watching from the corner of her eye as Jordan hefted a hammer before he followed. How old was he now? she wondered. Thirty-two. In his prime. A walking, talking, thirty-two-year-old specimen of temptation. She was only three years younger, but she often had the feeling that she had missed out on some part of her twenties that was important. She didn’t know how to flirt, and she didn’t know how to tell men things they wanted to hear.

Jordan knelt beside her, swiftly hammering in a nail at the joint next to the one she had just finished. His thigh was so close to her that the denim lightly brushed her hip, making her fingers shake as she searched in the bag for another nail. Unwillingly she remembered how that thigh had felt naked, hard and muscular along the length of her own leg. She stared down at the board in front of her.

She could feel him watching her, and she was sure he knew what effect he was having on her. She was almost positive that he was provoking this physical contact deliberately to pay her back for her cool treatment of him. Either that or he was intent on luring her into his bed again—and that was never going to happen.

He reached across her for another nail, and his firm hand brushed her bare arm, the contact, brief as it was, igniting heat that flared across her skin. She was trembling inside, hoping it didn’t show. She wouldn’t let him see how addled he was making her. Her flash point reaction to his casual touch could be easily explained by her long celibacy, she rationalized.

“So, what accounts for your expertise?” he asked suddenly, throwing her off guard.

“What?” She forgot about her rehearsed indifference and looked into his eyes. A mistake. They were far too probing, and she hastily looked away.

“The hammering,” he said. “Where did you learn carpentry?”

“From my father,” she said shortly. “I helped when he remodeled our house about twelve years ago. He taught me a lot. Sometimes I helped him when he accepted outside carpentry work.”

“Did we talk about that when we went out?” he asked, surprised.

This time she looked at him deliberately, meeting his eyes and making sure he saw her coolness.

“Frankly, Jordan, I doubt that you’d remember much of anything I told you then,” she said. “I don’t think conversation was your prime objective.” She wanted to make sure he understood that she hadn’t mistaken their pnor involvement for anything more than it was—an office affair, short and meaningless.

It had been so much more to her. She could remember almost every word of their conversations, even if Jordan couldn’t.

Abruptly she stood and moved to another corner of the foundation, deftly hammering in two nails where the sill boards joined.

Jordan followed her, squatting beside her, far too close for her comfort.

“That house your father remodeled,” he said. “Does he still live there?”

“He died a few years ago,” she said flatly, reaching for another nail even though two were sufficient.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked sharply, looking into his face. “Or is it just the polite thing to say?” She was aware that she’d spoken a little too loudly, and now Ronme and Jordan’s brothers were staring at her, the sounds of hammers and drills having ceased for the moment.

“I don’t know what’s wrong here,” Jordan said carefully. “What have I done, Hannah?”

“Nothing,” she said, lying, but still managing to sound tired and aggrieved, something she hated when other women did it. If something was wrong, a person should just come out and say it. At least that was what she believed. But this wasn’t the time or the place to get specific, not when half of Jordan’s family was listening with intense interest.

“Hey!” a commanding woman’s voice called over the whine of a car engine. “Who wants something to eat?”

Hannah turned as a battered, fluorescent orange Volkswagen churned the driveway’s gravel amid the grinding of gears. The car overshot the end of the driveway by a good five feet, coming to rest just inches from a scarred oak tree that looked like it had had more than its share of close encounters with the VW if the flecks of orange paint on the bark were any indication. Ronnie’s sigh was audible.

“Hi, Ma. How come you’re here so early?”