A Ring And A Rainbow. Deanna Talcott

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t wilt under the inspection and, strangely, she wasn’t offended, either. She stared right back, returning the favor in full.

      Damn him. He was everything she remembered and more. He was ruggedly handsome, and so masculine that, if measured, the virility quotient would likely pop the top off the charts. Why couldn’t the man be stoop shouldered and paunchy, with glasses and a receding hairline?

      But, no, that would have been too easy. No, he had to come back as a six-foot-four hardbody. At thirty-five, Hunter Starnes could live up to any trendy description and still manage to be a man’s man. He was everything that filled her dreams and sleepless nights. Everything that haunted and teased her.

      It surprised her a bit that he’d filled out, into the epitome of strength and resilience. He’d never looked like this at twenty.

      The last decade had given him a sexier, bolder look. His face was wider, squarer. His forehead was broad and smooth, while smile lines bracketed his mouth, sculpting age and experience into the tanned expanse of his cheeks. The blunt curve of his jaw—and the sawed-off, notched chin—were sooty from a day’s growth of stubble. It was the sort of look most women found mysteriously intoxicating—the look of a bad boy waiting to be tamed.

      Most women. Not her.

      And then there was his hair. Dark. Tousled. Sparse on the sides and decadently spiked. Clipped to precision, and trimmed to arch so perfectly over the flat shells of his ears that it made Claire realize he groomed his image just as much as he did his career.

      His hazel eyes, which had always been flirty and fun, had subtly changed. Now a shrewd quality filled their depths, putting his expression somewhere between piercing and ponderous. It scared her a little and made her feel inexplicably vulnerable, as if he could see right down to the bottom of her soul. She saw a grief there, too…a grief that, this time around, she didn’t know how to handle.

      He still had the whitest, straightest teeth—and, she guessed, a mouth that occasionally twitched when he teased. A mouth she once knew as soft and sexy and seductively sinful when he kissed. A mouth that had once taught her about French kisses and hickies and the delicious rapid-fire rapport between men and women. Now his mouth was solemn, sad, the corners turned down.

      If there was one compromise to perfection, it had to be his nose, she silently conceded, gratified to at least find something physically wrong with his looks. It still leaned a little off-kilter, his reward for playing smash-mouth basketball his senior year in high school.

      “I meant it. Didn’t mean to scare you, but—” he lifted an eyebrow as well as an apologetic shoulder as he sauntered into the room, pausing at the edge of the kitchen table “—I wasn’t expecting the girls yet, so I figured I ought to check out the noise, make sure no one broke in. I was ready to take you out.”

      “Sorry. I should have knocked,” she said stiffly, straightening. Funny, the last time he’d suggested taking her out it had been for a date. “I’m so used to just coming over. But I wanted to leave dinner for your family, so it would be here when they got in.” She didn’t want him to think she’d made the meal solely for his benefit. She waggled the slip of paper. “I was going to leave a note, Hunter, along with my condolences.”

      His gaze narrowed, eyeing the blank sheet of paper as if it was an unsigned sympathy card. The muscle along his jaw tightened. “Thanks.” The single word was rough, husky with unspent grief. “I appreciate it.”

      Claire hesitated, swallowing the lump in her throat. If he shed as much as one tear, she’d fall apart—and then she’d fall straight into his arms. “And I—I want you to know I’ll miss your mom a lot.”

      He nodded, his eyes shuttering closed for the briefest of moments. His head tipped slightly forward, and then he drew a ragged breath. “Thanks, Claire. But…well…I imagine it was as much of a shock to you as it was to any of us.”

      “It was.” Yet Claire knew that in the social scheme of things, she wasn’t deserving of sympathy. She was only the neighbor, not one of the children, not one of the in-laws. Still, Ella Starnes had been like a mother to her.

      “I knew, like you probably did, that she hadn’t been feeling well lately, but…” He let the explanation drift.

      “I saw her just the day before. Her color was fine, and she seemed better than she’d been all winter. She was even talking about taking a cruise this fall.”

      Hunter snorted, and shook his head, as if his mother’s antics would never cease to amaze him. “Up until this last year, she sure knew how to enjoy life,” he grudgingly admitted. “Beth said maybe it’s a blessing, that she went quickly like that. She never would have stood for being sick, or being a burden day in and day out.”

      Claire nodded, momentarily thinking how strange it was that they could talk about anything at all, even his mother’s death. “I know. If anything, your mother taught me how to fight back.” He looked at her quickly, making Claire immediately wish she could retract the words. But she couldn’t, so she amended them. “Your mother knew how to take things in stride. She was too feisty to let her arthritis get her down, and too strong willed to have anything but a smile on her face.”

      Hunter made a funny little noise in the back of his throat, as if he was choking up and couldn’t risk saying anything.

      Instinctively Claire knew he didn’t want to cry, or look weak, in front of her. So she tried to make a joke—as feeble as it was—to give him an out. “Of course, she did have a thing about the driveway,” she said. “She kept telling me that shoveling it was good exercise, that it would keep me young. She bought me a new shovel every fall. I, on the other hand, kept hinting about a snowblower….”

      He laughed, hard enough to explain away the red-rimmed, watery eyes. He swiped at them with the back of his hand, as if it was her poor joke that had brought tears to his eyes.

      But they both knew better.

      Claire longed to give him a hug and tell him she was really, truly sorry. But rational thought warned her that would be a particularly bad idea, given how she felt about him.

      So they stood there, grappling with a strained moment of silence. Claire realized she should make some kind of excuse and leave, but couldn’t bring herself to do so. It had been years, what were a few more miserable minutes? Especially if she could share them with Hunter.

      “So you caught me,” he said finally, changing the subject as he shook out the T-shirt. “I was about to jump in the shower before the girls and their families got in.” He pulled the shirt over his head, shouldering into the sleeves before yanking down the hem, and stretching it taut against his chest. Hunter’s biceps moved as though he was a day laborer, not a pampered entrepreneur. Claire suspected he probably popped the seams out of his designer suits. “Left my car in the street, so that’s why you probably didn’t notice it. I figured they’d be unloading playpens and high chairs and stuff.”

      Regret unexpectedly went zinging through her middle, and she looked away, refusing to let him see the longing she couldn’t control. She was slowly coming to terms with the fact that she’d probably never have a family, never have a child, but some days were more difficult than others.

      When she and Hunter were eighteen, and full of hope for the future, they’d impulsively picked out baby names. She wondered if he still remembered. April Michelle for a girl. Tyler Worth for a boy. She’d once written them in all the margins of her spiral-bound notebooks and imagined the beautiful babies СКАЧАТЬ