She shook her head, reaching into her handbag for her cell phone. “I’ll call my dad. He can be here in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll have you home in ten. You can take a photo of my license plate number and send it to your father if that makes you feel safer.”
“Oh, no. It’s not that.” She wasn’t afraid of him. He was on the Team, after all. He’d probably been through a dozen background checks. “My little boy and I are sick with strep throat, and I don’t want to get you sick, too.”
“All the more reason to get you home, ma’am.” He grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. “Besides, I have a monster immune system. I don’t get sick.”
* * *
Jesse Moretti stowed awaythe jumper cables and transferred the woman’s groceries from her trunk to the cargo hold of his Jeep, while she got both kids buckled into their car seats in the back. He climbed into the driver’s seat and turned up the heater, looking at the children in his rearview mirror.
He hadn’t had little kids in his vehicle since, well … ever.
The little boy whimpered. His sister sucked her thumb.
“We’ll get you home. Okay?” His gaze settled for a moment on the children’s mother. Beneath the fatigue and fever, she had a pretty face, with high cheekbones, a little upturned nose, and a full mouth. There was snow in her dark blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. It was too dark to see the color of her eyes. “I’m Jesse Moretti.”
“Thanks for the help, Jesse.” She gave a forced smile, clearly feeling like shit. “I’m Ellie Meeks. That’s Daniel and Daisy in the back.”
Daniel and Daisy.
Cute.
He shifted his vehicle into drive, pulled out of the parking lot, and turned left onto the highway, rush hour and snow bringing traffic to a crawl through the center of town.
“I live on Snow Creek Road just beyond mile marker—”
“I know where you live.”
That didn’t sound creepy at all, dumbass.
Did he want her to think he was some kind of stalker?
He tried again. “We’re neighbors. We share a property line. I’ve seen you playing out back with your kids.”
The first time he’d seen her, he’d been standing on his back deck with his real estate agent just before buying the property. She’d been sitting on a blanket, playing with two babies too little to sit up or crawl. His realtor had told him her husband had been killed fighting in Iraq.
That was a story Jesse knew only too well.
Since then, he’d done what he could to support her, shoveling her walk early in the morning on his way to work, moving her trash bin onto the curb when she’d forgotten trash day, and keeping an eye on the house, especially during the summer when tourist season made the crime rate spike.
“You bought the old cabin?” Her face lit up with a genuine smile this time. “And you never came down to introduce yourself?”
“I guess I never got time.”
Bullshit. He had avoided it.
He’d spent ten years of his life in sustained combat operations with Alpha Company, 3rdBattalion, 75th Ranger Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had seen his share of death and slaughter. He had his own emotional shit to deal with. He couldn’t take on anyone else’s.
“You’re with the Team, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I’m a primary member.” He didn’t want to brag, but he’d worked his ass off to make the cut, spending every free moment learning to climb, honing his skills on tough technical routes, even getting certified as an EMT.
“What’s it like?”
He got that question a lot but never had a real answer. How could he explain what being on the Team meant to him? “It’s busy.”
“I bet—especially in the summer.”