by Dani Collins
“Really. Imagine how you’d be reacting if I was here to break more than your concentration. What are you doing leaving yourself unprotected like this?” The words came out sharper than he’d intended. If that ex of hers was so worried about her, he ought to be here, looking after her, not screwing someone else.
“Rosie was here most of the morning and Olinda just left.” Paige nodded toward a box overflowing with files. “She dropped off some work for me.”
“Oh. And here I thought you were resting up from your ordeal.”
“Actually, I’m getting around. This foot doesn’t hurt at all and Brit dropped off Zack’s crutches from when he broke his leg.” She set her laptop in the dock and watched the light change color. “I probably could have come in to work. I just couldn’t figure out how to, um—” She touched where her hair was skimmed off her forehead and held by a yellow clip. “—shower.”
“Mmm.” He took in her lack of make-up, her bicycle shorts that fit like a second skin and her If It Never Rains In California What Am I Doing In Seattle T-shirt that covered—thank you, Lord—braless breasts.
“So, anyway, what did you want?” She folded her arms.
“To make sure you’re safe and sound. And to check inside Granny’s house.”
“Oh. So you were serious about moving in there? Frankly, if you and your dad are fighting, you should do it at home, away from where the employees can overhear it.”
“When I want advice, I ask for it,” he said in a perfect mock of his father.
“And what does your mother say? About your moving in, I mean.”
From the garage, he could hear the music kicking over to a woman claiming she didn’t give a damn about her bad reputation.
“That it’s a terrible neighborhood. I pointed out the house could be a target for squatters if it stays empty.”
“Hmph. Well, it seems a lot of trouble to go to for a few weeks.”
“Actually, I’ll probably be here a little long—”
“Ha.” She pointed an accusing finger at him. “I knew you couldn’t be trusted to leave when you said!”
“Hey, did I look happy last night? I lost a contract because of this. I’m pissed.”
“That’s what your phone call was about?”
He nodded once.
“You sounded pretty cheerful when you answered. You called whoever it was ‘sugar.’”
Was that a sulk? He folded his own arms and leaned his shoulder into the wall, feeling cheerful all of a sudden. “Patty,” he said. “My partner. In the company. Not romantically.” He thought about adding Patty’s sexual orientation, but he wasn’t one of those some-of-my-best-friends-are-lesbians braggarts. “Neither of us is happy this deal went south.”
“If it’s that important, you should go.” Paige looked sincere.
He shrugged. “Why work for yourself if you can’t pick and choose when you work and for whom? I’m needed at the factory right now, even if you and Dad won’t admit it.”
“I’ll admit that your father needs help. But I still don’t see why you have to live next door to me while you do it.”
He removed the key from his pocket and hitched his head in the direction of the house. “Come give me your opinion,” he invited. “Tell me if you think it’s worth my time to renovate.”
Why he said that, he didn’t know, since she was determined to talk him out of it. Maybe because he’d come damned close to crossing certain lines yesterday evening and all he could think about was doing it again. Doing it right. Going all the way.
“It’s probably worth someone’s time,” she conceded, taking up her crutches, giving them to him when they reached the top of the stairs. She braced herself between the rail and his arm as she bounced down the stairs beside him. “But it doesn’t seem fair to take this opportunity from a young family who won’t be able to afford it after it’s renovated.”
He rolled his eyes, admiring her tenacity, then went ahead of her out the front door, circumnavigating her father’s Wildcat while she closed the front door of the house and the big garage door, too.
“Can I ask you something? It’s none of my business, but I’ve always wondered,” he said.
“What?”
“How come you stayed here when your parents divorced? Was your mom’s place not big enough?”
Paige’s eyes went dark and vulnerable. She started around the outside of the house, toward the path that led down the side. For a minute he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but when he caught up to walk alongside her, she answered.
“Mom is bipolar. We didn’t know it then. All I knew growing up was that sometimes she loved me and sometimes she hated me. It was like that for all of us. She left because Dad was cheating, but he cheated because Mom made him crazy. She made us all crazy. It was a huge relief the day she was diagnosed and I could finally believe it wasn’t my fault that she acted the way she did. It took a while to find the right medication and she’s been stable for a long time now, but I couldn’t live with her back then. She wanted me to, but I couldn’t.”
So she’d stayed with the ne’er do well brother and the womanizing father. Sterling absorbed that, seeing old heartache in her expression. That’s why Paige was so self-reliant. When had she ever had anyone to lean on?
The music followed them, filling the silence, blaring through the open windows at the back of the house as they made their slow way, in deference to her crutches, across the yards. But it was a nice day and The Proclaimers—finally a band he recognized—were celebrating their shift from misery to happiness.
“What is this you’re listening to?” he asked.
“Soundtrack for Shrek. Get used to the music if you’re determined to move in. We make lousy neighbors. Always have.”
“I’m guessing you’re not head of the Welcome Wagon.” They reached the back porch. He paused as he set the key in the lock, adding, “Unless this place was used to slaughter pigs, I’m moving in.”
She sighed. “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
Chapter Twelve
“Why does it bother you so much?” he asked, opening the door and stepping in.
