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“If you hadn’t been too busy staring between that woman’s giant ass and your stupid phone, we wouldn’t have missed our flight,” the woman said.
“Can I help it if I like a nice ass?”
“No, apparently not. And I obviously like an ass, too, or I wouldn’t have married you.”
“Funny. Maybe if you stopped your constant yo-yo dieting you’d also have an ass.”
“Sure! Let me go ahead and eat like you do so you can just call me fat again.”
“You gained forty pounds, and it didn’t go to your ass.”
“I was pregnant!”
Apparently Matt became both deaf and invisible when he put on his headset. This was what he hated about people who possessed no filters. Simply because Mcallister Charters signed nondisclosure agreements, it didn’t mean he wanted to hear all this.
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me.”
“Yes? Is there a problem?” the man demanded.
Your mouth. Your existence. “There could be.”
“You idiot!” the woman whined. “Why did you make me take this little plane? Now there’s a problem.”
“Shut up,” the man said to his woman/wife/verbal whipping post.
“No problem,” Stone said with his most authoritative tone of voice. “But there could be. I need absolute silence to land this plane. I have to concentrate.”
He could land this plane in his sleep, but after a sharp intake of breath, there was not another sound from either of his passengers the rest of the trip.
By noon, the entitled celebrity couple long out of his mind, Matt sat in the high school’s office lobby waiting for Hunter and Joanne. They were both late.
“Matt Conner,” said a voice he recognized. It was none other than David Cross, his former Calculus teacher and a good ally should Matt care to have one.
Joanne would love this.
Matt stood up and shook the man’s hand. “Good to see you, Mr. Cross.”
“And you. We’re waiting on Hunter and...and...”
“His mother. Joanne. Joanne Fisher.” They’d never been married. Matt had dutifully offered but Joanne had refused him. Didn’t want to be a military wife. Lucky him.
Matt followed Mr. Cross into his office. “I’m sure she’ll be here any minute.” He drew his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. Ten minutes late. Shit.
“I’m glad we have a chance to catch up. I heard you’ve been overseas for years.”
Matt nodded. “True.”
“I was shocked to hear you’d enlisted. I never had a chance to tell you how sorry... I mean, after graduation you enlisted so quickly. There wasn’t time to...”
The typical awkward stammering happened whenever he ran into someone from his past. Someone who couldn’t reconcile Matt Conner from the Principal’s Honor Roll with the Matt who had knocked up his girlfriend. Correction, not girlfriend. Date. Matt glanced at his phone again. Had Joanne planned this? He didn’t want to rehash the past with Mr. Cross right now.
Hunter’s frame darkened the doorway of the office. “They said for me to go in.”
“Hunter.” Mr. Cross pointed at the seat next to Matt’s. “Your father’s here on time so we’ll just get started.”
Hunter grunted and wouldn’t make eye contact with Matt, which was fairly typical.
Joanne arrived as Hunter was taking his seat. “I’m sorry I’m late. I’m sure you remember Matt, Hunter’s father? Lieutenant Conner, I mean.”
“Just Matt,” Matt said with a tight jaw.
“He was in the Air Force,” she said, sitting between Matt and Hunter. “A veteran.”
Hunter rolled his eyes. Mr. Cross smiled. Matt said nothing, but gripped the armrest of his chair tighter.
“As you all know, there was spray-painting done on the fence and our cameras caught Hunter and two of his friends in action.”
“And Hunter’s so sorry about that,” Joanne said.
Matt stared at her, trying to silently communicate that she should let Hunter talk. Helpfully, she then tapped Hunter’s shoulder. He gave her a look that could kill and said nothing.
“Where are the other kids and their parents?” Matt asked.
“We met with them earlier in the week, but Mrs., uh... Miss Fisher kept rescheduling. So here we are.”
“All I did was paint a fence. It’s not like I killed someone,” Hunter finally spoke.
Matt had to give it to the kid. When it came to Hunter, what you saw was what you got. No subterfuge whatsoever. If it wasn’t for the fact that Hunter was Matt’s dead ringer, he’d have to wonder if the kid was his.
