Airman to the Rescue

by Heatherly Bell

  “Looks beautiful outside. What is everyone doing today?” Sarah tried for a bright and cheery tone. Well, it worked with her mother.

  “I don’t know,” Hunter said. “I’m what you’d call a slave, so I don’t make my own decisions.”

  Matt ignored the sarcastic comment. “We’re going to work on the window framing today. Hunter is my assistant. Unless you need help painting. Hunter likes to paint.”

  Hunter grunted.

  “I’d love help painting. Maybe we could start in my room today, since you already framed the windows in there.”

  * * *

  LATER THAT MORNING Sarah pulled the tape off the walls in Hunter’s room, then proceeded to show him how to tape before they painted in her room. She remembered to soften her edges and ask instead of demand. Despite his obvious reluctance, Hunter did everything he was supposed to do.

  They were in the middle of painting one wall when she asked him, “How long have you liked painting?”

  “I hate painting. Painting sucks.”

  “Oh.” So much for finding a kindred spirit. Sarah wasn’t sure she could find much in common with someone who didn’t appreciate color.

  Well, except for the abandonment thing. There was that.

  Of course, it had been different for Sarah. After the last summer she’d visited her father and both he and Stone had been so unhappy to have her around, she’d decided not to come back. Her father hadn’t pressed the issue. Technically it wasn’t the same, even if she’d still been the one to feel abandoned. The point was neither one of them had wanted her around.

  “Do you like school?”

  “Nah, school sucks.” He dipped his roll into the tray. “Why do you like brown so much?”

  “I don’t. My favorite color is green. And after that, definitely blue.”

  Hunter stared at her. “Then why are you painting everything brown?”

  “Actually, this is beige. The reason is that most people like neutral colors, according to the real estate agent who’s going to sell my house. And since I don’t know who’s buying it yet I have to go with something that is sort of...pleasant to most people? Does that make sense?”

  Hunter nodded. “That sucks.”

  Okay, favorite word registered. “I guess it kind of does.”

  “Why do you live in Colorado?”

  “That’s where I live. I have a job there and I own a condo I’m subletting. My mom doesn’t live too far away, either. We’re pretty close.” Suffocatingly close. Best not to add that tidbit.

  “What kind of a job? Are you former Air Force, too?”

  Sarah laughed. “Oh, no. That’s funny. I don’t even like to fly. I’m a forensic artist.”

  “For real? So you, like, meet the criminals and shit like that?”

  Hunter had a serious vocabulary limitation. Unless this was all teenagers.

  “Actually, no. I just paint the criminals. The ‘alleged’ criminals, er, suspects, I mean. I talk to the witness. Sometimes they’re also the victim so I have to be sensitive. In order to get a good description, it’s all about asking the right questions.”

  “Dude. That is wicked cool.”

  “Yeah?” Imagine that. She, Sarah Mcallister, was cool.

  Matt popped his head in the doorway. “Everything okay in here?”

  “Great,” Sarah said.

  When she turned back to the wall, Hunter was studying her. Eyes narrowed slightly. Lips a straight line. Suspicion. Oh my God, he knows. He knows I’ve got the hots for his father. Was she that obvious? Yes, she’d worked her entire adult life toward studying human expressions. But she’d never become an expert at schooling her own. And didn’t all kids secretly want their parents back together? Maybe that’s what this whole rebellion of Hunter’s was about. Sarah mentally slapped her forehead. Of course he didn’t want Joanne dating the ball player. He wanted his mom and dad back together again. And what better way of doing this than throwing them together for a common goal? Save Hunter from being a juvenile delinquent.

  “I’m seriously not your dad’s girlfriend.”

  “I know. That’s what he said.”

  “H-he did? When did he say that?”

  “Sorry, dude. I thought you were lying to me.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “Everybody lies. And I know you’re not his girlfriend, but he wants you to be.”

  Hunter’s voice was so matter-of-fact, but she couldn’t help but wonder if this was his sneaky way of drawing information out of her. He couldn’t possibly know that about Matt. But if she argued with him, she’d be protesting too loudly. If she agreed, he might not like that, either.

  She decided her best response was to keep quiet.

  * * *

  “I DON’T LIKE THIS,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve done this before. Plenty of times,” Matt said.

  “Shouldn’t we call an expert?”

  “We will if we need one.”

  Sarah closed her eyes and held on tight, hoping it would all be over quickly.

  Late in the afternoon, Matt had insisted he would take a look at the roof. She held the ladder steady and in place while Matt clambered up to the roof. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust he could handle a routine roof inspection, but the shingles were old and not the safest place for him to walk. But if she were being forced to put up with Matt climbing her roof and walking around on it, at least she could enjoy the view on his way up.

  Enjoy it she did, appreciating every muscle that bunched in his arms and muscular back. He wore a lightweight T-shirt that left little to the imagination and a pair of board shorts that had her staring at his ass.

  But seriously. Pilot, engineer, mechanic, carpenter and roofer. Would the overachieving never end?

