by Erin Wright
“I used to wear contacts,” he said, “but after the fire, my eyes were really irritated from all of the smoke and dust, and then reconstruction started on the bakery which caused even more dust, and…well, I got into the habit of wearing glasses and after a while, I just forgot to go back to contacts. It’s nice not to be trying to wake up at four in the morning by stabbing myself in the eyeball with my finger. I don’t miss contacts, honestly.”
Cady almost got sidetracked by the “four in the morning” comment – who woke up at four in the morning voluntarily?! – but managed by sheer dint of will to focus on an even more shocking statement: This fire he mentioned so casually.
“What fire?” she asked.
“What?” he murmured, distracted by a trail of melting ice cream down the side of the waffle cone and managing to catch it with his tongue before it dropped to the sand beneath their feet.
You have a very nice tongue…is what she almost said, but she managed to stop herself at the last moment. She really would have to be swallowed up whole by the sand beneath her feet if she made a ridiculous statement like that.
“You mentioned a fire. What fire?”
“Oh! Right. Shit, I keep forgetting that you haven’t been living here for forever. Last April – the 10th, to be exact – the chimney in my bakery caught fire. I stayed too long trying to put the fire out, and tripped over something in all of the smoke. Hit my head on the way down, and completely knocked me out. We have an excellent fire crew here, though, and Jaxson, Sugar’s husband, found me and got me out. Saved my life, and Sugar’s too. Didn’t you wonder where all of that black smoke on the wall of your store came from?”
He drew to a stop, looking out over the gently lapping lake, eating the last bites of his cone, offering her the last crunchy bite of the base of the cone but she shook her head. She’d managed to say no this long; she could continue holding out. He popped the rest into his mouth with a shrug.
“Huh,” she said thoughtfully, turning to also look out over the lake. It was a safer view. “I saw that, of course, but thought that there’d been some sort of electrical fire from an outlet or something that had caused it. It was that and the knob-and-tube wiring that caused me to call Watson’s.”
Gage shook his head ruefully. “Let’s just all be glad that he only knocked out the power to the whole town,” he said with a dry chuckle. “He could’ve actually tried to wire something up for you, and then you really would’ve had an electrical fire. No, all of that smoke damage was actually from the fire in the bakery. The previous owner of your building had had that damn place for sale for what seemed like years but no one was interested. Too many problems and the price was too high. After the fire, he came over to the bakery to complain about the smoke damage. I told him to file a complaint with my insurance company, and gave him the info. He never did. I think he just liked to hear the sound of his own voice, preferably complaining.”
They grew silent then, looking out over the moonlit lake. The ripples meant that the half-moon’s reflection was distorted and ever moving, and Cady stared at that, feeling like it had more significance than most would ever realize.
Distorted, moving and restless, but still pretty in its own way.
Yeah, that could definitely be an analogy for her life.
“You ready to head back?” Gage asked quietly, breaking into her thoughts.
She nodded, not meaning it but knowing that she should. If Gage was getting up at four in the morning, she’d already kept him up past his bedtime, and as his friend, she should be focused on his well-being.
Friend.
When was the last time she’d had a male friend?
Dad. She had been closest to her mom, but her dad was a damn close second. He’d cared about her.
When they’d died…
She tried to push down the pain of that memory, and instead think back to the last male friend she’d had who wasn’t related to her. Elementary school, probably. Back before boys got cooties. Back before boys became monsters without provocation.
“You okay?” Gage asked, breaking into her thoughts. She realized with a start that they were standing next to her Jeep. He must’ve decided to walk her to it, but instead of climbing inside when they got there, she’d gotten lost in her painful history.
“Oh yeah, I’m good. See you tomorrow?” she asked rhetorically, and her voice was too loud and forcefully happy and she knew it wasn’t believable but she ignored that and climbed into her Jeep, starting it and letting the quiet rumble of the engine soothe her as she tried to breathe again.
Despite her mental meanderings, she reflected as she drove home (this time Gage following her, waiting in her landlord’s driveway until she’d made it safely inside of her basement apartment and he could drive away) tonight had been fun. More fun than she’d had in a long time. Maybe years, even.
Maybe, just maybe, Gage was the perfect friend – attentive, thoughtful, protective without being overbearing, and really, what guy would dare even think about touching her with him hulking just behind her? He was like a human-sized bottle of mace, at the ready at a moment’s notice to take down any asshole who dared to step inside her personal space.
Yeah, she could get used to this. As long as his dick stayed zipped up and out of sight, this could work just fine.
Chapter 12
Gage
May, 2019
It, he decided as he stepped through the door of the Smoothie Queen, clomping loudly on the checkerboard floor and calling out Cady’s name to keep from surprising her, was quite an unusual way to spend a day off.
After a lecture from Emma, Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa (both separately and together) – oh, and Chris just because he knew he could get away with it and he thought it was hilarious to get away with scolding his older brother about anything at all – Gage finally decided that he’d have set days off each week. Two whole days, back to back, every single week where he wasn’t expected to show up at the bakery and count inventory or fulfill an order or bake a single thing.
