And he had the sudden and distinct sensation that he was lost, right there in his childhood home.
4
“Where do you want me, Miss Harriet?”
Harriet had known that Jensen was coming into the library that day. Bright and early on a Wednesday morning, as planned. She had given him a selection of dates after Sunday dinner, when he’d walked her out to her little car and had scowled at it as if the inoffensive hatchback were a personal insult to him.
I wouldn’t want to get caught in any real weather in that thing, he had said.
Happily, she had replied, it is July, not January.
He hadn’t smiled, which had felt … portentous.
But he’d chosen a day to come speak to her students, portents be damned. He had even called her to confirm the night before, and she’d heard her own, tinny voice in the background, suggesting he had just then gotten around to listening to the messages she’d left for him on the ranch’s answering machine.
She had woken up far too early this morning after not sleeping well last night. At first she blamed her restlessness on Chaucer, who often tried to smother her in her sleep with his weighty love, when she knew she could have locked him out of the bedroom if she’d wanted.
Harriet had accepted, sometime around three o’clock, that it was not the cat’s fault that sleep was eluding her. An hour or so later, she’d given up and had grumpily gotten out of bed. She’d folded all her laundry. She’d rearranged her cupboards. Then she’d gone out and repotted some plants in the predawn half-light, hoping it might settle her.
It was hours later now, and she felt a great many things, none of them settled.
And she still wasn’t prepared.
That voice of his, so unrepentantly male, curled into her and knotted itself up until she thought she might drop the books she was reorganizing on her little display behind the main library counter.
She took a moment to not drop her books. And to slap some sense into herself. Metaphorically. Maybe she didn’t really understand why it was that Jensen Kittredge, of all people, was getting to her in this way. But she didn’t need to understand.
What she needed to do was get through the upcoming class period without acting more like a silly teen than the actual teenagers who’d be shuffling in soon.
She could beat herself up about her outsize reactions to this man later.
When she turned around, Harriet was sure she was ready to deal with him the way she dealt with everyone else, or at least pretend she could. But she was not prepared to see Jensen Kittredge lounging there, once again outfitted in full cowboy regalia. The jeans and boots. A Stetson on his head, and another T-shirt. A T-shirt that did truly astonishing things to his absurdly well-carved torso, certainly, but also to her.
It was just her luck that the first time she had such an overwhelming physical response to someone, it was him. The sort of man Harriet would never, ever touch because, well. Because she knew better than to let her head get turned by the captain-of-the-football-team type.
“Jensen,” she said, and instantly felt like the silly, excitable girl she’d never been. “Good morning.”
Then had to stand there, in her place of work—her sanctuary—while he treated her to one of those lazy, too-knowing grins of his.
Harriet was deeply dismayed that she was susceptible to such a blatant display of masculinity, calculated to disarm and disconcert. She had always been immune to such things before.
She did not feel even remotely immune today.
Then again, as her mother had always said, it was actions that mattered. Not thoughts. Not wishes.
Not intense physical reactions to men she found otherwise vaguely distasteful.
You do not find him distasteful at all, an inner voice challenged her. That’s the problem.
Except Harriet thought that, actually, he was the problem.
“Good morning,” Jensen said. Eventually.
After looking at her in a way that made all those heated, knotted things inside her seem to hum, tuneless but too loud. She felt certain that whatever he was doing, it was deliberate. And more, that he knew precisely what effect it had.
Harriet felt scandalized, though she was perfectly well aware no scandalous behavior had occurred. And would not occur.
And maybe, just maybe, it should have occurred to her before now that a man she had to track down in a place like the Coyote was not exactly the kind of upstanding adult role model she should be presenting to children who were already halfway lost.
But it was too late for that now.
“Thank you for coming,” she managed to say in what she hoped were quelling tones. And she thanked all that was holy that she was not prone to blushing. “Did you check in at the front desk?”
“The legendary Miss Martina Patrick knew me by sight,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he sounded as if he was about to laugh, or if he always sounded like that and she was just feeling it inside her now, the horror. “I thought she was about to send me to detention, if you want to know the truth. Between you and me, I think she wanted to, like it was my sophomore year all over again.”
“Why am I not at all surprised to discover that you spent a lot of time in detention?”
“I can’t help it if people talk to me,” Jensen protested. “I’m a friendly guy.”
“I’m sure that argument swayed your teachers.”
“They were staunch enemies of socialization, it turns out. And it would have been a whole lot more time in detention, but folks got testy if random punishments kept me from football practice. During football season, at least, I seemed to end up there a lot less than I would have otherwise.”
Harriet stopped what she was doing—which was fluttering, she was all too aware, though she’d been trying to mask it by frantically stacking things that did not require stacking on the desk between them—and frowned at him. “It’s deeply objectionable that high school athletes are held to a different standard. It’s not fair to the athletes themselves, who never learn that there are consequences for their behavior, and it’s certainly not fair to any of the other students.”
“Miss Patrick shared your views, as I recall.” Jensen’s grin widened as if his apparently disreputable adolescence was making him nostalgic. “I never much minded detention. I’m not afraid of consequences. But I was a good running back, and Cold River loves some high school football, so there we are. The world is unfair, Harriet. Sad but true.”
She had not invited him to call her Harriet, despite his bizarre comments about fetishes at his parents’ house. And yet she found she didn’t have it in her to correct him.
Harriet assured herself that she was being polite to a guest in her space and nothing more.
And she had more important things to focus on than names or fetishes or his abdominal excellence. Like the list she’d typed out of questions to ask him should he flounder, or if her students did not engage with him enough to ask their own. “Well, none of the kids you’re about to meet are athletes. I’m sure they would all benefit greatly from a bit of moderate exercise, teamwork, and fresh air—as would we all, of course. I wanted to take them on a hiking trip, but the principal wouldn’t allow it.” Harriet sighed in remembered frustration. “He felt it had too much potential to go badly.”