Moonlight and Shadows (10 page)

Jack nodded sympathetically as he mentally
kicked himself. He had to ask, hadn’t he? Yes, by golly, he just
had to know about Danny Singer. Past loves had never been his
favorite topic of conversation with women he was dating, at least
not until Lila Singer. Maybe he’d allowed himself to get rusty. He
hadn’t been dating much this past year. He’d been too busy, and his
last blind date had been remarkably lacking in things like
conversation and mutual interest.

Funny thing, though, he hadn’t felt rusty
when he’d kissed Lila, and even as the words “the man who loved me”
fell from her lips, he wanted to kiss her again. Maybe he
was
rusty. He was beginning to suffer from a one-track mind.
But then, what man wouldn’t when she looked the way she did
tonight?

She had on one of those soft, fuzzy sweaters
again, angora or something. It was cut wide across the shoulders,
revealing cream-colored skin and the delicate protrusion of her
collarbone. Shiny black buttons held it together down the front,
matching the rich ebony of the
midnight cloud of her hair. It was the kind of sweater that invited
a man’s touch.

“You saw the photograph he took of me?” she
asked. “The one in the sitting room?”

He nodded. Oh, yes. He saw it in his
sleep.

“He created the lighting effects on
location, not in the darkroom. No one has been able to duplicate
them. Did you notice the way my skin glowed?”

He nodded again. He’d noticed, especially in
the curve of her neck and the slope of her shoulder. He’d noticed
it in the satin slide of skin from beneath her breast to over her
hip. He’d noticed it in the sleek straightaway of her thigh.

“I can’t tell you how many people have come
to me and asked me to tell them how he did it.”

Jack cleared his throat. “How did he do
it?”

A surprisingly mischievous smile lit her
face, curving her lush, full mouth, and she leaned closer over the
table. “Nobody believes me, but I don’t know. I saw the umbrellas
and the filters, and all the strobe equipment, but I don’t know how
he made them work together. He made only two hundred prints, and
the last I heard they were going for ten
thousand on the open market. Ten
thousand dollars for a bit of
light magic.”

No, Jack thought, not ten
thousand for a bit of light
magic. Ten
thousand for her, for
the magic of Lila Singer wrapped in gauze and moonbeams.

Dinner came and dinner went, and Jack barely
tasted a bite. He hadn’t tried to work the conversation around to
whoever had been holding her hand since Danny’s death. He wasn’t up
to another rundown of virtues, and vices would be even worse.

When dinner was over, he paid the check with
his credit card and managed to keep from wincing when she commended
his signature on the slip.

“That’s very good, Jack.”

“Thank you. I practice.”

In his truck, driving home, she glanced at
one of the books he’d brought for them to read. He’d conveniently
turned on the dome light for her.

“
Welding from A to Z and Beyond
?” she
read the title aloud.

“You said hobbies.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a hobby,” she
murmured, envisioning bumpers and ball jacks.

“It’s all in the wrist.”

She hid a quick grin and glanced over at
him. He said the craziest things. And he was cute. Well, maybe not
cute, exactly, but cute seemed a safer adjective than the naked
truth.

Naked?
Oh, great, now she’d really
gone too far. She shouldn’t even be thinking about things like Jack
Hudson without his clothes on, or Jack Hudson’s chest, how the
silky mat of hair would feel sliding between her fingers, how soft
his skin would be, how hard the muscle beneath. How it would feel
to press her mouth to the tender part of his throat and have his
arms encircle her and hold her tight against all his . . .
nakedness.

She shifted slightly, a weak-hearted attempt
to put more distance between them, then forced herself to look out
the windshield instead of at his face, which wasn’t cute at all,
but sexy like the rest of him. It was in his eyes, the curve of his
eyebrows, the sweep of his hair off his forehead. Sexy described
his mouth, and his shoulders, and his hands. It was the first word
she’d thought of when he’d stood in her doorway at six o’clock that
evening in his khaki
slacks, black polo shirt, braided leather belt, and bomber jacket.
It had been the second word to cross her mind when he’d smiled his
slightly off-center smile and looked at her with an appreciative
twinkle in his eye.

