He had to believe her. Wanted to believe her. And he wasn’t going to ask any more questions.
“I’m here for you anytime,” he said. “You can talk to me day or night. That’s what friends are for, right?”
She chuckled. Sniffed. “Yeah.”
He tried to think of something to say to change the subject, to ease the tension.
“They’re dead, Jon.”
Her words cut through the silence with the sharpness of a blade.
Dead? “Both of them?” Lillie was twenty-eight. Her parents should still be young, living life.
“Yes.” She was crying again. “They were killed in a car accident when I was a junior in college.”
Swallowing, Jon stared into the darkness. Not sure which was worse, to have had the dream and had it snatched so cruelly away. Or to have never had it at all.
“God, Lillie. I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too. I don’t dwell on it much. I miss them every single day, but I have a good life and I’m happy. It’s just today, I don’t know...anyway, thanks for asking. It means a lot.”
If she didn’t stop, he was going to do something stupid, like cry with her. “It means a lot to me, too.”
He took a deep breath. The emotion pushing up inside his chest subsided. He was fine. Chances were, after about two decades without shedding a tear, his tear ducts were dried up, anyway.
But the close call was a warning. Lillie Henderson meant more to him than anyone else he’d known in his adult life.
Other than Abe, of course.
He just wasn’t sure if his meeting Lillie was going to be the best thing that ever happened to him, or the worst.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LILLIE HAD HERSELF firmly in check by the time she climbed into Jon’s truck the following afternoon, a comment about Abe ready and waiting on her tongue.
“Abe didn’t cry this morning,” he said before she could speak.
Nodding, she noticed the chest hair visible in the V at the top of the oxford shirt he’d tucked into formfitting blue jeans. And looked away.
“I know,” she said. “I talked to Bonnie about him when I stopped in this afternoon. She’s been trying to provide some one-on-one companionship to him while integrating him into bigger playgroups. With some success, I might add.”
“She told me.” Jon’s voice wasn’t warm and intimate like it had been the night before on the phone. He was Abe’s father again. Still nice, but more like a stranger than a friend. And Lillie, glad for the distance, relaxed back into her seat and thought about French doors.
* * *
HER HOME WASN’T overly large, but it had never seemed small, either. Until that Friday night, standing in her kitchen while Jon expertly and seemingly easily removed her sliding glass door from its track with big suction cups, unscrewed the metal frame that had been holding the panels in place and carried the entire fixture out to his truck.
“Do you want to try to sell these doors?” he asked her as he wrapped the glass in furniture-moving pads that he’d carried in from the back of his truck. “You could probably get seventy-five dollars.”
Immediately seeing a way she could pay him the money he needed without damaging his pride, she said, “No, if you wouldn’t mind disposing of them, I’d appreciate it. If you can make any money doing it, it’s yours.”
Without saying another word on the subject, Jon carried them out, one at a time, coming back a couple of minutes later with the wooden frame they?
??d just purchased balanced on a homemade dolly.
It wasn’t yet seven o’clock. He didn’t pick up Abe until ten. Wiping her sweaty palms on the sides of the jeans she’d pulled on during the ten minutes she’d had between arriving home from work and Jon’s arrival earlier that afternoon, Lillie couldn’t calm the sexual jitters gathering force inside her. She was a healthy woman. She got urges.
But never like what she was feeling every time Jon Swartz was around. Maybe it was his cologne messing with her pheromones. A scientific explanation.