One From The Heart Read online

  Hannah lowered her eyes to the open neck of his plaid shirt. Beneath it he was wearing one of those old-fashioned undershirts with the buttons at the neck, buttons that weren’t fastened, letting her see the beginnings of the dark, curling hair on his chest. If anyone—if she happened to press her face there, she’d smell that heady masculine scent of his, the soap and the leather and the—

  “Hannah?”

  “What?” she said guiltily, her eyes flying to his as if she thought he could somehow tell what she’d been thinking. What was the matter with her?

  “You’re a good sport, Miss Hannah,” he said, his soft voice gently teasing.

  “I don’t think it counts if you don’t have a choice,” she answered.

  “Yeah, it counts. You’re a good sport—but you don’t take any crap.”

  Hannah frowned, wondering why in the world that sounded like a compliment, and why it pleased her so that it did.

  “You don’t look like Libby,” he added quietly, and she suddenly had the wild notion that he wanted to touch her. It was because of the trouble he’d just brought to Elizabeth’s sister, she assured herself. Nothing more. She stood there, incredulous at the delicious anticipation that suffused her body as she imagined the warm, rough hand that had comforted Petey reaching up to lightly touch her face.

  “I know,” she said abruptly, attempting to close the door again before he actually did touch her. Because her heart was pounding, because she was getting another feeling—one she had no business getting, a feeling more dangerous than the one she’d had when he’d done his masculine appraisal of her sweat suit, a feeling that was dark and warm and growing stronger the longer she let him look into her eyes.

  “Hannah?”

  “What?” she said again. It took a lot of effort to say it, and she couldn’t have looked away from those dark eyes of his if her life had depended on it.

  “I’m glad.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HANNAH SAT in the dark wishing she had some vice for comfort. She didn’t smoke; she didn’t drink. She had nothing to put between her and her worry but a cup of lemon zinger herbal tea. It wasn’t helping. It was three o’clock in the morning and raining hard. Petey had awakened twice already with nightmares, and Hannah hadn’t been able to sleep even before that. Having a restless four-year-old in one’s bed was like sleeping with a performing acrobat—while he performed.

  Hannah moved from the kitchen table to an easy chair by the window in the living room, opening the drapes and looking out into the rain-wet parking lot. The streetlight outside caused the rivulets of rain on the windowpane to cast strange, mottled shadows on her hands and arms. She lived in an older apartment complex, one with the living space actually cut up into rooms, and one having real six-over-six sash windows that were anything but energy efficient, but were aesthetically pleasing. She lived here because she could afford it and because she liked the solid feel these older places had. So what was she going to do about the No Children clause? Ignore it in the hope that Elizabeth would turn up soon? Hide Petey from the neighbors? Except for the nightmares, Petey didn’t seem likely to make enough noise to cause comment.

  Poor Petey, dressed in Hannah’s pink satin sleep shirt and a matching short robe. The outfit had swallowed her whole, but Hannah had never seen a child so pleased. She’d looked at herself in the mirror for a long time, turning this way and that. And her primary concern had been to show it to John Ernest Watson, who was long gone and likely to stay that way. Hannah pictured him driving on the rainswept interstate even now, determined to get to the rodeo in Rapid City, whether he could walk without limping or get his own pants off or not.

  Ernie. He wasn’t the first person to note that she looked nothing like Elizabeth, but he was the first one to make such a kind comment.

  I’m glad.

  Two insignificant words, and she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Remembering the way he’d said it gave her that dark, warm feeling again, and yet she knew exactly what he’d meant. After all that Elizabeth had apparently put him through over the years, he was relieved not to have to deal with someone who looked like her. It had to have been that. What else could it have been? He hadn’t meant he was glad because he was attracted to her. Elizabeth was … Elizabeth; she was only Hannah.

