No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2) Page 9

  “It’s just a ceiling.” He finished taping the last stall, then came out and tossed the roll of tape onto the pile.

  “Oh.” She smiled, still seeing too much. “All right. I’m backing off. So do I get to help?”

  “Yeah. But hey.” Forget that it was the wrong place. Forget that he ought to be draping the tops of those toilet stalls, too. He went over to her, put his hands on her hips, hauled her forward, stood between her thighs like he belonged there, and said, “Maybe I should say thanks for listening to my crazy ideas. And maybe I should tell you I like your painter clothes, and that you’re pretty.”

  “Mm.” She didn’t pull away. Not one bit. Instead, she put her hands on his biceps like she wanted to feel them, and like between her thighs was exactly where she wanted him. Which was convenient, since it was exactly where he wanted to be. “I like yours, too. Or maybe I just like you. Way too much. How about kissing me? I happen to want you a lot.”

  How could you get this hot this fast? She kept her hands on his arms, he pulled her up tight against him, sliding her right over the counter and into him, and damn. His hand was up under that braid, at the back of her neck, her hands were stroking up his arms, she was leaning into his kiss and closing her eyes, and they were diving into it like they were putting out a fire. Or starting one. Her body was slim and warm and melting into him, his hand was at the small of her back, her lips were parting for him, and he could swear that all she wanted to do was let him in.

  His hand was straying up her body again, and he was bending her back and giving her more of that when a clang from outside brought him back to himself. He may also have realized that when she opened her eyes, she was going to be looking at a toilet. And that he’d propped the restroom door open.

  Not that he left her that exact second. He couldn’t. He brushed a final kiss over her mouth, then trailed his lips across her cheek, kissed her in the fragile spot beneath her ear, and said, “You’re kinda tempting, you know? What is this we’re having again? ”

  “Mm. I don’t have words.” It was a murmur, and she arched her back and turned her head to give him better access, which—oh, yeah—didn’t turn him on much. “Don’t stop.”

  Another metallic clang, like somebody was dropping pipes out there, and he sighed, stood back, and said, “You could memorize that and say it again. As many times as you want. Want to help me prime?”

  Her pupils were dilated, and there was a pink flush on her cheeks that matched her shirt as she slid down off the counter with her hand in his. “Yes.” She was flustered, putting a hand to her hair, and he loved seeing it. “I really did come to help. And maybe I want to make you as crazy as you made me all those years ago. Not that that’s possible.”

  He busied himself prying open the paint bucket, because otherwise, he was going to kiss her again. Or maybe he was going to think about exactly what it was they were having, and neither of those things would be a good idea. But he still had to say, “It’s possible. All we need is the dog, and it’ll be just like before.”

  “Henry?” She picked up a paint roller. “I thought about bringing him, but the paint would have been overpowering.”

  “Also just like before. No, I meant Rosie. I guess she isn’t around anymore. It’s a long time.”

  “No.” Beth’s expression shifted like a cloud passing across the sun. “No. She died three years almost to the day after we broke up. It was right after I graduated from law school, the day before I took the bar exam. I was in Seattle, and I found out two days later that my mom had taken her to be put down. She had to do it, because Rosie had cancer, but I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I . . . I raged.”

  His hands stilled a moment, and then he poured paint into the pan, aiming for his usual deliberation. “Sorry to hear that. She was a good dog. You raged to your mom? I’d like to have seen that.”

  “No. Of course not. I raged alone. It was . . . excessive, how I felt. The same way I feel now. The same way I—” She stopped, then said, “I know she was a dog, not a person, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was so sad. Like none of it had meant anything at all, so what was the point? Like after all that, she just . . . died anyway.”

  Beth caught herself even as she choked up. Here she was, getting kissed by Evan like he couldn’t keep his hands off her, and two minutes later, she brought up her dead dog? Who did that? Hadn’t she learned a thing in almost ten years? What was this, the remedial romance class? Over-Emoters Anonymous?

