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
