Suddenly Family

“People often bring me wounded or orphaned animals.” She spoke with a shrug in her voice, as if there was nothing at all unusual about the occurrence. “Or I rescue them myself if I hear of one that needs help. We have about a dozen animals living at our place right now.” Softness entered her voice as she glanced at her son. “Isn’t that right, Andy?”

The child’s nose wrinkled as he cranked his neck back. “I forgot. How many is a dozen?”

“Twelve.”

The wrinkles remained long enough for him to equate the number with the word. Comprehension dawning, he gave his mom a nod. “Yeah. A dozen. ’Cept this makes thirteen.”

“The animals are why I wanted to see if I can fly,” she explained to Sam as she reached beneath the counter. “Doc Jackson has to move to the mainland because his heart is getting bad and there’s no one to take his place.”

With a metallic clink against the counter, she set a can of kitten formula on it, popped the top and poured an ounce into a medicine cup. After drawing some of the liquid into an eyedropper, she touched the end of the dropper to the tiny animal’s seeking mouth.

“Can I do it, Mom?”

Smiling at her son’s request, she handed over the dropper. “Just remember to keep him on his stomach. That’s the way these guys eat best.

“I suppose I can learn to do rabies checks and that sort of thing myself,” she continued to Sam while she watched her son dispense several drops into the hungry orphan’s waiting mouth. “I won’t risk having an infected animal around Andy or the other animals,” she explained. “But without a vet, I won’t be able to take care of the sicker or more severely injured ones.

“Unless,” she added, suddenly meeting his eyes across the cage and the counter, “you would be willing to fly them to the vet over on Orcas Island or to Bellingham yourself?”

For the first time since he’d walked in, Sam saw a flicker of spirit in her delicate features. That look was nothing less than pure hope.

He immediately felt himself take a mental step back. Despite the odd strain he’d sensed in her, there was an artlessness about this woman that tended to pull a person in, to put him at ease. He freely admitted he was drawn by the gentle way she soothed the little animal, by her concern for it, by her willingness to take it in. But her innocent request for his involvement clearly threatened the boundaries he’d drawn around his life.

He hadn’t realized how protective his instincts had become until he felt them kick into place.

“Sorry,” he muttered, refusing to consider why those instincts were there. He thought only of the hours involved transporting her and heaven-only-knew what sort of critters around the San Juans. “I’m not in a position to help you. I already spend too much time away from my kids.”

“Of course.” Hope died as quickly as it had arisen. “I didn’t really think you’d be interested.”

“It’s not that,” he insisted, feeling lousy for turning her down. Feeling a little defensive, too, for being put in that position. “I really can’t take more time from them than I do. How were you planning to get them to Orcas or Bellingham yourself, anyway? Do you have access to a plane?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she admitted with an amazing lack of concern. “I only found out that Doc Jackson was leaving an hour or so before I talked to you about lessons. I figured I’d get through those, then worry about what I’d fly.”

He didn’t know which surprised him more, her candor or the quickness of her decision to approach him. “Had you ever thought about flying before?”

“Not really.” She hesitated. “Never, actually,” she admitted and edged down the counter to intercept the man approaching the cash register with a magazine and a handful of postcards.

The two-tone melody of the door’s bell announced more shoppers. Asking her son to set the cage on the floor and finish feeding the raccoon there, she stepped over his coloring book and took the copy of Cycling World the guy in the spandex handed her.

One of the women who’d just come in had two cranky toddlers in tow. She asked for children’s books.

A woman in a huge straw hat wanted to know if the store had free maps.

Since they really had nothing else to discuss, Sam gave the manual a pat and said, “Call me.”

She promised that she would, but Sam could swear the odd strain had slipped back into her smile.

Telling himself it was none of his business why that faint tension was there, he stepped out into the crowd of visitors eating ice-cream cones, window shopping and queuing up at the expedition office across the street for whale excursions.

