His Innocent Temptress

Yet she had come home to work with her father, to help him. To prove to her father that she wasn’t worthless, that she was a good veterinarian, a competent doctor. To face him as an adult, maybe even as an equal, and prove to him—and to herself—that his lifelong assessment of her had been wrong.

“I could probably give a shrink enough ammunition to have me on the couch for the next five years,” she told herself as she stood up, sighed and walked back to her bedroom to put on the white blouse.

ALEX PARKED HIS four-wheel drive next to the SUV Hannah had driven out to The Desert Rose, noticing that she’d had it washed since that afternoon. An odd thing to do, considering it wasn’t quite spring yet, and cold, complete with rainy weather and muddy roads. His own vehicle had a crust of mud nearly up to the bottom of the windows, and he doubted he would do much more about it for the next few weeks than let nature give it an occasional bath.

Then again, Hannah was Hugo Clark’s daughter, and the man was a stickler for some things. Obviously a clean vehicle was one of them, although the man’s personal appearance wasn’t exactly out of GQ. Big and strong had softened to large and sloppy the past seven to ten years, about the same length of time Hannah had been away at school and he’d been left alone, his wife having taken off many years before that, heading for brighter lights and a bigger city.

“And away from Hugo,” Alex added out loud, shaking his head. Hugo Clark was one hell of a vet, the best around, but he had all the personality of a bear with a thorn in his paw.

Alex had never thought about it before, but now he found himself wondering what it must have been like for Hannah to grow up, motherless, with Hugo Clark for a father. It couldn’t have been much fun.

He knew that he and his brothers had been lucky. Uncle Randy and Aunt Vi had raised them as if they were their own, and even as they all missed their biological parents, none of them could ever say they were neglected or left hungry for love.

Alex looked at the dark two-story building in front of him; the boxlike veterinary office and the small apartment on the second floor. Quite a difference from The Desert Rose. Cheerless, with no grass, no flowers or trees. Just a cement area for parking and a double string of animal pens running the length of the cemented rear yard. Banded by streets at the front and on one side, there was a vacant gas station across the side street, while the other side of the building lined up closely with a small manufacturing plant, and the rear butted up against a small tire yard and automobile graveyard.

Hugo Clark served as vet for large animals for the most part, servicing his clients and patients on ranches more often than in his own office, which he reserved for treating dogs and cats and rabbits and, probably, the occasional armadillo. It wasn’t as if he needed a fancy office.

He certainly could afford a separate home for himself and his daughter, though, that was for sure, as he was the most prominent vet in the Bridle area. Alex wondered, just for a moment, why Hugo hadn’t taken more care about where he raised his daughter, then forgot about it as he remembered that he was here to take that daughter out to dinner.

Cade had teased the hell out of him before he left the ranch, warning him to wear steel-tipped shoes if he planned to take Hannah dancing, and reminding him of the day Hannah had come to the ranch with her father and fallen headfirst into a pile of manure.

Poor kid. She sure was a nervous sort. High-strung, like a young filly. Awkward, like a foal just finding its legs. Raw, unschooled, and yet with an air of promise about her, as if, with the right trainer, she could be a real champion.

Not that he would be volunteering for the job. He was here to thank her for the splendid job she’d done that afternoon. She’d saved the mare, he was sure of that, and probably the foal, as well. She’d been calm, focused, secure in her knowledge and not at all afraid to give him orders, take charge, take action.

And then, once the foal had been delivered, she’d reverted to type, turning back into Hannah Slip-on-a-banana, tripping over her own feet, stumbling over her own words, and generally reverting to the klutz he’d known and mostly ignored ever since he could remember.

But did he know her at all, beneath the shy, almost nerdy outside that she showed the world while trying to hide herself from it? Obviously not, because he hadn’t believed she could handle the mare, hadn’t even suspected the strength in her slim body, the calm purpose she could exhibit, the self-confidence that had practically oozed from her pores as she did the job she had been trained to do.

Hannah Clark wasn’t quite Jekyll and Hyde, but it was rather like there were two of her—the competent doctor, and the insecure, stumbling girl who’d always stood very much in her father’s shadow.