  She sighed and wondered if he and Elizabeth had been lovers, recognizing a nagging and inappropriate hope that they hadn’t been, which was ridiculous. Of course, they had been—regardless of the way he’d looked at her with those eyes of his, eyes that had made her want to comfort him or bandage his knee or whatever else he needed, even though she’d only just met him. And they’d hardly gotten off on the right foot. He had thought she was some kind of anorexic, career-minded nitwit who knew nothing about mothering. She thought he was …

  She wasn’t quite sure what she thought he was. Kind to small children, certainly, and dangerously appealing. One of those charming, irrepressible, macho types indigenous to cowboy country, who were annoyingly overprotective of women as long as it didn’t interfere with their nights out with the boys. And probably still in love with Elizabeth. A man wouldn’t have inconvenienced himself the way he had otherwise; there had to be more between Elizabeth and him than nostalgia for childhood, though Elizabeth had never said so. She had always been candid about such things, discussing her current bedmate as easily as someone else might have given the time of day. But Elizabeth, who was always “in love,” had never mentioned John Ernest Watson in that respect. She’d never mentioned that he had been a husband candidate or that she had broken his heart. The mental picture of his rough, weathered hands gently wiping away Petey’s tears and his dark eyes once again finding hers over Petey’s head suddenly came to mind. In his tenderness to Petey, he had shown he cared about Elizabeth a great deal. And he was sad because his love didn’t matter to her.

  So there you are, Hannah Rose. There were all the reasons why she shouldn’t even be thinking about Ernie Watson, much less letting herself feel anything for him. She wasn’t going to see him again anyway. She sighed and finished her tea and another pitiful wail came from the bedroom—Ernie Watson’s name. Ah, Petty, she thought, feeling her way toward the sound. The last thing you want to do is love a rodeo num. She had been in Texas long enough to know they were as bad as baseball players in gold neck chains or oil field wildcatters. They were fun for the moment, but a woman couldn’t count on them to be there when she needed them.

  She was able to settle Petey down with minimal difficulty this time; the child just seemed to need to know she hadn’t been left alone, that someone to whom she belonged was nearby. Hannah wondered if Elizabeth had ever done this before. And why hadn’t she left Petey with her father? Or with her grandfather, for heaven’s sake? No, Elizabeth had to upend two totally uninvolved people’s lives—hers and Ernie Watson’s—in typical “Libby” fashion.

  Petey slept through until morning. She was still asleep when Hannah called the television station to let them know she wouldn’t be in. When she told the station manager exactly what her problem was, he was understanding enough—because Ernie Watson had been there the night before trying to locate her, and because she had the scripts for the furniture outlet commercials she’d been working on, which she promised to finish at home. And she had every intention of doing so—ignorant as she was of what it was like to have a four-year-old underfoot, whether she had a spangled bear to comfort her or not. Petey had started talking more, but Hannah’s biggest aggravation was Petey and the telephone. She constantly picked up the receiver to see if Ernie was there when Hannah wasn’t looking; then she’d leave it off the hook until the alert signal sounded.

  “No, Petey,” Hannah said, trying to be patient. “Ernie can’t call you unless the phone is just like this—see? Don’t pick it up.” She gave up after the thousandth interruption, taking Petey and herself and the bear out into the rain to the grocery store before they drove each other entirely crazy. They had gotten by on peanut butter toast and Tang
for breakfast, but, as Ernie Watson had so tactlessly pointed out, the cupboard was nearly bare.

  “Rules,” Hannah said before they went inside. “First and foremost: No talking to strangers. Number two: Stick to me like glue. And absolutely, positively no taking anything off the shelf without my expressed permission. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Petey said sweetly. And she understood all right; she just wasn’t going to do it.

  “Petey!” Hannah said in exasperation the third time she tried to sneak a giant bag of marshmallows into the cart.

  “I think these are a green vegetable,” Petey said hopefully.

  “No way,” Hannah said, fighting down a grin. “Put those back—right now.”

  Petey complied, but only because Hannah was using her producer’s voice, the same one she used on lackadaisical cameramen when she was trying to get a commercial finished. Well, she’d always said cameramen were absolute children.

