Justine Davis - Always a Hero

“Hard to do when until seven months ago I never even knew he existed.”

Kai stared at the man standing on the other side of the counter. So many impressions were tumbling through her mind that she’d almost forgotten her first one, that those eyes, Jordy’s vivid green eyes, looked far too exhausted for a man in his line of work.

Jordy’s whine—because the long, wound-up complaint had indeed been that—echoed in her head. He’s a pill counter. He counts how many packages of cold pills they put in the boxes. How lame is that? And he wouldn’t even have that job if old man Hunt didn’t owe him a favor.

She had understood Jordy’s anger about his life, agreed he had a right to be upset, having been uprooted from the only home he knew and dragged a thousand miles away, away from his school, his friends. But this had hit a hot button with her, and it had been an effort to answer quietly.

“My dad worked in a canning plant once,” she’d told him. “Dead fish all day. He hated it. But he did it. Because he had a family to take care of, because he wanted me to have a roof over my head and food on the table. It’s called responsibility, Jordy. It’s called being an adult.”

Jordy had stared at her incredulously. “You standing up for him?”

“Nobody does everything wrong.”

Those words came back to her now as she stared at the pill counter. Of all the things this man might be in life, that was one she never would have guessed at if she didn’t already know. Because despite the weariness in his eyes, he was the most intense man she’d ever seen, and in her former life she’d seen some prime examples.

And she wasn’t sure she liked that intensity being turned on her.

Sexy girl rocker….

How could she be so flattered and so irritated at him at the same time? Perhaps it was the way he’d said it, so casually, as if it were self-evident. And he couldn’t know he was hitting a nerve.

A nerve that made her say, rather sharply, “Your wife has a kid and you never knew? How did that work?”

“She … wasn’t my wife. Then.”

Kai considered this, puzzled over it, and the only answer that fit was that he’d married her after he found out about Jordy. The boy hadn’t mentioned it, only that he’d never known his father, and wished his mother had never married him. She’d assumed he’d walked out on them, which had given her even more reason not to like the man.

Seven months, he’d said.

Jordy’s mother, he’d told her, died six months ago.

Which meant Wyatt Blake married her knowing she was dying.

Or perhaps because?

This put a whole new light on things for her. Whatever else his sins were, and according to Jordy they were many, Wyatt Blake was obviously trying to do the right thing by his son. The concern that had driven him here was apparently real, and somehow knowing that made his rude, accusatory questions easier to stomach. No less annoying, but slightly less temper-provoking.

“Look, Mr. Blake,” she began, “Jordy’s having a tough time. He misses the place he knew, his friends….”

“Those friends he misses are why we’re here. He was headed down a bad road.”

“At thirteen?”

“You think there’s an age limit? You of all people should know better.”

She bristled anew, her kinder thoughts about him forgotten. “Me, of all people?”

He jerked a thumb toward the photograph. “Half the kids in that audience were probably high.”

That hit a little too close to a nerve that would never heal, and she didn’t want to talk about it, especially not to this man who seemed intent on his interrogation and entirely oblivious of her efforts to be reasonable.

“What exactly do you want, Mr. Blake? I told you your son is here and what he’s doing. If you’re afraid of him falling under my evil sway, you can order him not to come back. But I’ll tell you up front that you’ll regret it.”

His brows lowered, and he looked even more intense. And, she admitted, intimidating. But she stood her ground, even when he said in a voice that sent a chill through her, “Is that a threat?”

“That,” she said determinedly, “is a simple fact. Playing is the one thing, the only thing, Jordy likes in his life right now. You take it away from him, give him no solace for what’s been done to him, and you’ll lose him completely.”

“Done to him? I brought him here to keep him out of some serious trouble. He was hanging with some kids who were headed that way fast.”

“Fine. But he’s in no danger here. Contrary to what you think.”

“Why should I believe you?”

Exasperation crowded out the wariness his voice had roused in her. “Why shouldn’t you? Or do you approach everyone you don’t even know with the assumption they’re lying?”

For an instant she saw something that looked like surprise cross his face. Then, in a voice she found, perhaps oddly, incredibly sad, he gave her an equally sad answer. “Yes.”

Again she got that impression of utter and total exhaustion. Not so much physical, he looked too fit and leanly muscled for that, but mentally. And emotionally, if she was willing to admit he might have any emotions other than anger, which she wasn’t. She—

Her thoughts broke off as Jordy emerged from the soundproof room. The boy stopped dead when he spotted his father.

“What are you doing here?”

The words held a barely suppressed anger tinged with a hurt it took a moment for Kai to figure out. Then she realized this had been Jordy’s safe place, the one place his father hadn’t known about and therefore didn’t intrude upon. And now that was gone, and, judging by his expression, he felt he had nothing left that was his.

“Looking for you. So you can explain why you lied about studying after school.”

Jordy flushed. “I lied to keep you off my back.”

“Yet here I am. Again. Go get in the car.”

Something in his words made Kai remember Jordy’s story about the times he’d run away after they’d first come here, and how his father always seemed to find him and drag him back, no matter how hard he tried to hide where he’d gone. That had to mean he cared, didn’t it? Or did it mean Jordy was right, that his father only wanted him so he could push him around?

When Jordy had first started coming here—after the third futile effort to run away—she’d wondered, enough that she kept a close eye on the boy for any sign of abuse. Finally she’d asked him, and Jordy’s surprise, then grudging admittance that his father had never struck him, told her it was the truth.

“He put a fist through a wall once, though,” Jordy had said, as if he felt he needed to prove to her that his father was as bad as he’d been saying.

“Better than backhanding you in the face,” she’d pointed out, and Jordy had subsided. She wasn’t so far removed from her own teenage years that she didn’t remember what a pain she herself had been, and sometimes she wondered why her own father hadn’t slapped her silly a time or two.

So she empathized with Jordy, tremendously. But now that Wyatt Blake was standing here, looking at the boy who looked so much like him with such frustration, she found herself empathizing with him as well. Not because of the frustration, but because beneath it she thought she saw something else.

Fear.

Whether it was fear of failing at the job he thought he sucked at, or of what would happen to Jordy if he did fail, she didn’t know. But either way, she knew that deep down this man did care.

“My mom was so wrong,” Jordy said. “She always told me you were a hero. But you’re not and I hate you.”

His father just took it. He never even reacted, and Kai guessed he’d heard it all before. His flat “I know” tugged at something deep inside her. Moved by that unexpected emotion, and remembering what Marilyn had said earlier, she spoke as if Jordy hadn’t said any of it.