by Liv Rancourt
She pouted, the naughty gleam in her eyes trying hard to sway him, and if he’d been less angry, he might have caved. Instead, he pushed on her shoulders, forcing her down onto the back seat of the cab.
“We’re done, Cherry. This is over.” He leaned in to talk to the driver. “How much to get her to Capitol Hill?”
The cab driver looked from Cherry to Ryan and back again. “She’s pretty drunk.”
“That’s why she’s in your cab.”
The cabbie nodded once. “About twelve dollars.”
“Here’s twenty. Don’t let her talk you into driving any place else.”
He backed away and the car pulled out into traffic. Chubb was standing on the sidewalk behind him. “I grabbed your jacket, man.”
Ryan took the leather coat from his friend. “I owe you for the tab.”
“You’ll get me next time. Besides, I think those chicks bought us a round or two.” Chubb reached up and loosened his ponytail, turning it into a bun on top of his head.
“Did you say thanks?”
“Nope.” Chubb snickered. When it came to women his self-confidence bordered on arrogance, especially since most of the time he’d rather be playing computer games.
“You dog.”
“Says the man who just stuffed his girlfriend in a cab.”
“Ex.” It was a sign of their friendship that Ryan didn’t smack him.
“Whatever. Her Volvo’s parked right over there.”
Ryan sighed, letting go of some of his frustration. “I saw it, but she was too drunk to drive, anyway.”
“I bet she saw your truck and stopped.”
Letting the bitterness in his smile answer for him, Ryan walked off toward the parking lot, pulling the keys from his pocket on the way. She could pay for a cab ride back in the morning. When she was sober.
Chapter Seven
On Tuesday morning Danielle found an invoice from Ryan when she got to her grandmother’s house, charging twenty-five dollars an hour for about forty hours of work, along with a pile of receipts for supplies. She would have paid him a lot more than that. She wrote him a check and left before he showed up.
On Wednesday morning, the check was gone.
Friday turned into a jumble of remodeling frustration, topped off by an email from Sharon, her boss, who tossed out a bunch of random ideas for Danielle to work on. These scattershot emails were part of Sharon’s style, and normally they didn’t bother her, but this time every bullet point ratcheted up her irritation until it passed exasperation and headed toward fury.
Sharon could take her wild ideas and blow them out her ass.
Ryan showed up around five, and instead of taking off, she stayed, hiding behind her laptop at the dining room table.
“Hey, are you okay if I make some noise in here?” Ryan dumped his toolbox on the kitchen floor.
Danielle minimized the offending email. “Sure.” She was too tired to feel uncomfortable anymore, and she tried to keep the conversation going. “What are you working on?”
He gave her a guarded look. “Now that the plumber’s done, I’m going to start patching some of the holes in the walls.”
“Sounds good.”
“Yeah.”
So much for conversation. He ducked back into the kitchen, and she went back to her laptop, attempting to draft a response to her boss to the intermittent grinding buzz of his table saw. Finally she gave up. Some things were better handled by phone.
Because of the noise, she went out to the living room. She reached voicemail. Irritated, she tossed her cell phone at her purse and dropped down into the wing chair, catching her fingernail in the shredded velvet covering the arm. “Ow! Damn it!”
Ryan leaned through the doorway. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” She stuck her finger in her mouth and swallowed down the sigh that wanted to blow through the word as she spoke.
Expecting him to go right back to work, she hunched in the chair, trying to figure out why this email bent her farther out of shape than most of the others. Yes, she was going back in less than two months. Yes, she’d agreed to do some work while she was gone.
Yes, time and distance were giving her a new perspective on her job.
Like, maybe Maeve had a point.
When the table saw didn’t start right up again, she glanced toward the dining room. The doorway framed Ryan, his hands gripping the molding above his head and his Levis riding low on his hips. His tee shirt stopped about an inch above the waistband of his jeans, and it took effort to pull her gaze away from the gap. “What?” Her voice caught, nearly scrambling the syllable.
“Just checking.” He halfway grinned, wary, cautious, the overhead fixture making shadows out of his dimples.
Something inside that had been all tight and wonky since the day she’d pushed him away started to unwind. “I’m pretty much screwed, I think,” she said, tucking her hands under her thighs, afraid she might accidently make a grab for all his yummy goodness.
His expression turned naughty. “And I missed it.”
“Shut up. That’s not what I meant.” She fell back into the chair, laughing in spite of herself.
“Stuck my head upstairs the other day.” Ryan let go of the molding and crossed his arms. Because that did nothing to make him look pumped. “The more rain we get, the more leaks I find.”
She had to work to keep her gaze on his face. “Super.” Bringing up the roof reminded Danielle she needed money, which distracted her from Ryan’s guns. “My mother is crazy.”
He stood straighter. “You talked to your mother?”
Frustration boiled up like a geyser. “Hell no.”
“So…”
“So what?”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “She must have done something to upset you, or you wouldn’t have mentioned her. Right?”
For a moment, she hoped silence would redirect his sympathy. It didn’t. He waited, patient, allowing her to find the words.
