Riley woke the following morning with a compound headache. His temple throbbed like a giant piston firing inside his head. The pain was complicated by the sounds of Hannah in the kitchen. From all the racket she was making, it sounded like ten women instead of one.
Holding his head between his hands, he staggered out of his bedroom. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded, grimacing at the sound of his own voice.
Hannah turned around and glared at him as though he were the devil incarnate. When she did deign to answer, she did so with a lofty tilt of her chin, as though speaking to him were beneath her. "I'm cooking breakfast."
"At this ungodly hour?"
"It's after nine." She set the cast-iron skillet down on the burner with enough force to break it in two. "But for those who choose to… to carouse to the wee hours of the morning, nine must indeed be an ungodly hour."
"Indeed," he echoed. If his head wasn't hurting so damn much, Riley might have been able to enjoy her tirade. Unable to understand why she was so angry, he watched as she slapped a piece of bacon in the pan, then jabbed it with a fork as though it needed to be killed before frying.
"Did you want something?" she demanded, when he continued to stand in his underwear in the middle of the kitchen.
"Peace and quiet," he suggested hopefully. "I don't suppose that would be so much to ask, would it?"
"Not in the least." With a flair for the dramatic, she turned off the stove, removed the pan and tossed the fork into the sink. Jerking the apron free from her waist, she hurled that at him, hitting him full in the face. By the time he'd managed to remove it, Hannah had walked out the front door, slamming it with enough force to shake the windows.
"Hannah!" he shouted, storming after her. He stopped abruptly when he reached the porch, realizing he couldn't very well traipse after her in his skivvies.
"Get back here right this minute," he ordered, pointing his finger at the ground.
She tossed him a defiant, mocking look and continued down the sidewalk. A suffragette couldn't have stepped with any more conviction than his wife, Riley noted wryly.
His first instinct was to let her go. If she was going to behave like a shrew, then to hell with her. His head was spinning, his ears rang and frankly he wasn't in any mood to deal with her temper tantrums.
As he was walking back to his bedroom, intent on ignoring Hannah and her outburst, it struck him how unusual it was for the sweet, gentle-natured Hannah to rage at him or anyone.
Holding his hands to his head, he tried to remember what he'd said to her to get her so irritated. Briefly he remembered their encounter from the night before. She'd shocked him by the eager way in which she'd raced into his arms and hugged him. They'd kissed, and the need he felt for her had all but consumed him. Then she'd pulled away from him just as she had every time he'd touched her since that night in Seattle, and he'd gotten angry with her. What had he said? Riley couldn't remember, not for the life of him.