Moonlight and Shadows (8 page)

She was sweet anticipation rising to his
need, and Jack wanted the moment to last—because it wasn’t going to
go any further. He traced her full lower lip with the pad of his
thumb, reveling in its softness, well aware of what he was passing
up.

When her thick black lashes drifted down to
rest on her rose-tinged cheeks, though, his resistance slipped
along with intentions. He pressed his mouth against her temple,
inhaling her fragrance and feeling her soft sigh blow across his
face. Rationalizing that there was a difference between a kiss and
a
kiss
, he decided to explore the limits of the former.

He caressed the side of her face with his
mouth, following a lazy trail to the sweet patch of skin between
her ear and throat. He lingered there, nuzzling—but not kissing;
grazing the tenderness of her lobe with his teeth—but not kissing;
tracing the curve of her jaw with his tongue—but not kissing; until
he admitted her lie was nothing compared to his own. He could kiss
her until he lost his mind and ever
once
come near her lips.

“You can keep your secrets and your letter,
Lila,” he murmured against her cheek. “And the torte.”

Lila felt his smile before he straightened
up on his makeshift stool.

“I think call it a night, if that’s okay
with you,” he continued, rising to his feet. “I need to help my dad
with his barn tomorrow during the day, but I’ll be back tomorrow
night to finish the electrical work. I’ll try to get the drywallers
in here by the end of the week.”

“I—I won’t be here tomorrow night,” she
said, still breathless from whatever it was he’d been doing to her
neck.

“Well, it’s a small house.” He grinned.
“We’re bound to run into each other sooner or later.”

He was leaving, she thought, which was what
she’d wanted. And he was coming back, which hadn’t been in her plan
at all. But she’d had her chance to tell him the truth about the
letter, and she’d declined.

“Thank you for dinner,” she said. “It was
wonderful.”

“Rudi’s makes a helluva pizza,” he
agreed.

She’d been talking about his company, but
she decided not to tell him that either. In fact, she needed to
think before she said anything else. She’d never known a man to
turn her around with such ease. She’d had everything planned before
he’d shown up, and her everything had been completely flip-flopped,
and the only thing that bothered her was that she wasn’t bothered.
Stranger things had happened, she was sure, but she couldn’t
remember the last time they’d happened to her.

“Well, good night,” she said.

“Yeah, good night.”

It was another perfect opportunity for a
kiss, a classic opportunity, time-tested and practically foolproof,
and they both knew it. Lila caught his quick glance at her mouth,
and Jack saw her wet lips.

“Yeah, well, good night,” he said again,
backing toward the French doors, his voice a shade rougher than it
had been.

She waved to him twice before he got into
his truck, and once more as he drove down the driveway. All three
times, in her private heart of hearts, she wished he weren’t
leaving.

Another week, another plan. Lila had decided
the only sensible thing left to do was to face her attraction for
Jack Hudson head-on. Ignoring it certainly hadn’t worked. She
needed to stop thinking of him as an intriguing, unknown quantity
in her life and instead put him in a new category, one she’d had
years of practice controlling. She needed to make a student out of
him, so she decided to teach him how to read.

Of course, she still could have just gotten
rid of him. Four things kept her from doing that. She now knew
where his unsettling look of defeat had come from the day he’d
stood in her sitting room and stared at Danny’s photograph.
Dyslexics faced thousands of failures before adulthood, though she
had to admit Jack Hudson seemed to have bounced back from them in
pretty good shape. She didn’t know exactly what had caused his
resigned expression at that moment, but she didn’t want to add to
his score sheet of failures.

His blush had definitely swayed her. He
hadn’t liked being found out, but neither had he done anything to
hide his disability, which led to reason number three—his mixture
of courage and confidence. It took both to invite an English
professor to eat pizza with you after she’d just found you
sounding-out syllables.

Reason number four was self-serving and
practical. Jack Hudson was the best carpenter in northern Colorado.
Long after the rest of her Victorian farmhouse crumbled into dust,
her office would be standing on the edge of the cornfields. She
didn’t doubt it for a minute.