  She stuck her roller into the pan of white primer and moved it back and forth, then ran it over the ridged slope the way Evan had taught her all those years ago before asking him, “Start anywhere?” Maybe if she just shut up . . .

  “Yeah,” Evan said. “We’ll do the walls, and I’ll get the ceiling later, once I’ve talked to Kristiansen. See how wild and crazy he wants to get.” He began to stroke primer onto the wall next to the door, every motion practiced and sure, then said, “You can tell me. I want to know.”

  “The ‘My Dead Pet’ story,” she said, trying for jaunty. “Pretty much Viagra.”

  He laughed. Quietly, the way Evan did most things. “Nope. And some people could say that babies put a little bit of a damper on the romance themselves, but you lived with that all right yesterday. Life happens to everybody.”

  “I guess so. It’s just that when it happened to us, it was so easy at first. Got me spoiled, maybe.”

  “Mm,” he said, looking at her with more than heat in his eyes now. With warmth. Something against which she had approximately . . . zero defenses. Just like before.

  It had been bitterly cold on that late December morning that marked the halfway point in Evan’s house-painting job and Beth’s winter break. The sun had turned every snowbank into a spectacle of glittering crystals, the evergreen carried softening blankets of white, and the lake gleamed blue as a jewel laid on white velvet. Beth left the house and walked up the drive, then turned and looked out at the panorama spread before her. And was that enough to satisfy her? Of course not. Instead, she had a romantic vision of Evan walking with her, holding her hand.

  Except that Evan was in the house painting. Doing his job. And her fantasies needed to slow the hell down and take a rest. All he had to do was look at her with that steady, intense gaze to make her knees weak and the heat flood her cheeks, and she had—let’s see, no idea at all if he felt the same way. If he did, why hadn’t he made a move? She was only here for another week. Time was running out.

  So why hadn’t she made the move? That was what powerful women did, right? But if she asked him out and he felt like he had to say “yes” because of the job? Or if he said “no.” What did powerful women do then? Presumably not cry.

  Strong women made the first move when it needed to be made. She believed that. Intellectually. Too bad she still wasn’t doing it. But she wasn’t going to show up to help paint her dad’s study this morning like a hopeful puppy. Maybe Evan would miss her, and maybe he’d say something, and maybe . . .

  No. She fastened her snowshoes on and kicked her way up to the road, then across it to the trail, and set off with determination. Endorphins. Energy. She was going to come back all worked-out and glowing, and then she was going to go for what she wanted before her chance passed her by like a semi blowing by on the highway.

  She’d worried for so long that there was something wrong with her. She had sexual feelings—she had them every single night, in fact, which was inconvenient when you had a roommate. But when it came down to it, she’d always balked, and she couldn’t even say why. It was ridiculous to be romantic when you believed in empowerment and rationality and equality, but . . .

  Well, she was ridiculous, she guessed. Nobody had ever seemed like the right guy, no matter how good his hands and mouth had felt, no matter how insistently her body had urged her to take the next step. A part of her had always been held in reserve, sitting back, watching, judging. For so long, she’d thought, What am I waiting for? And now she knew. She longed fo
r Evan, who’d never laid a hand on her, with a physical intensity that scared her, especially since she couldn’t tell if he felt the same way.

  There was a word for women who only fell for unattainable men. Well, there wasn’t, but there ought to be. “Perfectionist hopeless romantic” probably fit. Or “Thirteen-year-old girl safely having crushes on pop stars,” perhaps.

  She was getting breathless now, stomping up the hill, but she kept going. All right. Look at it logically. Since she wasn’t thirteen, she was obviously projecting something else onto Evan and their non-relationship, using it to avoid focusing on something she didn’t want to face. Fear about what would come after college, that law school was the wrong choice, or maybe just that she wouldn’t get in. One of those, because you didn’t actually meet “the one” and fall in love. Or if you did, he wasn’t likely to feel the same. And anyway, this wasn’t what her mind needed to be tangled up in right now.

