“Hey there, Miss Fraser.”
She didn’t need to see his face to know who was there. His familiar voice felt like a warm caress sliding up her neck, and her arm tingled where he’d touched it. The sensation surprised her because she’d thought her skin was too numb to feel anything.
Still, when she turned to face him, she did her best to appear surprised. Already a large man, Alex appeared massive wearing bunker pants and a cumbersome tan jacket with reflective bands on its chest, bottom edge and sleeves. He must have left his helmet in the truck.
“Oh, Mr. Donovan, it’s good to see you again.” She cleared her throat. “I mean…well, the circumstances aren’t the best, but—”
“I know what you mean.”
She smiled, grateful he’d saved her from whatever inane thing she would have said if she’d had time to come up with one. “Sorry about the false alarm.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“We’ve had a few lately.”
His nod and his frown combined. “It’s unfortunate and not just because it’s illegal to trigger a false alarm. If you have a lot of false alarms, people begin to not take them seriously.”
It was Dinah’s turn to frown. She’d worried about that exact thing. “You don’t mean…”
He shook his head as he must have picked up on her meaning. “No, the fire department responds every time as though it’s a real emergency. Even to those locations where there’s a bad track record.”
Dinah grimaced. Her school certainly had one of those.
But instead of criticizing as he had every right to, Alex waved away the situation as water under the bridge.
“What can you do?” he said with a sigh as he scanned the rows of students. “Since I was here anyway, I thought I would come over and say hello to my best girl.”
Dinah swallowed hard, and her neck tingled before she had the chance to really process what he’d said. Best girl? Did guys in the New Millennium still use an old term like that? Maybe they did when they were referring to a child who looked up to them with adoration in her huge, light brown eyes.
Chelsea was doing just that when Dinah caught the tiny blonde’s approach in her side vision. The child’s cap of straight, chin-length hair blew every which way, and her long-sleeved T-shirt probably wasn’t keeping her warm, but Chelsea still grinned like a child on Christmas morning as she stared at her hero.
Best girl. Of course. It humiliated Dinah to admit that, just for a second, she’d wished Alex had been talking about her. Who could blame the little girl for some hero adoration over Alex when Dinah had a mild case of that herself, and she was nowhere near a child.
“Hi, Uncle Alex,” Chelsea said almost shyly as she stepped closer to him.
“Get over here, you goofy kid.” Alex bent at the waist and held his hands wide.
That wouldn’t have been Dinah’s choice for what to say to a child, but the petite nine-year-old grinned and ran into his arms. So much for what she knew.
“Did you come here to put out the fire?” Chelsea asked him when she pulled back.
“There’s no fire. It’s a false alarm.”
“Oh.” The child stared back at the building and nodded as if just realizing that it wouldn’t be burning to the ground today.
“But you should always react to an alarm as if there could be a real fire,” he reminded her.
“Okay.”
Dinah couldn’t help but smile at that. Alex was so worried about being an inadequate guardian, and already Chelsea accepted his direction without question. Sometimes she would have given anything to have that kind of authority in the classroom.
“What are you smiling about?”
Alex lifted an eyebrow when Dinah turned after hearing his question. His bare hands must have been cold because he stuffed them in the pockets of his jacket.
When he might have looked away, he continued to watch her. His intelligent eyes seemed to see right through her, to recognize the loneliness in her that she’d always tried to hide. She wasn’t used to feeling this exposed, and yet for the life of her, she couldn’t look away.
If not for the bell that rang, signaling the all clear and making her leap back at least four inches, she might have gone right on staring back at him. Alex seemed to look away reluctantly, as well.
As if they both remembered where they were at the same time, Alex and Dinah glanced down at Chelsea. The two of them hadn’t been the only ones staring the last few minutes, and the child’s knowing smile hinted at just what she’d seen. Chelsea looked back and forth between them, her smile widening. If Alex really had been able to look into Dinah’s eyes and sense her thoughts, maybe Chelsea shared that family trait.
Dinah cleared her throat and turned to the rest of the class. “Okay, everyone. It’s time to go back inside. Please keep quiet and stay in line until we reach the classroom.”
“Well, I’d better get back to the truck. See you tonight, kiddo.” Alex gave Chelsea one last hug.
“Good seeing you, Mr. Donovan.”
Dinah started forward, putting on an air of nonchalance that she hoped Alex would buy. She couldn’t remember ever being around a man who put her nerve endings on alert the way he did. Her palms were so damp that she would be embarrassed if one of her students took her hand on the way inside the building. Despite her best resistance, she glanced over her shoulder at Alex, hoping he wouldn’t catch her.
He did, and he smiled and waved. “Goodbye, Miss Fraser. Tell Reverend Fraser I said hello.”
Dinah swallowed. If he knew about her family, why had he pretended not to the other day? But she had no time to process the information, not when she had twenty-four students behind her, who all needed to return to their classroom. Their chatter followed her inside the building and down the hall, but she didn’t take time to correct them.
She had a job to do, had a class full of third-graders relying on her to restore order and to make them feel safe at school, and she wouldn’t let anything, even her own hormones, get in the way of her doing it.
Soon, she’d taken her place behind her desk, and the students were back at their own grouped desks working on the illustrations for their personal narratives as they had been before the alarm. Dinah had just opened her copy of The Secret Garden again, when Chelsea raised her hand. Dinah would have been annoyed with the interruption, but at least the child was participating in class again.
“Yes, Chelsea? Do you need help with something?”
Chelsea nodded, as if she had a serious matter to discuss. Dinah straightened in her chair. She wasn’t sure what she would say if Chelsea said she was worried her father would die in the war or that her mother might not survive her cancer treatment. Should she encourage her to talk, even if it wasn’t the most appropriate time? Dinah braced her hands on the edge of her
