by Maisey Yates
“What are you doing here?” she asked, then kicked the door shut with her foot and made her way over to the coffeemaker.
“Good morning.”
“Shouldn’t you be home having breakfast with your wife and kids?”
“I would be, but Danielle has an OB appointment later this morning.” Joshua’s wife was pregnant, and he was ridiculously happy about it. And Faith was happy for him. Two of her sisters-in-law were currently pregnant. Danielle very newly so, and Poppy due soon. Mia and Devlin seemed content to just enjoy each other for now.
Her brothers were happy. Faith was happy for them.
It was weird to be the last one so resolutely single, though. Even with her dating life so inactive, she had never imagined she would be the last single sibling in her family.
“I need to be at the appointment,” he said. “She’s getting an ultrasound.”
“I see. So you came here to get work done early?”
“I’ve been here since six.”
“I guess I can’t scowl at you for that.”
“Why are you scowling at all?”
She didn’t say anything, and instead, she checked her buzzing text. It was from Levi. Just his address. Nothing more. It was awfully early. If he had a late night, would he be up texting her?
Maybe he’s just still up.
She wanted to snarl at that little inner voice.
“You busy today?” Joshua asked casually.
“Not really. I have some schematics to go over. Some designs to do. Emails to send.” She waved a hand. “A meeting later.”
He frowned. “I don’t have you down for a meeting.”
Great. She should have known her PR brother would want to know what meeting she would be going out for.
“It’s not, like, a work meeting. It’s, like, for...a school talk.” She stumbled over the lie, and immediately felt guilty.
“No school contacted me. Everything is supposed to go through me.”
“I can handle community work in the town of Copper Ridge, Joshua. It’s not like this is Seattle. And there’s not going to be press anywhere asking me stupid questions or trying to trip me up. It’s just Copper Ridge.”
“Still.”
The door opened and Isaiah came in, followed by his wife, Poppy, who was looking radiant in a tight, knee-length dress that showed off the full curve of her rounded stomach. They were holding hands, with their fingers laced together, and the contrast in their skin tones was beautiful—it always ignited a sense of artistic pleasure in Faith whenever she saw them. Well, and in general, seeing Isaiah happy made her feel that way. He was a difficult guy. Hard to understand, and seemingly emotionless sometimes.
But when he looked at Poppy... There was no doubt he was in love.
And no doubt that his wife was in love right back.
“Good morning,” Isaiah said.
“Did you know Faith had a meeting with one of the schools today to give some kind of community-service talk?” Joshua launched right in. The dickhead.
“No,” Isaiah said, looking at her. “You really need to clear these things with us.”
“Why?”
“That’s not on my schedule,” Poppy said, pulling out her phone and poking around the screen.
“Don’t start acting like my brothers,” Faith said to her sister-in-law.
“It’s my job to keep track of things,” Poppy insisted.
“This is off the books,” Faith said. “I’m allowed to have something that’s just me. I’m an adult.”
“You’re young,” Joshua said. “You’re incredibly successful. Everyone wants a piece of that, and you can’t afford to give out endless pieces of yourself.”
She huffed and took a drink of her coffee. “I can manage, Joshua. I don’t need you being controlling like this.”
“The company functions in a specific way—”
“But my life doesn’t. I don’t need to give you an accounting of everything I do with my time. And not everything is work-related.”
She spun on her heel and walked down the hall and, for some reason, was immediately hit with a flashback from last night. Levi didn’t talk to her like she was a child. Levi almost...flirted with her. That was what last night had been like. Like flirting.
The idea gave her a little thrill.
But there was no way Levi had been flirting with...her. He had been flirting with that pretty blonde.
Faith made sure the door to her office was shut, then she opened up her office drawer, pulling out the mirror she kept in there, that she didn’t often use. Just quick checks before meetings. And not to make sure she looked attractive—to make sure she didn’t look twelve.
She tilted her chin upward, then to the side, examining her reflection. It was almost absurd to think of him wanting to flirt with her. It wasn’t that she was unattractive, it was just that she was...plain.
She had never really cared. Not really.
She could look a little less plain when she threw on some makeup, but then, when she did that, her goal was to look capable and confident, and old enough to be entrusted with the design of someone’s house. Not to be pretty.
She twisted her lips to the side, then moved them back, making a kiss face before relaxing again. Then she sighed and put the mirror back in her drawer. It wasn’t that she cared. She was a professional. And she wasn’t going to...act on any weird feelings she had.
Even if they were plausible.
It was just... When she had talked to Levi last night she had left feeling like a woman. And then she had come into work this morning and her brothers had immediately reset her back to the role of little girl.
She thought about that so effectively that before she knew it, it was time for her to leave to go to Levi’s place.
