he didn't jump in with a word or an explanation of his own. He was pretty, and she remembered his gentle touch on her battered hands and knees, but now she figured him for a two-timing jerk. "Well?" she said, still staring at him.
He was staring at her too. He started, as if coming back to the present. "Well, uh...what?"
Maybe he had a subzero IQ as well. So much for her sense that he was someone worth her very first single-again sexual exploit. "Well, don't you have anything to say?"
"Good morning?"
She squinted at him. "That's it?"
He crossed his arms over his (still impressive, despite his other lacks) chest. "Look, sorry. It's pretty early."
"Maybe she means an introduction," the other woman said.
"Right." He ran his hands through his hair. The golden mass settled into straighter lines. "Deborah, Dez. Dez, Deborah."
"Oh." The word popped out of Hannah's mouth. Deborah. She'd forgotten she'd given him a different name. Heat rose on her cheeks. She'd forgotten she'd given him that name.
The other woman strode around the bed to hold out her hand. "Desiree," she said. "Or Dezi or Dez. What ever. It's nice to meet you."
Hannah found herself in the strange position of shaking hands with the woman whose almost-fiance she'd just spent the night with. Looking into Desiree's - so this was the famous Desiree - friendly face, she opened her mouth to get the situation back on a more honest footing. "It's really Hannah," she said.
"What?" This from the man she'd shared sheets with. He was looking at her with alarm, his body suddenly tense. "What did you say?"
Confession time. "I gave you the wrong name, Finn. I'm Hannah. Hannah Davis."
His horrified expression sent a chill down her spine. She scooted away from him, sliding half off the bed in one move. "I'll be going now. No muss. No fuss. No regrets. Sounds good, right?"
He pounced like a tiger. One moment he was on his side of the bed, the next he had his right hand wrapped around her wrist. "Don't even think about going anywhere," he commanded, pointing his left forefinger at her. "You park your pretty ass right where it is."
Chapter 6
If Tanner had thought his luck would change with the change in the calendar, he was already proved wrong. Of all the gin joints in all the world for her to walk into a night early, of all the women in all the world for him to break his eleven-month-long vow with, he'd selected the one woman he was charged with looking after.
He'd taken to his sheets the one woman who held his career in the palm of her hand.
Christ, and the bed hadn't even been made.
"Look, I've got an appointment this morning," she said now, tugging on the arm he held. "There's someone I'm supposed to see. You need to let go of me, Finn."
"Yes, Finn," Dez, the brat, said with a smirk. "Don't you think, Finn, that you should let her go, Finn?"
Hannah Davis's attention turned toward Desiree. Her head tilted. "Do I...do I know you?"
Dez's head tilted the same way, and Tanner remembered how at first sight he'd mistaken Hannah for his bad luck charm. They did have a more than passing resemblance, which should have scared him off from the get-go. What an idiot he was.
"Do you watch much television?" Desiree asked. "Entertainment shows, gossip TV, that kind of thing?"
Hannah shook her head. "I'm a teacher and I make a deal with my students every September. No more than five hours of television a week and I throw a pizza party in class at the end of every month. I spend mine on crime dramas and the occasional sitcom rerun."
Dez nodded. "But do you ever skim a copy of US Weekly? People? The Enquirer?"
Hannah shrugged. "I live alone. The fifteen-or-less line at my grocery store goes pretty quick."
Tanner remembered what his former boss, Geoff Brooks, had told him about his niece. An elementary school teacher from the same small town from whence Geoff hailed. This young woman had been going through some "rough times," and though the older man hadn't specified exactly what kind, he'd made it just short of an order that Tanner take good care of Hannah while she was in Coronado.
"Show her the sights. Make sure she doesn't have to sit at restaurants alone," Geoff had said. "Keep the hounds away from her."
Christ. Tanner knew what that meant, didn't he? He was supposed to protect her from himself and what they'd almost