But he wasn’t a run-in-the-other-direction kind of guy. When he saw a fire, he moved toward it, not away.
Harriet didn’t have her giant purse to wield before her the way she had last night, and he watched, unduly fascinated, as she shoved the bulky arm of her cardigan up. To display her wrist. Her wrist.
There was not one single reason Jensen could think of that his heart should be pounding at him the way it did then. It was a wrist.
Her frown was a relief, distracting him from her freaking wrist. “You do know that’s actually a remarkably rude thing to ask another person, don’t you?”
“If you say so.” He could not for the life of him understand why the huffy way she spoke to him entertained him so much. “I thought it was more along the lines of exhibiting hospitality, but what do I know?”
“Maybe I’m an alcoholic and do not wish to explain such a personal thing to a perfect stranger.”
“Are you?”
“I am not. I drink upon occasion.” She sniffed. “But not this early in the day. And no one wants to be interrogated about their personal choices.”
“You could have asked for water, Harriet.” He sounded indulgent. He even felt indulgent, which was worse. There was whatever his heart was doing, but more, they were standing in the hallway. She was so little, wrapped up in yards upon yards of that strange, frumpy dress that made no sense, and yet again sporting a totally unnecessary sweater in the middle of summer. She was ridiculous. But he didn’t look away. “Tea. Coffee. I don’t recall offering to whip up a few car bombs to get you drunk and sloppy.”
“I wanted to be clear. For all I know, your idea of an innocuous Sunday afternoon drink includes a vat of whiskey.”
“Miss Harriet.” His voice was low and laced with mock astonishment. “Have you been stalking me?”
“Everybody knows you have a thing about whiskey,” she said tartly. She considered him solemnly, then gave a little nod as if coming to a decision. “Jensen.”
That rolled through him the way the sight of her wrist had. Like a slow, improbable, confounding little earthquake when it was just his name. People had been yelling it at him as long as he could remember, on football fields and across paddocks. Girls had liked to giggle it when they were younger. And when they were not so much younger too.
Harriet Barnett pronounced his name as if it were, in and of itself, a declaration.
Of some or other kind of genteel war.
And it turned out, to his enduring astonishment, that Jensen was apparently prepared to be all in for the fight. Because he was still here, wasn’t he? He hadn’t laughed and walked away. He hadn’t left her to Zack, who had invited her in. He hadn’t done any of the approximately ten thousand things he knew how to do to redirect female attention when he didn’t want it.
Because of … her wrist? Her eyes? He was losing it.
But he still didn’t walk away.
“I shouldn’t have accepted your brother’s invitation,” she said then, surprising him. She laced her fingers together in front of her, and he found himself wondering what it would be like if she were the kind of person who reached out and touched. Because it turned out, he was something like desperate for the feel of those soft little hands on him.
Get it together, he growled at himself. If this was what happened because he’d gone home alone, that was clearly a lesson he needed to heed in the future. And avoid the issue. He’d gone home alone by choice, sure, but that almost made it worse. Because why on earth had he made that choice?
“Feel free to leave any time,” he encouraged her. “Though at this point, obviously, that will only make it worse.”
Harriet blinked. “Make what worse? You already said no.”
“You really are new in town.” He leaned back against the wall behind him and made a little show out of lounging there, crossing his arms as he gazed down at her. She, for her part, looked at him directly and made no attempt to flutter or deflect while she did it. He suspected she was equal parts officious and fearless. Jensen wasn’t generally fond of the first, but he was fascinated by the second.
Even—maybe especially—because it was fearlessness all done up in that sweater and that dress and her hair wrapped up in a bun that made him think of the old women at church, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t look away.
“You’re right, I didn’t grow up here, or happen to have found myself born to a family that settled here in the 1800s.” She shoved her glasses higher on her nose. “Yet I still would not describe three years as new.”
“My grandmother considers herself new, Harriet. She came here from Fort Collins when she was sixteen. Three years hardly counts.”
“According to the State of Colorado, I’m considered a resident. Like it or not.”
“That’s the state. This is a small town. Different rules, darlin’.”
“But what I was trying to say,” she said then, loftily, as if it was difficult to carry on in the face of such provocation, “is that, of course, your family doesn’t have to feed me.”
“And what I was trying to say is that you’ve already piqued their curiosity.” He nodded back to the living room, where he could hear Riley and Brady talking, which probably meant that their troublesome wives were whispering. Cooking up trouble, one way or another. “They’ll never believe you showed up here on a Sunday to try to talk me into showing up for your class.”
“That’s exactly why I showed up here. I shouldn’t have, I know, and I wouldn’t have if it wasn’t so critically important, in my opinion, that these kids have someone to look up to.” She lifted a hand as if she expected him to object. “I’m not asking you to think of yourself as a role model if you don’t want to. These are kids. Some of them act tough, others are withdrawn, but all they really want is someone to talk to them like they’re real. Like they matter. And I may not know you from a can of paint, but you don’t seem incapable of talking. To anyone. After all, you seem to have no trouble talking to me.”
Her generous mouth shifted into something rueful, and he was glad, for a minute, that he had that wall to hold him up. “How could anyone have trouble talking to you? You do most of the talking yourself.”
Her wry smile deepened. “You might be surprised how few people appreciate the pleasure of my conversation.”
His heart thumped in a different way then. “Talking is something I’m pretty good at, I guess. Maybe it’s my superpower.”
Harriet’s eyes were too blue. And he had the wild notion that he ought to reach over and push her glasses up her nose this time. But he didn’t.
“Then why not use your superpower for good?” she asked. “Simply because you can?”
Jensen was still caught up in that moment later, when they were all sitting around the dinner table, passing around his mother’s typically over-the-top roast, potatoes, and a variety of different vegetables grown out in the garden. Roasted and raw alike, because this was a family that took its vegetables seriously.
“I grew up in town,” he heard Missy telling Harriet. “But I feel like I’m new because I only moved back here last fall. After being away for a long, long time. Mostly in Santa Fe.”