by Julia London
“What’d you think?” he asked curiously.
“Oh, I don’t know. I had some theories—building crypts. Burying bodies.”
Dax stared at her, uncertain what to say to that.
She laughed. “I’m kidding. Well . . . sort of.”
Her eyes were twinkling at him, Dax thought. He liked that twinkle. It made him feel sort of twinkly himself.
“You’re kind of a mysterious guy,” she said. She’d twisted around in her seat, had crossed one leg over the other. Her foot was bouncing in time to the pencil she drummed against a thick, spiral-bound notebook. She wore a happy, amused smile that made him feel a little wobbly inside.
“I’m not mysterious,” he said. “Actually, I’m pretty boring.” He drilled the last screw in. “There you go.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
She didn’t look convinced, and stood up, walking to where he stood. She ducked around him and slipped between the door and him. With hands on hips, she looked up at the hinge, then the door. “It doesn’t close all the way,” she pointed out.
“Just adjust it,” he said.
“Just adjust it,” she repeated. “I don’t even know what this is, much less how to adjust it.”
Dax clucked his opinion of that. Everyone ought to know how to adjust things. Adjustment was part of life. He reached around her, but the hinge was a little bit out of range. He shifted, and she bumped up against his chest, and that mess of hair brushed against his cheek and made his skin tingle. “Here’s how you do it,” he said, showing her the tab.
“Aha,” she said and turned around, looking up at him with eyes the color of warm teak, crinkling in the corners because she was sort of smiling again like she was amused or happy, he didn’t know what. All he knew was that something was crackling in him, like a piece of paper thrown into a fire . . . crackling and crumbling and turning to ash. Dax couldn’t help himself; he looked at her mouth. He wanted to kiss that mouth in the worst way, wanted it so bad that he was a tiny bit fearful he might vomit with all that want churning in him.
The corners of her mouth turned up into a full-fledged smile, and Dax felt himself perilously close to doing something stupid.
“Thanks,” she said lightly, her voice reminding him of a morning bird. “I never knew how much that door annoyed me until you fixed it.”
“Yep.” He made himself look away and pick up his stuff. “Where’d the kid get off to?” he asked and risked a quick glance at Mrs. Coconuts.
She was still smiling. “She’s in her room—can’t you hear?”
All he could hear was a buzzing in his ears, Dax realized, due to the manic beating of his unused heart.
“She’s singing with her little recorder. She wants to be Katy Perry.”
“Well, if you can ever get the singing part of that to work out, she’ll be great at it,” he said.
She laughed.
“Okay, well . . . see you.” He opened the door and didn’t notice how soundlessly it closed behind him. He walked down the steps of the porch and tripped over one of Ruby’s toys in the yard, which he’d failed to notice right in front of him. Dax had been made deaf and blind by lust.
Okay, maybe not lust . . . but something equally precarious.
Chapter Seven
Kyra was surprisingly happy that she didn’t have to listen to the constant sound of that screen door slapping shut, but she realized very quickly that now she didn’t know when Ruby went in and out. When it came time for supper, she thought Ruby was in her room but found her in the newly planted rosebush beds Mr. McCauley had installed last week. Ruby was burying some of her Little People.
“Why?” Kyra demanded irritably as she dug them up and tried to repair the mulch.
“So someone can find them,” Ruby said. That made no sense to Kyra but seemed plainly logical to Ruby’s six-year-old brain.
Ruby was in bed now, and Kyra was, as always, beat. She wondered how those single moms with three children did it. She thought about Taleesha, Ruby’s friend. Kyra had taken Ruby into the city to attend Taleesha’s birthday party today because Ruby missed her so much. They’d practically grown up together in the day care where Kyra had worked. But Taleesha’s mother had three more children, all of them under ten years old. And she worked two jobs. Kyra would be dead on her feet if she had to squeeze in another job, and she only had one child.
