by Noelle Adams
There was no way he was going to start to imagine why Estelle and her date needed to spread out, and he figured the sooner he got this done, the better. Stepping into her apartment, he placed his bag of takeout on her kitchen counter and then moved over to the sofa. “Where am I moving this to?”
Estelle sniffed at the bag of food. “Chinese food?”
He nodded. “My dinner.”
“Oh, how nice! I do love some chicken chow mien.” Then she paused. “That’s an awful lot of food for one person.”
He let out a heavy sigh. “Estelle? The sofa? Where do you want it?”
“I saw Heather leaving earlier with a nice young man. They made a very handsome couple. I heard them laughing all the way down the hall.” She smiled, and then directed him on where she wanted the sofa. “Do you have a date tonight? Is that why you have so much food in the bag?”
“There’s really not that much in there.”
“Oh. Well that’s too bad.”
Chris paused and looked at her curiously. “What is?”
“That you don’t have a date,” she said, her expression bordered on pitiful.
“I never said—”
“You didn’t have to, dear. And here I am blathering on about my wonderful social life and Heather’s lucky young man, and you’re, well, you’re all alone,” she added sadly. Then she walked over and patted his hand. “I’m so sorry. It’s rude of me to flaunt my good fortune while you’re spending the night by yourself.”
Good fortune? It was on the tip of his tongue to try and correct her—to tell her exactly why it was that he was alone tonight, but decided against it. Instead, he hung his head a little and sighed again. “It’s all right, Estelle. I’ll be okay. Now where can I place that table so that you and your gentleman friend will be comfortable?”
Her smile brightened up, and she instructed him on the placement of the furniture and then thanked him profusely. Chris picked up his bag of food and made a quick beeline for the door.
“Thank you again, Christopher!”
“My pleasure, Estelle. You have a good night.” He quickly stepped out into the hallway and gave her a small wave before he turned.
“You too! And if you get too lonely, you can come back and—” she stopped. “Never mind. Have a good night!”
And then she slammed her door.
Great. Even the elderly didn’t want to hang out with him.
Well fine. No big deal. He opened the door to the apartment, walked in and tried to enjoy the peace and quiet. Kicking off his shoes, he shut the door and walked to the kitchen—stopping to pick up the TV remote and turning on ESPN to see if he could catch a game on somewhere.
Within minutes he was all set—his plate loaded with food, and a cold beer. Even though there wasn’t a game on that interested him, Chris had found a home renovation show that had captured his attention. He was just about to sit on Flo when he heard a noise. Well, not a noise, but a whimper. A whine. A scratch.
Ignoring it, he sat down and turned up the volume on the television. The forkful of food was halfway to his mouth when the whining grew louder and more insistent. “Can it, Lucy!” he called over his shoulder and quickly ate that first bite of his dinner.
More whining.
More scratching.
The damn dog’s scratching was so frantic that Chris was certain Lucy was going to get right through the door. With a muttered curse, he put his plate down and went to Heather’s door and yanked it open. The dog pranced out excitedly and began dancing around his legs. He would have thought that with all that carrying on she must have to go out, but she didn’t run to the door. She eventually just sat at his feet and stared up at him as her tail wagged.
“So what was all the fuss about?” he snapped. “I was eating my dinner and trying to watch some TV, but you were making such a racket that I had to stop!”
If anything, her tail wagged even more, and she seemed to be smiling at him.
Shit. Dogs don’t smile, and he had to be losing his mind if that was what he was seeing.
With a huff, he stepped over her, went back to Flo, and picked up his dinner. The home improvement show host was talking about the way to properly sand down and restore hardwood floors. It wasn’t exactly rocket science. It took only a minute before he was arguing with the screen.
“You can’t start with a medium grit sandpaper! You need the course grit to remove all the damn layers of crap! What is wrong with you?”
Beside him, Lucy let out a little bark.
Chris looked down at her. “Right? This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about! If you don’t start off with a course grit, you’ll be sanding twice as long and never get all of the old finish off. And on top of that, you’ll probably burn out the motor on the sander.” He snorted with disgust. “Seriously, how do these guys get their own shows?”
Another bark.
He finished his dinner and took a long pull of his beer. As he was sitting back in his seat, Lucy looked like she was ready to jump into his lap. Without much thought, he reached for her and put her in the seat beside him. “No point in hurting yourself.”
They sat like that watching the rest of the show—every once in a while Chris would comment on what they were doing wrong and why he’d do it differently. She was in his lap and listening intently to every word he said.
And he kind of liked it.
After the renovation show, another one started up—this time talking about working with stone houses. He loved this kind of thing, and even though Lucy had curled up in his lap and wasn’t listening nearly as much as she had a few minutes ago, Chris kept an open dialogue going the entire time—as he petted her.
By the end of a third episode, he was feeling the need to get up and move around. Maybe some dessert. “Cookies would be great right about now, if Heather was ever generous enough to make some for me. Not that she ever will. She’ll probably stuff damn Randy full of them, though.”
