Читать книгу Everybody's Hero - Karen Templeton - Страница 8

Despite his personal worries heckling Joe from the edge of his thought like those two old Muppet dudes, he could always count on the adrenaline rush from starting a new job to make him feel in control again. This one was a walk in the park in comparison with most of the projects he oversaw, but that also meant he’d only be spending the summer in this two-bit town. A fact for which he was even more grateful after his encounter with Taylor McIntyre, Joe thought grumpily as he steered down the road leading to the Double Arrow office. Not that Haven didn’t have its charms. Everyone he’d met so far certainly seemed friendly enough—although that, Joe thought with a tight grin, might have something to do with the dearth of strangers passing through—but there was that whole everybody-knowing-your business thing that rankled the living daylights out of him.

Joe never had been much on sharing his personal life with all and sundry. Not that he had anything to hide, he just didn’t think it was anybody’s business but his own, for one thing. And for another, he figured most folks only showed an interest out of politeness. Either that, or they got that oh-you-poor-thing look in their eyes that Joe detested. Especially since those eyes so often belonged to the kind of woman who was easily hurt. So the way he saw it, keeping to himself just saved everybody a lot of trouble.

And saving people trouble was what Joe did best, he mused as he pulled up alongside one of a series of dusty pickups in the small parking lot. He supposed he had a bit of a rep as somebody you could count on to follow through on his promises, which didn’t bother him one bit. Not considering how hard he’d worked to earn that rep.

His cell rang, rousing him out of his ponderings.

“Joe?” said a gruff voice. Wes Hinton, his boss. “Got a minute?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“You know that lot on the north side of town we bid on last month?”

“You mean the one we didn’t get?”

“Yep. Sale fell through, agent called today, asking if I wanted another shot at it. I said, hell, yes—you know I thought a strip mall would be perfect in that part of Tulsa. So I made another offer right on the phone, agent said it was as good as done.”

Joe frowned. “Thought you were up to your butt with that new condo development in Albuquerque. You think you can swing this?”

“No guts, no glory, son. I’ve always landed on my feet, don’t plan on changing my stripes anytime soon. But why I called is… I want you on the job.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose, after I get this one squared away—”

“No, I mean while you’re overseeing the Double Arrow. I’ve already got tenants lined up, but we’ll lose ’em if this isn’t ready to roll as soon as possible.”

“I don’t know, Wes…with the commute between here and Tulsa, that might be tricky.”

“Oh, the Double Arrow project is small potatoes and you know it. You could oversee that one blindfolded and with both hands tied behind your back.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“And there’s a real nice bonus in it for you, too. And with you now having more family responsibilities and all, I figured some extra cash probably wouldn’t hurt. I know only too well how expensive kids can be.”

Joe’s mouth stretched into a wry smile. With three teenagers, two of them in college, Wes knew all about hemorrhaging bank accounts.

“Of course,” Wes was saying, “if you don’t think you could handle it, I suppose I could always hand it to Madison.”

A robin landed in a birdbath a few feet away; Joe distractedly watched it splash around as his boss’s veiled threat reverberated inside his skull. For the past several months, Wes had been making noises about taking semiretirement at the end of the year. And about appointing Joe as his successor—a position which would not only mean a damn good income for somebody who’d been doing well to graduate from high school, but also a chance to stop bouncing from job site to job site all over the Southwest. But there was a fly in the ointment: Riley Madison, a hotshot business school grad who’d come to work for Wes a couple years ago. That Riley was also jockeying for the position was no secret, especially to Wes, who wasn’t above playing the two men against each other every chance he got.

“That wouldn’t be you blackmailing me, would it?” Joe said quietly.

“I prefer to think of it as…laying out the options. Joe,” Wes said before he could respond, “you’re my first choice. Not just for this job, but future opportunities, shall we say. But I gotta have someone I can count on, someone able to juggle several projects at one time. Riley might not know construction as well as you, but he sure as hell is eager and available. And that counts for a lot.” A pause. Then, kindly, “Don’t let me down, son. Be who I need you to be. You hear what I’m saying?”