He’d already completed two flights that morning. He had three more that afternoon. Two were short hauls of supplies to sportsmen’s camps on a couple of the more isolated islands. One was a passenger and mail pickup in Seattle. When he returned, there would be the usual maintenance on the planes, logs to fill in, manifests to file, tomorrow’s cargo to sort.

He headed around the corner and climbed into the midnight-blue pickup truck with E & M Air Carrier Service emblazoned on its door panels. As long as he was going to be on the mainland, he should be thinking about picking up office supplies and ordering a new seat bracket to replace the one he’d found cracked yesterday on their oldest Cessna. Instead, his thoughts crowded around a woman who made no sense to him at all.

He couldn’t believe she’d never given any thought to flying until an hour before she’d shown up at the airstrip.

She already had him wondering why she’d seemed so subdued compared to the other day. Now she had him flat-out baffled by her apparent tendency to leap first, then look. Considering that she’d decided to take flying lessons in less time than it took most women to pick out a dress—and that she’d come up with the offer to watch his children in mere seconds—it seemed that T.J. Walker simply took on whatever came her way and battled the consequences and details as she went along.

He didn’t know what to make of her. As a pilot he knew what it was to go with his gut, to rely on training and instinct to make split-second decisions. But he could back up those decisions with years of experience and advance preparation.

He had no idea what she based her decisions on.

The warm sea breeze blew through the truck’s open windows as he drove past the pier and the ferry dock and skirted the fourteen square blocks of businesses and weather-grayed buildings that comprised the town of Harbor. He would have thought that a woman who tended a small zoo of high-maintenance animals in addition to working part-time and raising a child on her own would need to be organized to survive. An organized person would think twice before committing herself to something that would eat up a hefty chunk of her time. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that her idea of preplanning was simply to take a deep breath before she plunged in.

His scowl of incomprehension was threatening to become permanent by the time he swung onto the long open road that edged the ocean and led to the airport. Logic told him he didn’t need to understand her. All he had to do was trust her. And there, he supposed, he really had no problem.

Her little boy had appeared well cared for. He’d been clean and healthy and had obviously been raised to be friendly and caring. Just meeting the child spoke well of his mother. Aside from that, anyone who rescued and cared for injured animals would have to have a very soft heart.

The arrangement was only temporary, anyway. Hopefully, it wouldn’t have to last more than a few weeks. Just that morning he’d received a promising response to one of his ads. He had an interview for a week from Saturday with a woman from Bellingham who was leaving her position as nanny. She’d be available as soon as the family moved east at the end of the month.

In the meantime, it seemed he was going to teach a woman with a soft heart and no apparent sense of logic how to fly.

Chapter Three

T.J. was intimately familiar with nearly every square mile of Harbor Island. She knew the lush mountainous forest that filled its interior and the hiking trails, caves and clear creeks meandering through it. She knew its coves and tide pools and had introduced her son to all manner of seals, urchins and starfish. She knew who lived in the secluded cabins, houses, shacks and the occasional mansion tucked into the trees or overlooking the shore.

She disturbed little of it. Not the wildlife and not her neighbors. She regarded herself and her son simply as part of the ecology, custodians of their own small space in the woods and observers of all the rest.

She felt safe on Harbor now. Secure in a way that had eluded her all the years she’d been growing up. That was why she’d come back after only a year away at college. It was why she wanted to raise her child in Harbor. But that hard-won sense of security felt threatened at the moment. It had ever since Maddy had told her about Brad.

Try as she might, T.J. simply couldn’t shake the feeling that she hadn’t heard the last of him.

She wasn’t sure if she was simply being cautious or actually getting paranoid, but she checked her rearview mirror twice before she pulled her ancient Jeep off the shore road and headed for the blinding-white hangar at the edge of the airstrip. She had no idea what she expected Brad to do. Or if he would do anything at all. As she glanced at the child craning his neck from the seat beside her, she just knew she didn’t want Andy to know she was concerned.

Not that he was paying any attention to her. His focus was glued to the half dozen private airplanes parked away from E & M Air Carrier’s huge hangar.

