Moonlight and Shadows (2 page)

Minutes later—or was it hours?—he lifted his
head. Gentle arousal thrummed through his body. The wind ruffled
her hair, and he stroked the silky strands, absently tucking them
behind her ear.

“Thank you, Lila.” His voice was husky, the
smile on his face one of sheer contentment. Maybe later he’d feel
foolish, but try as he might, he didn’t feel foolish then. He felt
whole. “Smitty will be around on Saturday.”

Looking thoroughly dazed, she nodded. The
action brought his fingers in contact with the velvety softness of
her cheek. Unbidden by conscious thought, he bent his head once
more and pressed a kiss to her brow. Then he turned and walked
away.

Lila stared after him, struck dumb by the
power of his kiss and her own startling response. The man had
hardly spoken twenty words to her, and she was sure he hadn’t heard
twenty of hers. Then he up and kissed her? She should have slapped
him, for crying out loud, not melted in his arms.

But she had melted. Why?

She touched her lips, and the warmth was
still there. If she touched her cheek she knew she’d find warmth
there, too, despite the chill tickling her skin.

The cab light in his truck came on when he
opened the door, and in the seconds before it went off, he looked
back at her, his clear gaze reaching across the night to hold her
with intimacy and a disarming tenderness.

Disarming? Yes. She hadn’t known he was
going to kiss her until it had been far too late to think. His
mouth had been so warm, wet, enticing, his tongue stroking hers in
an erotic dance. Had she really touched his face, felt the day’s
growth of beard? Tunneled her fingers into his sandy brown hair,
traced the lean angles of his face?

He was so tall, his body lanky and hard. She
didn’t like tall men, had decided as a teenager that she didn’t
want to spend her life looking at a man’s chest instead of his
face.

His face
. . . Her memory conjured up
the rough handsomeness of Jack Hudson’s face, the feathery lines at
the corners of his eyes, his sun-darkened skin, his silky eyebrows.
Lord! Had she touched him there too? What had gotten into her?

She slowly looked up at the sky, her gaze
drawn by the moon’s light flooding through the cottonwoods.
The
moon has gotten into you, Lila,
she told herself. The cold wind
sent a shudder through her body.
Only the harvest moon.

The reasoning sounded weak in her own mind,
like an excuse, and her one consolation was that she’d never have
to see the man again. The thought that she
might
see him
again was too embarrassing to contemplate. Mortifying, actually,
and ridden with guilt. No one had kissed her like that since Danny,
and she wasn’t ready to replace a widow’s memories. Not again,
never again.

A deep winter snow blanketed every square
inch of the prairie, the gently rolling hills, and all the roads
tying them together. Lila moved from room to room in the quiet dawn
of Christmas Eve, starting the coffeemaker, turning up the heat,
taking a moment to gaze at the white peaks of the Rockies standing
like earthbound clouds against the sky.

She had a dozen presents still to wrap, and
though she’d set her Christmas tree up in her new office, she
decided to finish the chore in the much warmer kitchen. For reasons
she couldn’t explain, her office seemed to have a crosswind. She’d
been meaning to call Dale Smith about it for weeks, but what with
final exams and advising her master’s students and doctoral
candidates, the month of December had slipped by without a minute
to spare. She had a feeling January was going to go the same way,
at least she hoped so. Moping around the house had been an
obsession the first year after Danny’s death. It was not a habit
she cared to fall into again, for last winter the antidote had
proven to be more painful than the loneliness.

Christmas break was the worst, but she had a
plan this year: work, work, and more work in her new office. She
wasn’t going to relax for a moment. Vigilance would keep her from
doing anything stupid; she was sure of it. She was counting on it.
Hadn’t work kept her from dwelling—too much—on Jack Hudson and the
magical kiss they’d shared one September evening? Hadn’t work kept
her from wondering if maybe he’d drop by, just to see how the
office looked; and kept her from feeling disappointed when he
didn’t? Yes, it had. Work was the answer.

