The Quiet Seduction (5 page)

Then, too, he didn't want Ellen going out of her way to do him any more favors. He already owed her too much. Once his brain came back on line and he was able to pick up his life again, he would be on his way. The first thing he intended to do was to find some way to repay her. Maybe he could find her a couple of good men and pay them under the table. Or maybe he could
set up some kind of a fund for Pete. Whatever he did would have to be done tactfully, possibly even secretly. For a lady who was living from day to day, she had more than her share of pride.

Maybe he could arrange to buy a couple of her horses, although where he would keep them, not to mention what use he had for them, remained to be seen.

As did far too much else.

 

Storm was going over an old newspaper he'd found in the kindling basket a day or so later when Ellen came inside from her morning chores, cheeks glowing and her hair slipping free of the scarf she'd used to tie it back. She was either upset or angry. He recognized that militant march.

“Where's Pete?” he asked, rising from the only man-size chair in the room.

“School. This is Monday, in case you've lost track.”

“I thought that was a bus I heard early this morning.”

“He hates having to ride it. He's been begging me all year to let him ride his bike to school, but now…”

Right. Now the argument was settled. Probably for the best, as the highway was no place for an eight-year-old on a bike. “Any chance of getting him another one?” He knew the answer before she spoke. She'd admitted to being unable to pay higher wages to attract good help. She was good at disguising it, but the signs of near poverty were everywhere. Beans, macaroni and bologna sandwiches weren't exactly his idea of gourmet fare.

“Maybe for Christmas. I worried about letting him ride it even as far as Joey's, but then, it's not like we're on a major highway.”

“Not all the dangers are out on the interstate.”

“Oh, I know, you think I'm being overprotective, but—” She gestured helplessly, visible anger seeping away as she crossed the room to hang up her heavy wool shirt. “I hate to deny him anything he really wants when he's already lost so much. And yes, you don't have to say it—I know he has to grow up. It's just that he's all I have. You know how it is.” Shrugging, she gestured, palms out, with her calloused hands.

When he didn't reply, she looked at him and bit her lip. “Sorry. I guess you don't.”

“No problem.” And then, “Yeah, big problem. Look, I can't even offer to pay room and board, much less—”

“Hush! I owe you more than I can ever repay. Pete would've— He told me how he froze, watching that awful thing roaring down at him, with no place to hide even if he'd had time. If anything had happened to him, I don't know what I'd have done.”

She turned away, arms hugging her chest as she stared out through the window at the red barn that was in far better shape than the house. He waited, not saying anything because he didn't know what to say. Hell, maybe he had saved the kid's neck, but it hadn't involved any heroics. There hadn't been time for heroics. Truth was, he'd come close to drowning them both in that flooded drainage ditch before Pete had managed to wiggle out from under him.

“How long has it been?” he asked, curious now about more than his own identity.

“How long?” She turned away from the window, arms still wrapped around the bosom she disguised whenever she went out to the barn by wearing a man's shirt. He'd noticed that about her—guessed the reason
for it. “If you mean how long have you been here, I've lost track. Let's see, the storm hit last…was it Tuesday or Wednesday?”

“No, I meant how long since your husband…”

“Died? You can say it. I'm not fragile.”

She was far more fragile than she cared to admit, but he didn't think she'd like knowing he'd picked up on her vulnerability. A man would have to be blind not to. Blank he might be; blind he was not. “How long have you and Pete lived here alone?”

“Jake died just over two years ago. He was sick for a while before that, and we stayed here as long as we could. The visiting nurse taught me—” Breaking off, she took a deep breath and turned to stare out the window at the high clouds building up out over the Gulf of Mexico.

She'd nursed him at home. It had to have been hellish for her, knowing that the end was inevitable. Somehow, though, he wasn't surprised. “Pete was in the first grade when Jake died,” she said, picking up the threads of her story as if determined to lay out all the facts and then move on. “We'd moved here from Laredo. Before that we lived in Dallas. And before that, we were in the army. At least, Jake was. See, we'd been looking for just the right place because Jake's ambition was to breed quarter horses, and we both wanted a place away from town, but close to a good school.”

He waited for her to go on, had a feeling she needed to talk. As far as he knew, no one had even come by to see how she'd fared in the tornado, which meant either she hadn't had time to make friends or she'd managed to tick off all her neighbors. She didn't strike him as antisocial, so too busy for much of a social life was his best guess.