She helped herself to a beer—cheaper than the bottle of wine she’d really wanted at the grocery store and had put back on the shelf—and turned on the television, intending to watch some mindless reality program. A wavy line cut through the middle of the picture. She tried several other channels and found the same thing. “Great. Just great,” she muttered.
She wiggled some of the cords coming out of the back of the television. That didn’t work. She pounded her fist on the top of the set. That definitely didn’t work, and she nearly toppled the thing over. This was a disaster. Ruby wouldn’t notice the line, but Mrs. Miller would not be happy. And if Mrs. Miller wasn’t happy, Kyra was not going to be happy, either. She couldn’t handle any major purchases right now. It was bad enough her car kept acting like it was going to quit on her, but this?
She sighed, turned it off. Maybe she could pick up some extra shifts, but she didn’t want to think about that tonight. She decided she’d have a long bath, maybe finish that paperback she’d been reading. There was nothing like a trip to eighteenth-century Scotland to take her mind off her money woes, nothing that a good Scottish Highlander couldn’t cure.
She walked into the kitchen and tossed her empty beer bottle, then moved to the fridge to get another beer. Through the kitchen window, she spotted Dax in his yard, working on that big piece of wood between the two sawhorses. It was getting late; the sun would be going down soon. Didn’t he need some light to do that?
She watched him lean over that enormous plank of wood, the size of a small boat. It reminded her of Titanic and the door that Rose had floated on while Jack had sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, when clearly there was enough room on that door for both of them. Dax sort of looked like a Jack—chiseled. Strong. Handsome. She idly imagined him in that situation, bobbing around the Atlantic Ocean as the ship went down. He wouldn’t have let go and sunk. No, he would have told her to move over, she was certain of it. It would have been a simple “Move.” She smiled, amused by that.
He suddenly straightened and looked straight at her window. Kyra gasped and ducked behind the fridge. She had to quit watching him out her kitchen window. It wasn’t her fault that he kept working right in her line of vision, but still. She opened the fridge, got a beer, and popped the top, unthinkingly taking a deep drink while she pondered her neighbor.
Really, had she thanked him enough for the new hinge? Sure, she’d said thanks, but she really ought to thank him.
Okay, she was not going to do that—she was not going to find an excuse to go over there and bother that man. Or was she? Because it wasn’t the worst thing to be neighborly and say thank you. And really, was she bothering him? Mr. McCauley stopped by routinely just to say hi and ask how they were doing, and that didn’t bother anyone. Then again, Mr. McCauley owned the cottage, and he was probably trying to get a look to make sure they hadn’t destroyed the place.
Okay, enough. She’d already sort of said thank you, and to say thank you now would be . . . flirty. Yep, flirty. And she was not the flirty type, even though Deenie had urged her to be more flirty. “You have to at least try,” she’d said one afternoon at the bistro when an older guy who smelled like cigars and sweat was hitting on Kyra. “You’ll make better tips. And are you really going to wait until you’re, like, forty before you date again? Because that’s too late. You’re practically done by then.”
Forty did sound a little too late to reenter the dating scene. Ruby would be eighteen when Kyra was forty. Kyra could well imagine that all the good guys would be taken by then, and she’d be left with those who drove around
in old pickups with campers on the back and giant antennas bouncing around on top.
Maybe she should just go and say thanks. Maybe just practice her flirty skills.
She took her beer and ducked into the tiny bathroom, flipped on the light, and recoiled slightly at her reflection. Jesus, had she walked around like this all day? There was a smudge of dirt under one eye, and holy smokes, her hair. She drank more beer, then pulled down her ratty hair and brushed it out. That helped, but not enough—she hadn’t used any product this morning in her haste to get the errands run, and now it was frizzy. There really wasn’t anything short of an industrial-strength makeover that was going to help her.
She reached for a bag tucked on a shelf above the sink—too high for little hands—and brought it down. Her makeup bag, stuffed with half-used tubes of mascara, face cream samples, a bronzer so old that it had caked, and some eyebrow shadow. She found a tube of mascara that looked newish and dabbed some on, then added a bit of blush.