  She returned from the grocery store with nothing but nutritious things to eat, a severely diminished checkbook balance, and a grave case of total exhaustion. She barely had the strength to put the groceries away. My God, how do women with more than one child do this? She felt nothing but admiration for the mothers she’d seen grocery shopping while they pushed one child and led two others. When she’d finished, she collapsed on the living room couch with her feet propped up on the coffee table—just a little rest before she tried again to work on the commercials.

  “Aunt Hannah?” Petey said, sitting down beside her and trying to prop her feet up, too. The “t” was somehow lost in her pronunciation of Hannah’s now well-used title, making her name sound like Anna-Hannah.

  “My dear, sweet Petey, what?” Hannah said, knowing that Petey would grin. She did, and Hannah grinned with her. She rather liked this little kid, whether she could get her commercial script done or not.

  “Tie my shoe, please.”

  “Again?” Hannah said in mock horror, making Petey give another smile. “Foot, please.” Petey stuck a sneaker up for Hannah’s attention.

  The shoe had really seen better days, Hannah noticed while she retied. “Are you tired?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to take a nap,” Petey advised her, cutting through to what she thought was the real reason for the inquiry about her state of fatigue.

  “Good. Do you think we could go out in the rain again and buy you some new shoes?”

  “You got to fix the ’mercial,” Petey said.

  “Shoes first, then I fix the ’mercial, okay?”

  “Okay,” Petey said, convinced.

  Hannah’s apartment complex was located south of the Trinity River, which translated to Below the Salt to the upwardly mobile movers and shakers of Dallas. She took Petey into north Dallas to the elite Galleria mall so she could see the ice skaters. They had two hours of that and shopping for a pair of expensive running shoes with Velcro closings, assorted frilly little-girl things, a yellow poncho, and ice cream. They returned home in a downpour, which didn’t penetrate the new poncho, but which was certainly going to wet the newly shod feet. Hannah wore herself out trying to carry Petey and Cowpoke over the puddles, manage the umbrella, and hang on to her packages.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said to the innocent bystander she plowed into because she couldn’t see around the umbrella.

  “Well, if it’s not Sneaky Pete and Miss Hannah,” Ernie Watson said. He took the umbrella out of her hand, holding it up high enough to clear his cowboy hat and putting his arm around her to keep both her and Petey dry. Hannah found herself nearly nose to nose with him and unable to do anything about it because Petey had locked her free arm around his neck.

  Oh, God, Hannah thought immediately and with some dismay. I’m glad to see him. She wasn’t supposed to be glad to see him. She’d convinced herself sometime before dawn that whatever had passed between them had been nothing—even if it was something. Worse, she suspected he was glad to see her, too, and just about as thrilled with the situation as she was. His tired eyes swept over her face. She was close enough to tell that he hadn’t been drinking, and she suspected he still hadn’t had much sleep.

  “You’ve got freckles,” he noted, his dark eyes more rascally than sad at that particular moment.

  Hannah frowned. His proximity and his clean male scent were calling up that dark, warm feeling again. Lord, what a nice face he had. Nice face, nice thighs …

  “Yes, I know,” she said dryly, trying not to return the mischievous grin she was getting. “Petey and I are lucky that way.”

  “I got new shoes,” Petey offered.

  “Yeah? Stick your foot up here and let me see.”

  Petey did it gladly, nearly overbalancing them all into the shrubbery.

  “Well, dang if you don’t,” Ernie observed. “Fine-looking shoes, they are, too. Who bought you those?”

  “Anna-Hannah. We don’t got money, but we got plastic.”

  “You don’t say,” he answered, casting a look at Hannah apparently because of Petey’s talkativeness. “That was nice. Did you say thank you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, somebody around here better say it before they end up on my list,” he said, giving Hannah a wink.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to South Dakota,” Hannah said, ignoring the wink and hoping to uncover some reason that would negate her pleasure at seeing him.

  “So did I. I got to thinking about the kid—”

  “We’re doing all right,” she interrupted.

  “—and you,” he finished.

