by Rachel Hanna
"Some weekend."
"Your idea of a good time?" Taylor asked Jason. The break room was as low tech as the company was supposed to be high tech. Everything in it was worn, soft, tired and probably out of order. It was restful after all the screen time and client time in the rest of Boring World.
"Yes, I'm planning not get caught in a tidal wave this coming weekend. Care to join?"
Even as Taylor was smirking at him he said, "Is that politically incorrect?"
"Only if there's been one recently, I think. Besides, when have you ever cared?"
"True." He pounced into a chair, looking like a tan and sandy cat leaping to curl up, put his chin on his hand and said, "So! The pilot."
Taylor groaned. "Not going there," she singsonged.
"I saw him kiss you." He looked like an imp, watching her, grinning.
"Not talking about it."
Jason cocked his head in the other direction. "Saw you kiss him back."
Taylor was momentarily speechless. "Did not."
A huge smile overtook Jason's face as her stutter proved him right. "So did," he said, and flitted out of the break room.
Did I?
Doesn't matter. He didn't ask for anything. Not a phone number, not an email.
…but you could. Twenty-first century and all.
Don't even know how to reach him.
Of course not. Because SEArch & Rescue isn't a clue. Or the beach-house-come-office.
…shut up.
"I'm looking for some information on the volunteer program with tech and children." Taylor paced through her lunch hour, hovering behind Boring World, the slat-roofed gazebo picnic tables area employees never, ever used. Still didn't – she had privacy back here.
"Ooh, good," said the girl's voice on the phone. "What can I tell you?"
Good question. She'd called to find out more because she always did but other than when they wanted to schedule her and whether or not there was training involved, there wasn't anything else. So she asked those questions – was there training required? How much, how long, what times? And what hours could she schedule volunteering? Because she worked, often more than the 40 hours a week full time.
The girl on the phone, Gemma, gave her directions, emailed her a link to a video, emailed her links to the games, explained training in such detail Taylor thought she could skip the training and still do just fine, and explained everything with such loving detail Taylor vacillated between feeling this was a good decision and fearing she'd simply somehow gotten the founder on the phone.
Founders were bound to be happy about volunteers. Right?
"Can you come down on Friday?" the girl asked. "There's training late afternoon, starting at 4:30, over by 6:00."
"On a Friday night?" Not that she had other plans, but it seemed presumptuous of whoever scheduled it.
"I know, right? But it's over early. Can I schedule you?"
Of course she could.
Wasn't like Taylor had other plans.
Maybe this was the first step in changing them.
Chapter Eight
The week following the Palomar National Forest fire Tanner overhauled the chopper, cleaning and oiling and checking every last detail. Military had their own specialists for helicopter care, but now that they were civilians, the DIY aspect meant not relying on any outsiders.
He hit the gym consistently, struggling to get his bench press back up to where it had been, then working his shoulder until instead of feeling more fluid and more like his old shoulder it began to ache and burn with a sullen intensity that made him expect to see steam curling up for it. He began favoring the damn thing while he worked with Jake on the Vegas demolitions contract, Knox with a building fire and Mike, when he reappeared, with a water rescue. Mike made diving look more natural than walking. He was like an otter or something, more at home in the water than on land.
Mike was the one who called Tanner on his shoulder.
"It's loosening up," Tanner said, ignoring the four Advil that had yet to detonate in his stomach – they were probably all still pill shaped.
"It's not loosening up, and you know it. It's stiff and unresponsive and still injured."
"I've got it handled, bro," he said, starting to walk away and Mike shot a hand out and grabbed him by the shoulder.
That shoulder.
Tanner dropped nearly all the way to his knees. "Look, ass hat – "
"Nah uh," Mike said. "I get you don't want to deal with it. Just imagine it froze up on you mid-rescue. You want to do that to someone who thinks they're on the verge of getting out of some disaster alive? How 'bout your former team members, now your business partners and friends?"
Well, fuck.
Mike met his gaze head on. Tall, sandy haired and blue eyed, he had deceptively lanky limbs that were actually more muscled than the rest of them combined, he came from a career military family where everyone seemed to learn how to ask the hard questions without blinking and then wait for an answer.
"All right, all right. What do you think I should do. Another surgery?"
Mikey seriously considered the question, then said, "I think you go back to PT, boss." He held his hands up without bothering to learn if Tanner was objecting to the content of his speech or to the word "boss." "I know, you tried it. Results not good. Progress slow. I get it. Frustrating. I've been there too. All I'm saying's you're not getting over it on your own. Maybe you're hurting it with the weights. Six weeks of – " and here he got a glint in his ocean blue eyes, and looked devilish with his carefully groomed goatee framing his smile – "Desk jockeying is preferable to being out of the game permanently."
"Six weeks on the desk. You're killing me."
"Yeah, I know. Better me than some desperate client who scales you like a sequoia and takes you down with her."
Tanner was still trying to figure out the analogy when Mike fired up his Harley and was out of there, MIA again for a week.
At the end of the week he came back and looked pointedly at Tanner, who said instantly, "I made an appointment with a new PT." And then waited until Mike and his thumbs up went away before locating and scheduling with a new PT.