Lucy jumped off his lap and followed him to the kitchen. “Oh no. Don’t even think about it. You can’t handle the big people stuff,” he said as he grabbed a pack of Oreos from the cabinet. The damn dog was right there with him—all jingly and happy and tail wagging. He sighed. Looking around, he went to where he knew Heather kept the dog treats and grabbed two of them. “And if you rat me out for this, I’ll deny it,” he said to the dog as they walked back over to Flo.
So Chris ate his Oreos and Lucy had her treats, and as the dog settled in beside him again, he couldn’t help but feel annoyed. Not at the dog. She wasn’t so bad. But at the entire situation. Here he was, watching renovation shows and looking at different ways to do things on their job sites, while Heather was out on a date. Why did she have enough free time on her hands to make plans to go out and socialize, anyway?
They were supposed to be proving something to her father—that they could work together and be ready to take over his business in six months so he could retire. Well, from where Chris was sitting—with a tiny dog snoring in his lap—it looked a little one-sided. His days were longer and far more physical than Heather’s, and while he didn’t begrudge her that—not really—right now, he couldn’t help but wonder about how fair this setup really was.
She had an entire office staff at her disposal to help her…do what? Push papers around? Pay some bills? Meanwhile, he was getting sweaty and dirty and doing a shit-ton of grunt work. How was that a partnership?
Plus, she was out on a date with Randy!
“I’m being crazy, right?” he said to the dog. “I can’t honestly expect Heather to walk onto a job site and start pulling down drywall, but…”
And that was just it. He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure what he wanted or what he expected of her, except that she not be off flitting around town with some guy while he was the one doing the majority of the work on putting Tom’s mind at ease.
Tomorrow—yes, definitely tomorrow—he was going to talk to her about where she saw this business going. Was she just
planning on riding the current wave of what her father had built, or was she looking and thinking of ways to improve and build the business?
It was about time he figured out just how useful of a partner he was going to be stuck with.
Five
The following Thursday, Heather felt like she was about to drown in paperwork.
She wasn’t sure what had gotten into Chris this week.
It had started fairly reasonably. On Monday, he’d wanted her to write up a plan for her ideas on expanding and improving the business. She’d been thinking through all of that for months now, and it was smart to have it written out, so she’d been happy to oblige. But after she’d given it to him on Wednesday—a very detailed and professional report—he’d demanded her to provide all this evidence in support of her ideas, pulling from the entire history of their previous jobs.
Those records, as Heather was all too aware, were kept in paper files in a tiny storage room in the basement, so she’d had to spend hours there, pulling information and then trying to compile it all into a coherent form for Chris.
It crossed her mind that he was just being a jerk—giving her busy work just so she had to put even more effort into her job—but she hated to assume something like that, especially since he seemed to be making an attempt to spend time with her father and invest time and energy in the company.
Maybe he just really did want to do a good job.
She hoped so. But either way, she didn’t have a choice but to collect all the information he asked for. She knew a challenge when she was offered one, and she wasn’t going to let Chris get the better of her.
But her head was spinning from peering at so many old files, and she hadn’t yet implemented a good computer system for keeping records, so she was compiling the information on PowerPoint spreadsheets.
On Thursday, she was only halfway done at six-thirty in the evening, and she’d started at six o’clock that morning.
She was exhausted, and she had a headache, and she was mentally cursing Chris for demanding all this information. She’d worked late every night this week, and she’d had to cancel a lunch she’d scheduled with Randy yesterday. Not that she cared too much about the lunch, but it was the principle of the thing.
What the hell did Chris need all this for anyway? He’d never been a numbers guy. He was a hands-on, hammer-the-nail kind of guy.
She was scowling at the computer screen in the empty office—her father and Jenny, who answered the phones and helped out around the office, had left more than an hour ago—when a sound at the door startled her.
She looked up to see Chris coming in.
She was hard pressed to summon a smile. “What are you doing here?”
“I was checking to see if you had that stuff for me yet?”
She blinked. “Not yet. I’m still working on it.” Surely he couldn’t expect her to pull years’ worth of information together from paper files in a couple of days. That would take a miracle.
He frowned. “How long do you think you’ll need?”
Evidently he did think she could perform such a miracle. She frowned back at him. “I don’t know. It’s a huge amount of information. I can’t just wave my wand and make it happen.” She caught herself as her voice sounded too sarcastic.
She wasn’t a sarcastic person normally. Normally, people would call her sweet and sincere. She wasn’t sure why Chris always brought out that side of herself, but she wanted to rein it in as much as possible.
For one thing, they had to work and live together. For another, she didn’t like to think he had the power to change her.
“I wasn’t saying you should wave your wand. I just asked how long it would take.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m not sure. I’d guess I’m about half way through. Hopefully, I’ll be done by early next week.”
He was opening his mouth to reply when his phone rang, and after he checked the screen, he held up a hand to indicate he was answering it and he’d return to their conversation in a moment.
