Free Moonlight and Shadows by Tara Janzen Page A

sexy swagger. “So . . . if you’ve
got an autobiography lying around somewhere or a diary you’d be
willing to share, I can guarantee you my undivided attention.”
    He was impossible, she thought. There was no
other word for him. Impossibly aggravating, impossibly
good-looking, impossibly, seductively appealing.
    Deciding to build an office addition onto
her house hadn’t seemed like such a big deal last fall. She’d just
wanted someplace to set up her computer and put her books,
someplace besides the living room, the sitting room, or the
kitchen, someplace besides rooms already jam-packed with Danny’s
exotic antiques from the four corners of the world. All she’d
wanted was a room of her own for her own stuff.
    What she’d gotten was Jack Hudson. What she
needed was help.
    * * *
    “You what?” Didi Caldwell’s tortoiseshell
glasses slid lower on her nose, giving Lila the full benefit of her
blue-eyed stare across the width of a cluttered desk.
    “Mother Goose,” Lila admitted for the second
time. “But I immediately offered to start with something else,
anything else.”
    “After you had already offended him,” her
friend added with a condemning sigh. Didi sat back in her chair and
swiped ineffectually at a multitude of straying, rust-colored
tendrils of hair. “Sometimes you’re so smart you’re dumb,
Lila.”
    “Sometimes,” she was forced to agree.
    “But not often,” Didi said. “What can I do
to help? Do you want me to find him a real reading tutor? The
public library runs a good literacy program. I’m sure they can
match him up with someone.”
    “No, no, that’s not what I had in mind,”
Lila said, not quite meeting Didi’s gaze.
    “Oh. Well, I guess I could offer him as an
extra-credit project to one of my grad students. Is he willing to
pay an hourly wage?”
    “No. I mean, that’s not what I had in mind
either.”
    Didi leaned forward and pushed her glasses
back into place. “Lila honey, I have adolescent literature,
grammar, and reading for education majors this semester. There’s no
way I can cram an illiterate carpenter into my personal
schedule.”
    “I’m not asking you to. I’m working him into
my own schedule. I just need to know what to do. I thought you
could give me a few pointers.”
    “Why?”
    Lila frowned at the blunt question, thinking
the answer was obvious. “So I don’t make any more mistakes.”
    “That wasn’t the question,” her friend said,
giving her a knowing look. When Lila didn’t reply, Didi sighed. “Is
there something about this guy I should know that you’re not
telling me?”
    “He’s a nice man,” Lila hedged.
    “And?”
    She shifted slightly in her chair, wondering
if her students felt as uncomfortable as she suddenly did on the
wrong side of the desk. “And he’s doing a lot of extra work on my
office, and I’d like to help him out. Isn’t that what teaching is
all about?”
    “That’s what it’s supposed to be
about. That’s what I tell my students it’s about. But you’ve been
in this game long enough to know it ain’t necessarily so,
especially at the university level. And that, my dear, is the level
we are at.” Didi paused long enough for her words to sink in, then
asked, “What’s his name?”
    “Jack. Jack Hudson.” Lila watched Didi’s
eyebrows slowly draw together. “What?”
    Didi shrugged. “The name sounds familiar,
but I don’t know why. I’ve never hired a carpenter in my life,
functionally illiterate or otherwise. Kevin does all our fix-it
work.” Kevin was Didi’s husband, an art professor and no handyman,
not by anyone’s standards.
    “Maybe you’d be better off with a
carpenter,” Lila said with a slight smile. “I’ve seen some of
Kevin’s carpentry. The next time he gets excited about building
onto the deck, call me, and I’ll give you Jack’s number. He’s
incredible.”
    “Incredible?” Didi’s eyebrows rose above the
tortoiseshell frames, and Lila realized there had been