The medical building was situated on a low foothill with a view of the city. Several years old, it had survived the Great Recession by forgoing maintenance and paint. Tanner found it depressing. In the last two weeks he'd found a lot of things depressing, like his own solitary nature and his inability to do much with his shoulder the way it was. He went on working out, went on studying the thing in mirrors, as if he could see beneath the skin and root out the ongoing problem.
The new PT came into the outer office to collect him herself. Tall, freckled, dark hair back in a ponytail and in hard body shape, she offered her hand.
"Kaylie Jones. You're Tanner Davis?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Come on back." She led him through the doors out of the waiting room and into a torture chamber. There were exam rooms on the edges of the big space but most of the back office and exam room area had been gutted to create a gym and spa. "We'll just head into this room and you can tell me about your injury."
Tanner shook his head, confused. "You should have my medical charts."
She was busily pulling them up on a computer terminal as he spoke. She nodded, ponytail bobbing. "We do. But what I want is to hear from you what you think the injury is all about."
Tanner didn't bother trying to disguise the groan. "You're kidding, right?" The word psychobabble was on his lips.
She took no offense, just looked up from the screen and smiled at him where he still stood beside the chair she'd indicated. "Too new age for you?"
He shrugged. "I just don't think my opinion of my injury has anything to do with how it's healing. Or not healing." But the shrug sent a bolt of white hot pain through his shoulder and it couldn't hurt to find out what the PT had in mind, could it?
Kaylie Jones looked away from the computer when he managed to force himself to sit down. Foldin
g her hands, she batted her screen away so it wasn't in her line of sight, then rested her chin on her hands, her elbows on her desk. Where other PT's had asked, "How did you sustain the injury?" and often referred to his shoulder by some complicated anatomical reference, Kaylie Jones said, "How did you hurt your shoulder?"
Tanner liked that. "My team led a mission to Syria. We were going inland, civilian hostage rescue only the insurgents were ready for us. No one knows if we had a spy or a hacker or what, and it doesn't matter. We were a sixteen-man crew and only half of us walked away."
"I'm sorry," she said simply, and didn't keep talking to make herself feel more comfortable. She just waited.
He found her easier to talk to than either of the shrinks. "We lost too many good men that day. Nobody did anything wrong. We had contingency plans for if we lost the element of surprise. We were just outmanned and outgunned and we lost people."
Quietly, she said, "Did you rescue the hostages?"
His gaze didn't quite sharpen on her. She remained a curiously cloudy and out of focus shape. He was letting himself remember. "Yes, ma'am, we did. All present and accounted for. But the Chinook chopper I was on went down in the gun fight. I ended up with wreckage from the wreck in my shoulder. Call it garbage." Catching her eye he said, "Not the shoulder. The metal in it. That's still there. It moves around. Some day we'll get it out. During the first surgeries it was in the wrong place. If they'd gone in, they'd risk me losing use of one or the other arms. Or both. Now the metal moves. Someday they'll pinpoint and retrieve it."
He stopped and just looked at her, feeling lost.
She said, "You're Ironman."
He laughed without expecting to and said, "I wish. Even I'm not arrogant enough to be Tony Stark."
She didn't point out that Stark was fiction. Instead, she said, "Let's get started finding out what you can do before we worry about your perceptions of what you can't do." She stopped when he didn't follow her and looked back. Then she grinned. "I know. Too new age. Give it a chance." Then she gestured at him as if he were a recalcitrant dog refusing to come when called. "Come on. Come on!" with big enthusiastic gestures.
He followed her. Smiling. Just a little.
The intake interview was in the office of the therapist working with the children. Dr. Andrew Case was young and optimistic and attractive and very obviously married – his wife worked with him, wrote about his findings, took photos of the children, and basically was part of everything he did.
Taylor thought that kind of closeness just might make her crazy in short order but she shook hands with the doctor and hoped his wife would leave the conversation shortly. The doctor's questions were cut and dried, unimaginative, as if he wanted to hire someone equally unimaginative who wouldn't challenge him for his place in the limelight.
Her first thought was she couldn't possibly work with the man. The second was that of course not, she wouldn't – she'd be working with the people he'd hired to run his clinic.
The next was that she wasn't going to do it forever. She could give it a shot and see if the volunteering made her life feel more valuable.
Taylor made herself smile when she suggested, "Tell me more." She wasn't prepared for how much more he told her. By the time he finished she was convinced she could run the program herself. She ended up backing out of the office, a loud interior monolog promising she wouldn't be working with the good but loquacious doctor but with people who could use her help.
The doctor didn't need her help. He had staff to corner and deafen.
The catty thought made her grin to herself. She wanted to go home, call Jessie, talk out the silly that was her life and get started with curing it.
Volunteering should be strictly about the other person or persons or organization.
But she didn't believe the inner voice. Standing waiting for the elevator because the stairs were locked in the old building, she tried to believe that if she happened to be volunteering at something she got satisfaction from, didn't the organization and people still benefit? Even more, if she liked what she was doing, then she could get behind doing whatever a volunteer did to help. If she was doing good works and just happened to improve her life –
--or meet someone –
--or –
"They still benefit," she said aloud at the same time the elevator doors opened.