Not that Alex planned to look any more deeply into Hannah’s life, the hows and the whys of it. He was here to take her out to dinner, thank her again and then forget about her until the next time they needed a vet at The Desert Rose.

He’d knocked on the door twice, with no answer, and finally tried the knob, which turned easily, opening onto a set of narrow, steep wooden steps. No wonder she didn’t hear his knock. He’d thought there might be one or two rooms downstairs, and the bedrooms upstairs, but it would seem that the entire first floor had been turned into offices, leaving the second floor for all of their living purposes.

Talk about your cramped quarters. Alex already could tell, from looking at the building, that there couldn’t be more than four rooms upstairs, none of them very large. Hugo Clark probably filled up each of them every time he entered a room, leaving very little space for his shy, easily spooked, motherless child.

Damn, now he was getting melodramatic. Alex smiled, blaming his more imaginative and passionate side on his Arab roots, but also pleased to know that he was, even in Texas, very much his father’s son.

He climbed the steps in the dark, having checked the light switch and finding the bulb burned out at the top of the stairs, and knocked on the door, which opened almost immediately.

He blinked twice, adjusting to the light spilling out into the stairway, then smiled at Hannah, who seemed to be blocking his way into the apartment.

“I’ll get my purse and be right with you,” she said without preamble, turning away from the door. Alex stepped back just in time, as the door closed in his face. He grinned, shook his head and headed back down the stairs, figuring it safer than standing on the top step to wait for Hannah to come barreling through the doorway and knock him down those same steps.

He stood in the small dark hallway, listening as at least three locks were turned, then looked up when Hannah, holding tightly to the railing, came toward him. Her legs were long, for such a petite woman, and her slacks were slim, allowing him to imagine how straight her legs could be underneath them.

But that was about all he could imagine. She wore a dark jacket, fully buttoned, and a white blouse that, by all rights, should have been cutting off circulation to her brain. The entire effect, minus the slacks and her sweep of blond hair, was like one big No Trespassing sign.

Not that the woman had anything to worry about on that head. It wasn’t as if Alex had a death wish, and trying to get close enough to clumsy, nervous, klutzy Hannah Clark to kiss her wasn’t something a guy would think about without first reviewing his health insurance. The only other time Alex could remember kissing as a sport not without potential mishap was the time he’d kissed Melody Pritchert when they’d both had teeth braces, and they’d gotten their hardware stuck together.

Kissing Hannah Clark would probably start with him putting his arm out to hold her and having her react like a startled mare, rearing up, and end with his arm in a cast.

“You look very nice tonight,” he said almost automatically as Hannah hesitated on the bottom step, looking at him as if she had no idea what came next and hoped to hell he had a clue or they were both in big trouble.

“Thank you,” she said formally, then pressed her lips together as if she didn’t trust herself to say anything more without giving away nuclear secrets or some such thing.

“You’re welcome,” he said, taking her hand so that she’d come with him out of this dark, confining hallway. Otherwise, he believed they might end up standing there all night. “I made reservations for six-thirty, so we’d better get a move on, all right?”

After a false start that called a halt until Hannah bent down to replace her left shoe, they actually made it out the door and into Alex’s vehicle without further mishap. He sighed as he closed the passenger door, hoping Hannah would put on her seat belt without incident, and wondered if he should be offering up the rest of the evening for some poor souls somewhere.

NERVOUS WAS SUCH A LAME WORD for the feeling that had invaded Hannah when she’d heard Alex’s knock. There should be a bigger word, one that sounded the way it felt—a real bam of a word. A ka-pow-ee sort of word that gave true meaning to the slam-in-the-gut sort of terror Hannah had felt, was still reeling from as she sat across the table from the man of her dreams and wondered, not for the first time, what had possessed her to order linguine with clam sauce.

With garlic.

But the garlic wasn’t the worst of it, especially since she certainly wasn’t counting on a good-night kiss.

It was the linguine that had proved a challenge too great for her and her trembling hands. Linguine twirling, to Hannah’s mind, could qualify as an Olympic sport, with degree-of-difficulty scores for picking the right amount to put on the fork, for twirling, for getting the slippery noodles into your mouth without dribbling the ends onto your chin.