  When he reached the roof and started walking around it, she didn’t like the sounds he made. Curse words were interspersed with the sounds of his footsteps as he walked and squatted, walked and squatted some more. It was much cheaper to offer the new buyer a roof allowance, according to the Realtor. But Matt had insisted he could repair it all himself.

  The Saturday sun bathed them in its midmorning heat, though not yet with the oppressive are-you-kidding-me temperatures expected to melt them all into puddles of flesh today. Hunter was in his bedroom, presumably sulking and staring at the four walls because Matt wouldn’t let him go up on the roof, too.

  “How’s it going up there?” she asked hopefully. Maybe good would be the next word out of his mouth. Maybe the roof would survive.

  A grunt. No answer.

  “Please say something.” Anything.

  She pressed her forehead against a rung of the ladder and pictured happy thoughts. Finally getting to kiss Matt. Taking his shirt off and running her hands from his pecs down to those delicious abs. She would lick in a straight line from his abs down to the gorgeous V and follow the line of hairs leading to his happy place. Then she would...

  “Well, crap!” Matt muttered and a shingle flew off the roof and landed in the yard.

  “Matt! Please! Is it really that bad?”

  He crept to the edge and looked down at her, not smiling, his aviator shades hiding his eyes. “It could be worse.”

  Sarah moaned and pressed her forehead against the rung of the ladder. It could be worse was not exactly what she’d been hoping for, but she’d take it. She did not want Matt spending any more of his hard-earned money on her father’s house. And until they sold this house, she couldn’t pay him back, so she had to hurry up and get on with the selling, too.

  Matt came back down the ladder. “I’m going to need to go inside and climb up in the attic.”

  “There’s an attic?” Why didn’t she know that?

  “It’s just a crawlspace attic. Prob
ably no more than a few feet high. I want to check and see how bad the damage is. There are rotted shingles just over the space.” He carried the outside ladder to the side of the house where he propped it.

  Sarah followed him inside and down the hallway, wringing her hands. “There’s going to be spiders in there.”

  Matt stopped in his tracks and turned to her, his lips curving slightly. “And I’m bigger than they are. Why? Would you like to do the honors? Because I wouldn’t mind spotting you on the ladder. I can stare at your ass and return the favor.”

  Busted! He had her dialed, didn’t he?

  “Oh, no. Not a good idea. There’s also... There might be...mice.”

  “Also bigger than them.” Matt carried the smaller inside ladder with him and stood it in the middle of the hallway.

  Sarah looked up, and sure enough there seemed to be an almost unnoticeable gap in the ceiling panel. Matt pushed on it slightly and it lifted up like a lid. He climbed through, and Sarah, her curiosity getting the best of her, followed one step behind him on the ladder rung. She stopped only when her head had an acceptable view of the attic space.

  “What’s all this?” Matt shone his small pocket flashlight, lighting up the dark spaces.

  No one could miss the cardboard boxes stacked one on top of the other in a line against the far wall.

  “More of his junk. We should get rid of it.” By now she doubted she’d find anything that would matter.

  The best so far were the three photo albums, which Stone had let her have. She understood fathers weren’t usually the ones who kept the family history of birthdays and vacations, so she should have been happy that some photos included her. And she had been. It just somehow didn’t work out to be enough.

  “Looks like old clothes.” Matt opened one box and rifled through it, holding the flashlight between his teeth.

  He slowly began to hand one cardboard box after another to Sarah, and she carefully backed down the ladder and set it down. One by one he did this, until in the end there were no less than five cardboard boxes in the hallway. Great. Did the man ever throw anything away?

  While Matt continued to crawl around in the attic, Sarah opened one of the boxes. They were indeed clothes, as Matt had said.

  She just hadn’t expected that they would be hers.

  The old jeans she wore holes in the summer she’d been about ten and they’d gone fishing nearly every day. She’d never caught a thing, happy enough to thread the bobs with the squirmy disgusting worms for him. T-shirts she hadn’t seen in years. Tennis shoes, a light Windbreaker, all in different sizes. Nothing too girly in here. They were all the comfortable clothes of a tomboy. And why on earth had he kept them?

  She remembered that although she always brought a suitcase or two full of clothes for the summer, her father always wound up buying her more. The stuff Mom had packed for her were dresses and nicer clothes. Dad had said she needed to wear stuff she wouldn’t mind getting dirty. Those new clothes tended to stay all year in her room at her dad’s house.

  He hadn’t given them away, but it didn’t make sense to have kept them, either. Unless you were talking about a man who had a hard time letting go of his possessions.

  Or maybe this was about something deeper. Something she hadn’t allowed herself to consider often enough.

  Maybe she’d been the one to abandon her father.

  She was so caught up in rifling through her old clothes, each piece eliciting a memory that played like a video in her mind, that she hadn’t noticed Matt climb down the ladder until he spoke.

  “Girl clothes?”

  “They’re my old clothes. He kept them.”

  “This box says ‘Sarah’s room.’ Check it out.”

  Indeed, her father’s familiar scrawl was all over the box in black lettering.

  “Sarah.” Matt had opened up another box.