She pulled a bag out of her desk drawer—her makeup bag—and made the snap decision to go for an entirely different look, accomplished with much internet searching for daytime glamour and an easy tutorial. Then she fluffed her hair, shaking it out and making sure the curls looked a little bit tousled.
She threw the bag back into her desk and stood, swaggering out of her office, where she was met by Isaiah, who jerked backward and made a surprised sound.
“What?” she asked.
“You look different.”
She waved a hand. “I thought I would try something new.”
“You’re going to give a talk at one of the...schools?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Which school?” he pressed.
She made an exasperated sound. “Why do you need to know?” He said nothing, staring at her with his jaw firmed up. “You need to know because you need it to be in Poppy’s planner, because if it’s not in Poppy’s planner it will feel incomplete to you, is that it?”
She’d long since given up trying to understand her brother’s particular quirks. He had them. There was no sense fighting against them. She was his sister, so sometimes she poked at them, rather than doing anything to help him out. That was the way the world worked, after all.
But she’d realized as she’d gotten older that he wasn’t being inflexible to be obnoxious. It was something he genuinely couldn’t help.
“Yes,” he responded, his tone flat.
If he was surprised that she had guessed what the issue was, he didn’t show it. But then, Isaiah wouldn’t.
“Copper Ridge Elementary,” she said, the lie slipping easily past her lips, and she wondered who she was.
A woman. That’s who she was.
A woman who had made an executive decision about her own career and she did not need her brothers meddling in it.
And her makeup wasn’t significant to anything except that she had been sitting there feeling bad about herself and there was no reason to do that when she had perfectly good eyeliner s
itting in her desk drawer.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Are we done? Can you add it to the calendar and pacify yourself and leave me alone?”
“Is everything okay?” he asked, the question uncharacteristically thoughtful.
“I’m fine, Isaiah. I promise. I’m just... Joshua is right. I’ve been working a lot. And I don’t feel like the solution is to do less. I think it might be...time that I took some initiative, make sure I’m filling my time with things that are important to me.”
Of course, she was lying about it being schoolchildren, which made her feel slightly guilty. But not guilty enough to tell the truth.
Isaiah left her office then, to update the planner, Faith assumed. And Faith left shortly after.
She put the address to Levi’s house in her car’s navigation system and followed the instructions, which led her on much the same route she had taken to get up the mountain to meet him the first time, at the building site. It appeared that his rental property was on the other side of that mountain, on a driveway that led up the opposite side that wound through evergreen trees and took her to a beautiful, rustic-looking structure.
It was an old-fashioned, narrow A-frame with windows that overlooked the valley below. She appreciated it, even if it wasn’t something she would ever have put together.
She had a fondness for classic, cozy spaces.
Though her designs always tended toward the open and the modern, she had grown up in a tiny, yellow farmhouse that she loved still. She loved that her parents still lived there in spite of the financial successes of their children.
Of course, Levi’s house was several notches above the little farmhouse. This was quite a nice place, even if it was worlds apart from a custom home.
She had been so focused on following the little rabbit trails of thought on her way over that she hadn’t noticed the tension she was carrying in her stomach. But as soon as she parked and turned off the engine, she seemed to be entirely made of that tension.
She could hardly breathe around it.
She had seen him outside, out in the open. And she had talked to him in a bar. But she had never been alone indoors with him before.
Not that it mattered. At all.
She clenched her teeth and got out of the car, gathering her bag that contained her sketchbook and all her other supplies. With the beat of each footstep on the gravel drive, she repeated those words in her head.
Not that it mattered.
Not that it mattered.
She might be having some weird thoughts about him, but he certainly wasn’t having them about her.
She could only hope that the blonde had vacated before Faith’s arrival.
Why did the thought of seeing her here make Faith feel sick? She couldn’t answer that question.
She didn’t even know the guy. And she had never been jealous of anyone or anything in her life. Okay, maybe vague twinges of jealousy that her brothers had found people to love. Or that Hayley had a husband who loved her. That Mia had found someone. And the fact that Mia’s someone was Faith’s brother made the whole thing a bit inaccessible to her.
But those feelings were more like...envy. This was different. This felt like a nasty little monster on her back that had no right to be there.
She steeled herself, and knocked on the door. And waited.
When the door swung open, it seemed to grab hold of her stomach and pull it along. An intense, sweeping sensation rode through her.
There he was.
Today, he’d traded in the black T-shirt and hat from the last couple of days for white ones.
The whole look was...beautiful and nearly absurd. Because he was not a white knight, far from it. And she wasn’t innocent enough to think that he was.
But there was something about the way the light color caught hold of those blue eyes and reflected the color even brighter that seemed to steal every thought from her head. Every thought but one.
Beautiful.
She was plain. And this man was beautiful.
Oh, not pretty. Scars marred his face and a hard line went through his chin, keeping him from being symmetrical. Another one slashed his top lip. And even then, the angles on his face were far too sharp to be anything so insipid as pretty.
