Unexpected Father. Kelly Jamison
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?”
“Early, schmearly. I figured you wouldn’t think to feed these folks. Now was I right or was I right?”
“Yeah, Ma, you’re right,” Ronnie agreed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
The portly woman in the green waitress uniform arched an eyebrow at him as she passed, trailing the scent of hamburgers in her wake. She smiled at Hannah as she set a large white bag on the foundation.
“Now, Hannah, these boys haven’t been working you too hard, have they?” she asked.
“Not even hard enough to earn a meal, Esther,” Hannah said, smiling despite her recent bitter exchange with Jordan.
Esther turned toward the car. “Kevin, if you want a hamburger, you’d better get over here.” She winked at Hannah. “He’s been busing and setting up tables for me all morning.”
“He hasn’t gotten in your way, has he?” Hannah asked. “I could watch him here.”
“The time a little boy gets in my way, honey,” Esther told her, “is the day that Esther Wardlow retires. He’s been an angel. Best bus boy we ever had,” she added in a loud voice as Kevin hopped from the car and trooped over to her, grinning at his mother.
“Look, Mom!” he called excitedly, holding out one small hand with four quarters on his palm. “I got tips. See? I’m rich. I done good, huh?”
Hannah couldn’t help smiling and gave him a short hug. He was such a good boy, always cheerful, always excited about something. He had her brown hair and eyes, but her sister’s short nose and bow-shaped mouth.
“Very good,” she said, tousling his hair. “I might even let you spend your fortune on some bubble gum since you worked so hard.”
“Really?”
“Really. I’m feeling generous. Are you hungry?”
Kevin shook his head. “I ate pancakes for breakfast and some toast and some bacon and some—” he wrinkled his nose, trying to think “—some sausages,” he concluded with satisfaction.
And this was the child who claimed he was never hungry in the morning, she