Thank God Sugar was back from maternity leave – this unheard of laziness on his behalf simply wouldn’t be possible without her there to take over the reins those two days. At least that part was taken care of. But as for two days off, in a row, every single week…Well, he wouldn’t lie, not even to himself.
It was…nice.
Unfortunately, all of this free time was also becoming boring as hell.
The first week, he’d read books. All of the books he was always going to read “someday.” Unfortunately, he’d never been one to read book after book, and even the classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, could only hold his interest for so long.
The second week, he decided to switch it up and binge-watch TV instead, ripping through every single episode of The Great British Bake Off he could get his hands on. This quickly backfired on him, however, when he realized that this just made him more restless and anxious to be in the kitchen, mixing up his own concoctions, and anyway, was it really too much to ask the gods that he be born in the UK so he could’ve competed on the show? A few of the mistakes that the contestants had made were just so…so amateurish. He could beat some of the contestants with one hand tied behind his back.
He was choosing, of course, to firmly ignore the fact that it was a show where one of the requirements to participate was that you be an amateur. Just because you had to be one didn’t mean you had to act like one.
It was now Week Three of this two-days-off-a-week experiment, and he was quite sure he was going to go insane. He just wasn’t meant to have this much free time on his hands to do absolutely nothing at all, no matter what every person in his life seemed to think.
Everyone except Cady, that was. When he’d originally told her the plan, she’d simply raised one eyebrow and then had blandly wished him the best of luck. No vanilla glaze he’d ever whipped up had dripped as much as her sarcasm did off those words.
It really wasn’t fair that
a woman he just met five months ago apparently knew him better than anyone else in his life, and maybe even better than he knew himself.
But all of that was why he was there at the Smoothie Queen that Wednesday morning. Cady had asked him who she should hire to do some carpentry work for her – after her electrical debacle, she’d become almost painfully insistent upon getting recommendations before hiring someone to so much as sneeze in her shop – and instead of recommending any number of handyman companies around town who’d jump at the chance for a small project like this to fill in the gaps between the larger projects, he found himself offering his own services. What else was he going to do with his Wednesday and Thursday this week? He was down to arranging the cans in his pantry by alphabetical order – he’d already done them by height – and after a five minute debate of whether “tuna fish” belonged with the T’s or the F’s, he’d decided that maybe something else to occupy his time might be a good idea.
A little woodworking would do the trick.
After his purposefully noisy entrance, Cady came walking up through the swinging doors from the back, an easy sway and grace to her steps as she shot him a pleased smile. He tried to force his body to ignore the appeal of that smile. His little feral kitten, all claws and hissing and angry, had finally started relaxing around him in the hardest-won fight of his life. He wasn’t about to send them hurtling back to square one by letting his errant dick lead him around. Cady had so firmly friend-zoned him, he was a little surprised she didn’t make him wear t-shirts while around her that said things like, “I own beachfront property in the Friend Zone” or “King of the Friend Zone.”
Actually, if she thought she could get away with it…
“Hey, Cady!” he said with a matching friendly smile of his own. “Reporting for duty as promised.”
“Thank you again,” she said – again – shooting him a grateful smile as she shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, unintentionally thrusting her perfectly proportioned tits forward as she did so. He gulped and forced his eyes up to her face. He’d simply never look below her neck ever again.
That was a totally doable and realistic plan.
Totally.
“I know this isn’t normally something that someone does on their day off,” she continued, “so I really appreciate it.”
He shrugged, shoving his hands into his back pockets, matching her stance in hopes of keeping his hands to himself. “No one in my family seems to understand this, but I like working,” he said. “Not all of it – spreadsheets aren’t exactly the most fun I’ve ever had, and I’m just lucky I can afford to have Jennifer and Bonnie help me with my bookkeeping – but the rest of it, I like. There’s a reason I chose to become a bakery owner. It gives me a sense of purpose.”
He stumbled to a stop then, before he continued his little spiel and said something stupidly personal. He couldn’t remember who he’d last tried to talk to about this sort of thing, who’d actually seemed to understand. Maybe Cady was just good at pretending, but the look in her eye…
It made him think she got it.
“Let me show you what’s going on,” Cady said, diplomatically understanding his desire to leave that topic alone and even better, respecting that desire. “I love these countertops,” she said, walking over to the line of glass-topped counters that ran the width of the store, breaking it up into customer and employee areas. “They’re just gorgeous. The woodworking people used to do…No one does this anymore. Everything is just a veneer of pine over chipboard or something.” She ran her hand lovingly over the carved dark wood. “But,” and she walked through the low swinging door that separated the retail area from the employee section and he followed, “on this side, it looks like someone let water drip down it without cleaning it up or something…? I’m not sure, but it’s in shit shape. This wasn’t just a little bit of water – it was a whole lot of water for a whole long time.”