She’d seen the grin twitching at the corners of Alex’s mouth when she’d finally figuratively thrown in the towel and cut the linguine into pieces. But anything was better than having to rescue another forkful of the stuff from her lap.

“So,” Alex said as the waiter cleared the plates, “what made you decide to come back to Bridle after veterinary school? I would have thought you’d get as far from here as possible.” As he said the words, he winced, adding, “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You’re talking about my father,” Hannah said, believing she knew what he meant. “Dad’s getting on, and I thought he needed me. He married late in life, you understand, and I was born when he was nearly forty. Besides, I want to work with horses, and this is horse country with a vengeance. Your stables alone keep us pretty busy.”

“True enough,” Alex said, picking two slices of chocolate cake from the serving cart the waiter had pushed up to the table and handing one to Hannah. “Coffee?”

She nodded and the waiter poured cups for each of them.

“You know, Hannah, I stood in front of your apartment tonight and realized that you might have had it pretty tough, growing up there without a mother.”

“And with my father,” Hannah said, feeling disloyal, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Something about the look in Alex’s eye had kept her talking all through dinner, and telling the truth more often than not. In fact, the only flat-out lie she’d told was to say that college had been a lot of “fun.” College had been work, which she had liked, but it certainly hadn’t been fun.

“He’s very…direct.”

“Blunt,” Hannah translated.

“Maybe a little stern.”

“Rigid,” Hannah amended.

Alex grinned. “Opinionated?”

“If that’s your opinion,” she shot back, then almost gasped when Alex laughed. What was she doing? She was teasing with him, bantering back and forth. And it was fun. “Want to go for the gold?” she heard herself ask. “And number one of the top ten reasons Hugo Clark is not exactly a barrel of laughs is…?”

Alex’s grin faded as he sat forward, propped his chin on his hands and looked at her. Through her.

She waited, trembling, wishing she’d kept her big mouth shut.

“He doesn’t appreciate what he has?” Alex asked at last, his voice low, intimate.

Hannah bowed her head, concentrated on pleating her napkin in her lap, then mentally slapped herself for fidgeting and folded her hands on the edge of the table. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Wrong. Somebody should have noticed sooner,” Alex told her sincerely, then rocked her to her core by adding, “I should have noticed sooner. Life with Hugo hasn’t been a picnic, has it, Hannah-banana?”

He reached across the table, took her hands in his. “I’m glad you came home, Hannah. And I’m glad we’re here tonight, as adults, rather than as the sometimes rotten kids some of us used to be. Not you, but me. Let me make it up to you.”

“Make it up to me?” Hannah’s mouth was so dry she was surprised she could even form words. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, exactly,” Alex said, releasing her hands and handing her a fork so that she could eat the cake in front of her. “And I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of do-gooder, or a penitent making up for past sins. Still, I do remember the way you were pretty much on the outside of things growing up, even if you were younger than I, and Cade and Mac as well. I remember you coming to The Desert Rose with your dad just about once a week, and I remember the way we used to tease you.”

Hannah poked the fork into the cake, breaking off a piece but not daring to lift it to her mouth just yet. “It wasn’t so bad. Except maybe the day Mac tossed me into the watering trough. It was hot, and he said I looked like I needed some cooling off. He was just having fun, and I couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve at the time. I think I thought it was fun, too, until everybody else started to point and laugh.”

Alex winced. “Where was your dad?”

“Standing there, laughing,” Hannah told him, remembering how her father had laughed with the boys, as if it had all been a very funny joke, until she’d stood up in the trough and everyone could see that her white T-shirt had become pretty close to transparent after her dunking. Then he’d grabbed her by the elbow, dragged her to the truck and lectured her all the way home about how real ladies don’t show everyone “their wares” like common sluts.

Hannah frowned now and decided maybe she’d been closer to thirteen the day of the dunking. She wasn’t sure, but she did know she woke up the next morning to see a training bra lying on the bottom of the bed. She’d looked at it, then cried for hours, wishing her mother would please come home and tell her what to do with it.