Paige stayed on the porch, just poked her head in, maintaining a sense of boundary. She wasn’t about to admit she was starting to feel all moonie over him again. It was embarrassing. If he was living in her back pocket, backyard, it might get worse. She’d rather he kept to the other side of town where he belonged.
“I’m not bothered.”
“Right,” he scoffed and moved into the kitchen.
As a child, she used to knock on this door and ask Mrs. Melker for a cookie, or lemonade in the summer. She even ate supper here some nights, after her mother left.
The kitchen was gloomy behind the closed curtains and smelled like stale wood-smoke. Sterling tried the lights. They didn’t work so he opened the curtains beside where the kitchen table should have been. He checked the corner cupboard.
“Looking for peppermints?” Paige teased.
“Owl eggs, she called them.” He walked through the archway into what his grandmother had referred to as ‘the parlor.’
After a moment, curiosity tugged Paige in. The paint was different and the teakettle from the top of the stove was gone. What else had changed?
The house was weirdly still. Mrs. Melker had always had music playing—Johnny Cash or Freddie Fender—and her little blue budgie twittering in its cage in the corner. Sometimes she had something baking that would make Paige’s tummy rumble.
Paige wandered to the narrow door into the hall. It led from the parlor to the two bedrooms and bathroom. All the doors were shut. That part of the house was dark.
Sterling strode out of the parlor, heading down there anyway, surprising her with his sudden closeness. She stepped back, winced when she didn’t manage the crutches right and put too much weight on the wrong part of her foot.
He paused, his expression hard to read in the shadows. “That’s why it bothers you if I m
ove in here.”
“What. I hurt my foot.”
He shifted his weight forward.
She retreated another clumsy step back.
He made a soft, “uh, huh,” sound and turned as if heading for the bedrooms, shook his head and turned back to her. “You know, the only reason it’s on my mind every time we’re together is because it’s so obviously on your mind.”
She didn’t know which way to turn, said, “Nothing’s on my mind.”
“Then why are you so jumpy around me?”
Because he was good-looking and funny and he had held her hand last night in a way that made her start believing in fairy tales. “I just don’t want people to think things.”
He snorted. “You can’t control what people think. Who cares what they think?”
“So says the man who has never had anyone think badly of him.”
“I don’t know. Half the time you seem to think I’m something that needs hosing off the bottom of your shoe.”
“I don’t think badly of you. You’re perfect, which is annoying, but—” Shut up, Paige. She leaned on the crutches, looked toward the door, glanced back to see if he was angry and saw he was suppressing a smile.
“Question is,” he murmured, “do you also think about that night?”
Her breath stopped in her throat, until she finally forced out, “Since I’m not anxious to relive my most humiliating rejection, no. I never think about it.”
In the silence that followed, she heard her own heartbeat pulsing in her ears. Okay, really. It was time to go. She moved the end of one crutch.
“Are we talking about what happened in my car before your dad grabbed me—”
“I’m not talking about anything,” she insisted. “It was horrible.”
“It was not.” After a beat, he said, “Did you really think it was awful, Paige?” He sounded concerned. Shocked. “I thought it was...” She heard him swallow and he was very careful as he said, “Consensual.”
Oh God. Why did every conversation with this man have to peel away every single layer of defenses she had?
“It was,” she mumbled, ducking her head so her hair would cover her hot cheeks, embarrassed by remembered passion. Need. One kiss was all it was supposed to be, a light thank you for asking her on a date. The next minute their clothing had been askew and she’d been trying to crawl inside his skin. He’d felt so good!
Her body was burning. She wanted to leave, but was pinned by mortification.
“I liked you, Sterling. And when you kissed me, I thought it meant you liked me back.” She sounded adolescent all over again. “But when you realized your good time was happening with a Fogarty, you got mad at me and acted like—”
“I wasn’t mad.” He had his hands in his pockets and slouched against the wall, his face still in shadow while she felt spotlighted by the light from the window and open door. A breeze through that door would be nice. “Not until after, when I thought you’d set me up. When I stopped, I was frustrated. Looks like anger, but it’s different.”
She thought back to a skinnier, big-handed, intense Sterling pushing her away, saying, What the hell? as if she’d been doing it all wrong. We’re not having sex. Like the thought of it revolted him.
The black and white tiles had gold sparkles in them. She’d never noticed that before.
“I was hard as an uncut diamond, Paige. You can’t seriously think I wasn’t into you.”
She remembered the hard as a diamond part, but from talk among her brother’s friends, she’d been under the impression guys were pretty much permanently in that state so she hadn’t taken credit for Sterling’s arousal.
She shrugged, forcing herself to lift her face and look at him even though it made her feel very vulnerable. “You always acted like you didn’t even know I existed.”
“So did you.”
And then they had finally spoken to each other, looked right at each other from across the width of a car and promptly collided like a pair of fusion atoms.
They were kind of looking at each other the same way now— Whew. Could they get some air in here? Please?
“I, um, didn’t know how to handle attention from boys,” she explained. Still didn’t. “So I just pretended they weren’t there.” It wasn’t working today.
