A Father, Again. Mary J. Forbes

used to hang with these guys. Once after school, one of them stopped me. He said things…and started handling my hair. It was very long at the time.” She looked to the hedge between their properties. Sunshine fueled flames into that hair now. “He scared me.” Her eyes were steady. “You told him to leave me alone.”

      “Gene Hyde.”

      “Yes, Gene Hyde.”

      Misty River High’s class-A idiot. The guy had wrapped a strand of her hair around his hand—with lewd innuendoes.

      “I remember. It was beside the gym and you were…” Wide-eyed and skittish as an alley cat. “Very young.”

      “Barely fourteen.”

      She’d been Seth’s age. A kid.

      And Jon had wondered after all those trips he’d driven her and his little brother home from school—he wondered what she’d be like one day as a woman.

      Now, he knew.

      Except, now he no longer cared. Or so he told himself. Of course, his conscience wouldn’t allow him to veto his four-day fantasies. She was female—an alluring female—after all.

      He bent, checked the primer. Free of gas. Taking hold of the starter cord, he yanked. The engine roared to life.

      Rianne grabbed the handle. Her shoulder brushed his arm; her woman’s smell beguiled his nose. “Thank you,” she mouthed over the buzzing motor. A quick smile and she pushed forward, hips swaying with each determined step of her dusty sneakers, following the cutter’s path toward the edge of the yard.

      He still had her image, her scent swirling in his head when he rounded the corner of the house and almost bumped into a tall, gangly kid chasing a runaway basketball. The same kid he’d seen the night he’d carried in her groceries.

      In one swoop Jon anchored the ball against his body with an elbow. “You Rianne’s boy?”

      The kid gave him a cautious look. “Yeah.”

      “How old are you?”

      “Thirteen.”

      “Shouldn’t you be helping your mother instead of playing?”

      The teenager had the decency to scan the backyard. “You mean like mow the lawn?”

      “That’d be a start.”

      “Yeah, well, Mom doesn’t want me operating machines.”

      “Why not?”

      “She’s scared I might hurt myself.”

      “Do you think you’ll hurt yourself?”

      The boy looked as if Jon had broken a raw egg on his head. “No way. I can handle a stupid mower.”

      Jon released a mild snort. Kid had guts, he’d give him that. “Lesson one. No machine is stupid. If you don’t respect it, it won’t respect you. Got it?”

      The boy nodded.

      “Good. Lesson two. Mothers tend to think their kids stay babies forever.” Jon lifted his eyebrows. “Up to you to choose.”

      “Geez. Like that’s hard.”

      “Thought so.” Jon handed him the ball. “Sam, right?”

      The boy nodded.

      “Think you can handle those two lessons, Sam?”

      Something shifted in his dark eyes. “I can handle ’em, sir.”

      Jon shook his head. “Not sir. Just Jon. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, go help your mother.”

      The last thing she wanted, marching out of her house, was to confront Jon Tucker. Brutally masculine, with those polar eyes icing a person in a heartbeat, she suspected he wasn’t a man who would give one hoot about what she had to say.

      But say it, she would.

      Just as she had, in the end, to Duane.

      No one—not now or ever again—would castigate her children or berate her mothering skills. Duane had discovered it the court-induced way. Jon Tucker would learn it in plain jargon.

      He worked on a plank supported by a pair of sawhorses several feet from his front steps, marking out a distance with a thick carpenter’s pencil and tape measure. Clad in the same frayed jeans, blue plaid shirt and cumbersome work boots of an hour ago, he had her heart taking another boisterous tumble.

      In the last sixty minutes he had rolled his sleeves to his biceps. Bread-brown muscles strained in the sun.

      The wolf tattoo glistened within dark hair.

      She chanced a furtive study of the man who had kept her spinning silly girlish dreams as a teenager. The harsh-crafted angles of his face, profiled against the bright day, showed an assertive nose, a bold ridge of brow. He’d switched the cap so its visor hid the five-inch bracket of ponytail. Pale skin peeked above the plastic band across his forehead. A silver ear stud flaunted wickedness.

      She pressed down a corner of excitement. And guilt because of her mission.

      After all, he’d taken time from his work to fix her beat-up, old mower.

      At her approach, his long, powerful body unfolded with calm ease. Slowly she was acclimating to the way he didn’t smile, didn’t speak, simply looked at her with that impenetrable, intelligent expression. Acknowledging the latter, she took heart and stepped close enough to speak in a normal tone. “Can we talk?”

      He shot a look toward her house. “The mower again?”

      “No. My son.”

      Those eyes conveyed nothing. Not curiosity, not amusement, not compassion. Two decades ago, a dozen expressions would have skimmed his rebel teenage features in mere seconds.

      Why are you so empty, Jon?

      She towed in a nourishing breath. She was here for Sam. “Please don’t persuade my son to do things against my will.”

      His black brows sprang. “How’d I do that?”

      “By telling him to mow the grass.”

      Silence. In the woods a bird trilled a minimusical.

      She pressed on. “You probably think he’s old enough, that he should be a man. Well, I’ll decide when the time is right and until then I don’t want my son handling machinery.”

      He gave her another long look, picked up a compact saw, flicked a switch and notched one end of the plank. When it was done, he carried the wood to the steps.

      It wasn’t so much a dismissal as disinterest.

      Jon Tucker simply did not care one way or another.

      In all her years with Duane, she couldn’t recollect feeling as detached as Jon looked. Alone, yes. Despondent, yes. But never detached to the point where life constituted meaningless mechanical movement from one day to the next.

      She drew closer, watching as he fit the board in place. “Sam’s not like other boys.”

      Would he quit working and look at her? Discuss this rationally? Or—the thought nipped her mind—was he like Duane after all, harboring an inner explosive rage while on the outside he appeared calm?

      Ludicrous. Jon was nothing like her dead husband. She didn’t know how or why, but she sensed a deep, agonizing pain in the man working on his house.

      She started back to her yard, weighing her suspicions.

      “Rianne.”

      She hesitated. “Yes?”

      “What’s the real reason?”

      “He has a deformed hand.” Lobster claw. An informal medical label for the fusing of all fingers into one, separate from the thumb. A hideous label. But a