Some time after that, she’d wished her mother home again to explain what was happening to her body, why she was bleeding and feeling so sore and sick. She couldn’t ask her father, she already knew that. So she had searched his bookshelves until she found one that explained what “going into heat” meant. Until tenth-grade biology class, she’d actually feared that each time she “went into heat” the boys in her class would know and try to go after her like stallions.

What a fear-ridden childhood she’d had. Alone, lonely and filled with fear. And all the time made very well aware that she was as worthless and shiftless and potentially wanton as her mother.

“Hannah? Hannah, what are you thinking? You have such a strange look on your face.”

“Hmm?” she said, coming out of her private thoughts, to realize she’d finished her cake, and to become aware that she’d been lost in those private thoughts while Alex sat there, ignored. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said quickly, reaching for her water glass and knocking it over on the table. “Oh! Look what I’ve done!”

Alex calmly patted the wet spot with his napkin, telling her, “It’s all right, Hannah. Look—” he said, knocking over his own water glass “—we might just be starting a new after-dinner ritual, washing the tablecloth while it’s still on the table.”

Hannah’s eyes were wide as she looked at what he’d done. “Well, that’s just plain silly.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Alex agreed, and then he smiled. He smiled so completely and happily that Hannah smiled with him, and a part of her that never seemed to relax slowly warmed, defrosted and allowed her to laugh in real enjoyment.

Alex laughed with her, laughed even louder when the waiter came rushing over to the table with a pile of dry napkins to blot the spills. “We’ve started a new tradition,” he told the waiter. “After-dinner spills. What do you think? Will it ever catch on?”

“I really couldn’t say, sir,” the waiter said sternly. “I’ll get your check.”

“He’s not very happy,” Hannah said, watching the waiter walk off, his spine rigid. “I guess that means you’ll have to leave him a big tip.”

“Oh, yeah,” Alex said, nodding. “A really big tip. But it was worth it to see you smile, hear you laugh. You do both much too seldom, Hannah.”

She dropped her gaze, then dared to look up at him again. “Don’t do that or I’ll get all nervous again, and I don’t think there’s a tip large enough to cover me knocking over the entire table when I stand up. And that’s possible, you know, knowing my history.”

“Hannah Slip-on-a-banana,” Alex said, also sober once more. “I wonder—how much do you think that name had to do with your little mishaps? It’s got to be really difficult to be graceful when everyone’s waiting for your next misstep. After a while, you’d have to start believing everyone’s right, and just plain give up trying.”

Hannah melted. Right there in the restaurant, with the waiter placing a burgundy leather folder in front of Alex and waiting until he’d produced a credit card to pay the check, Hannah Clark melted. He knew, Alex Coleman knew. For the first time in her life, she felt as if someone understood her, even cared about her, cared enough to consider how she got to be the local joke, the clumsy child, the awkward adolescent, the shy teenager. The oldest virgin in Texas, perhaps in all of the United States.

“Do…did you really mean it earlier when you said you’d like to make it up to me—you know, for that stuff we talked about?”

Alex pulled back her chair and helped her to her feet, then led her out of the restaurant. “Yes, Hannah, I did,” he said as he fished in his pocket for his keys, then opened the door into the night. “Why? Have you thought of a way I could begin repaying you? Tipping over my water glass seems somehow inadequate.”

How would she say it? Could she say it? She couldn’t believe she was even thinking it.

“Well,” she said at last, once they were in the car, “there is something…”

Chapter Three

The last time Alex had nearly run his own car off a road had been when he had just turned sixteen and decided that driving and smoking menthol cigarettes “went together.” He’d taken his first drag, choked, dropped the cigarette between his legs and nearly taken out Mrs. Rafferty’s hand-painted mailbox.

This time it was a U.S. mailbox at the corner of Fifth and Main that nearly bit the dust. But then, he was older now, and the shock had been bigger. Therefore, the mailbox should be bigger, too.

“You…you want me to what?” he said as he recovered, slowed the vehicle to look over at Hannah in the darkness.

She had sunk down in the seat, sitting on her spine, her head on her chest. “You did ask,” she said in a small voice.

“Well, hell, yeah—but what kind of answer was that? I mean, you could give a guy a little warning. You know, something like, ‘Hey, Alex, I’m going to drop a bomb now. Maybe you’ll want to duck and cover.”’

