“Right.”
“Andre…this is…thank you.”
Warmth fills my chest as she stands and holds her hands to her heart. Wow. Making her happy feels really fucking good.
“No worries, little Collins.” I stand and open my arms, feeling a literal magnetic pull as she accepts my embrace and squeezes tightly around my back.
My junk wakes up a little as her body presses against mine, and I have to resist grabbing a handful of her hair or ass or some other part of this very touchable girl.
After an extra beat, Kendall draws back, fixing her hair again and taking a deep breath as she pushes both of our chairs under the table. Is she…flustered? “Really, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. I’ll call this week, and we can start working out details. I definitely need to come and see it before anything else, so maybe some time this weekend?” She opens up a tablet and starts scrolling through the calendar, which is covered in items and appointments. “I’m sure the Riders are keeping you crazy-busy, so—”
“I’ll be around,” I say quietly, keeping my gaze locked on her as she tries to look anywhere but at me.
“Around?” She narrows her eyes and laughs a little. “I can’t schedule ‘around’ on my agenda.” She wiggles the iPad in my face.
I lift a shoulder and shoot her a wink, flirtier than I intended, but whatever. “I don’t really do agendas.”
She arches a brow. “How very Bohemian of you.”
“Fine.” I roll my eyes and give an easy laugh. “This weekend.”
I swallow and push away the heat that floods my body at the thought of being alone in my house with the magnetic dime piece of a girl who is completely, totally, undoubtedly off-limits.
Three
Kendall
Holy shit. It’s better than I even imagined.
I shut my car door and shield my eyes from the blinding sun, taking in the giant, historic, architectural masterpiece that is The Esplanade House.
It has all the bones. I could work with this house. I could make it absolutely perfect. That’s what I do.
“Hey!” Andre jogs out the front door, wearing a tank top that exposes his steel rocks of biceps and black sweatpants that faintly show the outline of his no-doubt-magnificent package.
Talk about a masterpiece.
“Hi there.” I walk toward him, holding my work tablet under my arm and forcing my gaze to stay on the house and not on his…everything else.
He holds out his arms, smiling brighter than the sun. “You like?”
Yes. Jesus, yes.
“It’s incredible!” I brush a strand of hair out of my face and take in a slow, deep breath. “The lot is just sublime. I can practically taste the ocean.”
He turns to the side, his profile somehow making him look even more chiseled and handsome. He runs a hand through the short, floppy curls on top of his head and cocks his chin back, eyeing me. “That’s all I really wanted when I told my agent to pick a place. If I’m coming to Florida, I want the beach. You feel me?”
I’d like to.
Something in that wink gives me a wave of familiar butterflies. I remember that wink. I remember it from when he was in eighth grade, before he really knew the magnitude of the power he held in that wink.
I’m sure he knows it now.
“Of course,” I say with a smile. “You picked, in my opinion, the best there is.” I tap an imaginary watch on my wrist. “But if we’re submitting to Mansion in a Month, our thirty days starts on Monday.”
He draws back, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Then you better get inside and start planning.”
I nod with certainty and open up my iPad. “Give me the grand tour, Smoke.”
He walks to the front door and holds it open.
As I slide past him and into the foyer of the home, I can practically feel the heat and sex appeal and testosterone radiating from him in waves. He must have just showered. Of course. They’re always freshly showered exactly when you’re trying not to feel any attraction whatsoever.
You’re here for a house, Kendall. For a job. He rejected you seven years ago, and he would do it again. Once this project is over, you’ll go back to having absolutely nothing to do with him.
“So this is the…” He scratches his head and laughs softly. “Part where you walk in.”
I look up at him. The expression on his face is almost self-deprecating. “Entryway,” I say with a light tap on his rock-solid chest. “It’s wonderful. Outdated, sure.” I glance at the gaudy handrails on the curved staircase and the old, worn-out wood floors. “But that’s where I come in. We’ll update the house…” I walk toward the sitting room beyond the entrance, noticing a pale green carpet under my feet. Ew. “But keep all the classic Floridian charm.” I gaze out the floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors at the sparkling Atlantic Ocean that stretches as far as the eye can see.
