One From The Heart (2 page)

She ignored his invitation to familiarity. He’d gotten more than familiar enough for her liking. “Mr. Watson,” she repeated, but he held up his hand to stop her.

“Where is Elizabeth?” she asked anyway, whispering so she wouldn’t wake up Petey.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back, leaning close to her so that she got the barest whiff of his definitely appealing masculine scent. “My knee’s bleeding again, Hannah. I need your bathroom,” he added in a normal tone of voice.

She looked down at his knees. One jeans leg had a big red stain, which was widening in an alarming manner.

“Oh, Lord—in there, in there,” she said, trying to wave him in the right direction, all the while trying to assess how it was she came to have an unauthorized child in her bed and a bleeding cowboy wandering all over the place. She didn’t mean to go along with him into the bathroom, but he was holding on to her by that time, his big hand warm and firm on her shoulder, and somehow she just
went
.

“Help me get my pants off,” he said, standing on one foot while he took off his jacket. Hannah looked at him, her pulse rate kicking up again.

“Hey,” he said, grinning and chucking her under the chin. “I generally have to know a woman awhile before I drop my pants, but this is an emergency.”

“You need a doctor!” Hannah insisted, frowning because the idea of having to get him out of his tight-fitting jeans was costing her what little composure she had left—and he knew it. He handed her his hat.

“No, honey, I need to get my pants off. Can you help me with that boot?”

She didn’t budge.

“What’s the matter?” he asked innocently.

“Nothing,” she said in a tone of voice that positively reeked of untruth.

“What is it you think I’m going to do, Hannah?” He was smiling and trying to look into her eyes.

“Nothing!” she said again, making herself look at him.

“Well, I’m going to bleed to death if you don’t help me.”

“Lord!” she said, abruptly kneeling down and tugging at the boot while still holding his hat. He let out a yelp of pain, and she turned his foot and the hat loose, nearly causing him to fall.

“Wait—wait!” he said, hopping until he could put the lid down on the commode and sit. “Now pull.”

“How did you get in this fix anyway?” she felt compelled to ask, largely because it kept her mind off the fact that she was having to put her hands all over him.

“Same way I always do. A high-kicking bull—”

She got his boot off, then his pants, trying not to look at his noticeably manly thighs. A random comparison image—
soccer-player thighs
—flitted through her mind, and she glanced up at him in spite of her attempts to stay as removed as possible from the situation. He was grinning from ear to ear.

She frowned again and backed out of the bathroom, leaving him alone with a stack of towels and cold water running in the sink, stumbling over a boot on the way out. After a moment she came back in to offer him antiseptic. And to prove to herself he was having no effect on her. He shooed her away, a bit irritably, she thought, informing her that anybody—even she—should know soap and water was the best thing to clean out a cut.

“No, I didn’t know,” she muttered to herself when she was back in the hall. Somehow she was holding his darn hat again. She hovered around for a minute, mentally chastising herself because his muscular thighs and overt assessment had rattled her so. He was one of those flirtatious, good-ole-cowboy types, and she should have more sense than to respond to his heavy-handed technique. She’d never responded to that type before, she assured herself, and she certainly wasn’t going to start now. She went to check on Petey. Her niece was sleeping quietly with her flashy cowboy bear clutched close. She reached out to turn off the light, then remembered that Petey was afraid of the dark.

Petey
,
Petey
, she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. Where the devil was Elizabeth, and what was she supposed to do with a four-year-old child? She had to go to work tomorrow; she had no place to leave Petey, and she couldn’t take her along. She had no vacation days left for the year—

“Hannah?” Ernie Watson called from the bathroom.

“What!” she said, giving in to the exasperation she was feeling. “Lord!” she said under her breath. God only knew what she was supposed to do about him, either—particularly if he was going to look at her the way he did and insist on having his pants off.