Joanne hit his shoulder again. “He doesn’t mean it. Actually, I blame myself. He grew up without a father.”
“What?” Hunter and Matt spoke at once.
“Let’s discuss our options,” Mr. Cross said. “We were able to keep this out of the police’s jurisdiction. I like to handle these matters, much as possible, in house. The other parents paid for the damages.”
Hunter snorted. Joanne tapped him again and then started rifling through her purse. Presumably for the checkbook.
“But someone will have to paint the fence.” Matt leaned forward.
“Yes,” Mr. Cross said. “We’ll hire someone.”
“How much?” Joanne already had her checkbook out.
Matt reached out to stay her arm. “Hold on. Why doesn’t Hunter paint the fence?”
Mr. Cross didn’t speak for a moment. “It would have to be after school is out for the summer.”
The kid stared at him, jaw dropped. “Seriously?”
“I’m not sure if...” Joanne said, and then, catching Matt’s stop-talking look, stopped talking.
Finally. “I’ll supervise,” Matt said.
“Actually,” Mr. Cross said, “what a good idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself. Of course, the Jacksons go to Europe for the summer, so not all the boys would be available anyway.”
“Fortunately, Hunter has no plans,” Matt said. “Do you?”
Hunter gave him one of those looks-could-kill scowls but didn’t speak.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” Matt said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“WAS THAT NECESSARY?” Joanne asked. “You’re not exactly Mr. Popularity around here.”
After the meeting, all three of them had walked to the school parking lot together. Hunter had climbed into Joanne’s SUV and slammed the passenger door shut without a word.
“Not interested in winning a contest.”
“I know you’re trying to be a hard-ass but he already doesn’t like you. So ease up on the boot camp stuff and let’s see if we can at least get him to want to spend time with you that isn’t forced labor.”
Shit. Was he being a hard-ass? He hadn’t meant to be. He’d reacted in a similar fashion that any of his COs would have to a rookie, to teach him a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget. Obviously Matt was still feeling his way around being the father of a hormone-driven teenager.
“I said I’d supervise. More likely, I’ll help.”
Joanne sighed and leaned against the driver’s-side door. “How much longer before he can spend a weekend with you?”
For months he’d been trying to find a suitable place to rent. At least two bedrooms with a backyard. Everything he’d located had been rented by the time he called. “No luck so far, but at least the lease is up on my apartment.”
“He would have been fine in your apartment. You’re so picky.”
“It’s a one-bedroom.”
“He would have been fine on the couch.”
“What’s the rush, Joanne?”
“Fine. If you must know, Chuck has a chance at the minors this summer.”
“Chuck?” That must be the new boyfriend he’d heard about, but let her tell him that.
“We’ve been seeing each other. Hunter doesn’t like him much, but as you can see he doesn’t like anyone. Anyway, I want to meet up with Chuck at one of the games, and it’s not like Hunter wants to go with me. All he wants to do is hang out with his friends, tag fences and play ‘Call of Duty’.”
Great. His kid was getting an education in military combat with little if any basis in reality. “I’m working on it.”
“Work harder.” Joanne slipped into her sedan and they were off.
Matt stood and watched for a moment. These were two people in his life he should somehow feel deeply connected to. He understood why he no longer felt anything for Joanne, but he was supposed to love Hunter. Did love him, in fact, or at least the kid he remembered. The little kid in that framed photo, for starters. But Hunter wasn’t a small boy he could please with shiny Air Force toy planes or help guide across the monkey bars. Matt shouldn’t have let two years go by between visits, even if Joanne had made it difficult. The last time he’d seen Hunter he’d been thirteen and just on the edge of puberty, his voice squeaking and his feet huge in comparison to the rest of him. But he’d still been at least human.
Fast-forward two short years and Hunter looked like a different kid. He was now nearly as tall as Matt himself, a man-child with an attitude. Not like he didn’t know a little bit about them, but the airmen he’d had in his wing weren’t children. Hunter was far more child than man, but Matt understood the kid didn’t see it that way.