“Charm, huh?”
“Yes. Charm.” I gather my hair over one shoulder and continue my way through the house, noting details I want to preserve, including the intricate coffered ceiling in the living room. “A concept you’re very familiar with,” I add, warranting a lift of the shoulder and cocky half smile from Andre.
I click the digital floor plan on my tablet screen, removing a wall between the kitchen and the family living area, comparing square footage and flow.
“What are you doing?” Andre cranes his neck and peeks at the screen.
I shoot him a look. “Thinking about how I’m gonna open up the main-floor living space. The closed-off kitchen is very old school. Everyone wants sight lines and open concept.”
He crosses his arms and tilts his head, keeping his gaze fixed on me with a playful glimmer in his eyes. “I like closed concept.”
I glare at him, pursing my lips. “Nobody likes closed concept.”
“I do.”
“I thought you weren’t gonna have an opinion.” I wave a hand and give a playful smirk. “No attachment, remember?”
“I think I just like annoying you.”
Is Andre Smoke flirting with me? No. God, no. That’s just his damn hotshot magnetic personality that had me tripping on my words ten years ago. Not anymore.
I clear my throat and try to force myself to treat him like I would any other client. Only, this is not just any other project. This house has to be even more than my usual perfection. It has to be mind-blowing, TV-worthy kind of perfection.
I quickly close out of the other open apps running on the iPad and clear the notification bar. When I glance up, I meet Andre’s eyes, looking at me with some mixture of amusement and mocking.
“What?” I frown.
He angles his head toward the tablet in my hands. “You had to do that now?”
“Do what?”
“Clear all the notifications and apps and all that.” He gives a soft laugh, looking at me as if he’s reading a textbook and trying to learn as much as humanly possible.
“Of course.” I swallow. “If I don’t clear them, they build up and get all…junky.”
“Junky?”
“Yes. I like things to be…” I lift a shoulder, thinking about how even though Andre technically “knows” me, he doesn’t know me as an adult. As an actual person. As anything other than the doe-eyed middle schooler who wrote essay-length journal entries about him. “A certain way,” I finish.
“Got a li’l OCD in ya?” He elbows my side lightly, enough for me to ache for more of his touch.
I look skyward. “More like perfectionism,” I say, brushing off the discussion of my personality and attempting to shift gears back to business. But he seems to be all into personality tonight. “Anyway…I think sight lines from the kitchen to the ocean view would add another level of wow factor, not to mention the natural light.”
He shrugs. “All right, all right. You do your thing. As long as you’re adding value to the place, it’s fine by me.”
I glance at him. “You’re already thinking about resale value?”
I purse my lips, a piece of my heart tugging at the decade-old memory that burns deep enough to make Andre Smoke think like that.
“So.” I turn around to face him, holding my iPad against my chest with crossed arms. “Have you thought about the safe room? I always think that’s such a cool concept, and we could really do something unique with—”
“Safe room?” He furrows his brows. “The hell you talking about?”
“You really didn’t look at a single thing about this house before dropping five million on it, did you?” I ask on a soft laugh.
He gives a cheesy grin and raises one of those massive shoulders. “Six, actually. But hey, I got my water view. I’m happy. Now what’s a safe room?”
“Well…” I flip the iPad around and zoom in on a tiny part of the floor plan. “A lot of high-end homes where very wealthy people live—congrats, that’s you—” I pause and give him a side-eye. “They have small spaces hidden in the house that are hard to find if you’re not looking for them. In case of a break-in or a robbery, generally. But in Florida, they’re fortified with concrete walls and cellarlike features for, you know, storms and hurricanes and…” I let my voice trail off.
