Selling Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 1)

by Samantha Westlake

  That moment of speechlessness, however, ended as soon as I saw how he pulled at the table. "Hey, take it easy!" I burst out, reaching forward and grabbing his arm without thinking. "You don't want to damage any of the pieces!"

  Only as these words were leaving my mouth, however, did I realize that I had my hand sitting on his arm, and that he felt warm and strong beneath my fingers. I jerked my hand back quickly, as if his skin was burning hot. Fortunately, Sanford didn't seem to notice.

  He did roll his eyes at me, however, for asking for his help and then immediately telling him that he was doing things wrong.

  Sanford stuck around with me for the rest of the day, helping out whenever I needed some extra muscle. He also spent a fair amount of time smirking at my own attempts, or rolling his eyes when I got all excited over some feature of a piece that we dragged out of the pile, but he didn't actually say anything mean to me.

  And to tell the truth, I actually didn't mind him hanging around. Despite the eye rolls and the occasional little grin dancing around his lips that told me that he was laughing inside his head at me, he wasn't a bad working companion. Whenever he saw me struggling with a heavy item, he'd move forward and take up the extra weight without needing any prompting.

  Besides, watching him move gave me a good idea of how he looked under those clothes - and it was the stuff of fantasies.

  We took a break after a couple hours, and Sanford summoned Winston to bring us some snacks and water. He sprawled down on top of a couch that we'd just cleared, apparently not caring about how his landing on the old plush surface sent clouds of dust radiating out in every direction.

  "You realize that you might be sitting on something worth thousands of dollars, right?" I asked him, watching with disapproval as he propped his feet up on a nearby chair.

  "You realize that I wanted to throw all this stuff out, don't you?" he answered me, but there wasn't any rancor in his words. "Look, it's great that you care about all this old stuff, but I just want it handled. That's why I'm helping you."

  "Oh, you're not just here to check out my body whenever I bend over to grab something?" I retorted without thinking.

  I meant for the words to sound sarcastic - it was clearly a joke! But Sanford hesitated for just a fraction of a second before interesting, and although the light in the room wasn't perfect, I could have sworn that I saw him blush a little, as if I'd actually caught him in the act.

  Ridiculous. He definitely wasn't checking me out.

  But he didn't answer my question, and for the rest of the afternoon, he seemed to be taking extra-special pains to ensure that his eyes were never resting on me. Every time I glanced over at him, he was glaring down single-mindedly at the furniture and other antique pieces, as if they had wronged him in some way.

  "So, you're being quiet."

  I glanced up as Della popped back over to me, standing on the other side of the bar and watching me closely. "Just thinking about all the work that still needs to get done," I said, reaching out to sip the last of my glass of wine. "In fact, I probably ought to head home soon. I can't get much done tomorrow morning if I'm nursing a hangover."

  "Uh huh." Della nodded, but her eyes lingered on me. "You know, you should try and draw him out of his shell."

  "What? Who, Sanford?"

  "No, your cat." She huffed, blowing a few errant strands of her curly hair out of the way from in front of her face. "Yes, Sanford! He's clearly withdrawn from the world, and that's not healthy. Try and talk to him."

  "I don't think that he wants to talk to me," I answered, but Della just waved a hand to brush away this protest.

  "Seriously. Just give him a chance, and maybe he'll open up," she insisted. "All these strong silent types are the same. Deep down inside, they just want someone to trust, someone who will listen to all the secrets that they lock away because they're afraid that those secrets make them vulnerable."

  "And you know all about this, do you?" I asked her.

  Della just shrugged, the motion making her whole body jiggle a little and attracting dozens of male eyes from all across the wine bar. "Just give it a try. You can thank me later."

  After a moment, I smiled at her. I knew that my best friend had good intentions, my best interests at heart. "Thanks for the advice, Della," I told her, pushing the empty glass back to her and sliding off of my stool.

