Maidenstone Lighthouse by Sally Smith O' Rourke Read Free Book Online

grateful to say.
    Meanwhile, content that I had been taken in hand, the small crowd of Manhattan sidewalk gawkers was drifting away.
    â€œI think maybe you need to see a doctor,” my handsome savior said in a pleasingly basso voice that was edged with a crisp Midwestern twang.
    I shook my pounding head vigorously. “I’m fine,” I mumbled past my aching jaw. “Jus wanna go home now.”
    He must have seen me starting to sway, for I was suddenly overcome by a wave of dizziness. Before I had a chance to topple I felt his strong hand under my elbow. “Home it is, then,” he said, effortlessly holding me upright with one hand while retrieving my miraculously undamaged bag of croissants with the other. “Is it close enough to walk, or should I call a cab?”
    At my insistence, we had walked. Rather, he walked while I stumbled along, leaning heavily on him.
    Ten minutes later I was seated at the chrome 50s dinette in my little apartment while he tenderly applied an ice-filled towel to my battered nose. I submitted to the soothing treatment like a broken marionette, gazing stupidly into the most devastating pair of ice-blue eyes I had ever seen, and marveling silently at the way the sunlight pouring in through the window at his back shone like gold on his wheat-colored hair.
    The whole scene was so steeped in melodrama that I halfway expected violins to start playing an accompaniment to the ringing in my ears.
    Of course, I was miserable to a degree far exceeding the superficial bumps and scrapes that had been dished out by my mugger. For I could only imagine what I must have looked like to my hero, all mud-stained and bloody, and with a jagged rip in one knee of my sweats.
    And if my bedraggled appearance alone was not enough to send my kind new friend running for the hills, I had clearly demonstrated to him by my carelessness in having openly flashed my wallet on a busy Manhattan street that I was a complete moron, to boot.
    So I kept waiting for the golden idol to finish up his obligatory first aid, make some hurried excuse and beat a hasty retreat.
    Instead, he lavishly tended my mashed nose and scraped knee, then made hot tea for me. In the process, I learned that his name was Robert Jonathan Hayward—“but you can call me Bobby”—and that he was a commercial pilot. He said he was originally from Colorado. And when I asked about the Midwestern accent he confided to me that the laconic twang was something all professional pilots affect in the cockpit when talking on the radio, so that nobody on the ground will suspect how shit-scared they are most of the time, he added with a grin.
    I had laughed then, which brought tears to my eyes, because my poor battered jaw really did hurt like hell.
    Saturday morning slipped effortlessly into afternoon as I learned more about Bobby Hayward. He was an ex-navy fighter pilot, had lost both parents in a car crash when he was twelve, had no other family and did not generally make a habit of cracking the ribs of New York muggers, unless they ran head-on into him while making their escape, as mine apparently had.
    Just before dark he finally left my apartment, explaining that he had to run out to LaGuardia to check on some repairs to a plane he was scheduled to fly to Greenland on Monday morning.
    Coming from anyone else, such an outrageous macho claim would have sounded like pure Manhattan singles bar bullshit. At that point, however, I think that Bobby Hayward could have told me that he was blasting off to Mars for the weekend and I would have swallowed it whole.
    So I had merely nodded meekly as he promised to return—just to be sure I was okay, he said—and threatened to take me somewhere for X-rays if the swelling in my jaw had not gone down appreciably in the interim.
    The moment the door closed behind him I jumped into the shower, then found some clean clothes and tried to pull myself together. Afterward, I sat in the living