  She should think about something else. She was twenty, and that was much too old to get herself stuck in this kind of whirlpool like somebody who’d never heard of love hormones, of dopamine and serotonin, of pheromones and all the rest of it. If Evan seemed like exactly the spot where she wanted to jump off that cliff, and also like the place she wanted to rest afterwards? There were reasons for that, and it wasn’t just his slow, calm voice, his clear, steady eyes, the width of his shoulders, or how hard he worked. Even though it felt like it.

  She tried to capture the threads of the honors thesis and weave them into something helpful. The history of secretarial work in popular American culture post-World War Two, a fascinating subject on which she’d put in her usual two hours of work this morning. She was still working on it, having actually helpful thoughts about romance novels, when a blue jay called overhead, raucous and bold, then flew like an arrow straight across her path. A rapid drumming that had to be a grouse flushed by the jay’s call came from her right, she caught a glimpse as it too evacuated the premises, and she forgot about the history of secretaries as stand-ins for the shifting view of women in the fifties. After that, she kicked on up the hill, got to the top, and turned around.

  Lake, mountains, trees, snow. The lakeside properties, softened by white, blended into their surroundings, a few fireplaces sent up trails of white wood smoke, and she could almost imagine that she was looking down on the winter lodges of the earliest inhabitants, retreating to communal shelters for the dark, cold season, telling stories, weaving and mending, and enlivening the winter nights with jump dances.

  Did the young ones long for each other back then, too? Did they look into a pair of eyes across the fire and wish for that one person with an intensity bordering on desperation? Probably. All those hormones—they were as old as humankind, and so was the desire to belong to somebody else and to have him belong to you.

  It was all very metaphysical, or rather, very biological. What it wasn’t was getting her thesis puzzled out, or anything else, either. Plus, it was too cold up here to stand around. She headed back down, moving as fast as the snowshoes would allow, her burning thighs complaining—or announcing, “Toning!” if you were a glass-half-full person. Which she was going to try a whole lot harder to be. Quit analyzing things so much and just . . . jump.

  How did you jump, though? Did you wait until you were both crouched over the paint tray and say, “I really want your body?”

  Ugh. No. Only in a movie. Real people said, “Hey. Do you want to hang out tonight?” She practiced saying it out loud and got a raucous squawk from another jay for her efforts. So she said it again until it sounded natural. Casual. And if he said, “Yeah, sure,” she’d . . . well, she’d worry about that when it came up. If he liked her half as much as she liked him, he’d probably take it from there anyway. If he didn’t, she’d be clued in that he was either (A) way more passive than her reckless imagination suggested, or (B) only interested in having sex with her, and only because she’d made herself that extravagantly available. Neither of which was good enough, she told herself sternly, no matter how many fantasies she had of him throwing down the roller, hustling her out to his truck, and driving off with her to show her what it was all about.

  Ha. She was so not the woman that would ever happen to.

  Here in the real world, though . . . What if he said, “Sorry, I’m busy tonight. Going out with my girlfriend”?

  Well, obviously, she’d shrivel up and die.

  No. She’d say, “Oh, OK. I just thought I’d ask,” make an excuse, put the paint roller down, and go to her room. And then she’d shrivel up and die.

  She was almost at the road, and yes, she had enough endorphins hopping, or flowing, or whatever endorphins did, to do this. You bet she did. She was going for it.

  It happened between one thought and the next. She came around the corner, saw the dark shape loping across it, and thought, Coyote. No. Dog, even as she registered the oncoming red pickup.

  One heart-stopping moment when she thought that surely the lean brown animal would make it. And the moment when it didn’t. When Beth’s mouth opened in a belated, soundless scream, and the animal was airborne, then down, while the truck sped on, the noise of its engine fading into the distance.