Therefore, she’d compiled a good, solid
beginning reading list. She’d take him through some of her
childhood favorites, and at the end of each lesson she’d read to
him from the classics. She’d give him the world.

It never occurred to her that he might not
want to.

* * *

“No.” Jack whacked the nail again, though
he’d already sunk it an eighth of an inch past the board. He was
standing with his back to her, inside the open framework of a
storage closet they’d decided to add to her office.

“No?”

“No.” He set another nail, and his hammer
rang out.

Lila dragged her gaze from the curve of his
backside, noting how nicely he fit into a pair of softly worn
denims, and looked down at her cherished copy of Mother Goose. She
admitted he might have a point. Maybe nursery rhymes weren’t the
best place to start. She’d thought the easy rhyme scheme would act
as a natural prompter, whereas she’d given little thought to the
subject matter.

“Okay,” she conceded. “What would you like
to read?”

“Nothing.”

For a woman who had spent some of the best
hours of her childhood on
Treasure Island
and bawling her
eyes out over
The Yearling,
his answer bordered on
incomprehensible.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

He just kept hammering away, nail after
nail, whack after whack. Outside, the wind whipped up flurries of
snow in the dark, blowing them off the roof of the milkhouse and
scraping them across the icy crust covering the yard.

“Maybe if you told me what you were
interested in,” she said, trying a new tack, “a hobby or something,
I could get some books on the subject.” Much to her surprise, that
worked.

He stopped with his hammer raised. After a
long pause he landed one final blow on the last nail, then slowly
turned to face her. “I don’t have much going in the hobby area, but
over the last few months I have been cultivating a new
interest.”

If his smooth drawl and the gleam in his eye
hadn’t warned her, his teasing grin should have, but it didn’t.

“Great.” She almost sighed in relief. “What
is it?”

“You,” His smile broadened, and he moved a
couple of steps closer in a slow, sexy swagger. “So . . . if you’ve
got an autobiography lying around somewhere or a diary you’d be
willing to share, I can guarantee you my undivided attention.”

He was impossible, she thought. There was no
other word for him. Impossibly aggravating, impossibly
good-looking, impossibly, seductively appealing.

Deciding to build an office addition onto
her house hadn’t seemed like such a big deal last fall. She’d just
wanted someplace to set up her computer and put her books,
someplace besides the living room, the sitting room, or the
kitchen, someplace besides rooms already jam-packed with Danny’s
exotic antiques from the four corners of the world. All she’d
wanted was a room of her own for her own stuff.

What she’d gotten was Jack Hudson. What she
needed was help.

* * *

“You what?” Didi Caldwell’s tortoiseshell
glasses slid lower on her nose, giving Lila the full benefit of her
blue-eyed stare across the width of a cluttered desk.

“Mother Goose,” Lila admitted for the second
time. “But I immediately offered to start with something else,
anything else.”

“After you had already offended him,” her
friend added with a condemning sigh. Didi sat back in her chair and
swiped ineffectually at a multitude of straying, rust-colored
tendrils of hair. “Sometimes you’re so smart you’re dumb,
Lila.”

“Sometimes,” she was forced to agree.

“But not often,” Didi said. “What can I do
to help? Do you want me to find him a real reading tutor? The
public library runs a good literacy program. I’m sure they can
match him up with someone.”

“No, no, that’s not what I had in mind,”
Lila said, not quite meeting Didi’s gaze.

“Oh. Well, I guess I could offer him as an
extra-credit project to one of my grad students. Is he willing to
pay an hourly wage?”

“No. I mean, that’s not what I had in mind
either.”

Didi leaned forward and pushed her glasses
back into place. “Lila honey, I have adolescent literature,
grammar, and reading for education majors this semester. There’s no
way I can cram an illiterate carpenter into my personal
schedule.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m working him into
my own schedule. I just need to know what to do. I thought you
could give me a few pointers.”

“Why?”

Lila frowned at the blunt question, thinking
the answer was obvious. “So I don’t make any more mistakes.”

“That wasn’t the question,” her friend said,
giving her a knowing look. When Lila didn’t reply, Didi sighed. “Is
there something about this guy I should know that you’re not
telling me?”