That was better. At least she had long lashes, but that was about the only natural beauty thing going for her. She needed to seriously up her game if she didn’t want to die old and alone at the age of forty. Deenie kept talking about going to Black Springs to shop. Maybe Kyra should put a little money aside for that. She could do with some shopping therapy.
Oh, who was she kidding? Right now it was all she could do to pay rent, Mrs. Miller, and the grocery bill. She tossed the mascara in the bag with a snort. Ah, those little pipe dreams of hers. When would they end?
She tried to make her hair look less like a fluff ball and more like a free spirit sort of coif but realized the longer she tried to tame it, the chances of Dax calling it a day were growing.
She returned to the kitchen and looked out the window. He was still there. So was his dog. It was lying beneath that massive piece of wood, its snout in the air and pointed in the general direction of the lake. Kyra opened the window in case Ruby should wake up and call for her, polished off her beer—liquid courage—then grabbed two more beers from the fridge and walked outside.
She had made it to the fence before Dax looked up and saw her coming. He straightened up and eyed her with his usual suspicion as she hooked one leg over the fence, and then the other. As she neared him, his gaze fell to the two bottles of beer.
Kyra hiccupped. “That was involuntary,” she said.
The dog hopped up and sauntered over, and stuck his snout in her crotch.
“Otto!” he snapped.
The dog ignored him as he moved his snout down her leg and studied her flip-flops pretty intently, snorting once or twice, before trotting back to his spot beneath the big plank of wood.
“Okay, well, now that’s over—” She hiccupped again. What the hell? She could feel heat flooding her face. “Sorry,” she said, touching three fingers to her mouth. “I have the hiccups.”
“I gathered.”
She held out a bottle. “Would you like a beer?”
He peered at the bottle. Then at her. “Why?”
“Why?” she laughed and hiccupped. “You’re a funny guy, Dax Bishop. Why does anyone offer a beer? I’m being neighborly, and I want to thank you for fixing that door. It’s so much better now.”
He nodded and wiped his hands on a dirty towel. “Where’s the little coconut?”
“In bed,” she said. “I have a window open so I can hear her if she wakes.” Did that make her a bad mother? He probably thought that made her a bad mother. Well, she wasn’t a great mother, Kyra was the first to admit. She smiled a little self-consciously and managed to choke down another hiccup.
He tossed down the towel. “Your hair is different.”
“What do you mean?” she asked and put a hand to it. “I set it free.” It was probably really frizzy now. Why, oh, why couldn’t she have used a little hair product? And so what if it was a little off-putting? She’d brought the man a beer, for God’s sake—that ought to make up for being offended by frizzy hair. “Okay, Dax, are you going to take this or not?” she demanded, dropping her hand from her hair.
“What?” He dragged his gaze from her hair to the bottle. “Sure. Thanks. By the way, I like it,” he said, his gaze traveling up to her hair again.
Kyra instantly smiled. “What, my hair? Really? Thank you.”
He walked around his project and took the beer from her hand, his fingers brushing carelessly against hers. He took a swig of it, nodded as if he approved, looked at the label—Budweiser—then at her again. He took another drink as he studied Kyra, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with her.
The feeling was entirely mutual. “What are you making?” she asked, stepping around him.
“Table.”
She could appreciate a man of few words, but he didn’t seem to know how to have an actual conversation. “For anyone in particular?”
“Some clients of John Beverly Interiors.” He took another sip. “I make some pieces for them.”
“I love that store. I can’t afford even their bath toys, but I like to look. So when you said you make furniture, you were talking furniture.”
“Well . . . yeah,” he said, sounding slightly mystified. “What else would I be talking about?”
“I mean high-end pieces.”
“I guess.”
She was going to need a pair of pliers to have any semblance of conversation with The Grump. Her look must have conveyed how she felt, because he said sheepishly, “I don’t know what to call the stuff I make. I just like to make it.”