  Beth didn’t cry, and she didn’t scream. She was fumbling at her feet for the snowshoe straps, then leaving the snowshoes behind and running awkwardly through the last few yards of snow until she was on the road, where the dog was rising to his—her—its feet.

  It’s all right. It’s not hurt, she thought for an instant, and then she saw the rear leg hanging awkwardly, the animal struggling.

  Oh, no. She got to the dog, crouched down, said, “Come on. Come on. Let’s go get you some help,” one part of her amazed at how calm she sounded. The animal turned liquid brown eyes on her, hopped closer, and licked her hand, and Beth’s throat closed.

  Carry it. Find a vet. Even though the dog wasn’t tiny, and carrying it wouldn’t be easy. There was no other choice. Her dad was at work, her mom was at the gym, and Beth didn’t have a car. But she had to do something. She got an arm under the dog’s chest. That was the easy part. When she reached around it, though, picked it up, and staggered to her feet, the animal whimpered, and Beth almost dropped it.

  Toughen up. “You can do this,” she said aloud, her voice so fierce, it startled her. The dog was whining, a barely audible sound, and Beth was nearly whining herself. But she had to do it or the dog would die, and the dog couldn’t die, not if Beth could stop it. So she clumped through the snow to the house, and then she was stuck. She couldn’t open the door without putting the dog down, and she couldn’t put her down. It would hurt her too much.

  Instead, she kicked, her boot slamming into the door over and over. She yelled, too. Just in case he could hear. “Evan!” Kick. “Evan!” Kick. “EVAN!” She kicked until she thought she’d kick the door in. And finally, he came.

  Overalls, T-shirt, work boots, and a startled expression. She said, “It got hit. By a truck. It’s hurt. Please.”

  He said, “Wait,” and went back into the house, and she thought, What? No. Please. Help me. The dog was shivering now, and so was she.

  She’d barely thought it when Evan came back, shrugging into his coat. It was only when he took the dog carefully out of her arms that she realized how heavy the animal had been. Evan was already down the steps, and she pulled the front door of the house shut and followed him.

  He stopped at the door of his battered old pickup and asked, “Can you hold her in your lap?”

  “Yes.” She was shivering as hard as the dog, but he didn’t seem to notice. He said, “Get in, and I’ll hand her to you.”

  He had noticed, though, because as soon as he got in and turned the truck on, he cranked the heat up. It took the entire drive, though, for Beth to stop shivering. The dog’s eyes were closed, and she panted all through that endless journey. The truck seemed to hit every bump in the road, too, until Evan was pulling into the parking lot of the strip mall that housed the vet’s offi
ce.

  He said, “Hang on, and I’ll come around and get her from you,” and he did. He carried the unresisting animal inside, and then he carried her to the exam room, where he finally set her gently down. Beth leaned over the table, stroked the dog’s fur, told it—her—that she would be all right, and tried not to cry. And as for Evan? He sat on the bench and didn’t say anything. But when the vet came in and said, “Let’s take a look,” and Beth had to leave the dog and sit on the bench herself, Evan took her hand, and he held it. Which was when she cried. Which was when he put his arm around her and let her tears fall on his broad chest like she belonged there.

  She went home four hours later with her savings account exhausted and a dog named Rosie, and if she also went home more in love with Evan than ever? Who wouldn’t have been, especially once he’d carried Rosie into the house and set her onto the dog bed Beth laid down, the one he’d run in and bought at the pet store while she held an exhausted Rosie in the truck? Along with the dog food and the dishes and the collar and the leash. And if none of that had been enough, he also stood with her while her mom asked questions, and he didn’t flinch or step back or look down or . . . anything.

  “You realize what this means,” Michelle said, her too-sharp gaze moving between Beth, Evan, and Rosie, who had curled up on her new bed in the corner of the family room, her hind foot sticking out behind her, and was resting her chin on her brown-and-white spotted paws. “It doesn’t mean you got a dog. It means your father and I got a dog.”