“I can’t afford a new roof, but if I ask her nicely enough, she might help me.” She let him see the turmoil that had just opened up underneath her.
“That’s cool.”
The concern in his expression reached out to her, as if he’d offered his hand to help her walk through a stony patch.
“You should talk to her for me. She’ll be nicer.” Danielle got up and moved slowly to the big front window. Words churned in her gut and she kept her back to his unspoken sympathy. “This is going to sound crazy, but I don’t really know what I’m doing here.” She paused to sort through her real thoughts. Sleet spattered the glass, thrown by bursts of wind. “This project is a lot bigger than I expected.”
“This place has been coming apart for a while.” His tone was neutral, relaxed even. “How’d it get to be such a mess?”
Danielle started with a sigh and ended up on a snorting chuckle. “My uncle Eric—”
“You have an Uncle Eric?”
“Yeah.” Danielle massaged her temples and kept going. “He’s a dick, and unfortunately for Uncle Jonathan, he’s real hard to get a hold of. Add in my mother, who disagrees with people on principle, and there wasn’t much Jonathan could do.”
“I don’t get it,” Ryan said.
“Gram suffered from just enough dementia to balk at anything Jonathan suggested. He’d hire someone to live here with her, and she’d kick them out. He couldn’t get his stupid siblings to agree to make him her guardian.” She had to choke back tears to get the words out. “You know, when I was a kid, my mother would take off for weeks at a time, and I’d stay here with Gram.” She pulled her hair out of the ponytail holder, then scooped it up, twisting it into a knot at the nape of her neck. “Do you remember how in the summer Maeve would come over? She’d bring Kelly and Trina, and we’d go down to the beach, hang out all day, and come back up here and have massive sleepovers.”
She faced him, daring to meet his gaze, near tears from the struggle for honesty. “Gram gave me a place, more
than my mother ever did, and despite that, I let her die alone.” She paused, swallowed. “When Uncle Jonathan finally got her into a home, he and Mom told me she wouldn’t know me even if I came, and I was self-involved enough to believe them.”
His continued silence made her nervous, as if he thought her confession was a load of crap. “When Uncle Jonathan called me about the house, I had the Mini headed north as fast as I could.” She pivoted slowly, waving a hand to take in the whole space. “Fixing the place up … was something I could do, you know? I just didn’t expect it to be this complicated.”
“Because of your mother?”
“Because I grew up here, and she gave it to me.”
“I get that.”
They shared a long moment, until finally Ryan knocked a fist gently against the wall. “Guess I’ll get back to work, then.”
“Thank you.” Relief spread over her like a warm blanket. He was as strong as the studs he was building around, and she was grateful.
He stepped back into the dining room, his head tipped down, his smile young and vulnerable. “Hey, um…”
The gravel in his voice tickled her most sensitive places. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, and ducked out of sight.
She might have snapped. She shouldn’t have snapped. She must have scared him off.
The table saw started back up, and Danielle stayed in the living room, wrestling with all different colors of guilt.
Ryan knew his way around guilt, a soggy blanket of feeling that could tighten like a python, wrapping around him and squeezing everything positive out of his head. Happened almost every time he thought about Cherry.
Late Saturday afternoon, it fueled his feet and kept him pounding along the treadmill, running until exhaustion took over and everything else faded.
The club’s flat screen television played a music video, some gyrating blonde wailing “gimmegimmegimmemoremoremore.” Damned pop music would give him a headache faster than anything. He slowed his pace for a minute, dragging his earbuds out of the pocket in his shorts and starting his playlist. The White Stripes chased away the pop-tart’s wail.
He shot a glance around the room and saw a redhead working the stair stepper. She was taller and curvier than Dani, but show him some ginger and he had something to run for.
He loved working with Dani, and not just because she reminded him of Nicole Kidman or Gwyneth Paltrow, all cool polish and elegance. She made lists and did research and figured out what she needed to know. They talked about the remodel like partners.
If only they could talk about more stuff like that.
Over the weeks he’d spent working on her grandmother’s house, his half-remembered schoolboy crush had grown up into a full-on Thing. A hard-on Thing, too, for that matter.
Either way it had a capital T.
He liked that her smile was too broad for her face, and that her hair never stayed in its ponytail holder, so smooth and straight it worked its way free and draped over her eyes. He liked her curves, at least from what he could see through the worn sweatshirts and jeans she wore to work on the house. He liked flirting with her, because when she blushed, it made him want to push her up against a wall and see what was under her baggy clothes.
It bugged him that he’d had her in his bed without finding out for sure.
She’d backed him off, told him to focus on the house. Rational decision. Dating his sister’s friend created instant drama. Common sense said not to do it. Maeve would bitch, and he already had more relationship crap than he wanted. That’s if she’d settle for dating a guy who worked with his hands. He’d do the job she’d hired him for while trying to ignore the way her eyes followed him as he worked.
Dani played her cards pretty close, but her body talk said a lot. He just had to let her work things out in her own head, and be ready if she did. When she did.