Back at the airport, Matt finished off his day with a onetime flying lesson gifted to a woman on her fiftieth birthday by her Airman First Class son, and a last-minute charter flight to Las Vegas. He was there to pick up a couple of businessmen who’d missed their connecting flight to San Francisco, but when Matt arrived the men had instead hired a private jet minutes after placing the call.
Wonderful.
He waited in line to taxi back down the runway and took off again, fuming. The passengers would be charged, but they’d wasted precious fuel. Stone would be pissed.
Back at the airport, Matt checked out with Cassie and Emily, gathered his keys and headed to Sarah’s, prepared to spend an evening putting in the rest of the hardwood flooring in the hallway. He was tired, irritated as hell and hungry like a lion. The rest of his evening would consist of physical labor and a large dose of sexually charged frustration to boot.
And he couldn’t figure out why he looked forward to all of it.
“Honey, I’m home,” Matt said as he walked in the front door to Sarah’s place.
His place now, too. Or at least fifteen percent his place until he talked the stubborn woman out of their arrangement. Sarah should have beaten him home hours ago, and he’d seen her car outside but didn’t find her in the kitchen. Shackles welcomed him instead, wagging his tail double time and leading the way to the sliding glass door. Matt let him out, then went to find Sarah.
Where the hell was she? They had to talk about the roof, and plenty of other decisions that would need to be made about their now joint project. This house was a classic when one got right down to it. A Craftsman built in the early 1960s, it had seen better days, but from the beginning Matt had seen nothing but possibilities. He figured it was the fixer in him, but he’d always admired great craftsmanship.
He headed toward her bedroom when the bathroom door jerked open a few feet away from him. Sarah emerged. Naked. She took one startled look in his direction and streaked down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Frozen in place, he stood as still as a rock and nearly as hard. Her sweet ass was the last thing he saw before she slammed the door to her bedroom shut.
“You took the last towel!” she screeched from inside.
“Sorry,” he called out. Not sorry.
If this was what living with her would be like, maybe he should just kill himself right now and make fast work of it. Anything had to be better than letting her kill him slowly like this without any mercy.
He headed back to the kitchen where he stuck his head in the freezer. “Yep. That ought to do it.”
Next he reached inside the refrigerator for bottled water and considered whether he should drink the cold water or pour it all over his head. Choosing to drink first, he uncapped it and took a big swallow just as Sarah walked in the kitchen.
“You men are all alike.”
He turned to find her standing in the kitchen, arms folded across what he now unfairly knew was one of the greatest racks he’d ever been privileged to see. She wore a blue tank top and loose gray sweats. Was she wearing the red bra or the pink one? Black or red panties?
“I didn’t see anything,” he lied.
“That’s not what I mean. Why is it so hard to remember to replace a towel? You use one, you put another one back. It’s not rocket science.”
“You’re right.”
“I went ahead and put all your towels in the top shelf of the linen closet.” Her arms dropped to her sides. “I guess I didn’t tell you that.”
“Nope,” he said, and drained the contents of the water bottle. “But I would have brought you a towel. All you had to do was ask.”
She shifted her weight from one leg to another. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
He scrunched up the water bottle until it was an inch tall, releasing a small amount of tension and pent-up sexual frustration, though not nearly enough. “Easy mistake. Don’t worry. We’re both grown-ups here.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “It’s just that...well, first the underwear and now the naked thing. I don’t want to scare you off.”
“Scare me off?” Was she seriously worried about this? Did she not notice his tongue practically hanging out, mouth salivating? Or maybe that was the problem. She didn’t appreciate the salivating.
She stared at her hands. “I need your help, as you know.”
“And you’ve got it.” He took a seat next to her.
She met his eyes and a tiny smile curved her lips. “Have I said thank you enough?”
“You have.” He forced himself to relax and unkink his shoulders. “Now, about the roof—”
“You said we’d talk about it, but honestly, the Realtor I talked to said we can just give the new owners a roof allowance. Roofs are expensive, they—”
“Unless you have a roofer in your pocket.”
He smiled, because now they were in his territory. Fixing inanimate objects, whether it be a broken sink, jammed window or bad electrical wiring. Planes, cars, bicycles, vacuum cleaners; you name it, he could damn well fix it when it broke. As long as it didn’t talk back to him.