Yeah, Joe heard, all right. When Wes was still in construction, he’d taken Joe on as a seventeen-year-old high school senior suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a man. A kid who knew squat about building, but figured it was something he’d be good at. As Wes’s business evolved and grew, so had Joe. He’d learned from Wes’s mistakes, but he’d learned.

And he owed the man an immeasurable debt.

Joe shut his eyes and massaged his forehead for a moment, then let out a sharp breath. “Fine, I’ll do it. Somehow.”

“Glad to hear it. Knew I could count on you.”

Joe snapped shut his phone and blew out another breath. Well, hell—he’d spent most of the past fifteen years making sure everyone could count on him. Guess he had nobody to blame but himself for accomplishing his goal.

He got out of the car and walked over to the office, where Hank Logan stood outside with a mug of coffee in one huge hand and a grin spread across a face nobody in their right mind would call handsome. Joe guessed the lodge’s owner to be around forty, although you sure couldn’t tell it from the flat stomach and impressive biceps evident through the plain white T-shirt. Taller than Joe by a good two or three inches, the intimidation factor was nicely rounded out by nearly black, straight hair and a nose that looked like it was no stranger to a barroom brawl.

Joe had liked, and trusted, the ex-cop practically on sight, which was anything but his usual reaction to people. By nature, he preferred to take things slow when it came to getting to know a person. Not that fostering friendships was something he’d had much time for in the past several years, in any case. But now, seeing that grin, he let himself entertain an idea he rarely did, which was that it might be nice to put down roots someday. Have a friend or two to shoot the bull with now and then.

To have something resembling a normal life.

“Just made a pot of coffee,” Hank said. “Want some?”

“Hell, yes.”

The two men walked into the lodge’s office, which, with its tired fake wood paneling and cast-off furniture, had seen better days twenty years ago. Soon it—along with the rest of the original utilitarian motel—would be transformed into a “rustic” counterpart to the individual cabins farther up the road, nestled here and there in the woods blanketing most of the property. Hank had bought the place cheap a few years back, apparently figuring he’d fix it up and sell it. Enter Wes, who’d run across the motel and wanted to buy it. But from what Joe had been able to glean through the grapevine—one rooted firmly in Ruby’s Diner in town—the addition of a wife and daughter to the former recluse’s life had changed his mind about selling outright. Since Wes had still believed the property had a lot of potential as a small resort, he suggested he and Hank become partners in the venture.

Which is where Joe came in.

“So who all’s here?” he asked, taking a swallow of coffee strong enough to wake the dead.

“Plumbers, mostly, deciding how to get water up to the lots where the new cabins are going. And the grader got here right after you left, started leveling the lot closest to the lake.” Another grin etched deep creases in the weathered face. “Told the guy he took out so much as a sapling, there’d be hell to pay.”

Joe chuckled. He was usually wary of hands-on property owners, since more often than not they either got in the way or botched things up—if not both—which ended up costing everybody time and money. But not only were the renovations that Hank had done himself on the original cabins top-notch, Joe got the definite feeling Hank Logan was not a man who tolerated stupidity. In himself or anybody else.

Not only that, but he made coffee with serious cojones.

“The electrical contractor should be here, soon, too,” Joe said.

“He already was,” Hank said. “Since you weren’t back yet, I suggested he go on to Ruby’s for breakfast.”

Joe grimaced. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hank said, frowning into his empty mug, then going back for a refill. “Breakfast at Ruby’s has a way of mellowing a man.” He poured his coffee, then glanced over at Joe. “How’s the boy doing?”

Other than thinking I’m slime? Joe thought, then said, “He wasn’t too sure about things. But they seem like nice people over there at the camp.”

“They are that. Seth’s in good hands, believe me. Hey,” he said, apparently changing the subject. “You see my kid? Blair? Kinda tall, long red hair?”

“Maybe. For a moment. Until the other one shooed everybody outside.”

“The other one?”

“Taylor? Another redhead. Said she ran the place with Didi.”

