Page 50 of Big Island Sunrise
“I’ll pull up the ones in the path,” Lani promised, “but I need some gloves.”
“I won’t let you kill her.” Lulu stood between her auntie and the thorny weed. Lani gave her a long, level look… and then she let the subject drop. She could easily wait until another day to pull weeds.
A familiar truck pulled up out front, and suddenly Lani’s entire focus was there beyond the fence.
Dio ran up to the gate, snapping and snarling the way he had the first time he saw Mano and Kekoa. Kai ran over and managed to calm him down, though he still growled low in his throat as Tenn walked around the back of his truck.
Olivia hopped out and was greeted with shrieks of excitement from the other girls. Even Kiana ran up and vied for her attention, injured foot forgotten. Lulu opened the front gate for her as Tenn pulled two paper bags out of the back of his truck.
Lani walked up to the gate. “What are you doing here?”
“Hello to you too.”
She waited, hands on her hips.
“I came to give the guys a hand with the roof, but it looks like they were too quick for me.” He looked over her shoulder to where Mano was climbing down from the roof. “I got stuck at work. I figured I could at least bring lunch. And these”
He reached into the cab of his truck and pulled out a stack of papers. They were high-quality card stock. On them, he had printed her new menus.
“Wow,” she breathed, startled to see her work come to life. “They look great.”
“They’re perfect. And the coloring pages were a nice touch. Thank you.”
“It was a fun project. I sketched too many things, more than I could reasonably fit on the menus. But I didn’t want them to go to waste, and you know how much kids love coloring sheets. We’ll even choose one restaurant over another based on that, because Rory gets so excited. Forget the twenty coloring books she has at home. It’s all about those restaurant placemats.”
“Yeah, Olivia too.” He smiled, and his singular focus was like sun through a magnifying glass. Dazzling. Dangerous.
Lani was too busy putting out the last fire to let a new one start.
“So what do I owe you?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“I have to pay you for your work.”
“Really, it was nothing. It’s just some doodles.”
“Don’t do that to yourself.”
“What?”
“This is your work. Your time, your talent. You are amazing at what you do. Don’t diminish it like that.”
Lani looked over to where the kids were swinging on vines. “I’m not going to take your money.”
“Free meals for life then.”
She looked back at him and tried not to smile. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Free lunch for a year?”
“Lunch for a month,” she countered.
“You know that negotiations generally work the opposite way, right?”
She smiled and looked away.
“Tenn! Howzit?” Kekoa walked up and greeted him with a back-slapping hug.