Sarah was staring at him. “Is there anything you can’t do?”
“Yeah. I’m a lousy cook.”
“I’m not half-bad, so I’ll cook for both of us.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to, but I want to.” The way she gazed at him with her pouty bottom lip made him think about the panties again.
He wondered if electroshock would help him with this little problem. He got up. “Sure, but nothing fancy. I better get to work.”
“Me too,” Sarah said, rising from her chair.
He winced. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t you give me that look.”
“What look?”
“The girl-needs-to-stay-out-of-my-way look.”
Check him out, male chauvinist pig of the year. “Of course you can help. What do you want to do?”
She smiled, and she might as well have coldcocked him for the way it temporarily stunned him. “I’m going to put the baseboards back on in the living room. Stone already painted in there, but I bought new boards. They have cool edging to them.”
So she’d picked out fancy baseboards but didn’t want a new roof. Okay, he’d let her have that one. Not going to judge. “Do you know how to use a nail gun?”
If he wasn’t mistaken she blinked twice as if to signal help me but her lips didn’t move to say those words and the hell if he’d be accused of being a chauvinist.
She nodded. “Yep. I watched Satan use it.”
While that didn’t mean she could use it herself, Matt went over to the nail gun he’d brought over and handed it to Sarah. He reminded himself that while trust didn’t always come easily to him, he did trust Sarah. Mostly. The rest of it he was working on.
“Thanks. I’ll just go get dressed in my construction outfit first.”
He almost asked, but thought better of it. If she had a special outfit she wanted to wear that was probably a good idea. Maybe some steel-toed boots or something that could protect her from catastrophic injury. He was on board with protecting her from injury. A few minutes later, he was going through his tools when she emerged from her room wearing what surely was from a page in a fashion catalog. And sue him if he still thought she looked blazing hot in khaki carpenter pants, a light-colored blouse, boots and protective eyewear. Nice touch with the protective eyewear. He felt better already. She carried with her a small toolbox in one hand and the nail gun he’d given her in the other.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“So you are.” He felt a grin coming on. “Sometimes I wear old clothes, but what you’re wearing is good, too.”
“Everything was on sale,” she said as though this explained everything. “Forty percent off with free shipping.”
She walked away from him and while he considered getting her set up, that might look like he didn’t have enough faith in her, so he hung back and let her do it all herself.
Have a little faith. Trust, Matt, trust.
Yeah. Still working on it.
Trust issues and him went way back, so it was no wonder that even with good friends he still occasionally wound up verifying. It had cost him a relationship or two in his past, but after Joanne his trust when it came to women had been compromised almost permanently.
A half an hour later, he still hadn’t heard the sounds of nail gunning in the living room so maybe Sarah was still lining up the boards. Or possibly trying to figure out a way out of this while saving face. He tacked in the last wood floor slat and determined he’d go in and pretend he only wanted to check out her great progress, then underhandedly find a way to assist her before she impaled herself.
He heard a strange whirring sound, immediately followed by the sounds of a nail gun...being operated at the rapid-fire rate of a machine gun.
Shit. Not good.
He dropped everything and ran to the living room, where he found Sarah on the ground, wearing her safety glasses, legs spread out, holding the nail gun away from herself as it shot nails out like it was possessed by the demonic soul of an assault rifle.
Fuck. Heart pounding in his ears, he yanked the electrical plug from its socket then dropped down next to her, worried because she looked shell-shocked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m s-sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Explain what the hell happened.” He took the nail gun from her.
“I don’t really know. Maybe it jammed? Everything was going well, and then...and then...” Her safety glasses slightly askew, she pushed them up with her finger.
Thank God for the safety glasses. “Doesn’t matter. Just please tell me you’re okay.”
“Fine, but a little humiliated. This looked so easy. I read all the instructions. Well. Most of them.”
He let out an uneven breath, and took a good long look at the wall. The wall Stone had painted not long ago with a shade of brown had nails all over it in interesting random patterns.