“Hey, Tom,” he said, after connecting the call. “What’s up?”
She frowned, wondering what her father wanted from Chris this evening. Obviously, it would be work related, and it probably wasn’t important at all. But it bothered her that she couldn’t tell the topic of conversation from Chris’s commentary, which was made up of nothing but, “Sounds good” and “Sure thing” and “Got it.”
When he’d hung up, he turned back to face her. “Sorry about that.”
“What did my dad want?”
He gave a half-shrug. “Nothing. Just work stuff.”
“What work stuff?”
“Why does it matter?”
Heather’s frown deepened. “It doesn’t matter. I just want to know. Why won’t you tell me?”
Chris stared at her like she was a curious experiment. “Are you always this nosy?”
“I’m not nosy. But that’s my father, and I’m part of this company. If it’s work related, why can’t I know?”
“He was just giving me some advice about the Garner job. The guys were having some trouble with the original woodwork.”
Heather relaxed. “Oh.”
Chris was still eyeing her, like he was trying to figure her out. “You didn’t think there was something going on behind your back, did you?”
“No,” she admitted, feeling kind of silly about her reaction now. “It’s just…secret conversations make me…really nervous.”
“It wasn’t secret.” He’d come a little closer, and his expression had changed—like he wasn’t just peering at her now, like he genuinely wanted to understand her.
“I know. But you wouldn’t tell me, and I’m…irrationally sensitive about that kind of thing.” She was a little embarrassed to tell him how horrified she’d been every time her parents had closed their bedroom door to fight when she was a child, not letting her hear what was going on. “Just leftovers from my parents’ break-up.”
“I get it,” he murmured. “We all have those kinds of leftovers, I guess.”
“Yeah.” She gave him a little smile, feeling better.
He smiled back, and she felt like they understood each other for real in that moment.
Then his expression changed, yet again, and he asked, “So when do you think you’ll be done with this stuff?”
She gave a little jerk, like he’d flung sand in her eyes. All her softer feelings evaporated as she remembered his obnoxious pushiness. “It will be done when it’s done. I’m working as hard as I can.”
“All right then. No need to snap my head off.”
Her tone had been a little cool, but she’d definitely not snapped. “I didn’t snap your head off.”
“Well, you snapped something off.”
She scowled at him. “If you don’t stop being annoying, I’m going to snap off something you like very much, and then how will you feel?”
He looked surprised by her comeback, and then he started to laugh.
He was still chuckling as he left the office.
He was a very good laugher, she had to admit. His whole face warmed in an incredibly attractive way. All kinds of things were attractive about him.
This morning, he’d come out of his room without a shirt on to get his coffee, and she’d almost melted at the sight of his gorgeous, masculine chest.
She’d wanted to touch it, touch him. She still did.
She brushed the thought away, since it would do her absolutely no good.
She wasn’t going to touch him. Not at all. Never.
She was a sensible woman, and she wasn’t at the mercy of her occasional lustful urges.
She just had to remember that.
***
Later that evening, Heather was sprawled out on her chair in the apartment, staring at the television.
Chris had been in his room when she’d finally got home, which was a great relief. She didn’t want to see him or talk to him. She’d warmed up some soup, since she didn’t hav
e energy to make anything more, and ate it while she watched a cooking show on TV.
Lucy was perched on her lap now, peering at her hopefully, wanting either attention, a walk, or a treat.
At the moment, the dog wasn’t going to get any of those things. Heather was too tired to move.
If she’d been smarter, she would have paced out the work involved in Chris’s project and not almost killed herself getting it done so quickly. It wasn’t like it was really urgent. Chris could have waited a little longer.
But Heather had always been an overachiever, and she didn’t like anyone to think she couldn’t do her job.
That applied double to Chris.
She wondered if he was taking his role in the company as seriously as it seemed.
That would be nice—if he was. Maybe he wouldn’t be walking out the door next month, as she half expected him to.
Her dad would be utterly crushed if Chris walked out on him again.
When she heard a noise from the other side of the apartment, she turned her head. Her eyes widened dramatically when she saw Chris come out of his room.
He wore a pair of boxers and nothing else. And, damn, his body was fine. She could see even more of it right now than she had this morning, and the effect on her own body was dramatic.
This evening, she had an even harder time tearing her eyes away from the broad chest, long legs, strong thighs, flat abs.
“Sorry,” he said, evidently noticing her staring. “I thought you’d be in your room. It’s late.”
“Is it past my bedtime?” Her tone was a little sharp, so she tempered it as she added, “I just hadn’t made it to my room yet.”
He shrugged and headed to the refrigerator, where he pulled out a bottle of water. Instead of returning to his room, he came a little closer to her. “You look beat.”
“I am. My head is still swimming with all those paper files. I told Dad he should have converted to computer records about ten years ago, but he never listened to me.”
“We can do it, then.”
“Yeah. That’s the plan.” She gave him a vague smile. “It doesn’t help in collecting information at the moment, of course.”