“Tornadoes,” Andre says, barely above a whisper. His eyes flash for a second, and I swallow hard.
“Not a lot of those down here.”
“Maybe not.” He glances around at the glass castle surrounding us. “But like you just said, all new possibilities of what could wipe this baby away in seconds.”
I pull in a sharp breath and feel a pang of hurt for the ten-year-old boy who was left without a home all those years ago. “Andre…” I whisper.
He chuckles and waves a hand. “I’m messing. It’s all good. Now show me this secret cave room.”
I linger on his eyes for a second, trying to study him and understand him and then trying to remind myself that I don’t need to.
At least he hasn’t teased me about that night when he was home from college. If only he knew that my virginity is still up for grabs. What would he think? Yikes.
“I think it’s this way.” I walk down a back hallway and into a study with wall-to-wall built-in bookshelves. Andre hasn’t put any books on them, and the room looks like it hasn’t been touched in years. “Not much of a reader, I take it.”
He bites his lip. “Unless they’re football playbooks. No, not much of one.”
“Well…” I face him and smile as I slowly back into the room through the open double doors. “If I’m right about this, then your empty study is about to get a whole lot cooler.”
He raises his brows and follows me, skepticism and amusement glinting in his hazel eyes.
I examine the tall, cherrywood bookshelves for a moment, running my hands along the center gap between them.
“Here we go,” I say through a laugh, yanking the little lever between the shelves and pulling back, shifting the bookshelf away from the wall and revealing a wooden door.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Andre’s chiseled jaw is slack as he steps back and stares at the secret door.
“Trick bookshelf.” I flip my hair over my shoulder and give him a smile. “Painfully cliché, isn’t it?”
“Like a fucking James Bond movie.” He shakes his head and laughs softly in disbelief. “So, what’s in it?”
I move aside and gesture for Andre to open the door. “You’re the homeowner. Do the honors.”
He narrows his eyes at me, then glances back at the door. “All right. But there better not be some weird shit back here. I don’t fuck with ghosts.”
I snort. “It’s just a safety shelter.”
He gives me a side-eye, locking his gaze with mine while he reaches for the ancient-looking wrought-iron handle. The extra beat of eye contact sends a jolt of heat through me, but I swallow it and force myself to look away.
I want nothing to do with Andre Smoke. He’s just my brother’s, quite literal, smokeshow of a best friend and my golden ticket to Mansion in a Month. My residual girlish crush will just have to be quiet.
Easier said than done.
“Oh damn.” He flips on a light switch in the small room, zinging me back to reality. “It really is like a cellar. It’s for…storms?”
My heart tugs. I don’t want anything about this house to make him unhappy or bring back bad memories. Yes, I’m here for my company to win the HGTV contest, but he’s still my client, and this will still be his home. “Not just storms,” I say quickly, running my fingers along the dusty cinderblock wall. “Like I said. Break-ins…robberies…maybe if you just need some alone time.”
He laughs heartily and inches close to me, his enormous, rock-solid chest right at my eye level. Damn it, Smoke.
“Alone time, huh? Normally, I’d just go down to the beach or lift some weights. But I guess when I want to be really alone, like in the case of a zombie apocalypse or nuclear war…” He smacks his hand on the concrete wall. “I’ll know where to go.”
“You got to admit…” I lean against the wall and look around, wondering what we could do with this space to really wow those HGTV judges, already envisioning how to make it a flawless, unique, and functional space. “The secrecy of it is pretty cool. It’s so…” I bite my lip and stare to the side, trying to ignore the fact that he’s getting closer and closer to me.
“Private,” he finishes under his breath, heat building between us and electricity buzzing down my spine.
The safe room is hot and still and silent, and I swear he can probably hear my heartbeat. He knows what he’s doing. He knows I had a crush on him the size of Mount Everest growing up, and if he didn’t know it then, he knew it when that night down at the lake when I offered up my virginity.
