Everybody's Hero

Joe smiled. “I’ve heard the name, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a reader. Not anymore, at least. Not since…” He pushed aside the cloud of memory to think back. “Not really since high school.” The realization surprised him—had it really been that long since he’d indulged in the simple pleasure of reading a novel?

Fortunately, before these people managed to find out what size drawers he wore, the electrical contractor returned, giving Joe an excuse to sidestep any further discussion about his personal life and retreat once again into the safe, generally orderly world of bids, supplies and schedules, a world over which he had a fair amount of control.

As opposed to the world where he had virtually none.

On brutally hot days like this, by midafternoon not even the littlest ones were much interested in moving. So Taylor usually settled them in the grass under one of the big old cottonwoods out behind the church, reading aloud until their parents came to get them or they nodded off. She loved changing her voice to match each character, seriously getting off on the glow of delight when she’d glance up and see a batch of wide eyes and, sometimes, open mouths. And the giggles. She lived for the giggles.

And at the moment, she’d give her right arm to hear Seth Salazar giggle.

When he wasn’t checking the huge watch smothering his narrow wrist, the boy was attentive enough, sitting cross-legged a little apart from the rest of the children. Although his slender fingers absently plucked at the blades of grass in front of his ankles, his solemn gaze stayed on her the entire time she read. But when the other kids howled at Junie B. Jones’s antics, Seth would barely crack a smile. His body was there, but clearly his mind was elsewhere.

“Joe!” he cried, leaping to his feet.

Like wondering when his brother would come rescue him, Taylor guessed, as the boy tore across the yard.

While the younger counselors herded the remaining kids inside for the last snack of the day, Taylor got to her feet, her knees protesting at sitting on the hard ground for so long, her brain giving her what-for for putting off the inevitable. Which would be—she turned—seeing Joe Salazar scoop his little brother up into his arms.

Strong, solid arms.

Against a strong, solid chest.

All barely hidden underneath the soft folds of a dusty blue workshirt.

Yep, it was just as bad as she thought it would be.

Taylor plastered a smile to her face and trooped over to the pair, just in time to hear Seth give Joe grief about being late.

“It was only a couple minutes, buddy,” Joe said, lowering his brother to the ground. “Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt the reading.”

“You were listening?” Taylor said, thinking, hmm…when was the last time some guy had made her stomach flutter? No, wait, she remembered: Mason. Her ex.

The fluttering might have degenerated into a vague nausea had Joe not smiled for her. Not exactly a laid-back, no-holds-barred smile, but a smile nonetheless. A smile sparkling in a face darkened by a suggestion of late-day beard shadow.

As Blair and company would say, this was so not fair.

“I was listening,” Joe said, and something in his voice or eyes or somewhere in there made Taylor suspect she wasn’t the only one here dodging a few red flags. A revelation which, aggravatingly enough, managed to flatter and annoy her at the same time. “Although I’m not sure who was having more fun—you or the kids.”

He wasn’t flirting, she was sure of it. Well, as sure as someone who hadn’t been flirted with in about a million years—except for Hootch Atkins, and he definitely did not count—could be. Then she noticed Seth’s head bopping back and forth between them, and Didi’s cocked eyebrow when she came outside and saw them standing there, and then fourteen-year-old April Gundersen tripped over a tree root because she was gawking at them instead of watching where she was going. Taylor realized she wasn’t sure of anything anymore, except that she didn’t feel much older than April, which probably wasn’t a good thing.

Then, to her horror, she heard herself going on about how she’d always been a big ham ever since she was little, how she’d set up her stuffed animals in rows—and her little sister, if she could get her to sit still long enough—and perform, making up stories as she went along and how she’d even thought about becoming an actor at one point, but had given it up when she realized all she really wanted to do was…teach…kids.

Whoa. Hot flash sneak preview. Not fun.

“Well,” Joe said, not looking a whole lot more comfortable than Taylor felt. “You’re very good.” Then he turned to Seth. “So how was your first day?” When all he got was a noncommittal shrug in reply, he added, “That good, huh?”

Another shrug.

“Guess he forgot about the worms we had for lunch,” Taylor said, which earned her startled looks from both brothers.

One day, maybe she’d start acting like a normal person. But the world probably shouldn’t hold its breath for that one. Joe muttered something about their needing to head to the store to find something for dinner, then left, Seth’s hand securely in his.

“Don’t look now,” Didi said behind Taylor, scaring her half to death, “but you look like you just saw the mother ship land in Cal Logan’s pasture.”

Taylor grunted and headed back to the Sunday school building, thinking she’d take a close encounter with a horde of little green men over one with Joe Salazar any day.

And if that didn’t make her certifiably insane, she didn’t know what did.

What the hell had just happened?

Joe yanked a grocery cart loose from the nested mass at the front of the Homeland, making Seth jerk beside him. Blessedly frigid air-conditioning soothed his heated skin, but not the dumb, pointless, totally off-the-wall fire raging inside him.

Five minutes. Five lousy minutes, he’d spent with Taylor. Five minutes of inane, completely innocent conversation. No sexual overtones whatsoever. Yet here he was, fighting to walk straight. What kind of man gets turned on by a woman reading a children’s story, for crying out loud?

The kind of man who was currently standing in a crowded supermarket with an eight-year-old beside him and thinking about breasts.

What the hell? Joe never thought about breasts, for God’s sake. At least not as often as he did when he was seventeen. Or twelve. But now, suddenly, mammary images crowded his thoughts like steak a starving man’s on a desert island. He shut his eyes to get his bearings, and saw nipples. Pink ones, on pale, translucent skin.

Like redheads had.

“So…you like spaghetti?” he barked to the child depending on him not to get distracted by things like sex and breasts—

No less than five women scowled at him.

—and a silky voice that changed like mercury as she read, making children laugh.

“Not really,” Seth said.

Joe let out a long, ragged breath and the breasts went away. Thank God. Strangling the grocery cart handle, he glowered at his little brother. “Whoever heard of a little kid who didn’t like spaghetti?”

The poor kid flinched, his brows practically meeting in the middle. “It makes me gag.”

Terrific. The one thing Joe knew how to cook with any reasonable success, and the kid didn’t like it. They’d eaten out most of the past three weeks, but that was in Oklahoma City where there were a few more restaurant choices than Ruby’s Diner or the Dairy Queen halfway between here and Claremore. Not that Ruby’s didn’t seem like a great place, but he’d lay odds Ruby Kennedy was the kind of women who had pity running in her veins. For hurting kids, for lost souls, for lonely men who couldn’t cook and who hallucinated about breasts in supermarkets because they couldn’t remember the last time they had sex worth remembering.

And anyway, if he was going to have this kid living with him for the next ten or so years—a thought which damn near stopped his breath—they couldn’t eat out every night. Which meant one of them was going to have to learn to cook.

“So what do you like?”

“Tacos?”

Okay, he could probably swing that. Joe steered the cart toward the meat section, Seth not exactly trotting along behind him. Every few feet or so, somebody would smile and nod, or say, “Hey.” Joe nodded and smiled and heyed back, but all this friendliness was beginning to get on his nerves.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say he felt trapped. In this town, in this life, by circumstances. By phantom, probably pink-tipped breasts he was pretty sure he’d never get to see.

A smile he’d never get to kiss.

“What else besides tacos?” he said, tossing a package of ground beef into the cart.

“Hamburgers. And fries.”