now, and you’ve got three empty bedrooms and no one to eat your cooking. Offer to let the guy stay for a couple of weeks and feed him until he bursts.”
“Gunny,” she whisper-growled. “I can’t let a virtual stranger into my home. For all we know the man moonlights as a paid assassin. And if he doesn’t kill me in my sleep, I’ll die of mortification when the neighbors start gossiping.”
“Hanson’s just a kid, Aunt May, no more than twenty-one or -two years old. The neighbors will think you’re taking in strays again instead of having a flaming affair with a foreigner.”
“He’s just a kid?” she said in surprise. “On the phone, he sounds old. All this time, I’ve pictured him as a middle-aged, potbellied nerd with thick glasses and thinning hair who’s addicted to sweets. Oh, that poor dear is just a starving child. Now I feel bad for running off.”
His spidey-senses tingled. “Running off? Where are you?”
She chuckled. “Oh, just a little R & R. I’ll be back home before Hanson hits town.”
“Be careful,” Gunnar warned. “You start mothering him and you’re going to find yourself with a permanent guest. And as you well know, I pay that poor dear enough to hire a personal cook. So, are they saying what made the bastard suddenly keel over dead two hundred meters from the summit?”
May paused, like she’d expected him to say something else. “Um, they won’t know until they dig his body out of the avalanche it caused when he fell and then do an autopsy. But you go ahead and keep right on cussing like that,” she snapped. “I’m sure it will really impress Miss MacBain. So,” she rambled on when he snorted, “if you’re in some town in Maine that I needed a magnifying glass to find on the map, why are you asking about a dead mountain climb— Wait a minute,” she muttered, her tone growing soft and distracted.
Gunnar sighed. She must have pulled out her tablet.
“Here it is,” she said after a few moments. “I assumed Fontanne had been highly respected in the climbing world to be making international news two days running, and I see he’s been a guest instructor at the mountain rescue school your Scottish lady attended.” She gave a little gasp. “In fact, he gave a clinic on technical climbing at the session Miss—”
Aunt May fell silent again, and then a heavy sigh came over the line. “Please don’t tell me you’ve spent all this time and energy pursuing the woman only to learn she’s emotionally unavailable. Gunnar Wolfe,” she rushed on in her listen-up-buster voice, “you better not be entertaining the notion you can step in and heal her wounds.” An even longer pause this time. “Oh, sweetie,” she said gently. “Hearts shatter into too many pieces when we’re abandoned or betrayed, and no one—not an eight-year-old boy and not even the amazing man he became—can ever make that heart whole again.”
Gunnar in turn fell silent as memories he’d thought long buried tightened his chest.
“You are such a hard man to pray for,” May whispered. “Half the time I pray you’ll find a woman who deserves you, and half the time I catch myself praying you don’t.”
“This isn’t exactly a case of heartbreak, Auntie,” he returned just as softly. “In fact, I’m pretty sure Katy hated Fontanne’s guts.”
Another deep sigh, and then, “Is she as sweet as she is pretty?”
“You tell me,” he said dryly. “You’ve had her name an entire two weeks now. Hell, you probably know more about Katherine MacBain than I do.”
“Touché,” she said and gave an overly exuberant chuckle that made him a little nervous. “She didn’t go to college,” May continued.
“Neither did I.”
A snort came over the line. “There isn’t a college course you couldn’t teach. So,” she rushed on, “if you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars flying all over creation, have called in probably another hundred thousand in favors, and are pretending to be a fireman, I’m guessing if this girl’s not sweeter than Mother Teresa, then she must be hell on wheels in bed.”
Gunnar laid his head on the table again. “Right after I fire Hanson,” he muttered into the phone, “I’m taking your name off all my bank accounts and getting my fuel bills sent to my new bookkeeper.”
Another snort. “As if that would get rid of me.”
“Also, I’m a fire chief now. And Katy—” He closed his eyes. “You’d love her, Auntie.”
“I already do,” May whispered. “Because you do,”