Always a Hero. Justine Davis

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       Chapter 3

      Kai stared at the man standing on the other side of the counter. So many impressions were tumbling through her mind that she’d almost forgotten her first one, that those eyes, Jordy’s vivid green eyes, looked far too exhausted for a man in his line of work.

      Jordy’s whine—because the long, wound-up complaint had indeed been that—echoed in her head. He’s a pill counter. He counts how many packages of cold pills they put in the boxes. How lame is that? And he wouldn’t even have that job if old man Hunt didn’t owe him a favor.

      She had understood Jordy’s anger about his life, agreed he had a right to be upset, having been uprooted from the only home he knew and dragged a thousand miles away, away from his school, his friends. But this had hit a hot button with her, and it had been an effort to answer quietly.

      “My dad worked in a canning plant once,” she’d told him. “Dead fish all day. He hated it. But he did it. Because he had a family to take care of, because he wanted me to have a roof over my head and food on the table. It’s called responsibility, Jordy. It’s called being an adult.”

      Jordy had stared at her incredulously. “You standing up for him?”

      “Nobody does everything wrong.”

      Those words came back to her now as she stared at the pill counter. Of all the things this man might be in life, that was one she never would have guessed at if she didn’t already know. Because despite the weariness in his eyes, he was the most intense man she’d ever seen, and in her former life she’d seen some prime examples.

      And she wasn’t sure she liked that intensity being turned on her.

       Sexy girl rocker….

      How could she be so flattered and so irritated at him at the same time? Perhaps it was the way he’d said it, so casually, as if it were self-evident. And he couldn’t know he was hitting a nerve.

      A nerve that made her say, rather sharply, “Your wife has a kid and you never knew? How did that work?”

      “She … wasn’t my wife. Then.”

      Kai considered this, puzzled over it, and the only answer that fit was that he’d married her after he found out about Jordy. The boy hadn’t mentioned it, only that he’d never known his father, and wished his mother had never married him. She’d assumed he’d walked out on them, which had given her even more reason not to like the man.

      Seven months, he’d said.

      Jordy’s mother, he’d told her, died six months ago.

      Which meant Wyatt Blake married her knowing she was dying.

      Or perhaps because?

      This put a whole new light on things for her. Whatever else his sins were, and according to Jordy they were many, Wyatt Blake was obviously trying to do the right thing by his son. The concern that had driven him here was apparently real, and somehow knowing that made his rude, accusatory questions easier to stomach. No less annoying, but slightly less temper-provoking.

      “Look, Mr. Blake,” she began, “Jordy’s having a tough time. He misses the place he knew, his friends….”

      “Those friends he misses are why we’re here. He was headed down a bad road.”

      “At thirteen?”

      “You think there’s an age limit? You of all people should know better.”

      She bristled anew, her kinder thoughts about him forgotten. “Me, of all people?”

      He jerked a thumb toward the photograph. “Half the kids in that audience were probably high.”

      That hit a little too close to a nerve that would never heal, and she didn’t want to talk about it, especially not to this man who seemed intent on his interrogation and entirely oblivious of her efforts to be reasonable.

      “What exactly СКАЧАТЬ