He practically vibrated with excitement as he grappled with the latch on his seat belt. “Can I go look at a plane? I won’t get too close. I promise.”

“Jason’s dad is expecting us in the office, honey.”

“Is Jason here?”

“He’s visiting his grandma in Seattle right now.”

Seat belt unfastened, he reached for the rusting handle on the door. “Can I see a plane after, then?”

“If it’s not too dark.”

Her son grinned. “’Kay,” he murmured, not bothering to press.

He was such a good little boy. Affectionate. Obedient. He never demanded anything the way she often heard children do in the bookstore when they would beg, cajole or cry for just one more toy or treat. He simply accepted what she said and moved on to whatever next claimed his interest.

Tugging her heavy denim bag over her shoulder, she climbed out of the battered, but blessedly reliable, old vehicle and automatically took Andy’s hand. She didn’t know why he was always so agreeable. It could have been because he knew there wasn’t money for extras. Or because he instinctively understood that she already gave him everything she could and that it all came from her heart. Maybe it was because, even with Crystal living nearby, he knew it was really just the two of them and that they had to take care of each other because there wasn’t anyone else who would.

Whatever it was, she told herself, pushing open the door next to the black letters indicating Office, she was simply grateful he was hers.

Andy looked up at her, confused. “There’s nobody here.”

“I see that.”

The small waiting room with its huge map on the wall was empty. So was the space across the long counter where filing cabinets and two gray metal desks—one cluttered, one painfully neat—occupied the area.

Sam had said he would be available that evening. He’d told her that yesterday when he’d brought her the book weighing down her bag. Though she hadn’t talked to him since then, she had left a message with one of his employees that she would be by after she got off work at eight and asked that he call if the time wasn’t convenient. Since she hadn’t heard from him, she’d assumed the timing was fine.

Still clutching Andy’s hand, she moved to the end of the counter to peek through the open door behind it. The door opened directly into the hangar. Wondering if the guy named Chuck who had taken her message had forgotten to pass it on, she glanced into the cavernous space.

A white aircraft far larger than the tiny two-and four-passenger planes outside occupied the middle of the huge hangar. The cargo pods on its underbelly hung open.

While her son whispered a reverent “Wow,” T.J.’s attention settled on the big man in a khaki shirt and jeans.

Sam was shifting boxes from the underbelly of the plane to a low flat dolly—large boxes that he handled two at a time and that were heavy enough to make the dolly buck when he hefted them onto it.

He didn’t seem to notice her and Andy when they moved to stand in the doorway. Not sure if they should enter, she simply watched, unwillingly fascinated by his strength. She was intrigued, too, by the concentration etched in his features. No one could deny the sense of capability surrounding him, or the masculine beauty in his sculpted profile.

Sam Edwards was an incredibly virile and handsome man. T.J. had always thought him so—much as she had always thought redwoods mighty and the ocean vast. It was simply a fact of nature, and she appreciated beauty in nature wherever she found it. She had just never before considered exactly how broad his shoulders were. Or how strong the muscles in his back and thighs had to be to raise him up so easily as he hefted the heavy loads. His arms had to feel as solid as stone.

She imagined his arms felt rather empty, too.

Her grip tightened slightly on her son’s little hand. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been for him to be left alone to raise his children, or how hard it had to be for his children to have lost their loving mother. She had known Tina. T.J. had even helped her out on occasion at the preschool where Tina had worked by bringing animals for the children to learn about and helping when the aide wasn’t available. She had been on school field trips with Tina, too, where they had talked about measles and how to get their offspring to eat vegetables. When Tina had brought Jason and Jenny into the bookstore, they had talked about children’s books.

The beautiful, bubbly ex-cheerleader had doted on her children and adored her husband. They had clearly cared for her, too. The few times T.J. had seen Sam with them at community functions, it had been clear that their family had been as happy as any around.

Watching him now, when she was so aware of his physical strength, she couldn’t help but wonder at the fortitude and tenacity he had to possess. Rumor had it that he seemed to be doing well now, though he stuck close to work and his family. But she remembered hearing early on that he’d taken his wife’s death as hard as any man could.