  "And try to get a good look at his ass, too!" she hollered after me as I left, and I grinned to myself. That was more like what I expected from her!

  Chapter Twelve

  *

  The next day, as Sanford grunted alongside me as we moved a heavy dresser out from against a wall so that I could look for markings on its backside, I remembered Della's words.

  No, not the thing about looking at Sanford's ass - although I did get a couple quick glances of it as he flexed in his jeans, and I had to admit that it was the most perfect male ass I'd ever spotted. My fingers twitched, wanting to reach out and give it a totally inappropriate little squeeze!

  But instead of committing sexual assault on my employer, I cleared my throat, trying not to cough from the dust clouds we'd raised, hanging in the air. "So," I said, doing my best to keep my voice casual. "Do you remember high school much?"

  Sanford glanced over at me. Those dark, strong eyebrows rose slightly, but after the last couple of days, I'd developed a bit of resistance to his stony looks. "Come on, we're just dragging stuff around. We might as well talk about something, just to pass the time."

  I thought for a minute that he'd tell me to just remain silent, that he wasn't paying me to talk. But just as my lips were forming an apology for even raising the question, he grunted and cleared his own throat.

  "I remember high school," he confirmed, although he didn't say anything more.

  "Do you remember me? I'm pretty sure that we overlapped by a year. You were a senior when I started as a freshman. Although you-" I closed my mouth mid-sentence, but he laughed harshly, already guessing what words I held back.

  "Yeah, I dropped out," he said, grunting as he shoved the dresser across the floor. I winced at the scratches he probably left in the hardwood floor, but he didn't even look down to see the damage. "Not exactly the model student."

  "Definitely one of the coolest ones, though," I replied without thinking, and I saw him pause. He faced away from me, but I saw the muscles in his back flex slightly as he stopped shoving at the dresser.

  "Coolest? You little freshmen thought that I was cool?" Something about the idea seemed amusing to him.

  "Well, yeah," I said, thinking back to those days as a teenager. "You had that leather jacket, hung out and smoked cigarettes and skipped class, and you skulked around with those dark glances. Everyone thought you were so mysterious, with the ripped jeans and dirty old shoes and everything."

  This comment made Sanford laugh out loud, and he turned to look over his shoulder at me. "That's hilarious."

  "Why? What's funny about it?"

  For a moment, he hesitated, but then sighed and turned around to fully face me. "Back when I was a senior, I was probably at the lowest point in my life, that's why," he replied. "That was just before my mom passed away, although I knew it was coming."

  "What??" My mouth dropped open.

  "Every day, I hung around at school because I didn't want to go home and find her dead, sprawled out on the floor of our trailer," he answered, his lips still slightly curved up in a sardonic smile that held no actual humor. "I made it most of the year before she finally keeled over. Fortunately for me, the mailman happened to stop by and found her before I made it back home."

  Holy shit. I just stared at Sanford, wondering if this was some sort of sick joke. He looked back at me steadily, however, and then shrugged, turning back to the pile of furniture. "What next?" he asked.

  I couldn't spare a single thought for thinking about what furniture piece to examine next. "Your mom died in high school?" I repeated, still not totally convinced that he wasn't playing some
sort of twisted prank on me.

  He turned back to me, planting his hands on his hips. "Do you really want to hear about this?"

  Yes. No. "If you're okay to talk about it," I finally said softly, wondering what can of worms I'd just opened.

  He hesitated for a second, glancing over at the pile of stuff still in the room, but then shrugged his shoulders. "Sure, why not. Therapist said that I ought to tell someone, kept on insisting it, even up to the point where I fired him."

  Oh. He'd been in therapy, too. Good job, Elaine, picking a real winner to totally develop a girly crush on. "I mean, I'm not a therapist, but I'll listen."

