Unstoppable (A Country Roads Novel) (5 page)

“That’s sweet.”

“Does that go on the list?” he asked with a grin, hoping to change the subject.

“Maybe,” she said, finishing her wine.

“Let me clean up and then we can get started. I can only imagine how anxious you are to finish the series,” he said, pushing his chair back.

“I’m only a little anxious.” She stood. “And I can help you.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“Let me help, Bennett.” She reached for the bowl of salad and walked into the kitchen. “If you get the stuff for me to put the food in, I can do that while you load the dishwasher.”

“No matter what I say, you’re going to insist on helping, aren’t you?” he asked as he grabbed the dish of chicken.

“Yup.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled at him.

“Then I guess it will have to work,” he said, putting the dish down on the counter next to her.

“I guess so.”

Bennett shook his head as he got some containers down from the cabinet and put them on the counter for Mel. When he stepped back, he couldn’t stop himself from looking at her.

Her curly hair was long, going well past the middle of her back. Her shorts weren’t indecent or anything, but they definitely hugged her tiny little bottom. Bennett pulled his gaze away, not wanting to get caught checking her out, and went back to gather more things in the dining room.

They cleaned the kitchen, and when everything was put away, Bennett led Mel to the living room.

“You ready for this?” he asked as he put the disc into the DVD player.

“As I’ll ever be. I feel so attached to all of these characters, I just don’t even know what I’m going to do when it’s done,” she said, as she settled down on the couch.

“I have a plethora of other series to watch. We can just start something new.”

We?

Yeah, that little word had popped out
way
too easily.

Mel couldn’t stop sniffling. Okay, so she got emotional sometimes. So what. But Bennett hadn’t laughed at her tears, or been weirded out by them. On the contrary, he’d gone to get her some tissues.

The final scene ended and the credits began to roll. Mel just stared at the screen, not sure of how she felt.

“How you doing over there?” Bennett asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” Mel said, still staring at the credits. “I think this is going to take some time to sink in.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Do you?” Mel asked, looking at him.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “This show is a total mind fuck. Excuse the language.”

Mel laughed. “You’re excused. It is definitely that. But I’m going to miss it.”

“Then we’ll just have to fill that void. How about Monday night? I’ll make you dinner again. I’m sure you’re going to need a little pick-me-up after your first day of school.”

“I’m sure that I’m going to as well.”

“All right. Same time, same place.”

“Same time, same place,” she agreed.

Mel did need a pick-me-up on Monday. A big one. She had a
very
long first day of school. There was a Mrs. O’Ryan who taught English, and her classes had been mixed with Mel’s, giving some students two math classes and no English, or two English classes and no math. But it wasn’t just a quick fix for the students—their entire schedules had to be redone.

During Mel’s second class of the day, her overhead projector stopped working. She requested a new one, but it wasn’t coming in for two weeks. This meant she had to deal with one of the ancient ones, which was a royal pain in the ass. Then the bell system malfunctioned, and for about an hour it went off every five minutes. And right before the last class, the janitor had disturbed a family of raccoons in the storage closet, and the family had quickly run out into the halls. The students had been switching classes, and needless to say it had caused a bit of a panic.

By the time Mel got to Bennett’s, she was exhausted and so looking forward to a home-cooked meal, a cold beer, and a hot man.

He provided all three.

And dinner had been amazing. He’d made apple and bacon pork chops with garlic-mashed potatoes and asparagus. Mel was stuffed.

“Pick something out to watch.” He nodded toward the living room before he pushed his chair back and stood from the table.

“I can help,” she said, standing.

“Come on, Mel, I know how tired you are, and this will only take a second,” he said, indicating the plates. “By the time you find something, I’ll have finished.”

“I don’t have the energy to argue with you,” she said, grabbing her beer.

“Good,” he said, as she headed into the living room.

Bennett kept all of his DVDs in the steamer trunk, so Mel walked over to it and knelt, popped the latches, and pulled up the lid.

Holy cow. It was filled with movies and TV shows, all of them alphabetized. She recognized
Game of Thrones
and grabbed the box to read the back. When Bennett came into the room a couple of minutes later she stood and handed him the box.

“I’ve heard of this, and I’d wanted to watch it,” she said.

He looked at it in surprise, and maybe a bit uncomfortably.

“Mel, there is
a lot
of sex in this show,” he told her.

“You don’t think I can handle it?” she asked narrowing her eyes playfully.

“Oh, I’m sure you can. I’m just telling you, it leaves
nothing
to the imagination.”

“Well, your warning has been heard. Let’s watch it,” she said, as she stepped past him and took a seat on the couch.

“All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

They were halfway through the second episode, and Mel was already hooked. Bennett hadn’t lied when he’d said that there was
a lot
of sex. And it was more than a little awkward watching scenes that were fairly intense with him sitting right next to her.