Her next words corroborated it. “At first I didn't much like it, with no close neighbors. I mean, I've always had people around. I grew up with lots of friends, and then, in the army, of course, there were the other wives.” She bit her lip and he found himself staring at the way her teeth dented the soft, pink flesh. “But once we settled in there wasn't time to think about anything but getting the barn in shape—that was our first priority, then we were going to tackle the house.”

He watched her as she talked, seeing the way she used her hands to make a point. She was graceful. Feminine. Even when she was wearing baggy jeans and one of her late husband's shirts.

“Jake always hated the city, but that's where the jobs were. He grew up in a rough section of Dallas and joined the army as soon as he was old enough. He was thinking about making it his career, but then we met and fell in love, and—” Here she paused, twisted the plain gold band on her ring finger, and then shook her head, as if in answer to an unasked question. “I got pregnant and Jake was afraid he'd be sent overseas, so he got out and we went back to Dallas, and Jake went into construction work. He was always good with his hands—he had this way of thinking through a project before he ever started it—sort of a logical mind. Truly, it's a gift. I hope Pete inherited it, but I'm afraid he might have inherited more of my impulsiveness.”

“Leap first and look later?” He'd never have pegged her for the impulsive type, not with that square little jaw. On the other hand, she'd hired that pair of scum-bags without first checking them out. But that, he suspected, had been more a case of desperation than impulsiveness.

For the first time since he'd erupted into her life—or she into his—he watched her visibly relax. It was like seeing a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis and flex its newfound wings.

And if that was a clue that he was some kind of poet, then he must be pretty damned good at it to afford the kind of clothes he'd been wearing.

Clearing his throat, Storm wrenched his mind back into line and asked, “How far are we from the state prison?”

Ellen blinked those remarkable green eyes. “The prison? Several miles, I think. I've never had occasion to go there. Why?”

He shrugged. “No real reason. Just a feeling I had. Probably something I heard on the news, I don't know.” He smiled at her then, the kind of smile that invited a like response. For several long moments he basked in the spell of her rare answering smile before turning away, oddly affected without knowing why. “Just grasping at straws, I guess.”

L
ong after he left the room, his step only slightly uneven as he favored his left leg, Ellen stared after him, thinking. Wondering. Struggling with feelings that veered from gratitude to suspicion to guilt—to something she would prefer not to examine too closely. The kind of tingling awareness she hadn't felt in years. Whoever and whatever he was, anything of that nature was out of the question. She owed him more than she could ever repay, but she really didn't know him.

He'd mentioned the prison. There had been prison gangs out cleaning up after the devastation, she'd heard that on the news—but that was after the tornado, not before. Besides, he would hardly have been a member of a road gang, dressed the way he'd been dressed. Still, he'd had no identification on him, and there hadn't been time to get rid of it. What kind of man traveled without identification?

What kind of woman living alone with her child, with no close neighbors, would bring home a stranger with no identification, one who claimed to have lost his memory? And then, based on instinct alone, turned away two men who might have identified him?

The answer, of course, was a gullible fool. One who had been severely overprotected to the point that she'd grown up feeling like a bird in a gilded cage.

After the only son of a friend had been kidnapped
for ransom, Leonard Summerlin had insisted that Howard, his chauffeur who doubled as a bodyguard, drive Ellen back and forth to school. All her friends had had to be vetted before she could even play with them. Having to bring her boyfriends home to be interrogated by her father had been so embarrassing it was a wonder she'd had had any social life at all.

How she had hated all that. It might even be the reason she had escaped the way she had—by eloping with a man she'd met at the mall when he'd been trying to pick out a birthday gift for a friend's three-year-old daughter. She had slipped her leash to go shopping that April afternoon and literally run headlong into a handsome young soldier who was standing outside a toy store window, trying to decide between a Barbie doll and a toy makeup kit. When he'd seen her staring at him—in a tight-fitting uniform with those shiny brown boots, he'd been well worth a second look—he had asked her what she thought a three-year-old girl would like better, the doll or the makeup kit. That had led to a discussion of baby dolls versus grown-up dolls and she had eventually helped him select a gift more suitable for the child.

After that, she'd done a lot of shopping. Howard would wait at the food court while she sallied forth in the mall. Jake, back in the States on leave, would meet her at the bookstore, which lent itself to leisurely browsing. Once inside, they would study the covers of all the paperbacks and Jake would make up outrageous stories to fit each one. She'd fallen in love with his mind even before she had with his body.

No, that wasn't quite true. She'd fallen in lust about half an hour before she'd fallen in love. Jake had been handsome, shy and protective, not to mention totally
unlike any man she had ever met before. What woman could resist such a combination? Certainly not a naive, overprotected college sophomore who had never been exposed at close range to a man who defined the word macho. The uniform had only added to the mystique.