“Yeah, that’s Taylor.” Hank took another swallow of coffee. “She teaches kindergarten up at the elementary school, went in with Didi when Bess Cassidy moved to Kansas to be with her kids two summers ago.” Nearly black eyes seemed to assess him. “From what I hear, Taylor’s got a magic touch with kids. They’re crazy about her, and she’s crazy about them. One of those women you figure would like nothing more than to have a batch of her own.”

Joe found himself staring hard at his coffee. “I suppose that’s an admirable trait in a teacher.”

“True. I don’t know her too well, myself, but Blair thinks the world of her.”

Now it was Joe’s turn for a second cup. “You have to wonder, though, how she ended up here.” At the silence following his comment, he turned to see Hank’s slightly puzzled expression. “Coming from someplace like Houston, I mean. Must be a big adjustment, living in a small town.”

“No argument there.” Hank knocked back the rest of his coffee, then twisted around to set the empty mug back beside the coffeemaker. “Guess it just depends on what you’re looking for at the time…. Well, hey, gorgeous.”

The last was directed, with a big smile, for a slender blonde dressed in shorts and a tucked-in sleeveless blouse who’d just come into the office. The woman was attractive in that way of women over forty who are unconscious of their beauty, her straight hair held back from her finely featured face with a couple of clips. Slipping a decidedly proprietary hand around her waist, Hank introduced her to Joe as his wife, Jenna, with a pride in his voice that Joe decided was due not to Jenna’s being his as much as that she’d chosen him.

He told himself the burning sensation in his gut was due to Hank’s coffee.

She welcomed him to Haven, a generous helping of crow’s feet splaying out from the corners of her eyes as a warm smile stretched across her face. While Joe was pondering her lack of Oklahoman twang, Hank asked Joe if he’d read any of his wife’s books—in her other life, she was the mystery writer Jennifer Phillips.

“For heaven’s sake, Hank,” Jenna said, swatting him lightly in the chest. “Quit putting people on the spot like that! You’re embarrassing both of us!”

Joe smiled. “I’ve heard the name, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a reader. Not anymore, at least. Not since…” He pushed aside the cloud of memory to think back. “Not really since high school.” The realization surprised him—had it really been that long since he’d indulged in the simple pleasure of reading a novel?

Fortunately, before these people managed to find out what size drawers he wore, the electrical contractor returned, giving Joe an excuse to sidestep any further discussion about his personal life and retreat once again into the safe, generally orderly world of bids, supplies and schedules, a world over which he had a fair amount of control.

As opposed to the world where he had virtually none.

On brutally hot days like this, by midafternoon not even the littlest ones were much interested in moving. So Taylor usually settled them in the grass under one of the big old cottonwoods out behind the church, reading aloud until their parents came to get them or they nodded off. She loved changing her voice to match each character, seriously getting off on the glow of delight when she’d glance up and see a batch of wide eyes and, sometimes, open mouths. And the giggles. She lived for the giggles.

And at the moment, she’d give her right arm to hear Seth Salazar giggle.

When he wasn’t checking the huge watch smothering his narrow wrist, the boy was attentive enough, sitting cross-legged a little apart from the rest of the children. Although his slender fingers absently plucked at the blades of grass in front of his ankles, his solemn gaze stayed on her the entire time she read. But when the other kids howled at Junie B. Jones’s antics, Seth would barely crack a smile. His body was there, but clearly his mind was elsewhere.

“Joe!” he cried, leaping to his feet.

Like wondering when his brother would come rescue him, Taylor guessed, as the boy tore across the yard.

While the younger counselors herded the remaining kids inside for the last snack of the day, Taylor got to her feet, her knees protesting at sitting on the hard ground for so long, her brain giving her what-for for putting off the inevitable. Which would be—she turned—seeing Joe Salazar scoop his little brother up into his arms.

Strong, solid arms.

Against a strong, solid chest.

All barely hidden underneath the soft folds of a dusty blue workshirt.

Yep, it was just as bad as she thought it would be.

Taylor plastered a smile to her face and trooped over to the pair, just in time to hear Seth give Joe grief about being late.

“It was only a couple minutes, buddy,” Joe said, lowering his brother to the ground. “Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt the reading.”

“You were listening?” Taylor said, thinking, hmm…when was the last time some guy had made her stomach flutter? No, wait, she remembered: Mason. Her ex.

