Redwood Bend (Virgin River #18)(15)

“Yeah?” she asked, returning the grin. “I’ll clean up later. I thought you left. I heard the gang pulled outta town.”

“The boys left,” he said, slapping his gloves into the palm of his hand and looking around her clearing. “I’m hanging out for a couple of days. Taking a closer look at this place. Interesting area.”

“Don’t you have a job?” she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

“Right now this is my job,” he answered. “Don’t you have a job?”

She gave him that one, laughing. “Besides mothering five-year-old boys? Not yet,” she said, finally taking her feet off the rail and standing up. She tugged on her shorts; they’d been riding up. “Want a Coke?”

“Why not.” He shrugged.

“Can okay?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She disappeared into the cabin and was back in seconds with a cold can. She handed it to him and he studied it briefly. “Diet,” he finally said.

“Well, if I sat on a vibrating machine all day, I probably wouldn’t have to watch my weight, either. By the way, who pays you to do that? I might be interested in that job.”

He came up on the porch and casually took the second chair, propping his feet up on the rail as hers had been. He wore leather pointy-toed cowboy boots; she wore old beat-up tennis shoes with a little oil on them.

“I probably wasn’t clear. The bike was recreation while I was riding with my friends but it’s now transportation—I’m here on business.” He popped the top on the can and took a drink. He made a face.

She returned to her seat, put her feet back on the rail. “What kind of business?”

“Well…my friends and I have a small air charter operation in Montana. Very small. A little airport in the middle of a bunch of national parks, great hunting grounds and dude ranches that aren’t doing such a great business right now. People are a little too hard up for fancy vacations. So I’m checking out the area fixed base operations to see if there’s any opportunity around here.”

She sat up a little. “Really? You fly?”

He gave a nod. “I fly. Our airport is a long way from the big airports, so, sometimes people need a puddle jumper. Or a charter to a lodge or something.”

Genuinely interested, she turned and faced him. “Fun,” she said, smiling. “I’d love to do that. Fly planes. Or jump out of them. Fun.”

“Why don’t you?” he asked. Because it never occurred to Dylan that you didn’t pursue any old thing that came to mind.

She laughed indulgently. “Oh, gosh, a little busy, I guess. And my line of work never left a lot of disposable income for extras, like learning to fly or skydive or mountain climbing or…or a lot of things.”

“What line of work is that?” he asked, completely interested.

“Hmm,” she said, taking a drink of her soda. “Well, my dad owned a hardware store, in which I was working on Saturdays by the time I was eleven. By the time I was twenty and had a couple of years of college under my belt, both my parents were gone, and Conner and I were struggling to run the store. He made sure I stayed in school, but I worked as hard in that store as he did until I got married and moved away.”

“In a hardware store?” he asked. Then he gave a little laugh. “She changes tires and changes oil…”

“I do a lot of things. When the boys came along, Conner stuck me with paperwork. I was happier in the store, building things, helping customers learn how to build and repair things, but you know—a person can only do so much.” She whistled and shook her head. “Twins. Couldn’t be twin girls, right? I’m probably better off with boys, given that I enjoy team sports a lot more than things like ballet and origami.”

He looked into her eyes. “You were kind of busy, I guess.”

“I lost Charlie right before they were born,” she said. “If not for Conner, I don’t know what I would’ve done, so when he gets all big brother on me, I let it go. But from twenty-one to twenty-six I worked full-time in that store. I worked as hard as Conner and I did as much, too. I wasn’t some girlie girl who could only do the books. I trained to be a phys ed teacher, but we had a commitment to the store.”

Now, this business about losing Charlie, this brought Dylan upright. His feet came off the rail; he turned toward her, leaning his elbows on his knees and said, “If you don’t mind my asking about Charlie…”

“He was army. He was deployed, I was pregnant, he was killed on a mission, the details of which I’ll never know, and the boys never knew him. But I have medals and pictures and I try to be sure they know about their dad. He was a great guy. He was a hero. When they’re older, they’ll be proud of him.”

Dylan nearly blanched. The closest he would ever come to being that kind of hero would be playing one in a movie. “Army widow,” he said for lack of anything intelligent.

“Army widow.”

He cleared his throat. “And you can do all the guy chores because…”

She looked at him with dead seriousness. “My dad taught Conner and I all the mechanical and maintenance stuff. He was so proud of that—that he didn’t cut me out of the loop. That store was to be in the family for as long as we wanted it to be. And it was to be as much mine as Conner’s. You don’t get a bigger cut for being a boy.” Then she laughed and said, “My mother did none of that stuff, by the way. She was old-fashioned and not very stylish. She cooked and cleaned and tended kids. She could never have been a soccer or softball coach and I might’ve been such a disappointment to her—I pitched girl’s softball rather than sewing or learning to bake. But when I was fourteen she said, ‘Katie, never underestimate the power of red lipstick.’ From that point on I knew when their anniversary was because they went out to dinner alone and she put on the red lipstick.” And she laughed. “My parents were pretty boring,” she added. “But they were in love in their own way. I mean, come on,” she said with a lift of a brow. “Red lipstick! Priceless, right?”