She’d thought it half a dozen more times as
he suggested dinner before reading lessons, and she’d had to force
herself not to gaze too long at either his mouth or his eyes, or
any other part of him, all of which seemed to fascinate her beyond
the bounds of reason.

With a silent sigh she closed her eyes and
lifted a gloved hand to her brow. Her plan wasn’t working. Against
all of her saner instincts, she continued to be attracted to him,
and attracted was putting it mildly. She didn’t know how he’d
slipped into her life and her imagination, but he’d become a
permanent fixture in both. He’d certainly done nothing overt,
except for those kisses. Maybe that was all it had taken. She
hadn’t been kissed in a long time, and though she didn’t subscribe
to the “sex is a necessary part of life” theory, she knew Jack’s
kiss had touched her more than physically.

Another sigh escaped her. She shifted again
in her seat and kept watching the darkness roll by until she saw
the silhouette of her house against the sky.

The night stretched over the prairie in all
its icy clarity, leaving the barest path open for a silvery stream
of moonlight to filter down through the cottonwoods bordering her
driveway. The hinges on the truck doors creaked in frozen protest
as they opened them. Lila didn’t wait for him to come around to
help her, a subtle way of letting him know she didn’t consider
their night out a date. She couldn’t afford to, no matter how
expensive and wonderful dinner had been.

Once inside, he offered to build a fire in
her living room fireplace, and she asked him if he’d like cream and
sugar with his coffee.

“No,” he said. “Black is fine.”

One mistake after another, she thought,
walking into the kitchen. One lousy mistake after another. She had
a furnace, and it worked fine. They didn’t need a cozy, romantic
fire to study.

They didn’t need Irish cream in their coffee
either, but she poured a good dollop into each steaming mug, then
arranged a variety of fancy cookies on a silver tray. Her lipstick
was probably fine, too, but she checked it in her compact mirror
just in case. Just in case of what, she wasn’t sure. It was a
purely precautionary measure.

He had a perfect fire going when she
returned to the living room, perfect like the breadth of his
shoulders in relation to the length of his torso, perfect like the
stretch of fabric outlining his thigh as he knelt on the hearth,
adding the last log. He wasn’t overly muscular, he was just right.
Perfect, from the tracing of veins up the inside curve of his arm
to the hard swell of bicep showing below the short sleeve of his
shirt.

Short sleeves in winter, she thought with a
forced huff, trying to construe his choice as a fashion blunder.
But nothing that looked as good as that shirt did on him could ever
be a fashion blunder, and he gave no signs of being chilled. Quite
the contrary. When he looked over his shoulder and smiled at her,
she felt the temperature in the room rise a good ten degrees,
enough to make undoing the first two buttons on her sweater seem
like a wise decision—until she did it. The responsive widening of
his eyes made her face flame with the realization of what she’d
done.

“It’s a little warm in here, don’t you
think?” She stumbled through her excuse, hardly buying it
herself.

“Pretty warm,” he agreed with a grin. “And
getting warmer.”

She smiled wanly and settled herself on the
couch, directing her attention to the books he’d brought in from
the truck. She assumed
Welding from A to Z and Beyond
would
be her last choice, and she set it aside. Sixty excruciatingly
silent seconds later she picked it up and looked at it with renewed
interest.

He’d brought another book, one more, a work
of fiction the likes of which she’d seen but never read. She’d
noticed her students reading books similar to the one he’d brought,
her female students. Her mother read them too. A year ago, even
Didi had pressed one into her hands and said, “You’ve got to read
this!” but Lila had never felt an equal sense of urgency. The book
had disappeared in her library somewhere, and she didn’t think this
was the time to initiate herself into the world of historical
romantic fiction. Not with Jack looking over her shoulder, and not
if the cover was any indication of what they’d find inside
Night
of the Hawk.