Beautiful.
“Come on in,” he said, stepping away from the door.
She didn’t know why, but she had expected a little more conversation on the porch. Maybe to give her some time to catch her breath. Sadly, he didn’t give it to her. So she found herself following his instructions and walking into the dimly lit entry.
“It’s not that great,” he said of his surroundings, lifting a shoulder.
“It’s cozy,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m kind of over cozy. But the view is good.”
“I can’t say that I blame you,” she said, following his lead and making her way into the living area, which was open. The point from the house’s A-frame gave height to the ceiling, and the vast windows lit the entire space. The furniture was placed at the center of the room, with a hefty amount of space all around. “That must’ve been really difficult.”
“Are you going to try to absorb details about my taste by asking about my personal life? Because I have to tell you, my aesthetic runs counter to where I’ve spent the last five years.”
“I understand that. And no, it wasn’t a leading question. I was just...commenting.”
“They started the investigation into my wife’s disappearance when you were about eighteen,” he said. “And while you were in school I was on house arrest, on trial. Then I spent time behind bars. In that time, you started your business and... Here you are.”
“A lot can happen in five years.”
“It sure can. Or a hell of a lot of nothing can happen. That’s the worst part. Life in a jail cell is monotonous. Things don’t change. An exciting day is probably not a good thing. Because it usually means you got stabbed.”
“Did you ever get—” her stomach tightened “—stabbed?”
He chuckled, then lifted up his white T-shirt, exposing a broad expanse of tan skin. Her brain processed things in snatches. Another tattoo. A bird, stretched across his side, and then the shifting and bunching of well-defined muscles. Followed by her registering that there was a sprinkling of golden hair across that skin. And then, her eye fell to the raised, ugly scar that was just above the tattooed bird’s wing.
“Once,” he said.
He pushed his shirt back down, and Faith shifted uncomfortably, trying to settle the feeling that the bird had peeled itself right off his skin and somehow ended up in her stomach, fluttering and struggling for freedom.
She looked away. “What happened?”
She put her hand on her own stomach, trying to calm her response. She didn’t know if that intense, unsettled feeling was coming from her horror over what had happened to him, or over the show of skin that had just occurred.
If it was the skin, she was going to be very disappointed in herself and in her hormones. Because the man had just told her he’d been stabbed. Responding to his body was awfully base. Not to mention insensitive.
“I made the motherfucker who did it regret that he’d ever seen me.” Suddenly, there was nothing in those ice-blue eyes but cold. And she didn’t doubt what he said. Not at all.
“I see.”
“You probably don’t. And it’s for the best. No, I didn’t kill him. If I had killed him, I would still be in prison.” He sat down in a chair that faced the windows. He rested his arms on the sides, the muscles there flexing as he moved his fingers, clenching them into fists. “But a brawl like that going badly for a couple of inmates? That’s easy enough to ignore. I got a few stitches because of a blade. He got a few more because of my fists. People learned quickly not to mess with me.”
“Apparent
ly,” she said, sitting down on the couch across from him, grateful for the large, oak coffee table between them. “Is any of this furniture yours?”
“No,” he responded.
“Good,” she replied. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it, per se. But—” she knocked on the table “—if you were married to a particular piece it might make it more difficult, design-wise. I prefer to have total freedom.”
“I find that in life I prefer to have total freedom,” he said, the corner of his mouth quirking upward.
A rash of heat started at Faith’s scalp and prickled downward. “Of course. I didn’t mean... You know that I didn’t...”
“Calm down,” he said. “I’m not that easily offended. Unless you stab me.”
“Right,” she responded. She fished around in her bag until she came up with her notepad. “We should talk more about what you have in mind. Let’s start with the specifics. How big do you want the house to be?”
“Big,” he replied. “It’s a massive lot. The property is about fifty acres, and that cleared-out space seems like there’s a lot of scope there.”
“Ten thousand square feet?”
“Sure,” he responded.
She put her pen over the pad. “How many bedrooms?”
“I should only need one.”
“If you don’t want more than one, that’s okay. But...guests?”
“The only people who are going to be coming to my house are going to be staying in my bed. And even then, not for the whole night.”
She cleared her throat. “Right.” She tapped her pen against the side of her notebook. “You know, you’re probably going to want more bedrooms.”
“In case of what? Orgies? Even then, we’d need one big room.”
“All right,” she said. “If you want an unprecedented one-bedroom, ten-thousand-square-foot house, it’s up to you.” She fought against the blush flooding her cheeks, because this entire conversation was getting a little earthy for her. And it was making her picture things. Imagining him touching women, and specifically the blonde from last night, and she just didn’t need that in her head.
“I wasn’t aware I had ordered judgment with my custom home. I thought I ordered an entirely custom home to be done to my specifications.”