No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  “So,” Beth went on, wiping her hands on her shorts as she finally got closer. Not close, but closer. “I came to apologize, because I think I presumed.”

  “Oh,” he said, still holding his daughter over his head, “is that what you did.”

  “I thought,” she went on doggedly, “that I was doing you a favor.”

  He had to take a breath. In and out. “I don’t need your favors. If I want to kiss somebody, I can find somebody to kiss. And if I want somebody to—” He was going to say it, but then he couldn’t say it to her after all, plus the fact that he couldn’t say it in front of Gracie. It made him furious that he still cared about hurting Beth. Why didn’t he ever learn? “I can find that too,” he said instead. “You bet I can.”

  The pink was creeping into her cheeks. “Of course I know that. I know I’m not some prize. At least I know it now. I’ve learned.” He was trying to let that not affect him when she went on in a big hurry, “I meant the opposite. I meant, at the time I thought, this is just going to mix me up more, and maybe mess you up too. I wanted to do it so much, which means it was probably exactly wrong. But I also thought it wouldn’t be good for you. Like you’d still feel the same way about me you did before. And obviously that was incredibly presumptuous of me.”

  He was trying to follow all that. “It was presumptuous of you to think that if I took you to bed, it would . . . what? Get me hung up on you again?”

  The pink was all the way there, suffusing her skin, which had always been nearly transparent, the fine blue veins visible beneath like she was made of finer, more delicate stuff than a normal person. Like she was breakable. That was what had messed him up. “I know,” she said. “See how bad it sounds? So I came here to say . . .” She hauled in a breath. “That I’ve realized how dumb that was, and since I’d been thinking I should do something crazy anyway, maybe I should . . . go ahead. Maybe we should. Maybe that would make it go away, the stuff we’re still carrying around. At least the stuff I am. We could light it up. We could burn it down. If you wanted.”

  He didn’t answer for a long minute. Gracie protested from where she was standing backwards on his shoulders, and he swung her down, jiggled her absently, and finally said, “If you came here to seduce me, I’d kind of think you’d have dressed better.”

  “Oh, man.” Beth rubbed her hands over her face and laughed, an explosive little sound like pressure relief. “I know. I changed my clothes so many times. I thought that maybe if I didn’t look like I was trying, it wouldn’t seem so . . . desperate. I’d just be putting it out there. But I’m bad at putting it out there. I should have worn a dress or something, the kind you used to like. Nonverbal communication. See, my nonverbal communication is . . . it’s a growth area for me.”

  He laughed himself. He couldn’t help it, but she jerked back. “Sorry,” he said. “But you have to admit it’s funny.” Gracie was climbing his chest again. “This is your basic TV repairman fantasy, except . . .”

  “Except not.” She was starting to smile at last, losing some of the tension. “I guess you’re not supposed to do it in front of somebody’s baby.”

  “Probably not.”

  “And it should be a sundress,” she said, “since that way you can, you know.”

  “Mm,” he agreed. “Reach under it. Shove it up. Yeah. That’d be the idea.”

  “So how do we, uh . . . I mean not here,” she hurried to say. “Obviously.”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t do this a lot. Proposition guys while they’re working.”

  “Don’t forget the baby.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s kind of the icing on the cake.” He was still talking, and she was, too, with close to that ease they’d had in the very beginning, when she’d tell him everything she was thinking and he’d listen and think how funny she was, even when she didn’t know it. And at the same time, the top of his head was about to blow off.

  Another guy might have had some pride, would have told her to forget it, that he wasn’t going to be her vacation fling. But another guy hadn’t felt her up against the wall at the Yacht Club the night before, and that guy didn’t know how hot and tight and wet she’d be, or how she’d wrap those long legs around you if it would get you inside her faster. Another guy wouldn’t know any of it. Only him.

