Free Moonlight and Shadows by Tara Janzen

again,
backing toward the French doors, his voice a shade rougher than it
had been.
    She waved to him twice before he got into
his truck, and once more as he drove down the driveway. All three
times, in her private heart of hearts, she wished he weren’t
leaving.
Five
    Another week, another plan. Lila had decided
the only sensible thing left to do was to face her attraction for
Jack Hudson head-on. Ignoring it certainly hadn’t worked. She
needed to stop thinking of him as an intriguing, unknown quantity
in her life and instead put him in a new category, one she’d had
years of practice controlling. She needed to make a student out of
him, so she decided to teach him how to read.
    Of course, she still could have just gotten
rid of him. Four things kept her from doing that. She now knew
where his unsettling look of defeat had come from the day he’d
stood in her sitting room and stared at Danny’s photograph.
Dyslexics faced thousands of failures before adulthood, though she
had to admit Jack Hudson seemed to have bounced back from them in
pretty good shape. She didn’t know exactly what had caused his
resigned expression at that moment, but she didn’t want to add to
his score sheet of failures.
    His blush had definitely swayed her. He
hadn’t liked being found out, but neither had he done anything to
hide his disability, which led to reason number three—his mixture
of courage and confidence. It took both to invite an English
professor to eat pizza with you after she’d just found you
sounding-out syllables.
    Reason number four was self-serving and
practical. Jack Hudson was the best carpenter in northern Colorado.
Long after the rest of her Victorian farmhouse crumbled into dust,
her office would be standing on the edge of the cornfields. She
didn’t doubt it for a minute.
    Therefore, she’d compiled a good, solid
beginning reading list. She’d take him through some of her
childhood favorites, and at the end of each lesson she’d read to
him from the classics. She’d give him the world.
    It never occurred to her that he might not
want to.
    * * *
    “No.” Jack whacked the nail again, though
he’d already sunk it an eighth of an inch past the board. He was
standing with his back to her, inside the open framework of a
storage closet they’d decided to add to her office.
    “No?”
    “No.” He set another nail, and his hammer
rang out.
    Lila dragged her gaze from the curve of his
backside, noting how nicely he fit into a pair of softly worn
denims, and looked down at her cherished copy of Mother Goose. She
admitted he might have a point. Maybe nursery rhymes weren’t the
best place to start. She’d thought the easy rhyme scheme would act
as a natural prompter, whereas she’d given little thought to the
subject matter.
    “Okay,” she conceded. “What would you like
to read?”
    “Nothing.”
    For a woman who had spent some of the best
hours of her childhood on Treasure Island and bawling her
eyes out over The Yearling, his answer bordered on
incomprehensible.
    “That’s impossible,” she said.
    He just kept hammering away, nail after
nail, whack after whack. Outside, the wind whipped up flurries of
snow in the dark, blowing them off the roof of the milkhouse and
scraping them across the icy crust covering the yard.
    “Maybe if you told me what you were
interested in,” she said, trying a new tack, “a hobby or something,
I could get some books on the subject.” Much to her surprise, that
worked.
    He stopped with his hammer raised. After a
long pause he landed one final blow on the last nail, then slowly
turned to face her. “I don’t have much going in the hobby area, but
over the last few months I have been cultivating a new
interest.”
    If his smooth drawl and the gleam in his eye
hadn’t warned her, his teasing grin should have, but it didn’t.
    “Great.” She almost sighed in relief. “What
is it?”
    “You,” His smile broadened, and he moved a
couple of steps closer in a slow,