Need You for Mine(79)
She looked at his uniform. “Aren’t you working?”
Adam gripped the back of his neck and groaned. This was one of the reasons he didn’t do relationships. He’d seen too many guys try to balance the job and family, missing anniversaries, first steps, all the important stuff in order to handle all the life-and-death stuff. The other reason, if he was being honest, was fear of failing.
Not himself, but others.
Adam knew that everyone experienced failure. It was a part of life. Only Adam never failed the small stuff. It was the moments that really mattered, the times someone was counting on him to pull through, the big shit that he always managed to drop the proverbial ball.
He’d done it with his family, with his team . . . with Trent. Even with every warning sign waving clear as fucking day, he’d still managed to make the wrong call.
Trent was as hotheaded and gung ho as Adam, but Adam should have used more caution. He shouldn’t have said they had this fire locked down when he was in no position to make such a claim, and he shouldn’t have spoken up without thinking through the consequences. The regret cut deep.
A warm hand slid into his and Harper gave him a little squeeze. “That’s okay, you can buy me a chocolate-dipped banana at the festival. Tonight, I’m helping Emerson with the food for tomorrow, which means I get to stuff my face with really yummy food that I didn’t have to cook. Then Shay is stopping by to help organize the decorations and help me brush up on my face-painting techniques.”
“Which means they get to drink wine while you bust out the Halloween paints?”
“Pretty much.”
Adam smiled. “Have I told you thank you for saving my ass?”
“Several times,” she said. “But you can tell me again, Saturday at the fair. When you let me paint your face.”
“Like unicorns and bunnies on my cheek?”
“Or a super manly mask. Like Robocop or the Black Flame. Anything but a zombie or skeleton, which the older boys ask for. Last year a group of them snuck into the girls’ dance team tent and scared them so bad that they couldn’t perform. So as the newbie running the face-painting booth, I was asked to come up with new ideas this year,” she said. “If the older boys see you going superhero and not villain, they might do it too.”
“First off Robocop is a cop, and that’s lame. Black Flame? A super villain. And a girl.” Harper gave a little shrug as if she knew that and was teasing him. “How do I know you’re not just saying you’ll paint something super manly, then paint a bunny on my cheek? Because I’ve only ever seen bunnies at these things.”
“Because I’ve never done the face-painting booth. But now that I am, there’s going to be some new manly designs to choose from. In fact, if you wanted, I could paint your face so that you’d look like Hephaestus, because I’m that good.”
“The god of fire?” he asked, impressed he remembered. “What, did you go to face-painting school at the National Academy of Arts?”
“Better.”
He looked down and found their hands swinging. The Five-Alarm Casanova was standing in the park, with his girlfriend, swinging hands—and liking it.
Wasn’t that unexpected?
“I got my training in body painting”—Harper leaned in, good and close, until he could feel her dress brush his thighs, her lips skate over the ridge of his ear—“from a legend in the field. And, yes, bunnies were my specialty, but not the fuzzy kind that hop on all fours. I painted on the bodies of Hugh Hefner’s Bunnies.”
Adam swallowed. “You worked at the Playboy Mansion?”
“How do you think I know so much about lingerie?”
With a final squeeze to his hand that said she was dead serious, Harper took her booth number off the table and walked toward the Fashion Flower, proving with that practiced sway that she was all about the unexpected.
That night Harper and Shay sat in Emerson’s apartment, picking out face-painting masks while testing a nice selection of the following day’s menu items. They had an even better selection of wine.
“How about I make you a fairy?” Harper asked, dipping her brush into the aqua glitter paint.
“Do you want dessert?” Emerson asked, snatching the tray of her famous baklava right before Harper could grab a piece. “Because if I see one fairy option then you will never get another one of these again. And never is a long-ass time.”
Harper raised a paintbrush in surrender. “No fairies, got it.”
Emerson’s six-year-old sister, Violet, had, up until recently, believed that fairies were real, that she was a fairy, and, therefore, would only answer to Pixie Girl. It had taken Emerson two years to get Violet out of her wings and into normal clothes, so Harper could see how it was still a sore subject.