“You killed the wall.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, crap.”
Yeah. It was okay, he told himself over and over again. She wasn’t hurt, and that was the main thing. Instinctively and possibly without much thought, he pulled Sarah’s back to his chest. They both sat on the ground of the living room floor staring at the massacred wall for several silent minutes. Finally, she leaned her head back and told him she was sorry another dozen times.
“Maybe you should stay away from power tools for now.”
She nodded slowly.
This would be an interesting couple of months, if they each lived to tell about it.
* * *
“HONESTLY, MATT, YOU look exhausted. Let me help,” Sarah said. “Please.”
“I’m good,” he said from the top of the ladder where he was fiddling with the wiring coming out of her bedroom ceiling.
Good. He was always good.
The man had run himself ragged all week long, working at the airport most of the daylight hours, helping his son paint a fence—she didn’t ask because Matt didn’t look happy about it—and working on her numerous home improvement projects. Being forever banned from using power tools meant that she couldn’t help him much anymore. But no sooner would he finish one house project than another issue would present itself. Either it was a wiring problem or a plumbing problem. Rather than the list getting shorter, it got longer. Just like the summer days.
And Matt got sexier every day. Each time he recited the complex reasoning behind why the house’s electrical wiring had “issues” she’d stare at him, appreciating that he understood her to be intelligent enough to follow was the single most attractive quality about him.
Of course, his most attractive quality changed from moment to moment and depending on what the man was doing. Sometimes his forearms were the single most attractive quality about him. Sometimes his eyes, beautifully dark and edgy. She had to face it—she had a large menu to choose from.
And now tonight he’d finally put in her ceiling fan, and those tentacles falling out of her ceiling would be covered up and stop giving her spider nightmares. She’d run the fan tonight and cool down from the suddenly hot summer nights. They were having a small heat wave.
Unless that was all Matt.
She was still feeling her way around this whole friends-and-roommates thing, thinking up ways to get Matt’s attention other than leaving all her underwear out, flashing him or scaring him with her appalling lack of carpentry skills. So far she’d accomplished all of those without even breaking a sweat.
He stood now on the ladder just under the wires, balancing his weight on the second highest rung. Her only job was to keep Shackles away from him, since her dog now had a serious case of hero worship for Matt and followed him around the sometimes-dangerous house. The evening sky had begun to darken and little slits of light were all that was left of the daylight coming through the bedroom window blinds he’d replaced for her. She walked to the window, still holding on to Shackles’s collar, to open them further and give Matt more light while he worked.
An enormous spark popped out of the ceiling, and Matt cursed as he fell from the ladder. Letting go of the dog, she lunged for the ladder to steady him, but he grabbed it and took it with him, presumably to keep from falling on them. Shackles yelped and ran out of the bedroom. Somehow Matt managed to topple onto her bed, at the last minute throwing the ladder away from them both. It landed with a crash against the far wall.
Matt lay on his back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Recovering from her small heart attack, Sarah rushed to him. “Matt! Oh my God, Matt, are you okay?”
“I’m good,” he said, wincing.
She climbed on the bed with him. “If you say you’re good one more time I’m seriously going to have to kill you.”
He groaned his response.
“What can I do? Do you need me to call 911? Should I get you a cold wet rag? How about a warm one? Talk to me!”
It took her a minute to realize that in her panic she’d crossed a dangerous line. She was pretty much straddling his hips. Not exactly how she’d pictured winding up in this position, with all her clothes still on, but damned if she would move now. She had a perfectly good excuse to be hovering over him, in care and concern over whether he’d managed to electrocute himself trying to fix her money pit of a house.
“I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
“It’s worse than I thought.” He looked at the wiring above them, then at her. “I’m not sure I can move my legs.”
Sarah drew in a sharp breath. What had she done? Why, oh why, had she let him help her? “You...you can’t m-move your legs?”
He didn’t answer, but in one swift move he flipped her and now she lay under him.
“How about that? Guess I can move them. Just needed a little motivation is all.”
She pushed on his chest, marveling at how quickly he’d switched gears. “Not funny, Matt! You scared me.”