Page 86 of Chasing Dreams
“Sorry. Got caught showing an interest, did you?”
“Shut up.”
He chuckled.
She grinned.
He moved a stack of folders from a battered straight-backed chair, pulled the chair beside hers and tapped the screen. “Click on that one.”
“This one?”
“Yeah.” After a minute he said, “If you’re like me, the first thing I do is delete all the games that came installed.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve been known to put myself to sleep with a rousing game of solitaire at midnight.”
“Whatever flips your switch.”
“This is the program you recommend?”
He spent most of an hour showing her the features and how to go between pages and merge documents.
“Is there a way I can bring the data from my old program into this one?” she asked.
“Let’s see.” He googled it and a few seconds later, they were watching a YouTube video with step-by-step instructions. “I told you. You can learn to do anything on YouTube. I fixed my refrigerator once.”
“First you’d have to understand what this guy’s talking about,” she said. “And he might as well be speaking another language, because I only understood about a third of what he said.”
“Do you want me to do it for you?”
Her indignity over the costly gift had evaporated pretty quickly once she’d seen how efficient this would make her business accounting. Maybe she’d find some way to repay him for the kindness. “Okay. It’s all backed up on this drive here.”
She took a thumb drive from her drawer.
It took him about twenty-five minutes to export and import all of her data into the new program. He prompted her to try the features, and she didn’t want to disappoint him. She talked to herself, to the computer the whole time. “Now where did…? Geesh, I lost that again… Where the heck…?”
Her baffled responses had him laughing out loud. The sound touched her, and she sat back, turning to look at him. Shaine was glad she’d been the one to reach him after so many years. Surely he knew he meant more to her than just being the man who could help her find Jack. She wished she could tell him, but she didn’t want to lay any additional pressure on him.
Nothing either of them had given the other had come with strings attached. And that’s the way it should stay.
He leaned in to point at the screen, and she turned her head to look at him.
Slowly he met her eyes.
She hadn’t admitted it before. Not really. Not like this. Not like the soul-deep knowledge that rose up inside her now and set her heart on a wild unsteady beat.
She loved him.
She loved Austin Allen. This all-consuming emotion wasn’t gratitude, though she recognized she felt that toward him, too. It wasn’t simply desire, though she desired him in a completely earnest and elemental way.
This was love. In a I’ll want you till I die, I’ll never get enough, I need to have your heart and soul kind of love. The emotion filled her with joy, and the knowledge that he didn’t want her love stole it away again.
He looked at her like he wanted to kiss her.
She wanted to touch him.
She wanted to keep him.
“Shaine!” Maya appeared in the doorway, one hand beneath her swollen belly. “Shaine, it’s time. Go find Craig!”
