Hank really hated kids. They made him nervous. They aroused all sorts of odd feelings of inadequacy. They were noisy, demanding and messy. They asked endless, unanswerable questions. They caused nothing but worry for their parents, aside from turning perfectly enjoyable lifestyles upside down and inside out. Girls were even more of a mystery to him than boys. At least he’d been a boy once himself.
Still, he had to admit there was something appealing about this little girl. With her silver-blond hair curling in a wispy halo, she looked placid and innocent, as if she’d had absolutely nothing to do with virtually upending a man six times her size.
“Hi,” he said cautiously. It had been a long time since Todd’s son—his godson—had been this age, and he’d vowed to avoid Todd’s new baby until she could speak intelligently. He’d figured that was another twelve to fourteen years away. He stared at the child in front of him. Beyond hello, what else did you say to a three-year-old, especially one who still had a thumb tucked in her mouth and showed no inclination to communicate?
“Where’s your mommy?” he tried finally.
To his horror, tears welled up in the wide, blue eyes and the child took off at a run, dragging her thumb from her mouth long enough to let out a wail that would have wakened the dead.
Hank was just considering getting straight back into the pickup and bolting to the most expensive, tiniest condo he could find when a screen door slammed. The woman who’d loomed in his memory rounded a corner of the house at a run, her ankle-length purple skirt flapping, a butcher knife clutched threateningly in her raised hand. She skidded to a stop at the sight of him and slowly lowered the knife. Her furious expression calmed slightly.
There was nothing at all calm about his own reaction to the sight of her. His heart lurched with an astonishing thump. He dismissed the sensation at once as delayed panic. He’d rarely been confronted at the door by knife-wielding women. Surely that explained the surge of adrenaline that had his blood pumping fast and hard through his veins.
And yet… He took a good long look at her. Somehow all those uneven features he’d recalled had been rearranged into a face that was interesting, rather than plain, especially now with her color high. The tall, gaunt body, still dressed in an utterly absurd combination of colors and styles, seemed, for some peculiar reason, more appealing than he’d remembered. Her hair, still cropped short, suddenly seemed to suit her face with its feathery softness. It emphasized her eyes and those thick, sooty lashes. She looked…good. Damned good. Even with a knife in her hand.
He’d obviously lost his mind.
“Well, here you are,” Ann said briskly as she put down the knife and began methodically to gather up the groceries. It gave her something to do to cover the nervous, fluttery feeling that had suddenly assailed her without warning. Nabbing a box of jelly doughnuts, she regarded them disapprovingly, then stuffed them in the bag along with assorted snack foods that she absolutely refused to have within a five-mile radius of the kids except on special occasions. She would deal with Hank Riley’s dietary habits later, after she’d reconciled her memory of the obnoxious, arrogant man with the disconcertingly appealing sight of him.
“Sorry about Melissa,” she apologized distractedly, fingering a head of lettuce. Lettuce was good. The choke hold this bearded giant of a man seemed to have over her senses was not. She swallowed hard. “I gather she’s responsible for this.”
“If she’s about so high and partial to her thumb, she’s the one,” he acknowledged with a smile that made her stomach do an unexpected flip. “Did I frighten her or something? I asked where her mommy was and she let out a war cry that would have straightened the hair on Hitler’s head.”
Ann struggled with the unfamiliar sensations that continued to rampage through her, decided her panic at Melissa’s scream was to blame and reclaimed a bit of control.
“So that’s it,” she said, satisfied with the explanation for her nervousness and oblivious to Hank’s confusion.
He was regarding her oddly. “That’s what?”
She tried frantically to recall what he’d just said. Something about Melissa’s mother and Hitler? She wasn’t sure what the Nazi connection was, but she understood precisely what had happened when Hank had mentioned the child’s mother.
“I wondered what brought on all the tears. She came in crying about some man.”
“Which explains the butcher knife.”
She glanced down at the weapon she’d grabbed on her way out the door. It was lying at her feet. “Oh, sorry.”
“Don’t be. In this day and age, I don’t suppose a woman can be too careful,” he said, reaching down to pick it up. “Since you didn’t use it on me, I gather you’ve decided I’m harmless.”
Harmless? No less than a pit of vipers. How had she forgotten that he had this strange effect on her? All she’d recalled after the wedding had been his infuriating habit of contradicting every opinion she held.
“Maybe I’d better explain about Melissa’s mother,” she said, clinging to a neutral topic. “The woman abandoned her a year ago, just took off without a word to anyone. A neighbor found Melissa all alone the next day. They say children adjust pretty easily, but Melissa hasn’t. She still wakes up in the middle of the night crying for her mother. Any reminder tends to set her off.”
Professional training kept her tone matter-of-fact, but she still seethed inside when she thought about it. “It’s beyond me how a mother could leave a child all alone like that. Anything could have happened to her. What if there’d been a fire? Good God, can you imagine?” she said, shuddering visibly. “Even waking up and being all alone would be enough to terrify a baby. When the social worker told me about it, I felt like going after the woman myself. No wonder Melissa’s not adjusting.”
Hank muttered what sounded like an indignant curse under his breath, then said, “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I guess I was just thinking of you as her mother.”
“We don’t do a lot of swearing around here,” she warned automatically. “The kids, well, some of them anyway, are at that impressionable age. As for Melissa, she calls me Ann. Some of the kids refer to me as Mother. It all depends on what they’re comfortable with. Since you’re going to be here awhile, I’ll give you a rundown on each of them, so you’ll understand how they ended up here. The older ones are pretty open about things, but the little ones are still a little sensitive.” She fingered a package of cupcakes, regarded them distastefully and sighed. “Then there’s Jason. He rarely talks at all.”
Hank didn’t seem to notice the fact that she couldn’t shut up. In fact, he looked decidedly uneasy. “How many are there?” he asked, as if he were inquiring about enemy troops just beyond a strategic hill.
“Five. Six. It depends on whether Tracy stays with friends after her classes at the junior college in Key West. Tonight they’re all here. Occasionally one of the kids who used to live here comes back for a visit.”
Hank, a man who struck her as big enough and tough enough to fear nothing, seemed to take a panicky step closer to his truck. He looked as though he wanted to escape. She could relate to the feeling. She’d felt that way since the instant she’d spotted him standing in the yard in faded jeans, a body-hugging T-shirt and sneakers. He hadn’t seemed nearly as devastating in the suits he’d worn the weekend of the wedding.
“I probably won’t see all that much of them,” he said, an edge of desperation in his voice. “I’ll be working pretty long hours.”
She waved aside the objection. “Nonetheless, it’ll be better if you know. Come on in now and I’ll show you around.”
She led him in through the kitchen, simply because it was