Free Running Fire by Lindsay McKenna Page B

growing up.”
    â€œCould have fooled me,” Kell said. “You are one heck of a good-looking woman even if you’re forced into wearing that bulky flight suit.”
    His compliment was sincere and Leah absorbed it. “Thanks...kind of hard to be very feminine out here in the badlands.”
    â€œDon’t kid yourself,” he said, smiling a little. “You give that flight suit a whole new, better, meaning.” He saw her blush and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her shyness bothered him. Again, Kell was seeing her inability to deal with a sincere male-to-female compliment. He wasn’t flirting with her. He was being honest. She didn’t know the difference.
    â€œI’m pretty much focused on my career” was all Leah could manage. There was no question Kell was interested in her. Leah felt the same toward him, but didn’t dare let him know it. There was just no room in her life, with her career as a warrant officer, to allow a potential relationship to work. She looked over. “Are you married, Kell? Have a bunch of children?” Because looking at him, he looked like the father type.
    â€œWas,” Kell admitted. “I met Addison, who was a criminal-defense lawyer, in San Diego. Married at twenty-three and divorced at twenty-seven. She couldn’t take my long deployments, and I didn’t want children while I was in the SEALs. I’d never be home often enough to be a father to them. My training and deployments kept me away from home so much of the time. I did want children, but I wanted to be a father who was home and there for them, like my pa was for us.”
    â€œYou’ll make a wonderful father someday,” Leah said. Mentally she was comparing her father to Kell. There was a Grand Canyon of difference between the two men. Her father was cold, bottled up, frozen in time and bitter. Kell was warm, kind and caring. He was able to show his feelings.
    Leah wondered if things would have been different between her father and herself if her mother hadn’t suddenly died. She had felt abandoned and alone after her mother was gone. She cried for months, every night, sobbing into her pillow, missing Evan and her. Her father was unable to care for her. He couldn’t even care for himself, as crippled as he’d been by the multiple deaths.
    â€œI have a good role model,” Kell admitted. “My pa. I have two younger brothers, Tyler and Cody, and we used to have so much fun with him. He taught us how to hunt, fish and care for the land. The three of us grew up milking dairy cows.”
    â€œYou’ve got a good work ethic,” Leah said, trying to imagine Kell when he was younger. She’d bet he was the brother who played humorous jokes on others. Not mean ones, but funny ones, because he was so laid-back and easygoing.
    â€œWe all worked hard,” Kell agreed, smiling fondly, remembering those days, “but we also played hard.”
    â€œWhat sports?”
    â€œI went into track and field. Ty and Cody went into football.”
    â€œYou look like a quarterback to me.”
    â€œNah, my two younger brothers were good at it. I wasn’t. I’m six-two and they’re both six-four and outweigh me by thirty pounds. I didn’t see any sense in getting the shinola kicked out of me on the football field. Running was something I was very good at. It came naturally.”
    â€œYou’ve got long legs,” Leah agreed. She visualized him running and imagined he would have looked to her like a cheetah with swift, boneless grace.
    â€œDid you ever go into sports?”
    â€œNo. I found my love, my passion, when I was sixteen. I loved flying. I still do.”
    â€œWhat does it give you?” Kell wondered. He looked forward to talking with Leah. She was intelligent, well grounded in reality and funny.
    â€œI guess...my freedom. When I’m flying, I’m above all the crap that I carry around with me. Up