As if he had finally become aware of how intently he was being watched, Sam’s motions began to slow. With his last box unloaded, he straightened like a pinnacle rising from the sea, plowed his fingers through his hair and turned toward the doorway.

The bright fluorescent lights illuminated the sculpted lines of his face when his glance jerked from them to his watch. “I didn’t realize how late it was,” he called to her. “How long have you been standing there?”

Longer than I probably should have, she thought. “Only a couple of minutes,” she called back. “I hope you don’t mind us coming through the office.”

“Not a problem. Come on over.”

Since he stayed where he was, near the plane, she gently tugged Andy forward. She was halfway across the gray concrete floor when she noticed the lines of fatigue fanning from the corners of Sam’s eyes. Deep creases bracketed his mouth. She’d noticed the lines before, but thought only that they added interest to a face that would have been too perfect otherwise.

With his loss fresh on her mind, she realized now that what had carved the furrows so deeply could very well have been grief—and a kind of weariness that ran soul deep.

She stopped a couple of yards away. “I didn’t know if you got my message.”

Looking very competent, very capable and very…big, he ran an impersonal glance from her short T-shirt to the hem of her baggy linen pants, then smiled at the child clinging to her hand.

“I got it about an hour ago.” Turning, he reached inside the open door of the plane’s cabin and pulled a clipboard from the pilot’s seat. “I just wanted to get the cargo unloaded before we got started. We can talk while I work on the plane.”

Concentration sharpened his features as he dropped the clipboard atop the stacked boxes and made a note on an attached form. His manner was as brisk and businesslike as his tone. She had no idea what time he’d started work that morning or how many places he’d flown over the course of the day. But from the fatigue he dutifully ignored, she had the impression of a man running on nothing but reserves.

Still, he offered another easy smile to the little boy who peered past him to the plane. Andy hadn’t budged from beside her. Sheer awe rooted him to the concrete.

Sam’s preoccupation lifted when he noticed where her son was staring. “Have you ever seen a plane up close before?” he asked the silent child.

Solemnly, Andy shook his head to indicate that he hadn’t.

“Then, you’ve never been inside a plane before, either?”

Without a blink, the little boy shook his head once more.

“Do you want to sit inside this one?”

The awe in Andy’s expression moved into his voice. “Inside it? Can I? Really?”

“Promise not to touch anything?”

Andy nodded so fast that his bangs bobbed.

“Wait a minute.” T.J.’s wary glance darted past the open cockpit door to the complex array of gauges and gadgets on the control panel. “Is it safe for him to be in there?”

Looking intimately familiar with the workings of a worried mother’s mind, Sam paused. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if it weren’t,” he replied, reasonably. “Would you rather he didn’t?”

Andy’s eyes beseeched her. Eyes of startling blue met hers with calm patience.

“If you’re sure he’ll be okay…”

“I’m sure.” He arched one eyebrow. “Do you want to let go of his hand?”

Andy nodded, his expression still pleading. “You can come, too, Mom.”

At her son’s encouragement, she finally let go. She always kept a close eye on her son. Especially in unfamiliar places. That was why she was right behind them when Sam swung her child up in one arm, carried him to the plane and plopped him onto the pilot’s seat.

“Here you go,” he said to Andy. “You can sit in here while your mom and I talk. That’s the throttle and this is what steers the plane. And this,” he said, digging something out from the utility box by the seat, “is a Game Boy. Do you know how to work it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. Then you can play with that. Hands off everything else. Okay?”

“’Kay,” Andy murmured, obligingly. His nose wrinkled. “What’s a throttle?”

“It’s like the gas pedal in a car,” T.J. replied from behind Sam’s broad back.

“Oh.”

“Look,” she murmured, touching Sam’s arm to get his attention. The muscle beneath the soft khaki felt every bit as hard as she’d imagined. “You’re sure he’s okay in there?” she asked, feeling that heat move into her palm.