After she had all the presents rounded up on
the kitchen table, she walked over to the counter to pour a cup of
coffee. That was when she heard it, a low, grumbling noise, more a
quiver in the air than a sound. She turned toward the doorway to
her office, then stared in dumbstruck horror as her brand-new
ten-by-twenty-foot addition peeled off the side of her house. The
roof went first, dropping straight down and dumping a ton of snow
onto her desk. The walls followed quickly, one at a time, buckling
and groaning and collapsing inward in slow motion.

When it was all over and destruction lay
across the land like the last invasion of Genghis Khan, she turned,
silent and ashen-faced, to the telephone. Fingers stiff with anger,
she punched in the seven numbers printed on the business card
tacked to her kitchen bulletin board.

“This number is no longer in service. If you
need—”

She slammed the phone down and whipped it
back up, punching in the next seven numbers on the card with a
vengeance, angrier than before, if that were possible.

How dare that damn carpenter change his
phone number when every whipstitch of work she’d paid him for had
just self-destructed! she railed silently. Well, somebody was going
to hear about it, and if it wasn’t that damn Dale Smith, it would
be that damn Jack Hudson!

Five rings later, a muffled, tired voice
answered. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Hudson?” She clipped off the name.

“Yeah?”

“Th-this—” Her voice broke. She paused to
inhale a trembling breath before trying again, and the words verily
hissed from between her tightly clenched jaws. “This is Dr. Singer.
If you’ve got a lawyer, you’d better call him, and if you don’t,
you’d better get one, because I’m—I’m going to sue you and your
partner
for every damn dime you’ve got
.”

“Who?”

“Dale Smith,” she snapped, wondering what
kind of idiot would forget his own partner’s name. The wind picked
up and blew across the demolished office and into the kitchen,
making her colder and angrier.

“Smitty? Is that you?” Jack slowly rolled to
a sitting position on the bed, holding his head with his free hand.
He’d worked too late to be able to think at the crack of dawn. “You
sound funny.”

“N-no, Mr. Hudson,” Lila said, hating the
way her voice was beginning to shake. She wrapped her arm tight
around her waist. “This is Dr. Singer. Doc-tor Sing-er,” she
repeated a little louder, a little clearer.

The barest gleam of a light bulb clicked on
in Jack’s muddled brain. “Lila Singer?”

“Yes!” She got the word out between
chattering teeth and huddled her backside up against the wall,
hunching her shoulders down. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t
believe anything as outrageously stupid as half her house falling
off had happened to her. “I . . . I . . .” Her voice broke again,
and she gave up in disgust.

Jack grinned and rubbed a hand over his
eyes. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe the woman he’d
kissed for no sane reason and hadn’t been able to forget was
calling him. Her timing was incredible, beating him to the punch by
mere hours. He’d promised himself the luxury of calling her during
the holidays, after his workload had eased up a bit.

He’d gone out to her place a couple of times
in early October, supposedly to help Smitty. Each time Lila Singer
hadn’t been home, though, and each time he hadn’t stayed longer
than five minutes. Smitty hadn’t seemed to want his help, and he’d
felt foolish hanging around waiting for her. He was too old, he’d
told himself, for crazy infatuations.

But he hadn’t forgotten what it was like to
kiss Lila Singer. The warmth, and taste, and welcoming softness of
her mouth beneath his had felt too good, too right.

“Hi, Lila,” he drawled, his voice still
husky with sleep. “It’s good to hear from you.” And it was very
good. “Quite a storm we’ve been having. Looks like a white
Christmas this year.”

Good to hear from her? Lila repeated
silently. She tightened her mouth and shivered inside her flannel
robe. He wasn’t listening to her again. Refraining from the rare
but succinct cussing on the tip of her tongue, she started to set
him straight. “Mr. Hudson—”

“Jack, please,” Jack interrupted with a
yawn, all the while fighting an overactive imagination stimulated
by her voice. It was damn early, barely six o’clock. She could be
wearing anything.

Black lace would be perfect, he thought,
with her dark hair and her soft, creamy skin . . . and that mouth.
He shifted on the bed, then decided just to get up and head for the
shower. Imagining Lila Singer in black lace had a way of taking the
chill off the morning in a hurry.

