“Mike pay you back yet?” Gabe asked shortly.
“Nope.”
Mike Wade was a friend who’d had his leg blown off in Iraq. Mac had loaned ten grand to help him keep his house, which was underwater. Mike had sworn he’d had a line on a job and he could pay Mac back in full pretty soon, but he hadn’t been to any of the meetings for weeks. And before he’d even offered the money, Mac had promised himself that he would never hound the guy with calls or visits. His credo was: don’t give or loan anything you can’t afford to lose.
He wondered if that applied to his own stony little heart, too.
Which was smarting right now, with righteous indignation. Almost as though it wasn’t made of stone. He knew better, though.
“Sorry, man.” Gabe knew what Mac could have done with that ten thousand dollars.
Mac just shrugged. “I wouldn’t have done it differently, but the timing kinda blows.”
Quite an understatement. It was a large part of why he wasn’t offering Avalon actual dough for the house. Which was why he was left working whimsical strategies that were effective in the short-term but doomed to fail, because her head was as hard as a rock. Lucky for her.
As hard as her heart was soft.
And her lips. Her lips were soft. He remembered that all too well.
And her eyes.
“So... I heard through the grapevine that Avalon Harwood bought that house at Devil’s Leap.”
“Oh, but she did indeed,” Mac said darkly. “That she did.”
Gabe regarded him wonderingly. “What’s with the ‘indeed’? Are you Irish, suddenly?”
“Drunkish,” Mac corrected. And took another sip.
“Sorry, man. Really sorry. About the house. If I could I would have—”
“You’re a freaking elementary school principal. And a veteran. You can’t afford it. But that, as far as I’m concerned, is about as heroic as it gets. After the dayIhad the other day, not sure which one you deserve more medals for.”
“Oh yeah. I actually heard all about your tomato garden and the worms and your goats. A few girls can’t stop talking about it.”
“Yeah?” Mac was oddly flattered by this.
“Yeah. Seems they were playing ‘Tomato Worms’ at recess. They put their fingers like horns over their heads and tried to ram each other with them. Two of them got in a fight over it and one got poked in the eye and they both wound up in the office for hair pulling.”
This was actually pretty funny. “I did make the worms sound pretty dangerous and badass. At least they learned something.”
“They all, and I quote, ‘totally want to do it again.’”
“Huh.” Despite himself, this was rather gratifying. “I put them to work finding tomato worms. Their little sharp beady eyes and their teeny little fingers came in surprisingly handy. Child labor laws are so yesterday.”
Gabe snorted. “Apparently you taught them a lot about worms and dirt and the growing cycles of tomatoes and I got a lecture on all of that from Annelise Harwood. They areintoit. How the hell did that even come about? Apart from the fact that you like to tell people what you know and boss people around.”
“Let’s just say there was an unexpected Hummingbird invasion on my property. I was ambushed. They took me hostage. How do you say no to all those little pleading eyes? I’m seriously asking. Seriously. That Annelise Harwood at the head of the pack.”
“That little girl is going to be president one day.”
“I think she wants to be a rock star.”
“Well, it’s really only a matter of time before a rock star is elected president, so.”
Mac understood, fully, perhaps for the first time, what it might be like to root for a kid. To savor the moment-by-moment gleeful chaos and actually relish helping them turn out to be whoever they wanted to be. His own dad had been an aggressive chiseler in more ways than one. He’d done his damnedest to turn Mac and Ty into chips off the old block. It had worked with Ty, pretty much.
Mac wasn’t made of anything so malleable as rock.