“Never mind, okay?” Hannah said, pushing herself upright once more. “Forget it. Just—forget it.”

“Forget it? How am I suppose to forget it? You just asked me to rid you of your…to…you want me to—oh, hell, Hannah. You can’t still be a virgin. You’re what—twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-eight,” she told him, her high-buttoned blouse choking her, half from sliding down in the seat and partly because she may just have swallowed her tongue. She wasn’t quite sure. But if she choked to death in the next five seconds, she really didn’t think that would be a bad thing. “I’m twenty-eight and never been more than kissed. It’s embarrassing.”

“How? Nobody knows but you. And now me,” Alex added, shaking his head. “And that’s another thing, Hannah. Why me?”

“Good question,” Hannah mumbled, mortified. What had gotten into her? She hadn’t had any wine, so she couldn’t use drunken stupidity as an excuse. “It’s just that…well, you did ask what you could do for me. And you said I could ask anything, anything at all, and I…well, I really would like your help.”

Alex pulled up in the small cement parking lot beside the veterinary office and cut the engine. “My help. Hannah, it isn’t as if you asked me to change a tire or help you move—which I think you ought to consider, not that it’s any of my business. But asking me to…to—”

“Make me a woman is how I think I said it,” Hannah said, helping him and cringing at the same time. The only thing worse than saying the words again would be to hear him say them.

“Yes, that,” Alex said, pushing his fingers through his hair. “Is it really so necessary to you?”

Hannah nodded. “Maybe it’s stupid, but yes, I do think it’s necessary.” She turned toward him, trying to explain. “It’s time I grew up—all the way up. I thought I had, but then I came home, and I’m right back where I started. Unsure of myself, wondering who and what I am. Falling back into old patterns, probably unhealthy patterns. I still feel like a girl. A young, clumsy little girl. I’m twenty-eight, Alex. Twenty-eight! It’s time I grew up.”

“Having sex doesn’t make you a grown-up, Hannah. Just ask all the teenage mothers, if you don’t believe me.”

“You…you’d be careful,” she said, averting her gaze once more, grateful for the relative dark inside the vehicle, even with the streetlight shining at the corner. “You wouldn’t let that happen to me.”

“No, of course I wouldn’t let anything like that happen to—what the hell am I saying? Hannah, no. It’s a crazy idea. I’m sorry, but it just is.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Just forget I asked. And you’re right, it is a crazy idea.”

“So you’re not going to go out hunting for someone else to…to make you a woman?”

Hannah bowed her head, bit her lips. She’d been right. It was worse when he said it.

“Hannah? Answer me. You are going to give up the idea, right?”

She looked over at him in the darkness. He couldn’t know, must never know. She’d rather go to her grave a repressed virgin than give herself to anyone but this man she’d dreamed of all her life. All she’d wanted was this one time, this one memory, before she went back to her unfulfilled and unfulfilling life. Was that too much to ask? Apparently it was.

“Hannah? Would you please answer me?”

“Good night, Alex,” she said, opening the door and quickly hopping out of the vehicle. “I had a wonderful time.”

“Hannah!” he called after her as she ran toward the door. Then he sat back in his seat and slammed his fists against the steering wheel. “Damn it! Now what do I do?”

THE THRONE ROOM in the great palace of Sorajhee, located in the capital city of Jeved, had always been one of the most beautiful chambers, its simple Moorish architecture accented with golf leaf, its tall, ornamental windows looking out over the perfect blue of the Persian Gulf.

From this room, from the jewel-encrusted throne set at the top of a pedestal surrounded by steps on which the guilty, the penitent and the hopeful petitioner had all prostrated themselves, the Jeved family had ruled for generations.

Today the air in the throne room was tense, almost trembling, as Azzam, ruler of Sorajhee, looked down at his counterpart from Balahar, King Zakariyya Al Farid.

“Will you speak, my friend, or only continue to pose, impressing me with your power, which is no less or greater than mine own?” King Zakariyya Al Farid turned away from Azzam and walked to the gilt chair that had been set out for him, his white robes flowing around him as he sat, placing his forearms on each arm of the chair. “Well, Azzam? Do we talk like men or must I remind you that I am here as your invited guest?”