But he didn’t take it. And now, no one has.
And here, in this room…this quiet, isolated, secret room, I’m looking into his eyes and feeling myself want to completely unravel the way I did that night seven years ago.
“Yeah,” I agree, backing up even though there isn’t much space for me to escape his panty-dropping magical spell. “It’s private. It needs a little bit of rehab.” I pick up my iPad and make a note, forcing myself back into work mode. “A facelift to make it a real selling point in the home.”
“It should be a secret room,” he says enthusiastically.
I frown and crouch down, checking the floor for any obvious dirt before I sit cross-legged and set my tablet next to me. “Yeah, it is a secret room. That’s the point. But I’m saying we really need to add a new factor to it, like—”
“No…” Andre sits next to me, stretching his legs out in front of him and torturing me with those godly sweatpants. “I mean a secret room. A room where you have to tell secrets.”
I look at him slowly, arching a brow and narrowing my gaze. “I’m sorry, are we suddenly at an eighth-grade sleepover?”
Eighth-grade sleepovers. Where the only secret I would ever tell is how I used to fantasize about being Mrs. Smoke.
He ignores my dig and looks straight ahead, that wide, happy, blindingly bright smile of his lighting up the room. “I’ll start. I’m terrified of spiders. They’re fucked up.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Spiders and ghosts?” I retort. “Not such a big NFL stud deep down, huh?”
He rolls his eyes and nudges me. I wish his hand would linger on me for hours. “Your turn.”
I scoff. “I don’t like this game.”
“Come on.” He shifts his body on the ground to face me. “One little weird Kendall fact. Besides the OCD thing.”
The words I’m still a virgin burn through my mind like wildfire. But I quickly shove them away. “I…don’t like wine.”
He squints and shakes his head slowly. “Weak secret. Not good enough.”
“Oh shut up.”
“Hey.” He juts his chin toward me, the angles of his face sharp and defined. “If you’re g
onna have a room that basically says, ‘Here’s where you go when the entire house gets destroyed, or shit otherwise completely hits the fan,’ you might as well have fun with it.”
I open my mouth to respond, but nothing comes out.
“Besides. You like to get to know your clients. Isn’t that what you said? What better way than…in the secret room?”
I push a strand of hair out of my face and give a soft laugh. “Okay, fine. The secret room. But it’s still getting a facelift and becoming a special feature.”
“Give me something, then.” His eyes twinkle, giving off sparks. “Anything.”
I pull in a slow breath and think hard about what I want to say next. “Okay. I wish I had more friends in South Florida.” I raise a shoulder. “I moved here with Desta and Jackson after college, and ever since then, the company has ruled my entire life. Of course, the two of them are my best friends, but they’re also my coworkers, so the company has become basically all we talk or think about. And don’t get me wrong, I completely love my team and crew. But everyone who works for me is a burly construction guy. Not exactly gal pal material. And if it isn’t obvious…” I brush off my jeans and look down. “I like everything in my life to be perfect. So I wish that part could improve.”
Andre ponders what I said and nods slowly. “Makes sense. I get that. I’d love to help you out, but I think I’m actually more friendless than you at this point. I don’t know anyone here except for some of my teammates. But hey…” He gives a cheesy grin and cocks his head. “I’ll be your friend.”
Warmth rises in my chest as I bubble with a laugh. “Well, how damn lucky am I?” I tease.
He shrugs his broad shoulders and stands up, offering me a big, masculine hand.
I grab it, feeling his rough, callused skin under mine and letting him effortlessly pull me off the concrete ground as if I weigh an ounce and a half.
Secret room. Fine. He can play and tease and flirt with me all he wants. He is Andre Smoke, after all. Charm is basically written in his DNA.
But I’m here for this house. I’m not here to relive my days of gawking over Andre and his muscles and his smile and the way he gives me just enough attention to keep me captivated.
Rough Ride Page 3