Page 84 of His Wounded Heart

He bursts out laughing and I do my best not to join him. I bet he can’t remember a time when his authority was questioned, let alone by a seven-year-old.

He looks over at me, a brilliant smile on his face. “I’ll be right back. Are you going to be here when I return?” he asks. For that smile, I sure as heck will be. I nod.

He catches up with Bella as they walk over to the part of the parking lot that has been cleared of debris where Ashley has parked her car. He and my daughter seem to be having quite the conversation, God knows what it’s about. She’s probably giving him advice about something. Simon opens the back door and pulls on her seat belt to make sure it’s properly buckled before closing the door and I wonder if he has children because it is such a fatherly thing to do.

Ashley heads back out and Simon makes quick work of walking back to me now that he doesn’t have to shorten his steps to match Bella’s. As soon as he reaches me, I hand him two brownies that I had purloined, wrapped in a napkin.

“For me?” He smiles. It’s that same smile again.

Damn!

“Sure are.”

“Well thank you. I’ll have to think of something really nice in return.” Then he winks at me.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Do you want to go and sit on the bleachers with me? I have a thermos of coffee and we can share.”

“I’m coffeed-out for the morning. If I take another hit of caffeine I’ll be zooming into the stratosphere. But it’d be nice to sit down for a while,” I admit.

“It’s tricky around here. We still have debris underneath the slush,” he says as he lightly takes my elbow. Where seconds before I had been cold, now I’m warm. Simon towers over me, and once again I feel fireflies flickering around in my stomach.

“Aren’t you needed to coordinate things?” I ask as we sit down on the bleachers.

“I was just doing that to help block out Arthur’s noise. Dave and Renzo have it covered. What is up with Arthur?”

“He was even like that as a little kid. Luckily, even though we were in the same grade, I didn’t go to the same school as him, but we were in the same school district, so I would occasionally brush shoulders with him.”

“He’s the same age as you? I would have never guessed it with the paunch he has on him and the stooped shoulders. He looks like he’s rounded forty, and you look like you’re in your early twenties.”

“Are you fishing for more information?”

His silver eyes twinkled. “I guess I am.”

“You should have asked my age when we went out to lunch the first time, after we visited with Bernie, Luther and Violet.” I don’t mention the second lunch; that got really deep.

“I was busy finding out your favorite kind of music, and may I say, I was surprised.”

“You were thinking it was going to be all country, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he says as he pours himself a cup of coffee. The man seems to live on it. “I was surprised you liked the big band era.”

“That was Granny Laughton. She introduced all of us girls to it. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, and the Andrew Sisters. They were all great. My sisters and I would go over to Granny’s house and would wear some of her old clothes and pretend to be the Andrews sisters. Granny taught Evie, Drake and I how to ballroom dance.”

“What about the others?”

“Her arthritis got too bad by then.”

“How is your grandmother doing now?”

The question hurts even to this day. “She died six years ago. She left everything to my youngest sister. I want to be like Granny when I grow up.”

I watch Simon take another sip of coffee, then he bites into one of the brownies. “My God, woman, what did you put in this thing? It tastes like I’m biting into the world’s fluffiest piece of fudge. How did you do this?”

“As soon as I was making a little bit of extra money that didn’t have to go to necessities, I asked Pearl to teach me how to bake. She was very kind. She knew we didn’t have enough money to buy her desserts, so she taught me, then after I got her recipes down pat, I started to experiment. The girls loved the treats, and I sent care packages to Drake as often as I could.”

“You’re a caretaker from the word go, aren’t you?” Simon’s question isn’t really a question.