  Sanford opened his mouth, but then paused and leveled a finger at me. "But this stays between the two of us," he warned, and this time his stony glare really did scare me. "No one, not your friends down at the bar where you drink, not your old gal pals, learns any of this. And if someone else starts talking to me about any of this, I'm not only firing you, but I'll also sue you for breach of confidentiality. Understand?"

  I didn't know if he could really sue me for something like that, but I wasn't going to take the risk. "You got it," I squeaked, staring at that finger pointed at me like it was the barrel of a gun.

  In the room next to our current location, the old couch that we'd dragged out of the pile yesterday still sat there, still dusty and unexamined. Sanford wandered over to it and dropped down onto it, once again sending out a little puff of dust in all directions.

  "Over here." He patted the cushion beside him.

  Feeling a little self-conscious about being directed around, I stepped over and sat down next to him. "So, where do you want to start?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "I dunno. Just go ahead and ask something."

  "What happened to your dad?"

  Sanford tilted his head back until it lay against the back of the couch, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. "Ah, going right to the good ones," he murmured.

  "Oh, I didn't - should I ask something else?"

  "No, that's okay." He grunted, and I watched him bite his lip for a moment as he considered his words. "I don't know much about him. He ran off when I was a kid, and I can barely even remember anything about him. Left me and my mom alone."

  "Oh," I said again, not knowing how to respond to this. "And then your mom died in high school?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why'd she die?" I asked, guessing that it was totally inappropriate, but not knowing what else to say.

  He shrugged. "Drug overdose. Probably heroin."

  "Oh my god, I'm so sorry," I said again, trying to ignore how I was starting to sound like a broken record.

  "That's alright. I knew she was a user, knew that all those times she promised me that she'd get clean were just lies. She'd say just about anything, towards the end. Whatever it took to get her the hit that she craved." I stared at Sanford as he said these awful, terrible things so matter-of-factly, as if this happened to people all the time. Although in his childhood world, maybe these things really were an everyday occurrence.

  "So... so what did you do?" I asked after another minute. I already felt uncomfortable, like I was staring into the very heart of this man's soul. I definitely didn't know him well enough for this, but at the same time, I felt an almost suicidal sense of curiosity drawing me in deeper, seeking more illicit answers. "After she died, I mean."

  "You know this part. I dropped out of school, went off to seek my future in the big city. I'm sure the other high school kids thought that it was very grand and idealistic." Sanford's grim smile told me what he thought of this viewpoint.

  "But it worked, though," I pointed out, waving my hand around to take in the big house.

  "Suppose." He didn't sound convinced. "I started working at an auto repair shop. We had a broken-down car that my mom used when she wasn't too high to drive, back in high school, but things kept on going wrong with it. I probably spent more time under that car, taking it apart and putting it back together, than I spent in front of an open textbook. When I got to the city, I started with what I knew - working on cars."

  "You got rich from fixing cars?" I asked skeptically.

  "Nah. I soon realized that, while I was doing all the hard work and had all the knowledge, my bosses were the ones making the real money. So I struck out with some friends that I've made, opened up my own shop, and promised that I wouldn't just focus on squeezing every dollar out of my customers like most of the other competitors seemed to want to do." Sanford tilted his head to look over at me, and a sardonic grin flickered across his face. "Who would have guessed that customers just wanted an auto mechanic to be honest and straightforward with them, instead of trying to scam them out of more cash?"

  "I'm sure your realization took the auto repair world by storm," I fired back, glad that he wasn't dwelling on dead people any longer.

  "It kind of did, actually," he admitted. "Before I knew it, I'd opened up a second location, and then a third. People kept on giving me these huge checks, and I had to learn everything as I went. I'm still impressed that I didn't do anything really stupid and lose it all."

  "And then what?"

  "At some point, I started attracting the notice of the bigger players, some of the national shops. They wanted to get a part of the action, and to tell the truth, I was already in so deep over my head that I would have taken any lifeline they offered me. A group of other CEOs and executives came to me with a buyout offer, and they didn't need to ask twice."

