“On the way where?”
“To your new job.”
“I told you, man. I ain’t working for you.”
“Aren’t, Jason. Do you ever crack that grammar book you’ve got under your arm?”
“I know enough to pass.”
“And that’s good enough for you? Just passing.”
“It beats what my old man did. He dropped out when he was fifteen.”
“And look how he wound up,” Hank pointed out.
Jason looked as though he wanted to take a punch at him. Hank held up his hand. “Sorry. That was out of line. What I’m trying to say here is that you’re too smart to waste your potential the way you’ve been doing. Ann went out on a limb for you. Don’t you think you owe it to her to try a little harder?”
“She’s never complained.”
“Because she loves you. Maybe a little too much. She doesn’t want to put extra pressure on you, but I think you’re tough enough to take it. What do you think?”
“I’m tough enough to take anything you can dish out.”
“Prove it. Start that job this afternoon. You won’t be answering to me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Jason clearly saw the trap that had been laid out for him. He also apparently realized there was no way around being snared, unless he wanted to show himself as a quitter. “I’ll try it,” he finally conceded. “But if I don’t like it, I’m out of there.”
“Fair enough.”
Hank introduced him to the site foreman, then watched as Ted put him to work. By six o’clock Jason was dirty, hot and exhausted, but some of his belligerence had dimmed. Hank offered him a lift home.
“What the hell,” Jason muttered, climbing into the pickup. “We’re going to the same place.”
At home, Jason walked through the kitchen like a kid asleep on his feet. Ann started to stop him, but Hank waved her off. “Let him go. He’ll feel better after he’s had a shower and some dinner.”
“He took the job?”
“With a little prodding.”
“Hank, you didn’t back him into a corner, did you?”
“Maybe.”
“But…”
“There’s a door. He can always get out, if he wants to badly enough.”
She nodded as Hank went off to take his own shower.
When he’d cleaned up and changed, he came back and found Ann sitting on the floor in the living room with Tommy and Melissa. Tommy, wearing his yellow hard hat, appeared to be in charge. They were building a skyscraper out of colored blocks. It was already tilting precariously.
Hank watched them for several minutes, enjoying the expression of fierce concentration on Melissa’s face, the tolerant amusement on Ann’s. “You’d better put something under the southwest corner,” he advised Tommy finally.
“This is our development,” Ann retorted. “You’ve got your own.”
“Mine’s bigger.”
She shot a baleful look at him. “Bigger isn’t necessarily better.”
“Maybe not, but mine will still be standing in twenty years. Yours may not make it another twenty seconds.” As if to prove his point, it wobbled under the weight of a red block Tommy was trying to add to the top. He knelt down and quickly inserted a block in the foundation. “There you go, partner. Steady as the Empire State Building.”
“Is that tall?” Tommy wanted to know.
“Very tall.”
“Want to see it,” Melissa said.
“Maybe someday we can,” he told her, his gaze locking with Ann’s just as she tried to tell Melissa that it was too far away.
“Want to go,” Melissa repeated.
“Someday,” Hank repeated firmly, his eyes never leaving Ann’s face, which was coloring under the direct gaze.
“What’s for dinner?” he said at last, breaking the tension.
“Oh, my gosh,” she said, jumping up and knocking over the tower in the process.
Melissa wailed. Tommy began gathering all the blocks and methodically going back to work. Hank dropped down to the floor. “I’ll help, while Mommy gets dinner on the table.”
“If I wasn’t so terrified of what you’d fix, I’d send you to the kitchen,” Ann said. “Nobody but an inveterate chauvinist would assume that cooking is woman’s work, while building skyscrapers can only be done by big, tough men.”
“Hey, I didn’t say anything of the kind,” he protested, laughing at her indignation. “I suspect that Melissa here could make a mighty fine engineer one day. I may even train her to follow in my footsteps.”
Again he saw that off-guard look of wistfulness on Ann’s face. His references to events far in the future seemed to rattle her even more than his touches. Perhaps she was right to be wary. How serious was he? The remarks seemed to come out without conscious thought on his part, indicating some subconscious direction in which he was heading without realizing it.
He blamed it on weeks of abstinence. Maybe he just needed to recall the experience of having a possessive woman back in his life again. A few carefully veiled references to commitment would put the fear of God back into him. Meantime, he was going to have to learn to think before he spoke.
Oddly enough, though, he couldn’t keep his mind off the future all evening long. As he watched Ann, a yearning began to build inside him. He wondered what it would be like to know that this was the way it would be for the rest of his life, to know that she would always be there waiting for him, that he would be enveloped in that loving generosity of spirit that made her care for all these children as if they were her own.
He also wondered again why she was every bit as wary of the future as he was. What had scarred her so deeply? She’d learned many of his secrets, but what about hers?
While she put the kids to bed, he stretched out in the hammock, staring up at the inky sky. The scattering of stars seemed so much brighter here, away from the city lights. What did they hold for the future?
He heard the creak of the back door.
“Annie?”
“Yes.”
“Come join me.”
She took several steps in the direction of his voice, then hesitated as if she’d just realized where he was.
“Come on. There’s room