And he was sitting
right
next to her. His arm resting on the back of the sofa and his leg pressed into hers. She really wanted to lean into him and use his chest as a pillow, but she refrained.

Well, really, she wanted to hide her face behind a pillow because she was the shade of a freaking strawberry. But she couldn’t look away. One reason was because more often than not something important besides all of the sex was going on in a scene. And second, because she’d told Bennett she could handle it, and she didn’t want to show weakness. So she watched, and even though she was completely into the show, she was aware of Bennett next to her the entire time.

And just like
Lost
, this one ended its episodes on a cliffhanger every time.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she yelled at the screen when the episode finished.

“So you’re into the show, I’m guessing.”

She turned and glared at him. “Does every episode end like this?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

“I don’t think I can handle this again. Why didn’t you warn me about this before?”

He laughed. “We can watch some more episodes this week.”

“Yeah?” she asked, her frustration quickly giving away to pleasure.

“Yeah.”

Huh.
Before, he’d just let her borrow the DVDs and watch episodes with her every once in a while. This time he wanted to watch all the episodes with her. This was an interesting development.

“Well, then I’ll cook. It’s only fair,” she said.

“It
is
only fair.”

“When is good for you?”

“I have baseball practice tomorrow. How about Wednesday?” he asked.

“Wednesday is good. Six?”

“Sounds perfect. I’ll be there.”

“All right. I should probably get going,” she said, more than a little disappointed. But it was getting late and she was exhausted.

Bennett stood and held out his hand. He helped her stand before he walked her outside. She unlocked her car with the remote, and he opened the door for her.

“I had a good time, Mel,” he said, reaching up and rubbing some of her hair between his fingers.

“Me too,” she said, resisting the urge to bite her lip. “Thanks for dinner and the entertainment. It was a relaxing night after a stressful day.”

She desperately wanted him to lean in and kiss her, and she thought he was going to. His eyes focused on her mouth for just a second before he took a deep breath and let go of her hair.

“Anytime. Drive safe,” he said, taking a step back from her.

Mel got into her car, and though the night had been perfect, she was more than a little disappointed that it hadn’t ended with his mouth on hers at least once.

Really? Was it so much for a girl to ask for?

B
ennett spent multiple nights that week with Mel, but he refused to look too much into it. They were just hanging out. Nothing more. No big deal.

They made some steady progress on
Game of Thrones
, granted there were only ten episodes per season, but still they were over halfway through the first season. The plan for that Monday night was for them to have dinner, Mel cooking for Bennett, and to celebrate the first day of the bookshelf project.

The supplies had been delivered to the school on Friday. Both Mel and Bennett had found multiple vendors around Atticus County who were willing to sell to them at cost. Some had been a little resistant at first, but they’d stood no chance against the sweet smile of one Melanie O’Bryan. She’d turned on her Southern charm, and they’d been putty in her hands.

On Monday morning, Bennett got to the school at six thirty. They were going to use the old wood shop building by the baseball field, so Bennett parked over there and headed inside.

Mr. Coryell had been the wood shop teacher when Bennett had been in high school. He’d retired five years ago, and no one had been hired to replace him. It was a position that the former superintendent, Reynolds, hadn’t thought important to fill. It was a shame, really, that the kids weren’t given the option to take the class anymore. Mr. Coryell had taught Bennett a lot, and he owed his former teacher in more ways than he could count. It was because of that class that Bennett had a job today. More important, it was because of that class that Bennett had found his passion in life.

Creating something with his hands gave Bennett a peace that he’d never had before, and these days he was always looking for a little bit of peace.

When Bennett walked into the building, Mel was already there. She was leaning over the table looking down, but her head came up and she smiled wide at him.

“Hello,” she said brightly.

“Hey,” he said as he crossed the room. “You’re rather cheerful in the mornings.”

“Oh, Bennett,” She shook her head. “I’d hate for you to think I’m even remotely a morning person. It’s all coffee.”

“Ah, a caffeine junkie.” He stopped on the other side of the table.

“Don’t you forget it,” she said, holding out a to-go cup for him. “I brought you some, too.”

“Looks like I’m now the one in your drink debt,” he said, taking the cup.

“Just bring something tonight and we’ll be even again.” She picked up her own cup and brought it to her lips.

“Sounds like a plan.” He took a sip of coffee. He’d already had some that morning, but Bennett had never been one to turn down caffeine. Mel had been generous with the cream and light on the sugar. Just how he liked it.

“I wasn’t sure how you took your coffee, so I just made it like mine.”

“This is perfect. Thank you,” he said, then took another long drink.

“So you ready for your first day of teenagers?”

“Teenagers don’t scare me.”

She grinned. “We’ll just see about that.”

