Escorted by Claire Kent

body was relaxed, but his position highlighted the muscles
development in his arms and abs.
    She let her
eyes linger on his fine chest, his tight belly, and then his long legs and bare
feet. When her eyes returned to his bald head, she felt a familiar question
prod her unmercifully.
    As if he’d
somehow been able to tell the difference between her leisurely leer and her
intense curiosity, he glanced over at her. “What is it?”
    “I’m sure you
get asked this all the time, but I’m dying to know.”
    His mouth quirked
up slightly. “The no hair thing?”
    She nodded
sheepishly. “I can’t even tell if you shave it. I’ve never felt any bristles.”
    “I don’t shave
it. I started going bald when I was seventeen. I was completely bald by the
time I was twenty-three. It’s a hereditary thing. Ran in my mother’s family.”
    Lori was
uncharacteristically silent, watching his face, trying to figure out if it was
a sensitive subject for him.
    Finally, she
asked, “Weren’t there any treatments or whatever you could have tried?” He
looked calm and natural, and so she hoped she wasn’t being unforgivably rude.
    Not that it
necessarily would have stopped her.
    “Yes. There
were. Medical treatments or cosmetic remedies. I was…encouraged to try them.”
The brief falter in his reply surprised her, as she’d never heard him stumble
over his words before.
    “You didn’t
want to try them?”
    He hesitated
and met her eyes. And something in her expression must have encouraged him to
continue, “No. My father wanted me to do something about it, and I wasn’t
inclined to do what he said.”
    “A teenage
rebellion thing?”
    Ander gave a
half-shrug. “Maybe. There’s a long history, and it’s not a pretty one. Maybe it
was just a way to rebel, but my mother died when I was very young and the hair
loss came from her family, so it seemed important that I…”
    When he didn’t
finish, Lori said softly, “That you affirm her memory that way?”
    “Yeah. My
father wasn’t always kind to her.” He cut a quick glance over to her, as if he
didn’t intend to say as much as he had.
    She didn’t
speak for a minute, not wanting to come off as too nosy and have him close up.
Then, “Was he mad about it? About your not treating the hair loss like he
wanted?”
     “Yes,” Ander
admitted softly, his eyes shifting to stare up at the ceiling. “He was mad. That
was the turning point.”
    There was
something here. Something Lori desperately wanted to know. A story. A history.
The shadows of Ander’s background. She was dying to ask him, to give him a
whole inquisition—despite the guarded look in his eyes and the slight tension on
his face.
    But she had
grown up a lot since she was a child and blurted out any question on her mind.
Now, occasionally, she could manage to keep her mouth shut.
    So she didn’t
push him, realizing it might bother him or hurt his feelings. Instead, she just
said, “I’m sure you know you’re absolutely gorgeous and the baldness just makes
you look more fascinating, so I think you made the right decision.”
    Ander’s
expression relaxed and he turned back to her with a slight twitch of his lips.
“I appreciate your affirmation, but where were you when I was seventeen years
old and all the kids thought I was a freak?”
    She laughed
softly at his dry question and responded in kind. “I was probably still playing
jump-rope, don’t you think? I’m twenty-six.”
    His smiled
widened briefly. “Yeah. That’s about right. I probably wouldn’t have thought
much of the admiration of a ten-year-old. Besides, when you were teenager, you
were probably crazy about some big, strapping jock with a full head of hair.”
    To Lori’s
absolutely annoyance, she blushed.
    Chuckling, Ander
said, “Thought so.”
    She made a face
at him, but she answered willingly enough. “I was in love with my best
friend—who was definitely jock material. He, of course, never thought about me
that way. But I