He crouched down next to the warped wood and took it in. She was right – someone hadn’t just spilled a water bottle here or something. For the water to seep into the lacquered wood, it had to have been something much worse than that.
On a hunch, he looked up at the ceiling tiles above them, and sure enough, he spotted the tell-tale brown stains in the otherwise white acoustic tiles. Confused, she followed his gaze.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. She walked over and stood right next to him, except he was still crouched down on the heels of his boots which meant that his face was now directly in line with her perfectly proportioned (was any part of her not perfectly proportioned?) ass.
Completely ignorant of what she was doing to him, she craned her neck, staring up at the ceiling and then down at the countertop. “Well, duh, Cady,” she muttered to herself. She looked down at him, her mouth quirked up in a self-deprecating smile. “Some business owner I am. Looking up…a new concept.”
It was, unfortunately, not a new concept for him, because he was quickly realizing that this vantage point meant that he was also able to admire the underside of her perfectly proportioned breasts, which were just as perfect from this vantage point as they had been when he’d been looking down on them.
With a grunt, he forced himself into a standing position. He couldn’t follow his new personal rule to not look below Cady’s neck if he was crouched below her and looking up at her. The laws of physics and all that.
“All right, talk to me. What kind of money are you wanting to spend on this project?” he asked, leaning against the countertop casually, trying to get his groin to unclench and act just as casual as the rest of him.
“I don’t know…” she said slowly. “I hadn’t thought about it. What are the different options?”
He rubbed his chin as he thought about it, scratching at the stubble growing there. It was his day off, dammit, and the way he figured it, that meant a day off from shaving, too. The stubble was a little itchy, but he was determined not to give in and shave until Friday. If he was going to be forced to take two days off every single week, then by God, he was going to enjoy those two days by not shaving.
Even if the stubble was driving him insane.
“Basically,” he said after a few more moments of scratching, “it comes down to whether or not you want to match the woodwork on the other side. This side is the employee-only side, so no one but you and anyone you hire will ever see it. You might want to use the money you have to focus on something that is customer-facing and use cheap wood back here just to get the counter back into functional shape. On the other hand, if you’re someone who is bothered by things not matching or if the beauty of something really matters to you, maybe even more than the function, it could bother you to have ugly-ass wood right here that you’re staring at all the time. Do you care what you’re looking at? Or do you care only about what the customers are looking at?”
“Both,” she said without hesitation. “It isn’t such a big deal if it’s just something that I’m renting – like my basement apartment is never going to win any architectural awards, you know? I love my landlords, Rochelle and Mike, to death, but it’s just an apartment, and I’m okay with that. But if I’m going to buy something and renovate it and make it my own, I want there to be beauty and function. As a business owner, I’m going to be here a lot. I want to make it into a place I want to be.”
He nodded approvingly. “When I first took over the bakery, I struggled with the lighting back in the kitchen. It’s fluorescent and it’s ugly and there are no windows where I can bring in natural light. I told myself it wasn’t such a big deal and it was better to spend the money on upgrading the mixer than it was to replace the lighting. It’s been four years now, and I hate that lighting just as much as I ever did, maybe more. I keep telling myself that the next thing I’m going to do is replace it, but there’s always something…And that damn fire really set me back. It’s taken the last year just to regain the ground I’d lost after that fire. I had insurance, but it never pays for everything, plus the loss of inco
me…Anyway.” He plastered a determined smile on his face. This was about her, not him. “So don’t let yourself think that aesthetics don’t matter,” he finished lamely.
She nodded slowly, chewing on her bottom lip as she thought, and he had to shove his hands into his back pockets again to keep from reaching out to her. If there was one thing guaranteed to drive Cady away, it would be reaching out to her, unless it was to save her from falling and breaking her neck, and even then, it was debatable.
She might as well have had a giant “Do Not Touch” sign blazing above her head at all times, visible to every guy for miles around.
“Can we match the dark cherry wood, though?” she asked. “And what about this lacquer finish? I love how gorgeous it is.” She trailed her fingers over the wood. “How replicable is all of this?”
This time, they crouched down together next to the countertop as they began to go over her options. She listened intently, asked intelligent questions, and made intelligent suggestions.
In other words, she seemed to know at least something about construction and woodworking. It was on the tip of Gage’s tongue to ask who she’d learned from – a city girl who knew how to run a table saw? He was flat-out shocked, not gonna lie.
But he didn’t want to pry into her background. She could tell him what she felt comfortable sharing, when she wanted to share it. He’d pushed her the night of the party – pushed her hard – and somehow, he knew that he couldn’t pull off a repeat performance. There was only so much prying into her life that Cady would tolerate.
And if he could only ask a limited number of questions, he better be damn picky when choosing. For example, she still hadn’t told him how she was affording all of this, and as a guy who was firmly in the friend zone, he had no right to ask. That didn’t keep him from being observant, however, and he hadn’t missed the fact that she wasn’t acting as if every penny were dear and was all that was between her and starvation, but she also didn’t appear to be spending those pennies excessively.