  Last night, he’d wanted to chase her down, pull her around by the hand, and say, “That girl I used to know. What happened to her? You think this is an improvement? Because it’s not. You’re eating yourself up from inside. Is that really better? How? Why would you want it?” He’d been furious with her. Furious for her. But he hadn’t chased her down, and he hadn’t asked her a single thing, because she wasn’t his business. She wanted to wreck her life? Fine. She wasn’t his problem.

  She didn’t have to become his problem, either. But if she wanted to burn it down? He could do that. All it would take was one match.

  Now that Beth thought about it, she could see that of course a sundress was the exact right outfit for showing up at a man’s workplace to offer him your body. Not a trench coat, because that would look ridiculous in Wild Horse in August, and it would be too hot anyway. A filmy sundress, though? Yes, obviously. With a V-neck and a fluttery hem, something that buttoned all the way from the neckline on down—but that you’d left unbuttoned to well above the knee because you might not have much in the way of breasts, but you did have good legs. You’d stand there in the high-heeled-yet-fun sandals that showed off those legs and start unbuttoning. Slowly, while your mouth parted and your legs trembled and you watched him heating up. Until he took that step forward and finished the job.

  Or maybe he’d even do that thing he’d said. Reach under your dress, shove your skirt up, and put you on a convenient counter, because he couldn’t wait, and he had to do it right now. Except that he’d drop to his knees first, out there in the open, and work you over until you were crying out and pulling his hair and . . .

  Yeah. That. What had she been reading all those smutty novels for if she hadn’t even figured that out? Also, your hair should clearly be in some sort of knot with pins that would fall out as soon as he shoved his hand into it, not a braid. A braid was as unsexy as it came.

  If you had an old-flame-seducing sundress in your closet, that is. Or high-heeled sandals, for that matter.

  Meanwhile, here in the real world, Evan was standing there holding his baby girl and she was standing there in her resolutely flat sandals and her khaki shorts, and no reaching-under of any kind was happening. Or any unbuttoning, either.

  The moment stretched out until Evan said, amusement or heat or both warming those ice-blue eyes, “Well, yeah. If you put it that way. We could do that.”

  “Good,” she said. “Right.” And tried to breathe.

  If this were a client meeting, she’d be moving on, wrapping it up and setting the next appointment. That was an even worse idea than the khaki shorts, though.

  Face it, she didn’t know how to do this. Plus, Gracie was distracting. Her white-blonde hair stuck up around her head like dandelion fluff, her eyes were huge, round, and blue, and she was wearing a pale-blue romper printed with tiny brown rabbits that was just impossibly cute. Beth smiled at her, maybe because she didn’t have to think about the appropriate response to a baby, Gracie smiled back, wide, joyous, and toothless, and something bright and warm as a sunbeam pierced Beth’s heart.

  “Did you buy her outfit?” she asked Evan. “Gracie’s? You a bunny guy?” And then realized that she’d drawn him straight off the target, and she wanted the target.

  “Hm?” he asked. “Oh. Yeah.” He jiggled her some more. “She likes rabbits.”

  “Do you?” Beth asked her. “Do you like bunnies that hop?”

  Gracie smiled again, and Beth asked Evan, “Do you think I could hold her a while?” That was clearly about the only holding that would be going on here, and anyway, she wanted to.

  Something that was probably amusement tugged at the corner of Evan’s mouth.
“I guess you’d better. If we’re going to start burning it down, I need to get my measurements done and this paint bought.”

  She had to laugh. “Are we bad at this or what?”

  “No,” he said, the burn back in his eyes. “We’re good at it. We always were.” And she may have lost her breath again.

  But that was why, after he’d handed Gracie over, he was measuring walls with that total Evan-concentration, then writing numbers in the little spiral notebook he pulled from his back pocket. Beth decided to take Gracie on an exploratory walk around the theater, and she may have rubbed her cheek against the top of the baby’s duck-down hair along the way just to feel it, and to inhale that powdery baby scent too.

  Why did you always long to hold a baby for yourself? And why should she want to hold Evan’s so much when she wasn’t hers?

