Finally a Family

“Back at you.” She kept her smile aloof. No sense encouraging one of the locals on a quick visit.

She forced her attention back to the little boy. “Sorry, I don’t have enough change for another doughnut,” she said.

He sighed and nodded.

“That’s okay. Susie will pay,” the man said as the girl came nearer. “Won’t you, Susie? I think you owe Todd about fifty cents.”

“Uncle Ethan,” she wailed, but even as she protested, she dug in her pocket. “You won’t tell Mom, will you?” she asked as she handed the money over.

“Of course I won’t tell your mom, you little twerp. Just don’t act like such a toughie.” He made the letter V with his fingers and pointed them at his eyes. “Remember, I see everything.”

Susie gave a nervous laugh.

“Okay, Uncle Ethan.” She took a few hesitant steps backward. “Can I go now?”

Uncle Ethan flipped his hand toward her in a dismissive gesture. “Shoo. Run along.” Ethan handed the coins to the little boy, who took them with a quickly murmured thank-you and scooted inside the bakery.

When Hannah stood, Ethan looked at her again. This time she caught a hint of puzzlement in his eyes.

“Do I know you?”

Hannah laughed then. Any number of smart remarks came to mind, but his laugh answered hers before she could share any of them.

“That was as lame as a two-legged cat. Sorry.” He scratched his head, rearranging his hair.

Weekend cowboy, Hannah deduced, taking in the long legs clad in crisp blue jeans and the polished cowboy boots.

“It’s so hard to come up with original lines these days. All the best ones have been taken,” Hannah said.

He looked as if he was about to answer with a smart remark of his own when a woman’s voice caught his attention.

“Ethan. Wait up.” A lithe blond woman came alongside him and slipped her arm through his. “I didn’t know you were coming to town, handsome.”

Ethan flicked his attention toward the woman, then back to Hannah.

Who, officially, was no longer interested. She had spent too much time with guys like Ethan. They encouraged women until things got too serious, then the men developed a sudden severe case of attention deficit disorder and moved on to another woman.

Case in point, Alex Deerborn.

No thanks.

She moved past him, the scent of coffee growing stronger and more tantalizing by the minute.

“So who was that?” she heard the blonde ask.

“I’m not sure, Jocelyn,” he responded.

His vague comment made her look back again. “Uncle Ethan” stared at her, a frown pulling his well-shaped eyebrows together, ignoring the woman clinging to his arm.

“I think I saw her.”

Morris Westerveld lowered his newspaper and favored his son with a puzzled look. “Saw who?”

“Hannah Kristoferson.” Ethan dropped onto the couch in his parents’ house, balancing the plate he’d stacked high with the freshly baked peanut-butter-chip cookies he’d found cooling on the kitchen counter. He’d lived on the farm for the past few years, but he still dropped in on his parents in town from time to time. Though his father, the principal of Riverbend High School, hadn’t done any work on the farm since he was in high school himself, Ethan often used him as a sounding board. Although his dad had never liked farm work or living on the farm, he humored Ethan by listening.

“Where did you see her?”

“I thought I saw her by the bakery after I gave Susie trouble for knocking Todd over.”

“What does she look like?”

“She should comb her hair. I’m sure Janie didn’t let her out of the house looking like that.”

“I meant that Hannah girl.”

Ethan took another bite. He had known whom his father meant. He didn’t want to think about Hannah and why exactly his uncle Sam had been so insistent she come for a simple reading of a will that had been postponed against her arrival.

“She’s tall. Long brownish hair, pretty thick. Curly. She was wearing some kind of bandanna over it. Brown eyes. Doesn’t look much different from the picture Uncle Sam had in the house.” Ethan added a shrug to the monologue as if to show his father that Hannah was simply an inconvenient blip on his radar instead of someone he’d been wondering about ever since he had first seen that picture.

Ethan didn’t want to think about the implications of Hannah’s presence and the questions that raised. He preferred to concentrate on the chewy cookies and the shred of comfort they gave him. A feeling in short supply since Sam’s death.

Though Sam had been in the hospital for the past six months, each morning Ethan got up, he still expected to see his beloved uncle and farming partner standing by the stove, asking Ethan how he wanted his eggs. Each morning the pain was as deep as the day before. That had made it difficult to get the equipment ready this spring for a job that, of all the farm work, Sam had loved the most. Working the fields.

“She doesn’t sound too remarkable,” his father said.

“Nope.” Ethan took another healthy bite. “Nothing remarkable about her at all.”

And he was lying through the peanut butter chips filling his mouth. When he had seen the girl he assumed was Hannah standing on the street corner, her expression holding the faintest glint of humor, he’d been intrigued enough to slow his truck down for a second look.

When she had tried to help out his nephew, she struck a chord in his heart. And then he’d tossed out that lame question.

Do I know you?

He blamed his lapse on the hint of laughter in the shape of her arching eyebrows and her soft mouth. Brown hair flowing like melted chocolate over her shoulders and down her back had also added to his momentary brainlessness.

In spite of his rather uncharacteristically gauche question, he still wanted to go after her and ask her a few questions, which would have violated his hard-won rules for living.

Keep your pride. Don’t go running after any girl. Let them come to you.

This had been his mantra ever since Colby left him the day before their wedding because she suddenly decided she couldn’t move onto the farm.

It took him four months to get over her, five months to use up all the envelopes that came with the thank-you cards and six months to decide he would never go running after a girl again.

“Hannah was supposed to be here by today, so that girl could easily have been her.” Morris Westerveld gave his newspaper a shake and dived into the news of the world again.

Ethan sighed and picked a crumb off his fingertip.

If that girl was Hannah, she would bring nothing but questions and potential trouble to the family and—more specifically—to him.