He ran himself into something close to peace and slowed to a walk for a few minutes. A quick shower and a short drive home later, he stood in his kitchen, cursing Chubb for drinking the last beer. Chubb wasn’t home, but Barnabas was, making an orange tabby shackle around his ankles. He shot his roommate a text, reaming him for neglecting his cat and demanding an expensive microbrew as compensation.
Chubb promised to bring beverages, ignoring the crack about the cat.
“Your daddy’s a loser,” Ryan said as he dumped a can of chicken-like substance into the cat’s dish, blinking at the pungent smell.
Barnabas ignored him, diving right into the food. Ryan briefly wondered how long it had been since the cat had been fed. Likely a couple of twenty-something guys were too irresponsible to be pet owners.
Instead of beer, Ryan found a bottle of wine in the cupboard and poured himself a glass. Chubb’s laptop was on the table, and Ryan idly booted it up and logged into Facebook, managing to connect after only a couple do-overs on his password. He wasn’t much for the whole social networking thing, but at one point Cherry had signed him up for a page he rarely used.
He scrolled through the feed, seeing half-remembered names from high school and baby pictures from one of the guys at work.
And pictures of Cherry. Making out with a guy. Posted the night before, by someone he didn’t know. Three pictures of them on a couch. In one, they toasted the photographer with raised cocktail glasses. In one, the guy had his arms around her shoulders while her head was tucked under his chin. In one, they were mashed together, tickling each other’s tonsils while she held up her hand in the universal ‘stop’ sign, aiming at the photographer, not at the guy with the tongue.
He closed the browser and downed his wine in one swallow. Barnabas jumped up onto his lap and started to knead, piercing his thigh with tiny claws. Ryan tossed him off. The cat landed on the kitchen floor in a scramble of scratching and one firm yowl, then stalked away.
She was probably drunk when it happened.
She had every right to go out with other guys.
Whatever.
He really, really wanted to hit something.
At Maeve’s insistence, Danielle agreed to go shopping before their big double date. “You dress like an old lady!” This became Maeve’s rallying cry, a phrase Danielle heard every time she picked up a hanger. The compromise outfit involved a pair of black leggings, a loose silk top in a soft dusty rose, and a big fur vest. They’d argued for ten minutes over whether or not Danielle could wear her black Ugg boots, until finally she gave in and agreed to borrow a pair of riding boots from Maeve’s closet.
Since Danielle was a minimalist, she was ready to go well ahead of Maeve.
Her memory of Christopher had faded into a vague impression of dark-skinned sophistication. In her imagination, he was a jungle cat, just like Braden. One of them a jaguar, the other a golden lion. Both sleek. Both dangerous.
Compared with them, Ryan was a wolf: rough, shaggy, but no less dangerous.
Sometimes her head went in such unexpected directions.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into the vest.” Danielle patted down the front like it was a dog giving her a hug. Maeve had mixed cocktails while they were getting ready, vodka and pomegranate with lime wedges and corn chips on the side. Danielle’s glass was still half full, and she was doing her best to keep her hands off the chips.
Maeve poked her head out of the bathroom, a tube of mascara in one hand, the fluorescent lights behind her making a halo. “Shut up. It looks cute on you.”
“Humph.” Danielle straddled a dining chair, her chin on her hands, watching the elaborate process involved in getting Maeve ready to go out. Hair products and make-up covered the gold-specked Formica countertop and half a dozen hangers dangled from the shower curtain rod. For all that Maeve had clear ideas of what Danielle should wear, it had been hard for her to decide on her own outfit. The winning look combined super-skinny jeans and a vintage blouse with a brocade corset worn on the outside.
For a while Danielle entertained herself by trying to walk in the sky-high heels Maeve
intended to wear. After a stumble sent her shin smacking into the chair, she gave up. She pulled on her borrowed boots and grabbed her phone, bringing up the Facebook app. Almost immediately, she saw pictures of Cherry French-kissing some guy.
Surprise made her tentative. “Um … Maeve?” She’d have to tread lightly or things could start exploding.
Mascara tube in hand, Maeve made eye contact with Danielle’s reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Yeah?”
“Have you been on Facebook today?” Danielle tried to keep her tone casual, though from the pinch in Maeve’s lips, she wasn’t entirely successful.
“This morning.”
“Did you see these pictures of Cherry?” Danielle held up her cell phone like she was presenting evidence in court.
“What?” Maeve grabbed the doorposts to rock backward and look over her shoulder. “Well damn, girlfriend, way to go.”
Danielle dropped her hand, but Maeve grabbed it, bringing the phone back to eye level.
Maeve’s sarcastic chuckle crawled right up under Danielle’s skin. “Ryan’s going to see these, right?”
“Like, next month when he checks his Facebook page.” Maeve flicked the screen, changing the picture. “What do you care, anyway?”
Bristling at the suspicion in Maeve’s voice, Danielle’s response had some snap to it. “Because he’s a nice guy and this will hurt his feelings.”
Maeve tipped her head down to glare at Danielle from under her eyebrows, then flipped around to the bathroom mirror.
The small apartment shrank around Danielle, its old damp wood smell choking her. She shuffled through mature thoughts about how any two people living in such close quarters and spending too much time together were bound to get on each other’s nerves. Then she snapped again.