  The lobby didn’t smell like popcorn anymore, which made her a little sad. She’d been here too many times to count, starting with Disney movies where she’d duck down behind the seats when the wolves or the scary ladies showed up. Birthdays with friends, special mother-daughter outings, high-school “hanging out” that had turned into almost-dates, exciting and frustrating and imperfect.

  And then that night. The look on Evan’s face when she’d hurried through the doors into the popcorn-scented warmth. She’d been breathless, her cheeks stinging with cold. He’d been wearing a soft, blue-checked flannel shirt that matched his eyes. He’d pushed off the wall to come meet her, and her heart had felt like it would beat straight out of her chest.

  When she’d called Dakota today after Evan hadn’t been home—after trying and failing to think up a plausible reason why she wanted to know, so she’d just asked—she’d barely been able to believe he was here. Like it was meant to be, except that she didn’t believe in “meant to be.”

  Nine years ago. That was a long time. The day she’d come home for Christmas during senior year, and he’d been there. The last person she’d have expected to see.

  “I can’t believe we’re painting the house over Christmas,” her mother had said that day. December nineteenth. Not that Beth remembered it or anything. She’d looked at Evan, then away, and then looked at him again to find him looking at her, as still as always. “But there you go,” her mother went on, “when your painter drops your job at the last minute and you’re this desperately shabby, what’s the alternative? I couldn’t have held our party at all in the state we were in, not without some very creative decorating.”

  The house hadn’t seemed in danger of being condemned when Beth had been home for Thanksgiving, and the attendees at her parents’ annual Christmas-Almost-Eve party probably wouldn’t have refused to set foot in such a miserable hovel, but Beth didn’t say that. She needed to say something else. Her mother was standing there talking like Evan was the . . . the furniture. Surely that wasn’t right, even though Evan, after those initial moments, had resumed the work with the roller that was restoring her mother’s soaring lakeside living room to pure white perfection. As if he were used to being ignored, or, more likely, wasn’t all that interested.

  “Hi, Evan,” Beth said, even though the sight of him had made her breathless and self-conscious. “I didn’t know you were, uh, painting. Oh, I’m Beth. Uh, Beth Schaefer.”

  “I know who you are,” he said gravely, only the lightening in his eyes and a barely perceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth betraying what she somehow knew was amusement. “And everybody needs a job, I guess.”

  Beth felt the telltale color rising up her neck. Of course he’d know who she was. She was standing in her parents’ living room dragging a suitcase behind her.

  “Evan’s working with Russell Matthews now,” Michelle Schaefer said, her social poise steamrolling right over the awkward moment. “We’re certainly pleased that he was available. There’s so little time left before the public rooms need to be ready.”

  Another twitch of Evan’s mouth, and Beth heard the same thing he had. So get back to work. He said, “Nice to see you, Beth,” dipped the roller into the pan again, turned his back to them, and did it. Like he’d never been a star. Like he’d put that dream away.

  He’d been three years ahead of her in high school, and all contradiction. Seeming older than the others, like he knew who he was and he didn’t need to convince anybody of anything. He was Riley Matthews’ best friend, and Riley was different from everybody else, too. Dark-eyed, intense, whipcord-lean and strong all the way through, like his sister Dakota, and in the Army now. Beth saw him around sometimes when he was on leave, his eyes more watchful than ever, and all of him looking ready to leap into action in a heartbeat, making you wonder what he’d seen and done to look that way.

  Evan was different. Big, quiet, and patient, all control and self-possession. And yes, every freshman girl who hadn’t had a crush on somebody more predictable, some golden boy, had probably had a thing for one of them. Because Riley always carried that edge of danger, and Evan? Evan was a star, but a different kind than the other high-school heroes. A dark star.

  She’d read about dark stars that year, and the idea had seemed so romantic, so appealing. Born when the universe was young, and with a gravitational pull so strong, they trapped the light within them. That was Evan. She fancied she could see that light, that silver core, even though he was all shadow and silence on the surface. And still—a star.