  And me? she almost said, the dark, warm feeling spreading, making her knees weak, making her heart pound. Once again his dark eyes traveled over her face. He really didn’t seem to mind that she was only Hannah or that she had freckles or that her eating habits were less than nutritionally sound. And here she was standing in the pouring rain behaving like a fool! “You didn’t have to come back,” she said with as much conviction as she could muster.

  “Yeah, that’s what I told myself the whole time I was getting my knee patched up and all the way down I-35—in both directions.” He started them walking toward Hannah’s doorstep. “Somehow I just couldn’t make myself believe it. You going to let me come in out of the rain?” he asked when Hannah would have taken exception to his lack of faith in her child-care abilities.

  “Depends on whether or not you’re going to make me take your pants off,” she said pointedly. She intended to be sarcastic, but she only made him grin that teasing, mischievous grin.

  “Nope. The doc closed the cut with clamps so I could bend my knee a little … unless, of course, you want to take my pants off.”

  A discreet little cough sounded and Hannah looked around directly into Rick Archer’s eyes. Her first inclination was to get out of Ernie’s embrace, but since neither he nor Petey seemed to have any intention of letting go of what they had, she simply stood.

  “I thought that was you,” Rick said, his voice as tight as the small frown fixed just between his eyes. “So what’s going on?” His eyes cut to Ernie Watson and back again. “You weren’t at work today. Nobody at KHRB seemed to know why.”

  “I had a family problem,” Hannah said, not liking the accusation in his voice. She had been out with him a number of times, but not enough to justify the annoyance she was hearing now. They weren’t lovers—though they had come close once, before Hannah had come to her senses. She liked Rick; he was witty and ruggedly handsome and fun, but she simply hadn’t wanted that kind of involvement. She was troubled by his keen ambition, for one thing. He had his own local talk show, People’s Eye, and had every hope of one day receiving the “call” from one of the networks, no matter what he had to do to get it. She had let ambition take over her own life once, as balm for a broken heart, and to a very unadmirable end. She’d become jaded and callous, until she’d finally realized that she didn’t want success at the price of her self-respect—either for herself or for Rick, whom she liked and wanted to r
espect.

  “I didn’t know you had cowboys in the family,” he said lightly, his eyes flicking over Ernie in a way that would have made a lesser man self-conscious. The look seemed to have no effect on Ernie at all.

  “John Ernest Watson,” Ernie said before Hannah could make any introductions. He handed the umbrella to Petey so he could shake hands. Petey promptly clunked Rick in the head with it. “I’m a friend of Hannah’s sister, Elizabeth,” Ernie added, trying not to grin.

  “Frederick Archer,” Rick said, dodging another of Petey’s passes with the umbrella. “I’m a friend of Hannah’s.”

  Hannah listened to this subtle male parry with fascination. Underlying the seemingly innocent social exchange was what amounted to, if not the actual drawing of swords, a certain hand-on-the-scabbard warning—when neither one of them had any right whatsoever to draw territorial boundaries where she was concerned.

  “Rick, would you open the door for us?” Hannah said, managing to pass him her keys. He opened the door, and, still limping, Ernie took Petey inside, pausing long enough to let her get her packages from Hannah before he carried her into the kitchen. “Be sure you show him the refrigerator, Petey,” Hannah called after them, her eyes meeting Ernie’s in a look she couldn’t read as he discreetly closed the door.

  “So what’s going on?” Rick said immediately.

  “A lot,” she answered. “And then some.” She sat down on the sofa and tried to massage into oblivion the headache she’d picked up somewhere along the way. Lord, what she’d give for a nap. She suddenly smiled, hearing Petey in the kitchen explaining something about green vegetables.

  “Well?” Rick said after a moment. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?”

  She looked at him sharply. He was using that tone of voice again.

  “My sister left her little girl, Petey, with Ernie—”

  “Ernie who?”

  “John Ernest Watson, the man you just met!” Hannah snapped because her head hurt and because he was venting his annoyance by pretending to be obtuse. He was a talk show host; he wasn’t that dense. “Ernie brought Petey to me. Neither of us has any idea where Elizabeth is or when she’s coming back or what this is all about. None.” She glanced at him. He seemed to be waiting for the punch line.