Page 30 of Dangerous December
She reached around him and pushed the door open. “Anywhere is fine.” She worried at her lower lip. “I can get the others, really.”
“It would be a sad day if I couldn’t do this much,” he managed through clenched teeth. “I’mfine.And I’m supposed to be helpingyou,remember?”
He loped back up the stairs and brought down both boxes in one trip, settled them on her bedroom floor and dusted off his hands. “Anything else?”
“No, nothing at all,” she fretted, eyeing him with considerable worry. “I just hope this wasn’t too much for you.”
Dev felt heat climb up the back of his neck.
He could handle himself in combat, but fluttering, hovering women were so far beyond the scope of his experience that he was at a dead loss as to how to respond.
“That boy is fine,” Carl barked. He rose from the settee under the window at the top of the stairs leading to the first floor. “Don’t send him off—there’s plenty to do around here. Someone needs to move my favorite chair, because it’s all wrong for the TV. He can check out the dryer vent...and there’s a broken screen on the back porch.
“And if he’s got time, I could use a ride to the shoe shop over on Willow. Sam is slow as molasses, but surely he has my Oxfords resoled by now. He’s had ’em for two months.”
“Carl,”Reva snapped. “Can’t you see—”
“If the boy can go out running, he isn’t an invalid. Plain as day to me.” Angling a keen look at Devlin, Carl pursed his lips. “Unless he don’t have time.”
“No problem.” Relieved at the opportunity to escape, Dev nodded at Reva and headed downstairs. “Just tell me what you want me to do first.”
His life was in ruins.
Old people pitied him.
And now he’d gone from commanding a unit of skilled marines to becoming a jack-of-all-trades—and an incompetent one, at that.
What did he know about appliances and civilian life skills—and how was he supposed to help these folks at Sloane House turn their lives around, when he couldn’t even manage his own?
Reva, with her polite but brittle, imperious shell, was so far outside Dev’s experiences in the military that she might as well have come from a different planet.
But cantankerous as he was, Carl was at least on familiar ground. If the man had chosen the military and ended up a drill sergeant, he would have been the happiest man alive.
So far, the sofa, a settee and two upholstered chairs had nearly worn trails in the carpet while Carl dithered and barked orders. The first half hour had been amusing. The second had become more than a little trying.
“No,” he growled. “I just wish I could do it myself. Over more to the left. No—too far. Back to the right. Just you wait—someday you’ll have trifocals and a bad heart. See ifyoucan ever get things right for watching your TV.”
Carl’s offhand words were harder to take than this endless exercise in furniture positioning.
Dev already had his hearing loss and bad shoulder. Was this where his life was headed?
Was he going to end up growing old alone, bitter and cranky—still young enough to work, but unwanted? At a point where the minute adjustment of a piece of furniture was a major issue?
The prospect darkened his mood even further, until he felt as if a heavy cloud was pressing him down into a morass of despair. He’d never understood depression. He’d always figured emotions were a choice. Now he wasn’t so sure.
“Devlin.”
He blinked and shook off his thoughts.
Carl frowned at him. “You moved it too far.”
“Yes, sir.” He adjusted Carl’s favorite easy chair a few millimeters to the right. “How’s this?”
Carl settled into the chair. Squinted at the television. Tipped his head up and down. “That’ll do,” he said. “Now, about the dryer vent. Just how much do you know about dryers?”
Only that he’d always done his laundry at the base or at a Laundromat when he traveled, and that someone else kept the machines working.
And that with anything he tackled, Carl would question his every move. “Not much.”