  It had been bitterly cold the winter of her freshman year, but she’d gone to every home football game all the same, sitting in the stands in what had felt like every layer of winter clothing she possessed. She’d watched the team on its way to the state championship, and then she’d watched them win it.

  Evan wasn’t the quarterback, and he never scored a single touchdown, because he was on the defense. He was never flashy anywhere at all until he took the field, but then? He was something.

  A strong safety, they called it, and “strong” was the word. What Evan did was get to the ball carrier and tackle. Hard. He did that well enough, though, to bring the scouts around. And when he got the football scholarship to the University of Washington and the quarterback went to the University of Idaho? It was clearer than ever who the real star was.

  There was bad blood there, and not just from football. Something to do with Riley, and with Dakota, Beth vaguely knew. There were whispers and giggles, low conversations among the guys, and wherever Dakota went that spring, Riley or Evan would show up. Beth had thought Evan was dating Dakota, and had tried not to be jealous, because she liked her Biology partner. Dakota was as strong as Riley, almost as strong as Evan, and she was willing to dissect every part of the frog without any of the little screams and shudders other girls indulged in. Which made her right for Evan. Obviously.

  Sophomore year came around, though, as years did, Evan was making his bruising tackles for the Huskies at the University of Washington, and Beth had other crushes, then actual boyfriends, and life went on. The next time she was aware of him, he’d suffered some kind of injury during the last game of the season his junior year, and it was a shame because the scouts from the Portland Devils and the Seattle Seahawks had both been watching. It was the talk of the town for a day, and then it wasn’t. That was her senior year of high school, when she was headed to the University of Washington herself. Where she never saw Evan, he wasn’t listed on the football team’s roster, and none of her new friends cared about football anyway.

  After that, she’d lost track entirely. Until she’d walked into her parents’ house and seen him looking at her like he saw all the way inside.

  “I came here to meet your dad for our first date,” she told Gracie now as they examined the framed posters in the dusty lobby, relics of those last weeks before the theater had finally closed its doors four or five years back. “He didn’t do ‘hanging out,’ not like other guys. He wasn’t scared to call it what it was. He wasn’t scared of anything, and I loved that so much about him. I loved that it was a date and he made sure I knew it. The movie was about the
worst possible choice, all those chases and explosions, but I didn’t care. I would have gone anywhere he’d asked me that night. He’s pretty special, isn’t he?”

  Gracie smiled again, grabbed Beth’s braid, and tugged at it, and Beth snuggled her close and let herself remember.

  Blood Diamond. The oddest of Christmas movies, but the only show in town. And when Evan had asked her, she’d said yes without a second thought. Well, she’d had a second thought. She’d said, “I’ll meet you there,” and hadn’t missed the searching look he’d given her. But he hadn’t pushed it. Then.

  He’d never even held her hand, and she was in the midst of work on her honors thesis, writing to a deadline, waiting on four law school applications and half-hoping that she wouldn’t get in so she could spend a year . . . picking apples or something. That was part of the reason for the attraction, she was sure. She’d felt overwhelmed by life, swallowed up, her essence floating away from her, and Evan had grounded her.

  But why had she felt that way? It wasn’t because law school would be hard. School was hard, but it was doable. She was good at school. She always had been, ever since she’d been the best reader in Mrs. Kenworthy’s first-grade class.

  All the same, there had to be some reason why her mind kept going to Evan during that week, and why her feet did, too. For the first time in her life, she couldn’t control either of them. There he was in her parents’ house, only a few doors down, drawing her in like a magnet.

  She didn’t know how he felt about her. All she knew was that when she was with him, the jagged pieces inside her fell into place and the worry receded. How could you feel so unsettled and breathless, and so ridiculously happy at the same time? How could you feel so there, so aware of your body and your desires and yourself, just because you were with that one person?

  Maybe because he seemed to understand you even when you didn’t understand yourself, and you thought you were understanding him better every day. Maybe because that connection seemed to be growing stronger all the time, deeper than conscious thought, and you thought he might be feeling it too.