A Bride For Jackson Powers

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“Can we afford to leave our space unguarded?” Miracle of miracles, no one had tried to push past their fragile barrier. Jax had moved a sign advertising a Bermuda Cruise so that it hid the area where they’d slept.

“There’s a lot of coughing and sneezing going on. I don’t mind taking my chances, but I hate to expose Sunny any more than I have to.”

It was decided that they would take turns scouting out food and information, and baby-sitting. He said, “I’ll make a run and see if I can round up some diapers and baby food.”

“I think I saw a drugstore down that way about half a mile,” Hetty offered.

There had to be something in an airport this size. It was almost a small city in itself. “I’ll give it a shot,” he said as he eased past the wheelchair.

She smiled, and without realizing it, Jax smiled back and went on smiling for the next few minutes until he caught himself at it.

He wasn’t a smiler. It wasn’t his nature. Something—either the ice storm or the woman—was royally screwing him up.

The day passed in slow motion, as if the hands of all the clocks had gone on strike. From sheer boredom, they lapsed into a desultory conversation. It started when Hetty caught him looking at her hands. She had polished her nails for the first time in years, but no amount of polish could disguise years of housework, minus all but the most basic appliances.

“I told you I’d been married. I don’t wear my wedding ring because it makes my fingers break out,” she confided diffidently.

“You’re divorced?” He knew several divorced women who had shifted their rings to the other hand. It was a personal choice, he supposed.

“My husband died.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He told her his secretary was allergic to anything that contained fragrance, but not to metal.

“My mother-in-law was allergic to animals. She used to live on a farm, too.”

Jax murmured a polite response, and Hetty went on to describe the house and the barn that had been turned into a hangar, where Gus had kept his green-and-yellow Cessna.

She told him about the potholders her mother-in-law had made. “She must have crocheted five hundred of the things before her last stroke. She couldn’t get out of bed, but she had the use of her hands right up until the last few months. I think it helped, having something to do.”

“Your husband was a pilot?”

“A crop duster. That is, he was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. For a while he didn’t want to fly at all, but then this plane went up for sale and he got interested again, and one thing led to another.”

Jax studied her for a long moment, making her aware all over again of how awful she must look. Something, probably the dry air, was making her hair frizz up all over her head. Not even the best haircut could change that, although even Jeannie, who’d barely been speaking to her by then, had agreed the cut was an improvement.

“A ’Nam vet, hmm? He must’ve been a few years older than you.”

“Age is irrelevant. Gus was the dearest man in the world. I’ve never known him to raise his voice, much less his hand, to anyone, no matter what the provocation.”

Gradually Jax drew forth her story. He wasn’t a trial lawyer, but he did know how to elicit information. He also knew how to read between the lines. Either she was a damned good liar or he was going to have to realign his thinking when it came to women. Hetty Reynolds didn’t fit any recognizable pattern.

Under the circumstances he couldn’t very well walk off and leave her to fend for herself, but he hoped to hell the weather broke before he got in any deeper.

Three

Stress. His doctor had told him four years ago, when he’d gone in for his last annual physical, that stress was a silent killer. Since then Jax had concentrated on relaxing whenever he could find time. It worked pretty well as long as nothing happened to blow his orderly routine, which could accommodate any number of international maritime disputes, ship disasters, oil spills and the like.

It was what happened outside his professional life that tended to screw up the works. A couple of impulsive acts and his whole life had suddenly lost steerage. Impulse one had been buying an old relic of a schooner last fall. For nearly a century the Lizzie-Linda had worked the waterways from Maryland to North Carolina, first as an oyster boat, then as a freighter. There wasn’t a lick of paint left on her anywhere. Five inches of her eight-inch log bottom were rotten, yet something about her graceful lines and proud bearing had struck an unsuspected lode of romanticism buried deep inside him. For the cost of hauling and back storage he’d bought her and eventually found a place where he could keep her. Since then he’d spent most of his spare time and a considerable portion of his funds trying to patch her up.