Crossing his arms on the counter, the slightly built child plopped his chin on his narrow wrists and smiled up at Sam.
“Hi,” the boy said easily.
A dimple winked by his perfect little mouth. His eyes were the same gray green as the woman’s beside him.
“Hi, yourself,” Sam replied, recognizing him instantly as her son.
“Winona Sykes brought him to me a few days ago,” T.J. continued, smiling at the tiny ball of fur in the cage. Reaching through the wires, she gently stroked one tiny hand-like paw. “He’s only a few weeks old and needs to be fed every couple of hours. That’s why we bring him to work with us.”
Sam recognized Winona as the mayor’s wife. He recognized the critter in the cage as a baby raccoon. The thing was so small its mask had barely begun to show. “Why did she bring it to you?”
“People often bring me wounded or orphaned animals.” She spoke with a shrug in her voice, as if there was nothing at all unusual about the occurrence. “Or I rescue them myself if I hear of one that needs help. We have about a dozen animals living at our place right now.” Softness entered her voice as she glanced at her son. “Isn’t that right, Andy?”
The child’s nose wrinkled as he cranked his neck back. “I forgot. How many is a dozen?”
“Twelve.”
The wrinkles remained long enough for him to equate the number with the word. Comprehension dawning, he gave his mom a nod. “Yeah. A dozen. ’Cept this makes thirteen.”
“The animals are why I wanted to see if I can fly,” she explained to Sam as she reached beneath the counter. “Doc Jackson has to move to the mainland because his heart is getting bad and there’s no one to take his place.”
With a metallic clink against the counter, she set a can of kitten formula on it, popped the top and poured an ounce into a medicine cup. After drawing some of the liquid into an eyedropper, she touched the end of the dropper to the tiny animal’s seeking mouth.
“Can I do it, Mom?”
Smiling at her son’s request, she handed over the dropper. “Just remember to keep him on his stomach. That’s the way these guys eat best.
“I suppose I can learn to do rabies checks and that sort of thing myself,” she continued to Sam while she watched her son dispense several drops into the hungry orphan’s waiting mouth. “I won’t risk having an infected animal around Andy or the other animals,” she explained. “But without a vet, I won’t be able to take care of the sicker or more severely injured ones.
“Unless,” she added, suddenly meeting his eyes across the cage and the counter, “you would be willing to fly them to the vet over on Orcas Island or to Bellingham yourself?”
For the first time since he’d walked in, Sam saw a flicker of spirit in her 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