The fluttering might have degenerated into a vague nausea had Joe not smiled for her. Not exactly a laid-back, no-holds-barred smile, but a smile nonetheless. A smile sparkling in a face darkened by a suggestion of late-day beard shadow.

As Blair and company would say, this was so not fair.

“I was listening,” Joe said, and something in his voice or eyes or somewhere in there made Taylor suspect she wasn’t the only one here dodging a few red flags. A revelation which, aggravatingly enough, managed to flatter and annoy her at the same time. “Although I’m not sure who was having more fun—you or the kids.”

He wasn’t flirting, she was sure of it. Well, as sure as someone who hadn’t been flirted with in about a million years—except for Hootch Atkins, and he definitely did not count—could be. Then she noticed Seth’s head bopping back and forth between them, and Didi’s cocked eyebrow when she came outside and saw them standing there, and then fourteen-year-old April Gundersen tripped over a tree root because she was gawking at them instead of watching where she was going. Taylor realized she wasn’t sure of anything anymore, except that she didn’t feel much older than April, which probably wasn’t a good thing.

Then, to her horror, she heard herself going on about how she’d always been a big ham ever since she was little, how she’d set up her stuffed animals in rows—and her little sister, if she could get her to sit still long enough—and perform, making up stories as she went along and how she’d even thought about becoming an actor at one point, but had given it up when she realized all she really wanted to do was…teach…kids.

Whoa. Hot flash sneak preview. Not fun.

“Well,” Joe said, not looking a whole lot more comfortable than Taylor felt. “You’re very good.” Then he turned to Seth. “So how was your first day?” When all he got was a noncommittal shrug in reply, he added, “That good, huh?”

Another shrug.

“Guess he forgot about the worms we had for lunch,” Taylor said, which earned her startled looks from both brothers.

One day, maybe she’d start acting like a normal person. But the world probably shouldn’t hold its breath for that one. Joe muttered something about their needing to head to the store to find something for dinner, then left, Seth’s hand securely in his.

“Don’t look now,” Didi said behind Taylor, scaring her half to death, “but you look like you just saw the mother ship land in Cal Logan’s pasture.”

Taylor grunted and headed back to the Sunday school building, thinking she’d take a close encounter with a horde of little green men over one with Joe Salazar any day.

And if that didn’t make her certifiably insane, she didn’t know what did.

What the hell had just happened?

Joe yanked a grocery cart loose from the nested mass at the front of the Homeland, making Seth jerk beside him. Blessedly frigid air-conditioning soothed his heated skin, but not the dumb, pointless, totally off-the-wall fire raging inside him.

Five minutes. Five lousy minutes, he’d spent with Taylor. Five minutes of inane, completely innocent conversation. No sexual overtones whatsoever. Yet here he was, fighting to walk straight. What kind of man gets turned on by a woman reading a children’s story, for crying out loud?

The kind of man who was currently standing in a crowded supermarket with an eight-year-old beside him and thinking about breasts.

What the hell? Joe never thought about breasts, for God’s sake. At least not as often as he did when he was seventeen. Or twelve. But now, suddenly, mammary images crowded his thoughts like steak a starving man’s on a desert island. He shut his eyes to get his bearings, and saw nipples. Pink ones, on pale, translucent skin.

Like redheads had.

“So…you like spaghetti?” he barked to the child depending on him not to get distracted by things like sex and breasts—

No less than five women scowled at him.

—and a silky voice that changed like mercury as she read, making children laugh.

“Not really,” Seth said.

Joe let out a long, ragged breath and the breasts went away. Thank God. Strangling the grocery cart handle, he glowered at his little brother. “Whoever heard of a little kid who didn’t like spaghetti?”

The poor kid flinched, his brows practically meeting in the middle. “It makes me gag.”

Terrific. The one thing Joe knew how to cook with any reasonable success, and the kid didn’t like it. They’d eaten out most of the past three weeks, but that was in Oklahoma City where there were a few more restaurant choices than Ruby’s Diner or the Dairy Queen halfway between here and Claremore. Not that Ruby’s didn’t seem like a great place, but he’d lay odds Ruby Kennedy was the kind of women who had pity running in her veins. For hurting kids, for lost souls, for lonely men who couldn’t cook and who hallucinated about breasts in supermarkets because they couldn’t remember the last time they had sex worth remembering.