They spent the next twenty minutes getting everything ready, and at ten till seven Mel headed back to the school to get her first-period kids.

Mel was doing this project with her geometry and trigonometry classes. Bennett would be coming on Monday mornings to work with the geometry classes, which were first and second period. On Wednesdays he would work with the trig classes.

The bookcases were going to be simple. They had to be, because any fancy woodwork would’ve been too difficult for the students to do. Elaborate and showy weren’t always the way to go, and more often than not they took away from the natural beauty. Sometimes something was just better the less you tried to change it.

Mel filed in with her students at ten after seven. Half of them looked like they were still fighting sleep, but they all looked fairly excited for the most part, except for a tall kid in the back who was standing a little off to himself. His arms were folded across his chest, and he looked thoroughly unimpressed. He was wearing jeans that hung down a little too low and a black T-shirt. His dark brown hair was long and shaggy, and his ears were pierced.

The only other kid that stood out to Bennett was Mel’s little brother, Hamilton. Well, these days he wasn’t so little. He’d already shot up past Mel, though he was a bit on the lanky side. Bennett had been around Hamilton a lot lately because of Mel, and he liked the kid.

“Everyone, this is Mr. Hart. He’s the real expert behind this project,” Mel told the class grinning at him.

Mr. Hart?
That was his father. That title was going to take some time to get used to.

“Have any of you ever worked with wood before?” Bennett asked the class.

“Not that kind of wood,” the tall kid said making a jacking-off gesture in the back.

“Dale Rigels,” Mel said sternly. The smile that had been on her face a moment before was gone, replaced by a severe frown. She now looked at the kid with narrowed eyes and raised eyebrows.

Dale dropped his hand and looked down at his feet. Yeah, Bennett didn’t blame the kid. If Mel had looked at him like that, she would’ve put the fear of God in him, too. Her
don’t fuck with me
attitude was scary, and just a little bit hot.

“All right, let’s get this out now,” Bennett said, trying not to laugh. “I’m sure there will be a lot of opportunities for ‘that’s what she said’ jokes, innuendos about sex, and so on. Let’s try to keep those to ourselves. It’s never the best time to tell a funny joke when someone is using a hammer or a power saw. Does everybody understand?”

The students nodded.

“But like I was saying,” he continued. “When it comes to working with wood, you have to pay attention, because if you measure wrong and start to cut, you can’t go back and fix it. Your actions are permanent, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, we don’t have unlimited supplies. So it’s important that you stay focused and alert at all times.

“Half of you look like you could crawl back into bed right now and take a little nap. That isn’t going to work when you’re in this room. So you guys are either going to need to start going to bed a little bit earlier or eat two bowls of Wheaties to give you some energy. Does everybody understand that?”

The students nodded again.

“All right, now for the fun part. Math is used often in our everyday lives. You have to use it in cooking, budgeting your money, dividing your time up in a day, and a hundred other things that you wouldn’t even think were related to mathematics. I use it every day in my profession, and if I didn’t use it correctly I would be highly unsuccessful. So all of you are going to learn how math helps build things.

“Ms. O’Bryan has already divided you up into groups of four, and each group will work solely on their own bookshelf. Any questions yet?” he asked.

The students shook their heads.

“All right, let’s get started,” he said, clapping his hands.

Mel was more than a little amazed as she watched Bennett interact with the kids. He was completely confortable around them. When he talked, they listened. Maybe they just realized right of the bat that he wasn’t someone to mess with.

She wished she’d been as smart to realize that from the beginning.

Today the kids were all going over the plans and deciding who was going to be their team leaders. Mel made a round of the class and headed over to the group where her brother was. She’d put Dale Rigels in his group in the hope that her brother might rub off on the troubled kid.

Dale hadn’t had it easy growing up. His father had been killed in Afghanistan three years ago, when Dale was twelve. Mrs. Rigels worked hard to support her son, but Mel could only imagine how hard it was for a single mother. Dale had a tendency to get into trouble. He’d been caught shoplifting more often than she could count, and he smoked pot and drank beer, sometimes right on school grounds. He was heading down a bad path.

Mel was going to try her hardest with the kid this year, and she prayed she—or someone—would get through to him.

She approached Hamilton’s table. Hamilton looked up at her and frowned. No, he was not happy with her.

Not. At. All.

Mel had been ten years old when Hamilton was born, and she’d been over the moon at having a baby brother. She’d always wanted a sibling, and Hamilton hadn’t disappointed. He’d followed her around the second he’d been able to crawl, and they’d always been incredibly close.

Mel pretty much looked like their mother, except for her hair. She’d inherited their father’s curly, light blond color. Hamilton was the opposite. He’d gotten their mother’s dark brown hair, but he looked like their father with his freckled cheeks, Roman nose, hazel eyes, and poor eyesight. Though both Mel and Hamilton had their father’s big smile, Hamilton’s was somewhat lopsided.