His mouth twitched, the indent at one corner of his mouth deepening. Not laughing at her, laughing at the two of them. Dumb kids.
She still didn’t get it, though. “Why did you push me away and say you didn’t want to have sex then?”
“Because we were in the driveway?”
“Oh. Right.” She dried her damp palms on her hips, fumbled to keep hold of her crutches, felt too aware of her unpolished appearance and the fact that her Fogarty-ness hadn’t turned him off back then. She wondered what he thought of her now.
Oh, don’t be such a girl.
He stood unmoving, all of his attention focused on her in a way that made the bottom of her stomach drop away.
Oh, dear. She needed some distance, stat.
“So you thought Lyle and I set you up? Because—”
“Your brother’s a prick. If I think about it, I want to kick his ass, so let’s never speak of him again. And be serious. All this time you’ve thought I drove to your house, asked you out, made the first move, then rejected you?”
She shrugged. “You wouldn’t talk to me. Everything after was so awful I tried to forget the whole thing. Didn’t you?”
“No.” His tone scoffed at her for the notion. “Not all of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“In my version we finish,” he said with the kind of shrug men gave when they were acting like men. “So I think about it. Sometimes.”
He had a version. She didn’t know they were allowed to have versions. And he thought about it when he... Oh dear God.
“You’re thinking about it now, aren’t you?” he accused, an intimate teasing entering his voice. “Revising as we speak.”
“I am not!” She was. Her palms were hot and slippery on the handles of her crutches. If she took out the part where he pushed her away and remembered the part where his hand shook when he touched her breast....
Her foot protested and she realized she had her feet mashed together, that she was pressing her thighs together. Oh, God.
He made a subtle adjustment against the front of his jeans.
Could this house get any more stifling? She had a feeling he was watching her mouth. He did that a lot. Last night, at the hospital, he’d seemed fixated on it. It made her self-conscious. She licked her lips, then pressed them together because she was making it worse.
“I’m leaving,” she told him. “And we’re adding this conversation to the list of things we never mention again.” She arranged the crutches so she pointed toward the door.
“If we don’t talk about it, how will we trade notes on our edits?”
She would have to drop a crutch to show him her middle finger, so she refrained, getting away from his laughter as fast as her hobbled gait could carry her.
~ * ~
Concentrate on the audit, Paige reminded herself for the millionth time and considered closing the door of her father’s office to shut out the distractions, but every time she did, the scent of cigarettes condensed around her. Besides, it wouldn’t help with the real distraction.
More yelling came through the venting system, originating from Walter’s office.
She flinched, losing the thread of figures she was punching into her spreadsheet.
What was he doing to make his father react like that? Was it not enough that he invaded her thoughts all night, to the point she now had her own version of their near miss at sex, in which they didn’t miss anything at all? Did he also have to attempt a coup d’etat on his father every day? Was he trying to cement his presence in her skull?
“Don’t think I’m afraid to! I’ll fire you if I see fit,” she heard Walter shout.
Sterling’s voice followed, coming to h
er as a murmur of sound, the tone firm, the sentences short and hard.
Then, the dreaded silence.
Terrific. He’d be up here in a minute, jockeying for her signature on whatever Walter was refusing to approve.
She debated closing the door, but the smell. Deodorizers weren’t helping. Even washing the walls hadn’t helped and that just took time away from what she was really trying to do.
This bloody audit. Why wouldn’t it come together the way it was supposed to?
Oh, who was she kidding? She could blame the odor in the office, and Sterling picking fights with his father, but she knew the real reason she couldn’t concentrate.
Walter said something, low and final, then the door to his office slammed.
Here it comes, she thought, and heard feet tramping up the stairs. She covered her face, hoping, praying....
“Sign this,” Sterling said from the door.
She uncovered her face and folded her arms on the desktop, trying to maintain a wall of indifference.
It was impossible. He wore jeans and a company T-shirt, but his dander was up, making it an effort to meet his intense gaze. It had been an effort all week. Nothing had changed since they’d spoken at his grandmother’s house, but everything had. Now, instead of the air being filled with old hurts and resentments, it rang instead with I was into you.
Kids with an unspoken crush. Adults in a contentious, impossible situation. Undercurrents. She felt like her lungs were in a vice every time she was around him.
“I’m busy,” she told him. “Quit fighting with him. It looks bad to the employees.”
“Oh, is this my mother’s living room? I was looking for Paige Fogarty’s office.” He glanced at the nameplate on the door. It read ‘Grady Fogarty.’ He stepped in anyway and started to swing the door closed behind him.
“Don’t. It smells like cigarettes if I close the door.”
“No, it smells like cloves and oranges.” He followed his nose to her desk. “Actually, today it smells like something else.”
She pointed to the plug-in diffuser burning essential oils and the bottle of patchouli, mildly annoyed when he picked it up to read the label. She wanted to believe it was because she didn’t want to lose another minute, but it was really because every time she so much as passed him in the hallway, her imagination ballooned with his admission that he had been interested back then. How could she have read him so wrongly? Why did it matter? Get back to the audit, hormone-case.