Carolina Dreaming: A Dare Island Novel by Virginia Kantra Page B

weight as the window broke loose, his legs bracing as he lowered it to the ground.
    The kid missed a shot and went running after the ball. Gabe half hauled, half slid the heavy window to the side, ready for the Dumpster. The light glared off the glass, pink and gold. He looked at the sky. Six o’clock. Gabe’s stomach, spoiled by two whole days of regular meals, growled.
    He wondered if Jane had plans for dinner.
    Not that he had plans to ask her out. He’d never in his life had to buy a woman dinner in exchange for sex. And while he’d never hooked up with anybody’s mother before, he had this idea that you didn’t take a kid along on a date to a restaurant. At least not a first date. He’d have to ask Luke how he had managed with a kid.
    Not that it mattered to Gabe. He had no business getting involved with a woman like Jane.
    The problem was she stirred him, rousing old hungers to life. She was so soft, all of her round and pink and touchable, that she woke all his crazy caveman protective instincts. The last time he’d acted on those instincts, he’d spent nine months in jail.
    Which was another reason to stay away from her. She had an ex-husband with a restraining order who was getting out of prison in a month. A kid to raise. A business to run.
    And a badge-wearing, gun-toting daddy who wanted to run Gabe out of town.
    He had come here to find his feet, to make a fresh start. To figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
    You could get certified
, Meg Fletcher had said.
    He shook the thought away. The GI Bill covered tuition—he was fuzzy on the details—but he needed a real job to pay the bills. Anyway, chasing a piece of paper to prove he knew what he already knew, starting at the bottom with a bunch of fresh-faced premeds who had probably never dealt with anything more life-threatening than a hangnail . . . Not for him.
    He had enough baggage of his own without taking on Jane’s.
    But there was that moment, God, that moment, when she looked at him with those soft gray eyes, when all his muscles clenched and every cell in his body whispered,
Yess
. That look that said she was interested in him, like he was worthy of her interest.
Tell me about you
.
    He whacked the guide board into place. He needed to get laid.
    Because what were the odds, really, that a woman like her would give a guy like him the time of day?
    From what he’d seen of her today—with the teenagers, with the old guy who’d lost his wife—bakers must operate like bartenders, making them all feel better, making them all feel special. Treating them all with that same warm, focused attention, feeding them all out of her bounty and the goodness of her heart. Maybe she was simply being nice to him. Or worse, felt sorry for him.
    He set the depth of the circular saw and ran it up along the board, buzzing through the cedar shake siding.
    No wonder that his sex-starved brain, his eager dick, mistook her sympathy for something else. He’d probably imagined that moment of electric awareness.
    But he hadn’t imagined that blush.
    Gabe released the trigger, stopping the saw. So . . . Yeah. There was that.
    He moved the ladder to work on the other side. From the corner of his eye he could see the kid, Aidan, creeping closer.
    The pull of power tools on the American male, Gabe thought.
    When he was that age, he used to sit on an upturned bucket, watching Uncle Chuck at work. Even then, his uncle found him things to do, little shit that would make him feel useful.
    At least let me take him for the day
, Uncle Chuck would say to Mom, lowering his voice to avoid waking Pop, sleeping it off in the next room.
He’ll be safe with me
.
    And Mom, moving stiffly, a bruise on her arm like the shadow of a hand, would wince and agree.
    You must miss him very much
.
    His throat burned. Ah, Christ. He couldn’t afford this kind of distraction. Not unless he wanted to lose a finger. He blinked and went back down the ladder.
    The kid