  Inside that box were drawings. Hers. She flipped through them, her agitation increasing as she studied all her childlike drawings and sketches from the time she’d been small and could barely hold a crayon. Her mother had boxes of her drawings she also kept, but Sarah never had any idea her father had these. Of course, they were his. Special drawings she’d obviously created for him. Father’s Day drawings and cards, a day which she’d spent with him since it fell during summertime. Letters, still in the opened envelopes, she’d sent him throughout the year. A Christmas card in her childish writing.

  “He kept all this?” She flipped through dozens of envelopes in faded ink. “Why?”

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? He never let go. It’s hard to do that with your own flesh and blood.”

  Matt would know, wouldn’t he? “It would have been nice if he’d said something. All those years he never picked up the phone.”

  “Did you?”

  Her head whipped up and her gaze met Matt’s. His dark eyes were soft and tender and she absolutely hated that about him right now. She wanted to fight. Throw things. Get messy and real and raw.

  “I was a child. It was up to him to tell me that he missed me. Ask me to come and visit again. Not just stand by and accept it.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “It’s not complicated!” She threw an envelope back in the box and shut it, her jerky movements swift and irate.

  “No matter what a father wants, he’s always going to do what’s best for his child. It’s always got to be about the kid first.”

  “Don’t defend him!” You’re supposed to be on my side! she wanted to scream.

  “I’m only trying to help you understand.”

  “No, Matt. There’s no comparison. I know what you’re trying to do. You’re also a single father, but you care about Hunter. You want to see him.”

  “I’m glad to be a part of his life. But it wasn’t always easy.”

  “There’s no comparison. You’re not just allowing Hunter to drop out of your life.”

  Matt looked at the ground, then met Sarah’s gaze. “If that’s what I thought he wanted, maybe I would.”

  “But sometimes kids don’t even know what they want or need. They shouldn’t be allowed to make those choices. Not when they’re so young and self-centered that they don’t even realize they’ve...hurt someone...they don’t even...”

  Great, she was crying again, unable to finish her sentence.

  “C’mere.” Matt pulled her into his arms.

  She folded into him, such a rock-hard and warm assurance encircling her. His arms were tight around her, holding her close. She never wanted to go anywhere else. Just stay right here where Matt made it all bearable. And she was getting addicted to the friendship she had with him.

  Addicted to him.

  She’d been such a ridiculous wreck since she’d arrived in Fortune. Trying to be strong, holding it all inside even while still grieving over her father. She’d tried to find something, anything that could give her some comfort. And then Matt. Sexy as sin, sweet and gorgeous Matt. He managed to wreck her all over again in brand-new ways.

  “I’m sorry,” she sniffed against his beautiful, powerful neck, getting it wet with her stupid tears. “I think I’ve cried as much in these past two weeks as I have in my entire life.”

  “I’ll try also to not take that personally.” He tugged her in tighter still, his hand moving down her spine to the small of her back and back up again in soothing strokes.

  She laughed a little at that, still against his neck, trying hard to catch her breath. If he’d brought the emotions out of her, it was only because he made her feel so much. Thoughts and sensations she’d stuffed down for years. Both hating men and loving them too much, wanting to fill an overwhelming gap in her life for years. She’d basically shut down. Tried to tell herself that none of it mattered, that she was a competent and take-charge
woman of the world who didn’t need a man, and certainly didn’t need her father.

  Except that in the back of her mind, she’d entertained the notion that someday, as a grown-up, she would reconcile with her father. Stone would get married and have a child, or she would, and the next generation would reach out to be a bridge. She’d never been in a hurry about any of it, charging through her life like she had a million days in front of her. Like time was insignificant and never in short supply. Now it was far too late for grandchildren or connections, or hope. He was gone.

  She’d never even had a chance to say goodbye. Because if she’d had half a chance, she’d have told him she was sorry. And maybe that was the hardest pill of all to swallow.

  Matt had her face framed between his hands and his thumbs wiped away her tears. He studied her carefully, his gaze shifting from worry and concern to a more heated look that she understood all too well.

  And just like a switch had been flipped, she came alive again. “Matt—”

  Then she was hauled up by her elbows to the tips of her toes and he lowered his lips to hers.

  “Hey.”

  It sounded like...everything stopped as Sarah turned to follow the sound and found Hunter standing in the hallway just outside his bedroom door. He stood, hands stuffed in his pants pockets, trying hard to look anywhere else. His eyes were unnaturally fixated on the ceiling.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SHE WAS KILLING HIM.

  When Sarah clung to him, every inch of space between them wiped away, he wanted to haul her into the nearest bedroom. He’d make her feel good, at least for a little while. They could both get lost in each other and forget everything and everyone else. Fighting this attraction for her was turning out to be the toughest thing he’d ever done. And now Hunter had practically caught them in the act.

  “Is Sarah okay?” Hunter asked the minute Sarah stepped into the bathroom.

  “Yeah.” Matt took a seat on the couch. “Why?”

  “Because she looked like she’d been crying?” Hunter said this with almost exaggerated patience.

  “She’s having a hard time.” Matt wondered how much he could tell Hunter without violating Sarah’s confidence. He quickly decided on nothing. “If she’s upset, it’s not because of you.”