And anyway, if he was going to have this kid living with him for the next ten or so years—a thought which damn near stopped his breath—they couldn’t eat out every night. Which meant one of them was going to have to learn to cook.

“So what do you like?”

“Tacos?”

Okay, he could probably swing that. Joe steered the cart toward the meat section, Seth not exactly trotting along behind him. Every few feet or so, somebody would smile and nod, or say, “Hey.” Joe nodded and smiled and heyed back, but all this friendliness was beginning to get on his nerves.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say he felt trapped. In this town, in this life, by circumstances. By phantom, probably pink-tipped breasts he was pretty sure he’d never get to see.

A smile he’d never get to kiss.

“What else besides tacos?” he said, tossing a package of ground beef into the cart.

“Hamburgers. And fries.”

Yeah, the kid had put a few dozen of those away. Once he started eating again, that is. The first week had been sort of dicey, with Joe beginning to worry he’d be jailed for letting the kid starve to death. Not that Seth ate much even now, but Joe’s mother had reminded him that he’d never eaten much as a kid, either, not until he hit his late teens, at least.

Thinking about his mother brought him up short, making him realize it’d been nearly a week since he’d talked to his mom and Kristen, his sister. A dull pain tried to assert itself at the base of his skull.

“I like fried chicken, too.” Just as Joe was about to say he wasn’t sure he could handle fried chicken that didn’t come out of a box, the boy added, “But only Mama’s.”

Joe muttered a bad word under his breath, only to realize this was the first time Seth had mentioned his mother since the boy had come to live with him. The lady from social services in Oklahoma City had said Seth’s talking about his parents would help him to accept their deaths and eventually heal some of his pain, but that Joe shouldn’t worry if it took a while for that to happen. Joe knew nothing about his father’s second wife—she could have been a saint, for all he knew, even though he did know the couple hadn’t been living together at the time of their deaths—but he sure as hell knew his father. And a not-so-small, unhealed part of himself was hard put to wonder how, or why, the child would grieve Jose Salazar at all.

Except Joe certainly had, hadn’t he, all those years ago?

“Joe?”

He looked down at Seth. The boy’s forehead was a mass of wrinkles.

“You mad at me?”

“No,” Joe said on a rush of guilt. None of this was Seth’s fault. And there was no way he would’ve refused to take his brother on. Still, that didn’t mean he was a hundred percent okay with the situation, either. Full-time responsibility for an eight-year-old boy you’d never met before wasn’t something easily slotted into your life, especially one already crammed to the gills. But more than that, Seth’s sudden appearance had stirred up a whole mess of issues Joe’d thought he’d dealt with years ago and was not at all amused to discover he hadn’t. Not as much as he’d thought, at least. The social worker had suggested counseling to help Seth through this, but Joe was beginning to think maybe he was the one who needed help getting his head screwed on straight. “Just got a lot on my mind, that’s all. And it’s been a long day.”

Seth nodded, but didn’t say anything, leaving Joe wrestling with another brand of guilt—that he didn’t feel more for the kid than he did. Sure, he cared about what happened to him, and he hated seeing the boy so unhappy, but if he thought he’d feel a strong attachment right off just because they were brothers, he’d been dead wrong.

“Hey. You want some ice cream?”

After a moment of apparent contemplation, Seth said, “C’n we get chocolate chip?”

“That your favorite?”

Seth nodded.

“Huh. Mine, too. Let’s go see if they’ve got some.”

As they walked up and down the aisles until they found the frozen-food section—not only did they have chocolate-chip ice cream, they had five different kinds—it struck Joe that he’d better damn well work on forming that attachment, because right now the only thing that mattered was making this kid feel secure again. And the only way that was going to happen was by Joe’s devoting as much time and attention to him as he possibly could. No distractions allowed.

Especially distractions with red hair, a generous smile and green-gold eyes that saw deeper inside a man than this man wanted them to see.