This Kiss

“She took Ben to story hour at the library in town.” He shifted his boots in the red dirt, then folded his arms over his chest.

Her mind raced, searching for something to say to fill the silence. This was her first trip home since her mom had taken over his household. Hannah had known she would see Dev, but she hadn’t expected to have to make conversation with him, alone, right off the bat. Polly was supposed to be here to run interference.

“How old is your son now?” she finally asked.

“Almost four. Next week as a matter of fact.” His wonderfully shaped mouth turned up at the corners. “He’s an active little son of a gun. I don’t know what I’d do without your mother. She’s pretty special.”

“You won’t get any argument about that from me,” Hannah agreed.

She knew he and his wife had split up, but not the details. When she’d heard, her first thought had been that golden boys have problems just like scholastically gifted geeky girls who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Her second, that it would be hard on his little boy. She knew from firsthand experience what it was like when a parent turned their back on a child.

He shoved his hat up with a knuckle and she noticed that the glow of fatherly pride lingered in his eyes. She couldn’t help wondering what kind of parent he was. Memories of her own father were memories she tried to forget.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Fine. And you?”

“Good. Although I’ll be better when I get an offer from one of the medical groups that I interviewed with. I’m just waiting to see which one wants me.”

“Who wouldn’t want you—the smartest girl who ever graduated from Destiny High,” he added, his eyes sparkling with surprising interest.

“I don’t know about smartest, but skipping a couple grades was probably noteworthy,” she agreed.

“Are you going to be here long enough for the high school rodeo championships?”

“To be honest, I’d forgotten about that. When are they?”

“Four weeks away. And if I were you, I’d watch my step after a remark like that. In this neck of the woods, forgetting rodeo is practically a hanging offense.” There was a smile in his eyes.

She laughed. “Yeah, Destiny is nothing if not rodeo country. How is the stock business?” she asked.

Ten years ago, it had been profitable and she assumed that hadn’t changed. Dev’s family made a better-than-good living supplying stock to rodeos all across the country as well as breeding and training cutting horses, and raising cattle. He was the guy all the high school girls wanted, as much for his money as his looks. If he hadn’t needed her to tutor him, they probably never would have crossed paths, let alone spoken. Of course, after each session, he’d never looked at her or claimed any association at all when they passed in the school hallways.

He folded his arms over a pretty impressive chest. “Business is better than ever. Keeps me busy. Which is why I’m so grateful to Polly. If I didn’t have her to watch over Ben, the home part of this homestead would have come apart faster than a fat man’s britches.”

Hannah laughed. “She adores your son.”

He angled a hip toward the fence and rested his elbow on top. “She did say you’re unattached and it doesn’t look like you’re going to have kids any time soon. She claimed she needed to flex her grandmothering muscles while she’s still young enough.”

Annoyance cut through Hannah, and she wasn’t sure what bothered her more. That her mother had talked to Dev about her, or that he knew she had no one special.

“How are your folks?” she asked, changing the subject with what she hoped was scalpel-like precision. Her personal life, or lack thereof, was not something she wanted to discuss with Destiny High’s infamous chick magnet.

“They’re traveling from coast to coast in a motor home. It’s what they always dreamed of doing and hadn’t made time for. After Dad’s heart attack last year, they decided not to put it off. He retired and turned the business over to me.”

“Good for him.” In all of her medical training rotations, she’d seen patients forced back to work by economic circumstances when they should have taken off more time for their health. She looked beyond the corral at the red Texas dirt covered by scrub and mesquite as far as the eye could see. “But of course he could afford to. Everyone says that this is the biggest spread in Destiny.”

“Everyone says?” He frowned. “You’ve seen the place.” It wasn’t a question.

“Nope.” She shook her head. Her mother worked for his family, but always during Hannah’s school hours. And she hadn’t been back for several years. Polly had visited her in L.A. “You must be thinking of one of the other girls who followed you around adoringly.”

That had popped out more bitterly than she intended. Funny how coming home brought these feelings to the surface.

“Times have sure changed,” he said, shaking his head. “And I mean that in a good way.”

“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t like all that female attention?”

“Do I have stupid written on my forehead?” he asked, grinning. “I liked it a lot. But that was a long time ago. I’ve got better things to do now. Running the place and being a father doesn’t leave time for a whole lot else.”

“Is that so?” Why should that surprise her? Still, it wasn’t fair to peg him as the same selfish teenage guy she’d known. She had grown up. He must have too. After all, he’d married, become a father and divorced. And he’d had the good sense to hire her mother.

That was the good news. The bad—her mom was a live-in housekeeper and had sold her own home. She’d said it cut down expenses. More bad news—on this visit to her mother, Hannah had to stay on the Hart ranch, under Dev’s roof.

But when she’d arrived, she glimpsed the house from the outside. It was a really big roof and her mother had said there was a separate wing for the hired help. Still Hannah knew she would have to see Dev. For the life of her, she didn’t know what she would find to talk with him about. They had nearly exhausted all topics of conversation in the last few minutes, and her crack about adoring girls had no doubt put her on the verge of wearing out her welcome already. She’d taken classes in medical school dealing with bedside manner, but they didn’t include polite interaction with the opposite sex. Her training had taught her to be assertive, but had been sadly lacking in diplomacy. In other words—she was socially backward. Which could be why she was still unattached.

“Look, Dev, I don’t want to take you away from your work. I’ll walk back to the house and wait for Mom there.”

“You’re not keeping me. I’ve got time to show you around the ranch now if you’d like to see it. I can have Wade saddle up a couple of horses.”

“No thanks,” she said, a little too quickly. “But if you’re sure it’s not an imposition, I wouldn’t mind the walking tour.”

“You have something against riding?”

“Not in a plane, train or automobile.”

“You’re afraid of horses?” he guessed.

She nodded. “I fell off when I was a kid.”

In addition to being a brainer geek, her subsequent apprehension around horses had always made her feel like a fish out of water in ranch country. Just one more thing to prove that she didn’t quite belong anywhere. If there was anyone else who’d grown up in Destiny and was scared of horses, she would like to meet them. All two of them could form a support group.

“In spite of that, I don’t freely admit to being afraid of anything.” She met his amused gaze. “I prefer to think of it as a failure to overcome a high IQ. It’s not especially smart to voluntarily climb up on top of an animal who could squash me like a grape.”

He nodded, but there was a twinkle in his eyes. “It’s because of the whole physics thing, right?”

“What does physics have to do with it?”

“A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.”

“Yes, but—”

“Or a body accelerates at thirty-two feet per second per second.”

“You remembered. And here I thought I was wasting my breath all that time.” She couldn’t help smiling. “Except I believe I said objects—because the principle holds true for a feather or a bowling ball.”

He’d had the oddest, sort of intense look in his eyes both times he’d said “body.” And she saw his gaze slip from her face to the chest of her white T-shirt which now felt transparent, then lower still to her khaki pants and white tennis shoes. When he looked her in the eyes again, his held a gleam that she didn’t understand.

Oh, she hadn’t just crawled out from under a rock. She’d been around the block and guys had come on to her. But this was Dev Hart. If their past history was anything to go by, he barely knew she was alive. So how could she trust a look like that coming from him?