One From The Heart by Cinda Richards, Cheryl Reavis Page A

laughed.
    “Give ’em hell, Miss Hannah,” he told her on her way out, giving her a hard hug as if he knew she needed it, regardless of the suit and the briefcase, and leaving her all addled and ridiculously reassured. She replayed the moment in her mind all day, his warmth and his masculine soap and leather scent, and the strength of his hard male body. For a moment, just a moment, she’d pressed her face into that place at his neck: the place in the V of his undershirt where she could see the beginnings of the curling hair on his chest. It had been entirely pleasant—wonderful—no matter how hard she tried to deny it.
    She had to work late, and she looked up just after nine to see Ernie and Petey through the glass windows of the studio, the misery in Petey’s face abating somewhat at the sight of Anna-Hannah working hard on her ’mercial just the way she had at home.
    “Sorry,” Ernie whispered to her when she came out into the hall. “I think she’s scared you’ll go off, like Libby.”
    Petey, what are we going to do? Hannah thought as she held out her arms to the child. She stood in the dimly lit hallway, holding a silent Petey tightly and leaning against the wall. Someone opened a door nearby and Hannah could hear the noise of KHRB’s eight-o’clock supermovie until the door closed again. She kissed Petey on the cheek and looked up into Ernie’s eyes, familiar now with the feelings of helplessness coping with Elizabeth’s disappearance generated.
    “Hey,” he said, reaching to catch a strand of her hair that had come unpinned and place it carefully behind her ear. The light brush of his fingers against her face was like a jolt of lightning. “What you two need is a big brown milk shake.”
    But there weren’t enough big brown milk shakes in the world to assuage Hannah’s worry. Petey was becoming more and more attached to her, and Hannah was beginning to look forward to their evenings together, evenings that more often than not included Ernie, with the three of them piling on the living room couch while Hannah told Petey bedtime stories. Petey’s favorites—and Ernie’s, too, she was beginning to suspect—were about Anna-Hannah’s halcyon days as Little Girl Hannah with Grandmama Browne, traveling around the country and living in motor courts or small town hotels or trailer parks with neon names like the Evening Breeze, or the New Alma, or the Blue Bird of Happiness. She told Petey about the things her grandmother had called “life’s little surprises”—a carousel in the middle of nowhere, twilight and a wheatfield full of fireflies, a first snow, chocolate cake.
    Hannah was only too aware that the ten days were running out. She had tried everyone and everywhere she knew to try to locate Elizabeth, and she couldn’t expect Ernie to hang around forever—as much as she might want it. She tried telling herself that it was just that she was … comfortable having him around, even though he drove her crazy with his personal questions and his more personal looks. And his damn personal telephone calls—ones that came in night and day on her telephone as the news spread among the honky-tonk angels of Dallas-Fort Worth that John Ernest Watson was back in town. He never seemed to do anything about the women who called, but to Hannah, the Marlenes and Selenas and the Modestas who telephoned all the time were just one more reason why she shouldn’t look forward to seeing him the way she did, or to having him stay for dinner, or to being able to talk to him.
    “What did you do?” Hannah said testily. “Post my number in the ladies’ room of every cowboy dive between here and Amarillo? It’s supposed to be unlisted, you know!”
    Ernie grinned and took his own good time about answering. “Yeah, Hannah,” he said, “I did. All the places where Libby goes.”
    “He’s just a warm, friendly person, that’s all,” Hannah whispered to herself in the kitchen one evening because she was worn