“I am so sorry I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.”
“I’m sorry that I thought I was safe around you and weapons of mass destruction,” he said with a chuckle.
Bonnie tipped her chin up. “Weird, your head injury somehow made you less hilarious than usual.”
“How are we doing in here?” Aaron popped into the room. He had a soda in each hand and one tucked under his arm. The nurse had given him some scrubs so he didn’t have to sit in the waiting room half-naked. “I wasn’t aware of the fact that you were such an injury magnet, David. Your luck has not been very good lately.”
He handed them each a soda and sat on the doctor’s stool. He spun around in a couple circles. Bonnie smiled at his silliness. She felt bad that he’d stopped working to accompany them to the hospital, but he’d been adamant that he would drive them.
“I think we need to be honest about the bad karma coming from us working together,” Bonnie said. Her dad had worked for Cole Construction for years and never had to be rushed to the hospital. He worked for Aaron for a couple weeks and he’d become a regular in the ER.
“I don’t know why you’d say I’m unlucky,” her dad said to Aaron. “And I don’t know why you think this was bad karma, Bon Bon. Things could have been much worse.”
“That is true. It was actually very lucky that you hit him with the handle of the sledgehammer instead of the head.”
“Right,” Bonnie said. Emotion began to tighten her throat. “Unlucky would have been dying from a massive brain bleed. Killing you would have been worse than slicing your head open.”
He reached for her hand. “It’s going to take more than a swarm of angry wasps and a flyaway sledgehammer to take me out, sweetheart.”
It was dumb to be upset. He was fine. She hadn’t done any major harm, but her dad was her person. He was the one who loved her unconditionally. He was the only family she had left. Their bond had only gotten stronger when her mom died, and losing him was completely unthinkable.
Aaron wheeled himself over to her. “I know you’re letting yourself doubt why you agreed to take this on with me, but I promise I’m going to make sure that we are safe moving forward. It’s my responsibility to make sure there are no more injuries.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, kid. If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I should have known something like this could happen. I mean, I’m the one who coached her when she played T-ball and usually threw the bat farther than she hit the ball.”
Aaron laughed while Bonnie narrowed her eyes. “Wow. There’s that terrible sense of humor again. That hit on the head really messed up your ability to tell a funny joke.”
Her dad smiled and gave her hand another pat. “I love you. You know that.”
The lump in her throat was back. She did know.
AARON DROPPED THE Windsors off at David’s house. Bonnie was going to stay with him overnight, since he had been diagnosed with a concussion. Even when she nearly took his head off, their love for one another shone through. He wasn’t so sure his dad would have been so forgiving.
“How’s the patient?” Sasha asked when Aaron got back to the job.
Sasha the Giant had single-handedly bulldozed everything in the living room and kitchen. He’d seriously finished more on his own in a few hours than Aaron would have hoped the four of them could accomplish all day. He had knocked down the wall between the living and dining rooms. The countertops were gone, and the cabinets were all removed.
Aaron’s jaw dropped. “You are the hardest-working man I have ever met.”
“It wasn’t that much. The hanging cabinets our little firecracker was trying to hit fell down with nothing more than a tap. Had she hit her mark, those things would have gone flying at her dad like the hammer did. He’s probably lucky she lost her grip.”
His use of the word lucky made Aaron laugh. Bonnie would most likely disagree that any of this was lucky. She didn’t realize what a good-luck charm she was. She was the one who’d found Sasha, and he was more than Aaron could have asked for.
Aaron inspected the work that had been done. It looked like nothing had been holding the cabinets to the ceiling, but the paint under them was a completely different color than the rest.
“It’s going to look so good in here when we’re finished,” Aaron said. “I love how open this space is now. If we could just find a way to get some more light in here, it would be perfect.”
There was a sharp knock on the door. Aaron felt his brow furrow.
“Sounds like you have a guest,” Sasha said.
That was strange. Aaron hadn’t given this address to anyone. “I don’t have any friends who would come looking for me here.”
“Maybe it’s a neighbor.”
Aaron would need to be neighborly while he was working on the house, but he didn’t need people nosing around until they were closer to being finished. He made his way to the front door. “Are there still door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesmen? I’d rather deal with that.”
“Oh, what if it’s a little girl selling cookies?” Sasha’s eyes got big. Aaron could only imagine how many cookies Sasha could eat.
He opened the front door to find out if either one of them was right. Two Blue Springs police officers were on the other side. They were a huge letdown after the mention of cookies. “Good afternoon, Officers. What can I do for you?”
“Are you the owner of this house?” the burly officer in sunglasses asked.