She ran smack into a chest.
A big, strong, cotton-t-shirt-smelling chest.
Oh.
Strong arms caught her by the shoulders, drew her inside the elevator as the doors were already closing. A voice said, "I'm sorry, I was on the wrong floor anyway. Hey, it's Taylor Adams!"
Taylor was still staring at the chest, not quite looking up yet, blinking and trying to overcome the surprise. At the sound of her name, she looked up into the ice blue eyes of the helicopter pilot.
She blinked and took a step back. "Hello!" It kind of exploded out of her, a blurting of sound that was less greeting than verbalized shock. "What are you doing here?"
"Blundering into people in elevators. It's good to see you again. Did you get home all right?"
Taylor cringed. First she ran into him. Then she stared, stupefied, at his chest, unable to speak in complete sentences when she did start to talk.
Just fantastic.
…he was every bit as amazing as she remembered.
Tanner Davis blew out a mental breath. He'd been through BUD/S training for Navy SEALs, had been on covert ops missions in terrorist countries, had been put on reserve with an injury sustained in a helicopter crash and had preformed how many rescues in the scant 10 months SEArch & Rescue had been open?
And now he was felled and brought to incoherence by a girl who stood a full head shorter than him.
Smooth.
Chapter Nine
The elevator bumped down like a bad touchdown of a passenger jet. They hadn't spoken for six floors, nor been interrupted by anyone else joining them in the elevator.
"It's been nice seeing you again," Taylor said, lying. It wasn't nice. It was – frustrating. She bit down on her tongue to stop herself from falling back into thank you for saving my life mode.
Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would judder right out of her chest. She was breathless and woozy and a little nauseated.
Everything inside her wanted to go on feeling that way. Those first crazy signs of attraction were rare and precious and made every day last forever when he wasn't there and zip by when he – whoever he was in that instance – was.
This one, though? He still wasn't asking her anything. He was still letting her walk away. Hell, he could be married. Or gay. Maybe Jason had a shot. Or married to his job.
Or just not interested.
That thought made her old life flare up. The one where her life flashed in front of her eyes in the middle of a fire and bored her.
"Do you come here often?" she asked without giving herself time to think, then winced hard enough he had to notice. Had she really just said that aloud? Must've because he was looking at her curiously. "I mean, maybe I'll see you around. Here. Maybe I'll see you here again." She made a gesture that seemed to encompass just the elevator, which neither of them had exited yet. Right, because no doubt when not rescuing stranded hikers, Tanner Davis spent a lot of time hanging out in decrepit medical buildings.
She winced again. Medical buildings. Maybe he didn't want to discuss why he was in a medical building. Some people were intensely private about things like that.
The blush was about to make her break out in a sweat. That would make her curly blond hair start straggling and sticking to her face. She opened her mouth, apparently intent on making this worse, forced it closed again, raised her hand in an inane wave considering they were only a foot or so apart and she could easily have jabbed him mid-wave, and tried to leave the elevator.
The steel doors promptly slid shut. She managed to bump into them. In their spotlessly clean and shined surfaces she could see he was grinning.
Shit.
She started to reach for the door open button when the elevator lurched into motion and started back up.
"Hey!"
Which was when she noticed his arm had snaked around her and hit the button for the top floor. She looked for a long time at the now-lit button, then up at him. "Um?"
Tanner leaned against the back wall of the elevator, arms folded over his chest, legs crossed at the ankle, looking like a centerfold (albeit clothed) for a hot search and rescue guys calendar. The lazy look in the pale blue eyes made her want to act inappropriately in the elevator where undoubtedly there was a camera. Even in an old building like this, surely the owners wanted to avoid lawsuits should anything happen in their elevators like when that rap star or football player or whoever it was punched his girlfriend.
"Do you think there are cameras in this elevator?" she asked, forgetting to keep her incisors firmly planted in her tongue.
Tanner's eyebrows went up and he blinked several times. "Uh, hard to say. I'm not really – versed, I guess, in elevator." Then he studied her like she was a talking cactus.
Taylor shut her eyes and took a breath. "I just – wondered," she said lamely, realizing that Thought about launching myself into your arms and wondered if that would end up on tape wasn't any better than suddenly asking about cameras.
"Listen, I – " she started, and was grateful when he interrupted with "I'm really bad at this, but would you like to go out sometime?"
Her racing heart stopped. Not just racing. It stopped beating, completely. If they were ever going to have a date, he needed to know CPR. He said he was bad at it but what he'd just done was the perfect way to ask her.
Taylor leaned against her side of the elevator car, striving for relaxed in the seconds before the car would reach the tenth floor. She smiled. It felt like the wrong size smile. On the wrong sized face. When was the last time a guy had made her this nervous? "I'd really like that." The blush deepened.
He nodded as if she had just presented a scientific theory he was now turning over in his mind. "Me, too." As if he hadn't been the one to ask. "I'll call you."