He wanted her to search through his jeans pockets for some butterfly adhesive bandages. Then he gave her the choice of either taping the cut closed with the butterflies while he held the gaping edges together or vice versa. She chose the latter—because he did need help—but she was able to accomplish it only by closing her eyes. First aid was definitely not her forte, and touching this man’s bare knee wasn’t helping.

“So. Hannah,” he said after a moment. “What’s new?”

She opened her eyes. “What’s new?” she repeated, momentarily bewildered by the triteness of the question … given the recent turn of events. She found herself staring into his dark eyes again. Something about them reminded her of the grave dignity of old daguerreotype photographs, and the sadness she’d noted earlier was not diminished by the teasing grin he was still wearing. “Oh,” she said airily, “not much. Why?”

His grin broadened, then faded away. “You know your sister’s a long-term nut case, don’t you?” The words were light, but, oh, those sad eyes. He pulled several sterile gauze pads out of his shirt pocket and gave them to her to open. She tore open the ends of the packs and carefully took the gauze squares out while he kept pressure on the cut.

“Yes, well … I didn’t know Elizabeth until I was sixteen,” she said, trying to be careful where she looked, a difficult task when one had only arresting eyes, naked muscular thighs, and a bleeding cut to choose from. “I can only vouch for the last nineteen years or so.”

She and Elizabeth had been separated by their parents’ divorce when Elizabeth was four and she was two. Hannah had gone to live with their mother, while Elizabeth had remained with their father in the bosom of one of the most successful ranching families around Tulsa. But it was Hannah who had been the better off, growing up poor but happy, bouncing from motor court to trailer park in the vagabond life their free-spirited mother had chosen.

Shamelessly spoiled, her sister Elizabeth had had every material thing money could buy. She had been born with their mother’s beauty and strong will and their father’s reckless charm. Everyone loved Elizabeth, especially Hannah—and probably John Ernest Watson. There was something in her that inspired mindless devotion. But to expect anything in return for it was like waiting on the corner for a streetcar—in Death Valley.

“Shouldn’t you put something on that first?” Hannah asked worriedly as he arranged the gauze over the cut. It looked awful, and soap and water hardly seemed enough. She raised her eyes and found him staring at her. This look was neither grave nor teasing. It was a man-woman look, one that quickened her already hustling pulse, one that made her forget what she was talking about, and one that was definitely not suitable for the person he knew only as “Elizabeth’s sister.” Once again she had the feeling that while he might find her attractive, he also considered her something on the order of a fate worse than death. Then he smiled abruptly, and she couldn’t tell if she’d imagined it or not.

“Hannah, will you let me handle this? A man who’s been kicked and hooked by a damn cow as many times as I have knows what to do. Reach into my jacket pocket, will you? There’s an elastic bandage in there. So why did your mother keep you and Elizabeth apart?” he asked, all business now and obviously interested in the subject she’d had no more sense than to introduce. She found the bandage and handed it to him. She also found herself answering him.

“She didn’t keep us apart. It was my father—part of the divorce agreement, I think. Elizabeth was eighteen when she decided she ought to get to know us. I imagine the Tulsa part of the family had a fit. Anyway, there she was at the door one day—rich, gorgeous. I expected to hate her guts, but I didn’t. She was sort of like a little lost child or something, you know?” She glanced at him. Yes, she thought immediately. He knew.

“I don’t understand why Elizabeth would leave Petey with you,” she said, getting back to one of the two problems at hand. Her other problem was that he didn’t need her help anymore, and she should gave gotten herself out of the bathroom, but she could hardly move without touching him.

“Elizabeth trusts me,” he said simply, not looking up from his bandaging. “I spent a big part of my life looking after your sister. You can probably guess what that was like,” he added with a candor she hadn’t expected. “She came to see me at the rodeo in Oklahoma City—hell, I hadn’t seen her since before she took up with that last poor fool she married. How many husbands does that make now, anyway?”

“Three,” Hannah said dryly. “That we know about.”