She had trusted her instincts and they hadn't let her down. In spite of the difference in their backgrounds, Jake had wanted to confront her father and ask for her hand. Ellen had nixed that notion immediately. Her father might be a model citizen, a world-class financier and the recipient of more civic awards than his walls would comfortably hold, but he knew too many people in high places. Jake would have suddenly found himself transferred to the South Pole for an extended tour of duty, and before she knew it, she'd have been hustled into a match with her father's ambitious junior partner, Greg Sanders. He of the Gucci loafers and the pungent personalized cologne.

They had eloped, but Jake had insisted on calling her father immediately afterward to tell him she was all right. It was Jake who had notified her father of the change of address each time they'd moved. “In case he should take a notion to come see us,” he'd said, and she'd scoffed at the idea. Eight months after she'd married, her father had written to ask if she had come to her senses yet. He had demanded that she move back to Austin. She had ignored that letter as she had done all the rest—four in all—demanding that she return. “I had your tin soldier investigated, and I assure you, you can have no idea what kind of man he really is. What kind of neighborhood he grew up in. He's not our kind of people, Ellen. I blame your lapse in judgment on your mother's side of the family. I'm sure I taught you to be more discriminating.”

That was one of her father's favorite forms of discrimination. Anyone who didn't go to the right school, belong to the right clubs, attend the right church or even drive the right kind of car, was “not our kind of people.” It used to make her cringe whenever he said it, as often as not in the presence of the staff or some of their children, with whom she used to sneak out to play dolls or jump rope.

Since then she'd had only one occasion to contact her father. When Jake had been so desperately ill and she'd needed money to hire someone to help with Pete. Leonard Summerlin had ignored her pleas, just as she had ignored his letters. Her last contact, three months after Jake had died, had been through his lawyer, who had urged her to reconsider and move back home to Austin.

“Go back and be treated like a recaptured prisoner?” she'd retorted. “No thanks. My father couldn't be bothered to help me the one time I ever asked him for anything. I don't need him now.”

“Has he even met your son?” the pin-striped lawyer had asked.

“No, and I don't want him to. He'll insist on taking over every aspect of my son's life the way he did mine after Mama died, and it's not going to happen.”

She had learned many things in the years since she had defied her father and been disowned for her efforts—learned to manage money and to do her own housework. Learned to do without things she had once considered necessities. She had learned that she had worth as an individual, completely unrelated to who her father was.

She liked to think of herself as a work in progress. Every day she learned something new. One of the first
things she'd learned was to rely on her instincts. So far, they had yet to let her down.

“All right,” she told herself now. “Think! Work it out step by step.” What if the man she called Storm was actually J. Spencer Harrison, the missing district attorney? Or what if he was only pretending to have lost his memory, but was actually a crook? Not all crooks looked like those two thugs who had turned up on her doorstep the night of the tornado. She knew of one man who had belonged to two of her father's clubs and had actually dined at the Summerlin home, who had later been arrested for laundering money for a drug cartel.

All right, so she didn't have enough information to build a case either way. Instinct or not, she'd do well not to let her impulsive nature lead her into trouble. Pete desperately missed his father, even though he was trying hard not to let on. The last thing he needed was to start thinking of their unexpected guest as a hero and have him turn out to be some awful person who would suddenly disappear from their lives. Or worse.

Of course, he really was a hero, she admitted. Whatever else he was or wasn't, at least he was a gentle man. That much was evident in the way he treated Pete. Most men tended to talk down to children. Storm treated him as an individual, and Pete responded to him the way a puppy responded to a friendly voice.

She just hoped nothing would cause either of them to regret taking him in. Poor Pete had lost too much to risk attachment to a new friend only to lose him, too.

Oddly enough, it never occurred to her to put herself in that same category. Storm was an attractive man—even an intriguing man—but he was only passing through, she reminded herself, not for the first time.
Like one of those gorgeous migratory birds she occasionally saw, wishing it would linger long enough for her to identify.

 

First thing every morning, as soon as he'd washed the breakfast dishes, Storm took the morning paper and a second cup of coffee into the living room. There were beds to be made and laundry to be done, but he felt a deep compulsion to read every word in the
Mission Creek Clarion.
At this point he was grasping for straws. Too much time had passed and he was still drawing a blank. By now the storm news had been relegated to a few paragraphs in the second section, but sooner or later, something had to ring a bell.