Okay, then. She could go with that. Kyra moved to have a closer look at the big plank of wood and brushed past him, shoulder connecting lightly with his chest. Did I just do that on purpose? I did. I damn sure did. And I liked it.
“So this is a table,” she said. He’d already said that, obviously. She sipped her beer and noticed that she felt a little buzzed. How many beers was it now, anyway? That six-pack was supposed to last her all week.
“Big enough to seat twelve. The wood came from a barn they razed to install a pool.” He leaned over the plank and ran his fingers lightly over the surface. “See how the grain is raised here?”
“No.”
“Give me your hand,” he said.
Kyra held out her hand; he took it and pressed her fingers lightly to the plane of the wood, sweeping them across the surface. “Feel it?”
She was feeling something all right, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the grain. “Yes.”
He let go of her hand. “People pay crazy money for that raised grain. I’d be surprised if the clients who commissioned this even know what they’ve got.”
“Where are the legs?”
He pointed to a pedestal next to one of the sawhorses.
Kyra leaned over his arm to have a look. “Nice,” she said, nodding at the carved piece of wood.
“Thanks,” Dax said. He moved his arm and himself away.
Okay, she’d gotten too close, so sue her already. Was it her fault that she was a single mom with an extremely limited social life and starved for physical contact? Okay, yes, it was technically her fault, but surely the statute of limitations had to be running out on that one. Was it her fault that he happened to be an astonishingly sexy grouch? Nope.
He was squinting at something on the thick plank, flicking it off with his finger.
The thing was, Kyra hadn’t been with a guy in so long, and her supergrouchy neighbor, who was maybe a little off in the mental department, was really very hot. Hot hot.
She walked around the end of the sawhorse and set her beer down on the corner of it. She shoved her hands into her pockets to keep from doing something stupid with them, like twirling her hair around a finger like Ruby did. She turned her back to him and looked at Number Two. “You live here by yourself, huh?” she asked. He didn’t answer. She glanced at him over her shoulder.
He was watching her now, holding the beer loosely between two fingers. “No.”
“No?” she asked with surprise and turned around
to face him.
“Otto lives here, too.” He pointed to his dog and received two thumps of the tail for it.
“Oh yeah, of course,” Kyra said. “You and the dog.”
Dax gave her a tiny bit of a smile and tilted his head to one side. “You don’t have to say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a shut-in with a therapy dog.”
Kyra smiled. “If the shoe fits.”
He smiled, too. And then he began to move toward her. “Here’s the thing about that, Kyra,” he said, saying her name for the first time, and wow, did it ever trickle down her spine when said in that low-timbre voice. He was moving slowly, his gaze, dark and intent, locked on hers. The closer he drew, the more Kyra felt a little like bacon on the inside, everything sizzling. Is he going to kiss me? He is totally going to kiss me. Kyra was a little nervous, and a little hopeful, and yeah, a little crazy. But she kept smiling, because suddenly kissing The Grouch seemed like the perfect idea.
But when Dax reached her, he swept her beer up off the sawhorse and pressed it into her chest. His gaze fell to her mouth, and he said, very softly, “Otto couldn’t be a therapy dog if his life depended on it. He’s too lazy.” He smiled, lifted his beer, and drank. “Thanks for the beer,” he said, tapped his bottle against hers, and stepped away.
Kyra blinked. He hadn’t kissed her, but he’d looked at her with those gray-blue eyes, and her heart was pounding like a jackhammer right now.
He bent over and picked up sandpaper from the ground.
Kyra drank more beer, then walked around to his side of the plank and squatted down, picking up a sheet of the sandpaper. “Where are you from?”
“Teaneck.”
Teaneck, Teaneck. She tried to think of something to say about that, but in her buzzed head, she had nothing. “Here.” She handed him the sandpaper. When he took it, she made sure her fingers brushed against his. Awkwardly—because she had to reach for it, but she managed it. And then she dropped her hand to the ground before she toppled over, because apparently she’d had more beer than she realized.