He almost smiled, and he still wasn’t looking at her. She could almost feel the effort he was putting into that—
not
looking at her. Which was crazy, since they’d only just met.

“So the next thing I know, Elizabeth’s gone again and I find Petey asleep in my car with a note in her pocket that says I’m to bring her here to Dallas to you. I had a hell of a time finding you. You’re not in the phone book, and you didn’t work anymore where Elizabeth said you were working … and I could tell right off how you were really expecting us.” He glanced up to find her studying him thoughtfully.

“What?” he asked, and this time his eyes frankly met hers. She was, quite honestly, making an appraisal of her own, trying to decide what it was about this man that unnerved her so. He wasn’t
that
handsome. True, he had beautiful dark eyes—and a bit of the lost-waif look that Elizabeth had. He smelled of soap and leather and the out-of-doors. His hair was thick and very black, clean and shiny and in bad need of a trim. She couldn’t decide whether he ought to get rid of the mustache and the five-o’clock shadow or not. It was certainly … intimate looking.

“I … was just trying to remember what I know about you,” she said, being less than candid herself. It was odd, she thought, that he should affect her the way he did and yet be so easy to talk to. But that was probably because he behaved as if his long-standing friendship with Elizabeth somehow extended to her. He obviously felt he could be as cranky or inquisitive as he liked. Of course, there weren’t many men one could just meet and still feel at ease with while they were bleeding and wearing nothing but underwear and a long-tailed shirt, whether they knew one’s sister or not.

He gave a crooked smile. “I don’t guess there’s much for you to remember. My dad was a cowhand on the Browne ranch, and my aunt Mim was Libby’s nursemaid from the time you and your mother left. It drove old man Browne—your dad—crazy that I associated with his precious daughter. See, my mother was Cherokee—and Mim, too. And if that wasn’t enough, I was just the hired help. No, hell, I wasn’t even that. I was just one of the hired help’s relatives; I never tried to pass inspection and get hired. By the time you got to know Libby, my mama was dead and my dad had moved us off to New Mexico.”

“My sister told me about you.”

“Did she?” he asked, and Hannah had the distinct impression that while that thought pleased him, it also caused him pain.

“She told me what you just said. And that you’re the only person in the world who calls her Libby. And you taught her to ride and to swim. And she didn’t know what it was you thought was so great about New Mexico.”

“I was glad to be in New Mexico by that time. It kept me from—” He didn’t go on, glancing briefly into Hannah’s eyes and then away. “So what else did she tell you?”

She hesitated. “Nothing,” she decided. She wasn’t going to tell him about the hard drinking and the womanizing.

“She tell you I was a drunk?” he asked point blank.

“Not—exactly.”

“What, exactly?” he asked, glancing briefly into her eyes again. Hannah had the sudden feeling that this man could spot a lie in a second.

“She mentioned that you … had problems, and maybe you drank more than you should,” Hannah said, trying to be tactful.

He gave a short laugh. “I’ll just bet she did. Did she happen to mention that she was one of the problems? Did she tell you a few years ago I was damn fool enough to think she’d marry me? Man, I was dumb. Maybe she told you what a stupid bastard I was—”

“No, she didn’t tell me anything about that,” Hannah said too quickly. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, she didn’t want to be privy to Ernie Watson’s pain, particularly if Elizabeth had caused it. “I’m … sorry it didn’t work out,” she added, feeling that somebody ought to be, because Elizabeth probably wasn’t.

“Yeah,” Ernie said, putting the finishing touches on his bandaging. “You’re sorry, I’m sorry, but that didn’t keep Libby from saddling me with child care for a week—whether I’m supposed to be a drunk or not. And I don’t know what the hell I’m telling you all this for. Hand me my pants.”

“You’ve had Petey for a week?”

“Yeah. My pants?”

“You took your own good time about getting in touch with me.”

“I had problems of my own.”

“
You
had problems? My sister is missing!”