“He’s a nice man,” Lila hedged.

“And?”

She shifted slightly in her chair, wondering
if her students felt as uncomfortable as she suddenly did on the
wrong side of the desk. “And he’s doing a lot of extra work on my
office, and I’d like to help him out. Isn’t that what teaching is
all about?”

“That’s what it’s
supposed
to be
about. That’s what I tell my students it’s about. But you’ve been
in this game long enough to know it ain’t necessarily so,
especially at the university level. And that, my dear, is the level
we are at.” Didi paused long enough for her words to sink in, then
asked, “What’s his name?”

“Jack. Jack Hudson.” Lila watched Didi’s
eyebrows slowly draw together. “What?”

Didi shrugged. “The name sounds familiar,
but I don’t know why. I’ve never hired a carpenter in my life,
functionally illiterate or otherwise. Kevin does all our fix-it
work.” Kevin was Didi’s husband, an art professor and no handyman,
not by anyone’s standards.

“Maybe you’d be better off with a
carpenter,” Lila said with a slight smile. “I’ve seen some of
Kevin’s carpentry. The next time he gets excited about building
onto the deck, call me, and I’ll give you Jack’s number. He’s
incredible.”

“Incredible?” Didi’s eyebrows rose above the
tortoiseshell frames, and Lila realized there had been more than a
trace of enthusiasm in her voice.

“Good,” she amended. “He’s very good at his
job.”

“Oh?” Didi’s eyebrows didn’t budge a
millimeter. “Are we talking about a good, illiterate,
old
carpenter, or a good, illiterate, prime-of-manhood carpenter?”

“Actually, he’s dyslexic.”

Didi gasped. “I don’t believe it! You’re
seeing a man!”

It was a leap of logic to be sure, but Lila
knew how her friend’s mind worked, and she knew Didi would be hard
to dissuade. Still, she had to try. She couldn’t let one of her
oldest and dearest friends harbor false hopes.

“I said he was dyslexic, Didi. I wasn’t
being evasive.”

“You were being evasive, totally evasive. Of
course, dyslexia is a whole different problem from functional
illiteracy. You should have told me right up front. The library
program is no good. Their volunteers aren’t trained to tutor
dyslexics. I can’t wait to meet him. He must be very special. Do
you know how long it’s been since you had a date?” She paused as if
she expected an answer, and when she didn’t get one, she filled in
her own blank. “A year ago December.”

“Thank you, Dee,” Lila drawled, “for
reminding me of such a pleasant occasion.” Thankfully, Didi missed
the sarcasm.

“It was awful!” she exclaimed. “I was there.
Remember? But a whole year, Lila? Man does not live by bread
alone.”

“And it’s physically impossible to die of
embarrassment,” Lila countered, one clichéd phrase for another.

“Hey, wait a minute. You said he couldn’t
read the letter you’d written him?”

“Yes,” she said, wary of what Didi was going
to ask next.

“Handwritten?”

“Yes.”

“Well, hell, Lila.
I
can’t read your
handwriting, and I have a doctorate.”

“My handwriting is not that bad.”

“It’s worse,” Didi said succinctly. “Bring
him around to the reading lab on Wednesday, and I’ll have him
tested. Then we can figure out where to go from there. Okay?”

“No, not okay. He doesn’t want to be tested.
I’m not even sure he wants to learn how to read.”

Didi thought about that for a moment, then
threw Lila another curve. “Maybe he already knows how and he just
doesn’t like to read. It wouldn’t be on the top of a dyslexic’s
list of fun things to do.”

Perfect, Lila thought, sinking deep into the
chair. She hadn’t fired him because he couldn’t read, and she
couldn’t teach him to read because he might already know. She’d
ignored him and confronted him, kissed him and offended him, lied
with him and to him. She’d be darned if she knew what else to do
with him.

* * *

Fortunately, Jack was full of ideas, and he
wasn’t shy about pursuing them.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said
that evening. He’d taken a short break from working on the office,
helped himself to a cup of coffee in the kitchen, then unerringly
wandered into the sitting room, where Lila worked every night.