Teresa Hill - Someone To Watch Over Me

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

“And thanks for meeting here today.”

“It’s no problem. I didn’t have anything to do and…” She frowned, looking away. “It’s fine.”

Scared and at loose ends, in a town where she probably didn’t know a lot of people, Jax figured. And kindhearted, just as he’d suspected.

He took a long drink of water and then started dabbing at the sweat on his arms and face with the towel.

She glanced at him, and then just as quickly looked away.

Shy, scared and lonely, he corrected himself. Not at all his type. “I’ll hurry,” he promised.

“Okay. I’ll be uh…I’ll be out front. Whenever you’re ready.”

Jax wiped off the worst of the sweat. When he came back to the front of the shop, with Romeo trotting after him, Gwen had her head stuck in a cooler full of flowers by the front window.

“Gwen, is it okay for me to be here with you?” He hesitated five feet away once again. “Last night…I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

She whirled around to face him. He saw heat blooming in her cheeks. She closed her eyes for a moment, then managed to give him the barest of smiles. “It’s all right. And it’s not you. Not your fault.”

Yeah, but it was some man’s.

“So…” She put a determined smile on her sad face. “Did your mother have a favorite flower? Do you have any idea what she would have wanted?”

Which meant she didn’t want to talk about this with him, which was fine too. Her right. He was just curious, thinking there might be something he could do to help. But he’d leave that for another day.

Not one when he was planning his mother’s funeral.

“She liked anything bright and cheery,” he said, frowning at the flower case, full to overflowing. “You know, I just thought of something. She made her own funeral arrangements, and she might have specified something in her instructions. Which I just left on the refrigerator at home.” He frowned yet again. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I know how difficult this is. I mean, I don’t really know. My mother’s…She’s fine. But we do a lot of flowers for funerals, so I’ve seen a lot of people trying to handle this and…I understand. You’re welcome to use the phone by the cash register, if you think anyone’s home.”

“Sure. I’ll try that.” He found the phone, made the call. Kim was there, and he frowned as she read the arrangements his mother had made.

“Couldn’t find it?” Gwen asked once he hung up.

“No. We did. She didn’t want any flowers. She said people had already spent a fortune on flowers for her, while she was sick—”

“They had. She had a lot of people who cared about her.”

“Yeah. And she was really into her cancer support group, said the group needed money for their programs a lot more than she needed more flowers, so she asked everyone to make a donation instead.”

“Lots of people make requests like that. If you’ll leave a name and address for the support group, we’ll keep it here, in case people call to order flowers.”

“Okay. Thanks.” He rubbed his hands against his forehead, which absolutely ached, and then remembered. “I’m sorry. I took up your Sunday afternoon for nothing.”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine. I didn’t have anything planned, and honestly, it’s…Well, sometimes the days are so long, you know?”

“Oh, yeah. I know. Cancer time, we called it, like the regular rules of time didn’t even apply.” Days could creep along so that every minute was agony.

“You miss her terribly, don’t you?”

He nodded. “And it’s selfish of me, that I’d wish one more day like that on her, but…I guess everybody thinks they’re going to have time to say everything they wanted to say, and now I wonder if anyone ever gets enough time to say it all or to do everything they always thought they’d do.”

Jax looked up self-consciously, realizing he’d said a lot more than he intended. Judging from the look on Gwen’s face, he’d either said way too much or something terribly wrong.

“I’m sorry. Did you lose someone recently?”

“No.” She hesitated. “Not really. I just…I almost lost myself.”

She said it with a sad, apologetic smile, as if that wouldn’t really count, losing herself. And he wondered if she meant it literally—if she’d nearly died—or if she was talking figuratively.

How out of line would he be to ask that question? Not that they seemed to be observing any of the boundaries of what ordinarily constituted polite conversation. He supposed having someone die did that to people.

“Gwen, just so you know, I’m going to be staying at my mother’s for a while. The lease on my apartment was up two months ago, and she really didn’t need to be alone then, so I moved back in. I haven’t even started to think about finding my own place again. So if you need someone to talk to or if anything happens, anytime at all, just give me a call or come knock on the door. Or you can always call the police department and ask for me. I’m off this week and maybe next week, but I’ll be back there soon.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s good to know there’s someone I can call. Especially someone around the corner.”

“Anything I should know about this situation?” he tried. “I mean, if I were keeping an eye on the place, watching out for trouble, it would help to know what to look for.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she offered.

“Sure I do. It’s my job.”

“Oh. Okay. It’s…It’s a man….” She turned pale and hugged her arms around her own waist. “But then, you probably guessed that much.”

Jax nodded. “What does the guy look like?”

“White. Five-ten, a hundred and eighty pounds, short brown hair, brown eyes, nineteen years old. I could get you a picture.”

“Okay.” Sounded like she’d given out that description more than once. “Is this guy on the loose or locked up?”

“Locked up. In Virginia.”

“Good. Is he going to stay that way?”

She looked truly frightened then. Her eyes got so big, and she looked like he’d just knocked the breath out of her. “He’s supposed to.”

“I mean, has he been convicted and sentenced already?”

She nodded.

“Okay. No reason to think he wouldn’t stay locked up. I know that’s easy for me to say, when I’m not the one he hurt or whatever it was that he did to you.” Jax really didn’t want to know exactly what the guy had done. “He’ll stay there, Gwen. Trust that. And I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Romeo came up to her and nudged her hand until it was resting against his head. He looked up at her with something that bore a remarkable resemblance to a smile and made silly dog noises at her that Romeo probably thought were both soothing and charming, and she just ate it up.

His mother swore Jax could do the same thing in a heartbeat with a skittish female crime victim and that his father could, too. Jax was highly skeptical of that notion, and offended, too. He didn’t flirt with women who’d just been traumatized by crime. That would be crass, and he tried never to be that. And he wasn’t nearly as shameless as Romeo.

Gwen rubbed the dog’s ears and hugged him to her side for a moment. Romeo gave her his poor-misunderstood-hound-dog look. He got a lot of affection out of that expression, too.

Shameless. The dog was absolutely shameless.

And women were never skittish around Romeo.

Not that Jax was jealous of a dog.

“Give it a break, Romeo,” he said finally.

Romeo made a face at him, then turned back to Gwen and most likely laid his poor-misunderstood-hound-dog look on her again.