He turned, causing her hand to fall, then forced her to back up as he stepped toward her. “I’m positive. Even if he does touch something, it might mess up an instrument, but it won’t hurt him.” His big body towered over hers as he nodded toward the exposed engine. Its cowling lay on the ground. “You don’t have to worry about him starting it up, either,” he murmured, sounding as if he knew she was thinking just that. “I have the key, and the fuel line is disconnected.”

He was crowding her, though she didn’t think he was doing it on purpose. There was just nowhere else for him to go with the door open, the plane at his back and her blocking his path from the front.

Jerking her focus from his firm mouth to his wide chest, she curled her fingers over the odd heat lingering in her hand and backed to the middle of the long high wing.

“You’ve been reading.” He offered the observation as he followed her, obviously referring to her response about the throttle. “Did you get the chapters finished?”

Nothing about him made her think he was at all affected by her proximity. Uneasily aware that she was not unaffected by his, she thought about the book she carried and willed herself to relax.

“Some of them. Most of them,” she corrected, her glance automatically seeking her son.

She had been more anxious than usual about her little boy over the past couple of days. Every time she lost sight of him, which was never for more than a few moments, a bubble of panic rose in her chest, pumping adrenaline into her veins, making her heart lurch. But she could easily see Andy holding the Game Boy in a death grip as he stared, enthralled, at the complex instruments.

He was fine. Sam had even assured her that he was safe.

For the moment, with Sam there, she realized that Andy truly was.

The knot that had formed in her stomach yesterday morning actually began to loosen. Grateful for the respite, only now realizing how tense she had been, she pulled the book from her big denim bag and held it out with both hands. “I’m afraid I won’t be needing lessons, though. Thank you, anyway.”

The weathered creases in his forehead deepened as he reached for the bulky volume. Confusion colored his tone. “What changed your mind?”

“That book, for one thing. I had no idea until I started reading it how complicated it all would be. Even if you could teach me how to get a plane off the ground, I can’t afford the money or the time it would it take for real lessons and to get a license. Doc Jackson will be leaving in a couple of weeks. It would be a couple of years before I could fly a plane on my own.”

“It wouldn’t take that long.”

“It would for me. I wouldn’t want to leave Andy all those hours, either.” She didn’t want to leave him at all. “It’s like you with your children,” she explained, because there was no need to tell him why she didn’t want her child out of her sight. “You said you hated leaving them any more than you already have to. I feel the same way about Andy.

“I’ll still watch Jason and Jenny,” she hurried to assure him, “but I’ll have to find some other way to get veterinary care.”

Ratchets and wrenches rattled as Sam set the book atop the chest-high portable toolbox under the tip of the wing. The entire time she’d been backing down from flying lessons, he’d been waiting for her to back down from watching his kids. He’d felt it coming as surely as sunset over the Pacific. Since she had just unexpectedly eliminated that worry, he now was simply feeling mystified.

He had already told himself he didn’t have to understand this woman to work with her. He’d even expected her to throw him off guard. After all, it wasn’t every day a man encountered a woman who informed him out of the blue that she wasn’t going to sleep with him. Or who practically begged him to teach her to fly so she could rescue the local wildlife.

He’d been unwillingly impressed by that desire, too. Though he’d never considered himself particularly jaded, he had to admit there really wasn’t much that did impress him anymore.

He also had to admit that the idea of sex with her had crept into his thoughts with disquieting regularity.

The phenomenon was nothing more than a power-of-suggestion thing. He wouldn’t have thought of it if she hadn’t put the idea in his head. He felt certain of that. But thoughts of how soft her skin would feel, of burying his fingers in the wild tangle of her hair, of how shapely she was beneath the baggy clothes she wore, had crept into his mind, his sleep. The unwanted mental images had to be why his body had tightened when she’d touched him. And why the fresh wildflower scent of her had him feeling as taut as a trip wire every time he breathed it in.

“Do you mind if I ask you something personal?”

“That depends.” With his glance on her mouth, hesitation slipped over her face. “What do you want to know?”