She had a few jocks in her literature
classes from time to time, young men who gloried in their own
physiques. She’d seen enough torn T-shirts revealing rock-hard
abdomens, and bulging biceps showing below frayed sleeves to last
her a lifetime, or at least until next semester. She wasn’t a
prude, but she’d never been able to appreciate a good, solid muscle
without a brain behind it.

The Hawk looked plenty smart, and the rough
clothing covering him allowed enticing glimpses of a man’s, not a
boy’s, muscled body. His long seal-brown hair was tied at his nape,
a few strands left free to frame a chiseled face that spoke of the
power and dignity of a warrior-king. Moonlight streamed over his
tall frame, shadowing the tough leanness of his body. His clothes
were colored like the horizon behind him, in shades of ice gray to
match his eyes.

That was what had taken her sixty seconds,
that and the way he was looking at the woman in his arms. The
artist had captured a special tenderness in his gaze, a fierce
tenderness. One look convinced Lila he’d lay down his life for his
woman, and that’s what the cover said. In every ancient, primitive
way imaginable, she was the Hawk’s woman. The cascade of tawny
blond hair flowing across her bare shoulders was gathered in his
fist. His other arm held her around the waist in a protective,
possessive gesture. She was looking off into the distance, but he
was looking at her, unfailing.

Welding from A to Z and Beyond
had an
arc welder on the cover with an interesting spray of sparks zipping
off into the corners of the book. But that wasn’t the only
interesting thing about it.

She opened the book and read a much more
interesting item on the flyleaf:
To Jack with love. Happy
Birthday, Karen.

She stared at the handwriting—printing,
actually—for a moment, then asked very nonchalantly, “When was your
birthday?”

“Last week,” he said, coming over and
sitting down beside her.

“Oh.”

“The book was a present from my sister.”

“Oh,” she said again, relieved, but thinking
a book was a particularly poor gift for someone who couldn’t read.
What had his sister been thinking? Especially a “with love”
sister.

“She’s the one who sent along the other book
too,” Jack said. “She was afraid you might find welding a little
dry.” Karen had also thought it was about time her brother showed
more than a passing interest in a woman. Rather than being
displeased with his inability to read ploy, she’d told him he could
always use the practice, since he did tend to avoid the written
word, and she’d rummaged under her bed until she’d found the
perfect primer. “No woman can resist this man,” she’d told him with
an uncomfortably dreamy sigh. Uncomfortable, that is, for Jack.
He’d told his sister he had plenty of competition, thank you, and
did she have another book. She’d only said, “Trust me.”

“Actually,” Lila said. “I think
Welding
from A to Z and Beyond
is going to better suit our purposes.”
She opened the handbook to the first chapter and tried to keep her
gaze off the cover of the romance novel. The Hawk looked like Jack
with a wild streak, and she didn’t need the added stimulation to
her imagination. “Do you know the alphabet?”

“Inside out and backward,” he said,
grinning.

She slanted him a wry glance. “Dyslexic
joke?”

He laughed and helped himself to a handful
of cookies.

Five minutes later Lila realized there was
more to welding than she’d thought, and most of it was couched in
technical jargon. Boring, indecipherable technical jargon. She was
halfway through the book and she still hadn’t found a good starting
page. She never should have agreed to let him bring his own
material, she thought, or allowed him to sit quite so close to her
on the couch. He disrupted her concentration.

“Stop,” he suddenly said, scooting even
closer and making it difficult for her even to breathe. “Back up a
couple of pages. Yep. That’s it. That’s the page we want.”

“Arc, TIG, MIG?”

“Just the arc part. I don’t need TIG
capabilities or MIG speed.”

“How lovely,” she mumbled, searching the
page for something simple, something she understood and he could
read.

“I’m not even sure I need arc,” he
added.

Then why, she asked silently, was she
reading stuff like, “The duty cycle at nonrated amperage is
inversely proportional to the square of the new amperage?” She’d
always struggled with anything remotely related to mathematics, but
she kept her thoughts to herself and scanned farther down the
page.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Here’s a good
sentence to start with.” She set her finger on the page below a
line of type. He leaned over her, and she swore she could feel his
body heat warming her right side.

“AC or DC?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Can you read it?”