I’m calling him Apollo anyway.”
“My wife calls me Thor, the god of thunder. But that’s only when I’ve been very good.”
They laughed and Ivy pocketed her keys.
Genny watched her, shaking her head. “You’re not going to tell us his name? You’ve been with us, what—three years now?—and this is the first sign of life on the outside we see and you’re not sharing?”
“When he becomes a household name, I’ll let you know it,” Ivy returned.
“You just pick him up on the side of the road?” Genny persisted.
Ivy shook her head.”He picked me up, and drove me all the way to work.”
“How far was that?”
“East of Riverside.”
That announcement dropped their jaws.
“No kidding,” Genny whispered. “Look at that, Stan, Ivy’s got the real thing.”
“I don’t have anything. Not yet. Well, except my car. Did he say where he parked it?”
“Blue three. North side.”
Ivy thought about her options. She had Triple A, so it was either have it towed home or to the shop. At home, it would sit until Ivy had the funds to replace the tire and she would have to rely on public transportation to get to work. Not a very practical solution as sometimes she had only thirty minutes to get from her shift at Children’s to her part time at the rehabilitation center. So she was going to have to dip into the precious little that was in her savings account now.
“You guys know of a good deal on tires?”
“No need,” Genny replied. “His message was, ‘You’re good to roll.’”
Ivy felt her eyes flare. There was no fixing that tire, but maybe Jake had managed to find a spare. He’d gone out of his way to do it, too. Again. And it made her a little uncomfortable. It must have shown on her face.
“In the world of man-woman relationships,” Genny said, “this kind of thing is done all the time.”
“But we don’t have a relationship,” Ivy protested.
“Yet. This is the best part,” Genny warned, “when he’s working to win you over. He’ll do the unthinkable—leap tall buildings and all of that. Make a record of it, so you’ll have something to fall back on later. It dries up, all this romance.”
“Now that’s not true,” Stan said. “I still buy my wife flowers for no obvious reason and tell her everyday how lovely she is.”
“That’s why you’ve been married twenty-something years,” Genny pointed out. “You’re a rare breed, Stan.”
“He fixed my car,” Ivy was still stuck on it.
“You’ve got to do better than that, honey,” Genny advised. “Expect the sweet, the nothings and the somethings.”
“This is a something.” It was pretty big to Ivy.
“This is definitely a something. The man knows how to take care of his woman.”
But I’m not his woman. Not yet.
Ivy said good-bye to her friends, grabbed her purse and walked off the floor. She boarded the elevator still feeling that Jake’s gesture was one of trespass. But that was ridiculous. His act of kindness seemed too close, too personal, she argued with herself, because no one, other than Holly, had ever extended themselves so much for her. And maybe she was putting too much weight into Jake’s actions. Fixing her tire was an extension of the man himself—that honor and follow-through she’d already noticed about him—and probably had very little to do with her. Maybe.
By the time she got to the parking garage she was feeling better about the situation.
Jake was a soldier. He helped. He rescued. He restored. It was who he was.
Ivy had never been rescued before. She didn’t realize that it was all-inclusive. That the job wasn’t considered done until the problem was solved. She accepted that. Just as she accepted that people raised in loving homes were conditioned to expect it and that she and Holly, and a whole lot of other people, had to get used to it. And it’s not that Ivy didn’t extend herself in similar ways. Loaning her spare is what got her in this predicament to begin with.
But all that reasoning evaporated when she arrived at her car.
Her Patriot was sporting new tires. Two of them. Not a single, donut-sized spare, but replacement. New tread, shiny black. And her car had been washed, too. The film of dust coating the black paint was gone; the bird spatter, the streaks of desert across her windshield cleaned.
For a moment Ivy lost her equilibrium. She actually felt the world around her tilt a little.
She was overwhelmed. And she didn’t like it.
She felt threatened, but why?
Was it her independence that