Page 18 of Orphan Girl's Mountain Men

It takes another fifteen minutes or so to wrap up at the store, and in that time I finally manage to get Reed to send me a sensible table that contains the information I need. After I tally up the numbers on my phone, I take my daughter to grab lunch, after which we head home.

Grace promptly passes out in the back seat, as she often does in moving vehicles, and I glance at her through the rearview mirror, secure in her special child seat, telling myself it's to check if she's sleeping, but really it's to reassure myself she's still here, still with me.

I finally allow myself to relax and I begin to breathe more normally again, the tension from all the stress of the last hour beginning to leave me. I survey the other emotions plaguing me. The most prominent one is regret. I'm feeling guilty, because now I am calmer, I realize how badly I've treated our new neighbor.

I sigh. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have yelled at her like that. My tumultuous emotions were motivated by fear... but if I am honest, also by attraction. Fuck: when she’d smiled at me, something actually tugged in my heart. Something I haven't felt in years. Nothing has done that since my wife died, and it scares me because my strong attraction to Hailey means that I'm forgetting about Georgia, and I promised Georgia on her grave that I would never be with any other woman but her.

I glance at our daughter again, sleeping like an angel on the back seat. Sometimes I've been tempted to try to find anotherwoman to marry, to give my daughter a mother. But I could never go through with it. I remember Georgia and get heartsick at the thought of betraying her like that.

Yet I forgot all about my promises to Georgia, today when Hailey smiled at me. How pathetic.

I need to stay away from her. For my own good and hers.

CHAPTER 7

Hailey

Iam furious—almost incandescent—with anger at this… this… inconsiderate, arrogant, self-important neanderthal of a man.

What the heck is his problem?

I thought yesterday that I caught him in a bad mood. Or I was being annoying by pestering him, so I excused his attitude. I was prepared to give the benefit of my doubt and assume the best.

But not anymore. There's no excuse for how he just talked to me.

I understand that he was worried because his daughter was missing, and of course I sympathize with that. But, if anything, he should have been grateful, not angry, and relieved that he had found her safe and happy, eating ice cream with a responsible and caring adult. Not lying somewhere hurt, or worse still, abducted by a pervert or something. He should have thanked me for keeping her safe, not to mention forking out for treats. Not that I need the thanks since I only did what any decent human being would do. Nevertheless, I certainly hadn't deserved to be treated like I was some kind of criminal.

I glare at his broad, retreating back, his daughter's pigtails bouncing in tandem as she takes three little steps to keep up witheach enormous stride of his. She glances back at me over his shoulder, smiles, and waves.

Despite my annoyance with him, I wave back. She's so adorable it's hard not to love her, and after all, it's not her I have a problem with. Far from it, it had been fun buying ice cream with her. Made me feel normal again, interacting with kids. Almost like being back in the school in the Sudan. Kind of, anyway.

At first, I hadn't known what to think when the little girl had come up and grasped my hand. She'd seemingly come out of nowhere and there she was, blinking up at me with the most adorable, wide and innocent-looking blue eyes in the world, set on a round face with chubby cheeks. My heart practically melted even before she tugged my hand, pointed at the dress in the window and said, "That's like a Princess dress."

"It is," I responded and squatted down to her level. "You like it?"

"Momma would have liked it," she said. "Momma is a princess in heaven."

Aww, poor thing. My heart twisted in empathy. "My momma's a princess in heaven too. Where's your dad, sweetie?"

"At the princess store."

"I don't know what that means. Can you show me where he is?"

She thought about it for a second, then shook her head. No matter how hard I tried to get her to direct me to her dad or whoever was supposed to be looking after her, she kept staring at the dress and asking if I was gonna buy it and be a princess too. If not, she wanted me to get the dress for her.

I might have, had the dress not been adult-sized and far, far too big for a little girl her age, which I judged was about four or five. I tried every trick in the book to coax her into telling me where she came from, but she simply didn't know how todescribe it except as 'the princess store', which made no sense to me.

Then, her stomach had rumbled, so I asked if she would like some ice cream. She agreed to that quickly enough.

We popped across the street to the ice cream parlor. I asked her to choose a flavor, and she chose strawberry. We didn't add any toppings in case she had any allergies, and she seemed to think it was fine like that. Then, as we stepped out of the ice cream store and I was on the verge of trying again to find out where she had sprung from, her dad had shown up like a grizzly bear with a bad hangover, accusing me of being a kidnapper.

It felt like he was blaming me for the entire debacle, and all I'd done was to act as a kind stranger, trying to help a little girl out. He was the one who had let his little girl out of his sight. It was his fault she was missing, not mine.

They do say 'no good deed goes unpunished'. Now I realize why.

Whatever, I sigh to myself, as the huge father and his incongruously tiny daughter disappear around the corner. At least I was proven to be right in my initial assumption about my neighbors being troublesome. Now I know for sure that I was justified in my resolution to stay away from them. Apart from Reed, they have shown themselves to be nothing but a pair of assholes. As for Reed… well, charming as he is, he is obviously a 'player' and not the type of man any woman should take too seriously. Even if he does have an amazing smile.And that ass in his blue jeans… mmm!

I continue my errands. I need some paint, paintbrushes and rollers, a whole bunch of cleaning stuff to replace what I'd borrowed the other night from my irritating neighbors, and a load of groceries to stock cupboards, fridge and freezer. I also want a better flashlight and some spare batteries for it, a few lightbulbs to replace a couple that I found were dead, and alittle radio for some company in the evenings. Most important of all, I stop off at the hunting and fishing store and fill out the ATF form for a background check, which comes back all clear about twenty minutes later. Due to local legislation, however, I still have to wait for the statutory three days "cooling off period" before I can actually make my purchase—a Savage Arms 11/111 Lady Hunter bolt action rifle that's custom designed for females. It has a walnut stock that is customized to fit the female form, and is a little smaller, slimmer, and lighter than the average rifle, with a shortened pull length and a slender grip that is made to fit the female form. The man in the store had introduced himself as 'Joe' and he told me he's been hunting and fishing in these parts for over fifty years. He looked to me to be at least seventy if not older, and he promised me that the Lady Hunter was the'Perfect rifle for protection against either four legged or two legged intruders'. Since he was prepared to throw in some free shooting practice on his indoor target range, and a lesson on the care and maintenance of my new equipment, I close the deal without haggling. It's a thousand bucks for the rifle, and then there's a case, a scope, some cleaning equipment and fluids, and of course a bunch of ammunition to purchase as well. I buy a couple of hundred .243 Winchester rounds which according to Joe is what I need, figuring that I could practice on the first hundred and keep the second hundred for emergencies. All-in-all the balance comes to $1,700, which is a fairly large chunk of my available cash. Still,'you cannot put a price on personal safety', or so Joe says. I grab a bear spray too, on my way out. I get a good one because, well… you can hardly go back and exchange it later if it didn't stop the bear, right?

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