Mel had also inherited their father’s love for math. Miles O’Bryan was an accountant, and he took great pleasure in crunching numbers every day. Though the love for math was much stronger in Mel, Hamilton wasn’t completely out of the loop. He was all about music, which used its own fair share of math.

Hamilton was in the high school band, where he played about six different instruments, all of them amazingly. He was just a little bit on the nerdy side with his black, framed glasses. But Mel had been around long enough to recognize his type. Once he grew into himself girls would be all over him, especially if he was a musician.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Just grand,” Hamilton said, not hiding his sarcasm.

Okay, so she might’ve paired him with Dale, but the other two girls in his group were sweet. He could just suck it up. It would be a learning experience for him, too.

“Good,” Mel said, resisting the urge to ruffle his hair. He was already pissed off at her; no need to make it worse. “Who’s going to be the team leader?”

“Kylee,” Hamilton said.

Kylee Flint was a tall, pretty blonde girl with big blue eyes and long lashes. Her mother was the owner of the spa where Harper worked, the same spa where Mel had been shot. Celeste Flint was a bit of a free spirit, and it had most definitely rubbed off on her daughter, except when it came to school. The girl was hard-core when it came to her studies. She’d been in Mel’s algebra class last year, and she’d gotten straight As.

“So what do you think, Dale?” Mel asked him.

“It’s whatever.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked thoroughly bored.

“Well, I think it’s awesome,” Kylee said, looking straight at Dale with a
you think you’re so cool but you’re not
look. Dale straightened a little bit in his seat.

Well, Kylee was definitely going to keep the boy in line.

“I do too,” Ashley Rodriguez said, her shrewd brown eyes peeking out from under her auburn bangs. She was another girl not to be messed with, and Mel knew she wasn’t going to take any crap from Dale, either. This was why Mel had put him in their group.

The bell rang, and everyone started packing up their stuff.

“So how did I do, Teach?” Bennett asked, coming up to Mel.

“Pretty impressive, actually.”

“Don’t sound so shocked. I can handle myself around the young’uns.”

“I saw. Thanks again for doing this, Bennett. I’m going to go get the next class,” she said, turning around.

But before she could start walking, he took her hand and stopped her from leaving. She turned, more than a little startled, and looked up at him.

“I’m really glad I’m a part of this, Mel. You don’t have to keep thanking me,” he said seriously.

She could only nod. He let go of her hand, and as Mel walked back to her classroom she was at a complete loss for words.

Over the next three weeks Bennett quickly adjusted to his new work schedule. Really, it wasn’t that much different. His Mondays started a little earlier. Normally he hadn’t gotten to a construction site until about nine, and that was about the time he finished up with Mel and the kids.

On Wednesdays, he cut it a little short at work and headed over to the school just before one. Different groups of kids had started to stay late on Wednesday to work a little bit more and catch up on their shelf. A few of the kids wanted to work on other projects, and Bennett was more than happy to help them as long as they paid for the supplies.

He was having a good time with the project, and he was having a
really
good time with Mel. He looked forward to being in that wood shop with her and to regularly hanging out with her at night.

“You’ve been MIA lately,” Tripp said to Bennett one Tuesday night. It was another karaoke night at the Sleepy Sheep, and since Bennett was so involved with everything he made a point of going to them.

But he flat-out refused to sing. Nope. That shit wasn’t happening.

“Yeah.” Shep sipped his beer behind the bar. “I feel like I only see you at practice and at games. What are you doing with all your free time these days?”

“I’m pretty sure it has to do with that pretty girl over there,” Brendan said, indicating a spot behind Bennett.

Bennett didn’t need to turn to see that Brendan was talking about Mel. She sat at a corner table with Grace, taking money, signing people up for karaoke slots, and helping them pick out which songs they wanted to sing.

No, Bennett knew exactly where Mel was, because he’d looked over at her not even sixty seconds ago.

“We’re just friends.” He was tired of saying that, but mainly because it wasn’t true anymore.

“I’ve heard that before,” Shep said.

“I’ve
said
that before.” Jax shook his head pityingly at Bennett. “It sounds about as true coming out of your mouth as it did coming out of mine.”

“Jeez, when Jax calls you out about being clueless, that’s saying something,” Brendan said.

“I really wish I could take offense to that, but it’s sadly true,” Jax said.

“But not anymore,” Tripp said.

“Nope,” Jax said, grinning. “Not anymore.”

Yup, Jax had the grin of a very satisfied man. Something that Bennett was definitely not. Frustrated was a way more accurate word, and every time he even looked at Mel his frustration grew. Who was he kidding? All he had to do was think about her. Which was all the fucking time.