  "So you sold it all, and then came back here? Why?" I asked.

  Sanford's expression momentarily shifted into one of worry. "I'm still working on an answer to that."

  I didn't have a response for him, and we both fell silent for a minute, sitting side by side on the dusty old couch. I kept on sneaking glances over at the man beside me, now seeing him through different eyes. I'd thought that he was arrogant and cold because he held himself as better than everyone else around him, but I now knew that he'd already endured far more than his own share of personal problems.

  Maybe, for a man like Sanford, acting cold and cruel and distant was just his way of handling all the cruelty that the world dished out to him.

  With both of us sitting down on the couch, no longer moving around and hauling furniture out of stacks and into position for me to examine the pieces and take photographs, I suddenly felt a little chilly. I leaned over slightly, and brushed against Sanford's warm arm on the couch next to me.

  He didn't say anything, but he didn't draw away.

  After another minute, however, I looked up at the sound of a soft cry. Whiskers had wandered into the room, and now made a beeline over to us. He stopped for a moment at the foot of the couch, looking up at it - and then, before I could stop him, hopped right up onto Sanford's lap!

  "You can push him off, if you don't want him there," I said immediately, not wanting my cat to further embarrass me.

  Sanford, however, smiled a little as he looked down at the fat orange tabby sitting on his lap. "Nah, he's alright," he replied, dropping one hand down on top of Whiskers' head and rubbing him behind the ears. Whiskers' purr ratcheted up by about ten notches in volume and he looked up at me, wearing the most satisfied grin that I'd ever seen on an animal.

  "Traitor," I told him, pouting that he'd chosen Sanford over me, and the man sitting beside me let out what might have been the very first genuine laugh I'd ever heard from him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  *

  "Yes!" I cheered, as Sanford stacked the last of the chairs on top of its fellows. "The first floor inventory is complete!"

  Just as I'd expected, the man rolled his eyes at me for cheering over such a mundane little thing, but I could see that, deep down, he was also proud of our progress. We'd been working for nearly the entire week to reach this point, but we'd finally managed to disentangle all the furniture from the stacked piles. I had tossed out most of the crap, and had enough photographs and measurements of the potentially valuable items to get through my researc
h to figure out their values.

  "There's still the second floor," Sanford pointed out after a moment, as if determined to prick my happiness and deflate me back down.

  It wasn't going to work, however, and I grinned at him. "Yeah, but we're halfway done! This is still a big step, and I'm still really proud of myself."

  "You're proud of yourself?" he protested. "So I don't get any credit for handling most of the heavy lifting?"

  "Brains trump muscles every time," I told him, while carefully making sure that I didn't admit how much I liked watching his muscles in action. For the last couple of days, Sanford had worn a tight tee shirt instead of his normal, slightly baggier button-up shirt, and I'd nearly started drooling several times as I watched his body flex in the tight clothing.

  "Whatever." Sanford sat down on one of the chairs, ignoring how the aged wood creaked alarmingly as he flopped down onto it. "So what next?"

  "Next?" I didn't have to consider the question for long. "Now, we should go out and celebrate! And you should come with me!"

  For just a moment, I saw a deer in the headlights look flash across Sanford's handsome face. "Me? No, that's okay, you go ahead-"

  Not letting myself stop and think about what I was doing, I grabbed his hand off of his lap, squeezing it in both of my own. "Oh, come on," I wheedled. "Don't you want to just go out and have fun for a night, not be trapped in this dusty, dirty house with no one but your butler to entertain you?"

  "It's not dirty," he protested weakly, but he didn't pull his hand away from my grip. It felt warm, and I could feel the strength in his firm fingers as I gripped them.

  Good lord, I was crushing so hard on the man that I didn't even want to let go of his hand! This was really getting out of control, a little part of me thought, but I told that voice inside my head to hush. Nothing was going to come of it, anyway. Just like a statue, Sanford didn't return any of my few and far between attempts at flirting.