Daniel's Daddy

Bitterness laced his words, making Hannah feel even more awkward. She’d been crazy to think she could offer a man like Jess Malone any sort of sympathy. He’d been around and she’d been nowhere. What could she say to him that might help or make a difference?

He set a sandwich and a glass of milk in front of Daniel. “There you go, sport,” he told the boy. “We’ll have a big supper tonight.”

“Pizza,” Daniel said hopefully.

Jess shook his head. “No. Not pizza. You’d eat that stuff three times a day if I’d let you.”

Watching Jess and the child, Hannah once again wondered about Daniel’s mother. Where was she? Or had Jess simply adopted a child on his own? She quickly discounted that notion with a mental shake of her head. Daniel resembled Jess very closely. He had the same dark hair and green eyes. Even the dimple in his left cheek was a carbon copy of Jess’s.

After setting two thick coffee cups on the small chrome and Formica table, Jess opened the thermos Hannah had given him.

She watched him pour out the hot drink before she ventured to speak. “You know, alcoholism is ugly but you need to remember it’s an illness,” she said quietly.

“Yeah. An illness,” he said, his voice rough with emotion.

Hannah watched him keenly as he took a seat beside Daniel and directly across from her. The pain on his face was at complete odds with the tough-guy image of him she’d always held in her mind.

He pushed one of the cups across the table to her. “The old man should have been strong enough to overcome it,” he went on after a minute.

Hannah took a sip of the coffee, then decided she might as well be frank. That was often the best way to help a person. “Perhaps you should have been strong enough to help him.”

Jess stared at her. Where did this timid woman get off saying such a thing to him? “Me strong enough! You think I didn’t try to get my father off the booze? Let me tell you, Hannah Dunbar, I tried to help him. My father didn’t want to be helped!”

She looked at him, her gray eyes full of compassion. “Then you have nothing to feel guilty about.”

Jess couldn’t believe this woman. How had she known he’d been feeling guilty about his father’s death? And how had she found the nerve to tell him so? During high school, he couldn’t remember her saying much to anyone, and when she’d spoken to him, he figured that was because they were neighbors. Mostly, she’d been a loner with her nose constantly stuck in a book.

“What did you do after we got out of high school, become a part-time psychologist?”

Hannah’s spine stiffened at his mocking question. Maybe she hadn’t gone places and maybe she did still live in the same little stucco house she’d shared with her mother. That didn’t mean she wanted to be insulted by the likes of him!

“Hardly,” she said crisply.

“This was my grandpa’s house,” Daniel spoke up, interrupting the tension between the two adults. “He was old and sick. But I wish he was here.”

Hannah’s heart went out to the child who was still too small to understand what losing a loved one was all about. She longed to move around the table and hold him in her arms.

“Yes, I wish he was here, too,” Hannah agreed softly, then offered him a smile. “How old are you, Daniel?”

He held up three fingers. “Daddy says I’ll be four soon.”

“February,” Jess told Hannah with an indulgent grin for his son.

“That old!” Hannah exclaimed, always finding it easy to talk to children. “Why, you’ll be in school soon.”

“I can say my ABCs already,” Daniel told her between gulps of milk. “And I can count, too!”

“Really? You must be a smart little boy,” Hannah said.

His head bobbed up and down with childlike conceit. “I am. Wanna hear me count?”

Jess looked at his son with mild surprise. He’d never seen him open up to a stranger like this. Especially a woman. “Not now, Daniel. Eat your sandwich and let Hannah drink her coffee.”

Hannah gave Daniel a conspiratorial wink, then reached for the small loaf of pumpkin bread she’d carefully wrapped in aluminum foil. “If you’ll fetch me a knife,” she told Jess, “I’ll slice this for us.”

He got up from his seat and rummaged around in a cabinet drawer. With his back presented to her, Hannah took the liberty of looking at him. A white shirt with navy blue pinstripes covered his broad shoulders. It was tucked into a pair of dark trousers and Hannah couldn’t help but notice his trim waist and firmly muscled hips.

Jess Malone was certainly good to look at, she decided. But that didn’t mean a whole lot to her. Hannah wasn’t one to admire men. The one time she had—well, that was an experience Hannah wished with all her might that she could forget.

Jess returned to the table with a small paring knife and offered it to her. Hannah thanked him and quickly sliced off two thick pieces of the sweet, nut-filled bread. When she glanced inquiringly at Daniel, Jess nodded, so she cut a piece for the boy, too.

“You’re probably thinking I haven’t accomplished much since we graduated high school. I mean—me working in a day-care center.”

Jess glanced at her fine-boned hands as she cut the dessert. There was no wedding ring on her finger, which didn’t surprise him. He imagined Hannah Dunbar was just as virginal now as she had been fifteen years ago. He would have found that idea amusing back then. Now it both saddened and intrigued him. No person should be that alone, he thought.

“I wasn’t thinking that at all. In fact, I admire anyone that works with children,” he said, his eyes moving from her hands to the thrust of her small bosom, then finally to her face. Hannah Dunbar was far from ugly. In fact, he figured she could be a looker if she’d let her hair loose and throw away that matronly dress she was hiding behind.

That idea had his thoughts going one step further and his gaze made a slow appraisal of her slender figure. What would Hannah look like without that dark print dress that buttoned tightly at her throat?

Jess mentally shook his head, wondering again where these strange thoughts were coming from. What was it about this woman that kept turning his mind to sex?

“Well, I could understand if you had been thinking that about me,” she said with a sigh. “I haven’t been anywhere but here in Lordsburg since we graduated.”

Her gaze connected with his as she handed him a slice of pumpkin bread, and in that moment it dawned on her that she’d never seen such green eyes on a man before. They were moss green, deep and clear, and very disarming.

You don’t admire men, she quickly reminded herself, especially their eyes. So why are you looking at Jess’s? Hannah couldn’t answer that question. She only knew there was something about the bad boy in him that had always intrigued her. She could admit that much to herself, but no one else. She likened the weakness to Eve’s fascination for the Serpent.

“Staying in one place isn’t a crime,” he said, then eased back in his chair. “I don’t suppose you ever married?”

Jess took a bite of the bread. As he chewed and waited for her to answer, his eyes slowly studied her face.

She shook her head. “No. I guess I just turned out not to be the marrying sort.”

Hannah watched his eyebrows move slightly upward, indicating her words had surprised him.

“You never did like guys very much, did you?” he asked casually.

Did he honestly think that was the reason she hadn’t married? Because she didn’t like men? Dear Lord, if he only knew how many years she’d dreamed that some good man would ask her to be his wife. But it had never happened and it hurt too much to ever tell him such a thing.

Lifting her chin, she said, “I never liked them as much as you seemed to like women.”

To her surprise, he threw back his head and laughed. “Apparently, my old reputation is still alive in Lordsburg.”

Color flooded Hannah’s cheeks and she quickly looked away. Where was all this stuff coming from? How could she be saying such things to him? Just because she remembered a wild, teenage boy by the name of Jess Malone didn’t mean she knew the man across from her.

Clearing her throat, she said, “I don’t know why I—I shouldn’t have said that.” Still unable to look at him, she grabbed her coffee and took a quick gulp.

“So you work at a day-care center. Do you like it?”