New District Attorney Appointed Following Harrison's Disappearance. The headline was centered on the front page above the fold, accompanied by a photo of a well-dressed, middle-aged man with a skimpy moustache and a bad comb-over. Storm skimmed the pull-quote and then returned his attention to the picture, studying every detail. Waiting for something to trigger a reaction. Standard rent-a-bookshelf background. Nothing particularly alarming about the guy, who looked like a typical chamber-of-commerce type. So what was there about the new D. A. that affected him like a hard right to the solar plexus?

Sitting in Ellen's man-size leather chair, in her attractive, if slightly cluttered, slightly shabby living room, he suddenly felt compelled to do something. To collar someone and protest—

Protest what?

He felt the first qualms of nausea. Taking a deep breath, he carefully reread the headline, the pull-quote, then devoured the complete text again. He stared at the
photograph of the new district attorney and then he clenched his fists, closed his eyes and began to swear.

J. S. Harrison.

Storm Harrison?

There was a connection there, but until he knew which side of the law he was on, and who he was running from, he'd do well to keep his suspicions to himself.

A few minutes later he rose to begin gathering up the laundry. Ellen's bundle had been carefully sorted and left on the washing machine. She did her own intimate garments, which Storm found amusing. Evidently she'd picked up on the way he was beginning to feel about her. Guilty, for one thing. While the last thing on his mind should be sex with his benefactress, it was growing increasingly hard to see her bursting in through the back door, her silky brown hair windblown and her green eyes sparkling, and not react.

Gratitude would have been an appropriate reaction. Friendship—sure, why not? He knew more about her now than her closest neighbor did—probably even more than her own son. And the more he came to know her, the more he found to like. To admire.

The fact that it wasn't solely friendship he was feeling was inconvenient, to say the least. Even that first night, when his head had felt like a busted melon and she'd come into his room wearing that shabby old bathrobe, shoved up his pajama leg and began massaging liniment into his knee, he'd felt the first stir of sexual awareness. Since then it had grown to the point where he was wary of being alone with her after Pete went to bed. With his mind an empty slate, he found it too easy to fill it with visions of himself following Ellen up those stairs—of Ellen stepping out of the shower
and reaching for a towel. Of Ellen tossing restlessly in her bed, which happened to be right above the room he was using.

“Judas priest, man, get a grip!” he muttered as he ran water into the washer, tossed in a pair of his jeans and two pairs of Ellen's, and looked around for Pete's things. He was supposed to have brought them down before leaving for school.

Well, hell, if he could tote a basket full of wet laundry, he could handle a few stairs. All signs of inflammation in both his ankle and his knee had disappeared. The knot on his head was gone. Basically he was good as new, if only he could fill in a few Grand-Canyon-size potholes where his memory was supposed to reside.

He'd quit using the crutch a couple of days ago. Now he held on to the banister, taking one step at a time. No pain, no gain. Where had he heard that before? Did that work in reverse? Because he didn't feel so much as a twinge.

He was grinning triumphantly by the time he reached the top of the stairs. That was, he was grinning until he saw Ellen. She was clutching her bathrobe and a pair of slippers in front of her. Jaybird naked, as far as he could tell.

“Omigod,” she blurted.

“I thought you were outside.” Stepping back, he grabbed the newel to keep from tumbling down the stairs. He was breathing heavily. From exertion, he told himself, trying hard not to stare at the satiny flesh above the chenille robe.

“What are you doing up here? You're not supposed to tackle stairs yet.”

“I could ask you the same thing. I didn't hear you
come inside.” To reach her bedroom she would have to pass close by where he was standing.

“I came in the back way. Look, I don't know what you're doing up here, but if it can wait…?” She'd managed to slip her arms into her robe. Now she tightened the sash around her waist.

“Sure. I mean, I was only going to see if Pete had anything to wash. He forgot to bring his things down this morning.” Storm couldn't take his eyes off her waist. Couldn't be more than twenty inches—in another era, hers would have been called an hourglass figure.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to stare—only, Ellen, you do know how beautiful you are, don't you?”

Her jaw fell. “I know what? Storm, have you been drinking?”

“Coffee. That's all, I swear. I just thought…I mean—” He shook his head. What did he mean? That she was beautiful? That was a given.

That he would like nothing better than to open her bedroom door, lead her over to her bed and join her there?

Absolutely.

That he was acting like a man who'd lost not only his memory but every grain of decency he'd ever possessed?

Yeah, that, too.

“I slipped and fell down in the manure pile.”