“
Mr. Hudson
,” she said clearly, “I am
instigating legal action against you, and if you are not here in
fifteen minutes, I’m going to call the police and have you
arrested!”

The phone banged in Jack’s ear. He winced
and jerked the receiver away from his head. Arrested? He’d missed
something. What had happened to the weather and black lace? He gave
his head a slight shake. No, they hadn’t been talking about black
lace. He’d been imagining that part. But the weather had been real.
A white Christmas, more snow than they’d had in twenty years, a
heavy, wet snow, the kind that broke tree limbs and tested roofs,
the kind that . . .

He did a mental backtrack and swore softly
under his breath. Moving quicker than his brain told him was wise,
he reached for his pants and shirt, praying the snowplows had
worked all night. She’d only
given him
fifteen minutes before she
called
the cops.

* * *

Jack stood outside in the snow; then,
without needing to open a door, walked inside to stand in more
snow. Disaster was the only word that came to mind. Actually, a
couple of other words did come to mind, words like liability,
expensive, and damn Smitty. What had he been doing out there for
the last three months? And where had all of Lila Singer’s money
gone? Certainly not into quality construction. He’d never seen a
mess like the one tumbled all over her backyard and through her
office.

“Ten
thousand dollars,” she muttered, struggling past him with a
computer console in her arms. Her full mouth didn’t look the least
bit kissable this morning. In fact, the lady looked like a small
pot ready to boil over. Her movements were jerky, her muscles tight
with anger.

Jack nodded in agreement, jotted the figure
down on his small notepad, and wished he’d taken the time to fix
himself a thermos of coffee. It was going to be a long day, and he
didn’t have the guts to ask Dr. Singer for a cup. Neither did he
have the nerve to offer his help again, as he had when he’d first
arrived. She’d made it clear what his job was, and it didn’t
include rescuing her office equipment or any of the hundreds of
books scattered in the rubble.

Dr. Singer.
He shook his head and
continued looking around. More money than brains, and damn little
money, had been his erroneous initial summation of her. The lady
obviously had plenty of brains.

“Oh, no.” The whispered wail came from
behind him. He turned and found her kneeling by a pile of books.
She lifted one and gently brushed the snow off its blue cover,
revealing a gold-leaf border. “Oh, no,” she repeated, softly to
herself, the first bit of softness she’d shown all morning.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and immediately
felt stupid. What was wrong was all around him, some of it broken,
most of it wet.

She flashed him an icy glance, the tightness
returning to her mouth. “Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Son of
Tarzan
, first edition,
formerly
in immaculate
condition.” She rose and wrapped her arms around the book. “Four
hundred and fifty dollars.”

Jack watched her stomp through the mess and
into the house. “Four hundred and fifty dollars,” he whispered,
adding the number to the growing column on his notepad. He looked
at the half ton of other books and prayed there weren’t too many
more four-hundred-fifty-dollar versions in the wreckage. He’d never
heard of such a thing. Four hundred and fifty dollars for a book,
and a Tarzan book at that. He’d seen the movies as a kid and
thought they were pretty good, but not four hundred dollars worth
of good. Maybe the books were better than the movies. He’d heard
similar opinions about other movies from friends of his who read a
lot.

He spent the next half hour combing through
the broken lumber and found nothing to decrease his anger at
Smitty. His partner, his best friend, had short-shrifted every
aspect of the job. He’d bought third grade lumber and pieced it
together into the worst excuse for a framing job Jack had ever
seen. There was barely enough wood in the roof to hold up the
shingles. There certainly hadn’t been enough to hold up the
Colorado snows. The whole damn room had crumbled under the
weight.

Hudson and Smith Construction would no doubt
crumble under it too. The mess piled around his feet was the result
of negligence and fraud. Dr. Singer had paid good money for good
construction, and even an unskilled eye could tell that the money
had gone someplace else, probably into Smitty’s pocket. They were
doomed.

A sudden thought had him swearing.
They
weren’t doomed. He was doomed all by himself. Smitty
had said he needed to get away for a while, and he’d refused to say
where he was going or how long he’d be gone. Jack was afraid the
answer to the last question was a very long time. Divorce did crazy
things to some people, crazy, criminal things.