He nodded. “Understood. But, um...” He squinted at me and pointed to his own forehead. “You’ve got some dirt.”
I removed my glove to reach up and rub the spot that he’d indicated. My fingers came away dirty. “Did I get it?” I asked, wiping my fingers against my grubby work shorts.
“No, here,” he said, walking toward me. “You kind of spread it around.”
When he was in arm’s reach, he stopped and reached toward my forehead, slowly enough for me to duck away, but his presence wasn’t at all threatening, so I stood still to let him get at the dirt.
He brushed at it lightly but only frowned at the results. “Uh, may I...?” He plucked at the hem of his T-shirt, but I wasn’t sure what he was asking, so I only blinked at him. He lifted it up, exposing a flash of his well-defined abs before they disappeared from view as he used the fabric to rub gently at my face. I was too preoccupied by the effect his abs had on me to squirm away from his fussing. I did notice that his shirt was as soft as it looked before he dropped it and stepped back, all so quickly that I didn’t get another glimpse before his shirt fell into place.
“I don’t think I fixed it,” he said. “Sorry. I think I made it worse.”
How dirty was my face? I’d need to wash it in the kitchen sink where there was no mirror to make me die of delayed embarrassment.
“It’s fine.” I scooped up my gardening tote. “I’m going home anyway. Enjoy your dinner.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I will.”
I refrained from touching the spot he’d tried to clean, sensing without looking that his gaze was following me to the front door. I closed it behind me then leaned against it. Ian had cleaned dirt off my forehead, and I’d started wondering what it would be like to make out with him.
What even...?
I touched the warm spot on my forehead. That was no fever. That was Ian Greene’s touch causing the heat reaction, and as an expert in biology, I knew we were dealing with chemistry.
And I had no interest in that kind of chemical reaction.
Chapter Fifteen
Ian
Gran had warned me that Brooke was an early riser, so I knocked on her door with a mug of Mary’s hot coffee in hand a half-hour before a time most people would consider decent.
Sure enough, Brooke opened the door already dressed in paint-stained work clothes, her hair gathered into a braid.
“Hey,” she said, a look of mild surprise on her face. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard the rumors, but I love tiling so much. So I’m hanging around on your front porch hoping you’ll let me help.”
Her eyebrow rose. “You love tiling floors?”
“It’s my favorite. So relaxing.”
She rolled her eyes. “Your gran talks too much.”
I grinned. “So can I help?”
She hesitated for a minute. “I can handle this by myself.”
“I brought fresh coffee. Letting me help will be like letting me get free therapy.” I extended the mug.
She accepted and stepped back. “All right, if it’s really going to make you happy.”
“Wildest dreams come true, I swear.” That earned me another eyeroll, but this one came with a laugh.
“I’m tiling the stupid downstairs bathroom. It’s tedious. I don’t know how it can do anything besides frustrate you completely, but sure, jump right in and swear at the grout with me.”
“Wait, can I see the library before we start?”
“Sure,” she said, turning toward it. “I like how it came out.”
“It’s pretty great,” I said from the threshold, admiring her progress. Bookcases now lined the walls, though only one of them had any books in it yet. Several boxes sat in front of each bookcase bearing labels like, “Cooking,” “History,” “Fiction,” and other genres. A large, overstuffed striped chair sat in the corner beside an end table holding a blue glass lamp. “This isn’t the kind of space I would picture when I think of a home library, but this makes me want to curl up and read and the kind I would usually picture doesn’t.”
“That’s the goal,” she said. “I wanted a quiet place for reading. Cozy, comfortable.”
“You nailed it.” The bookcases were white against the soft neutral walls, and the reading chair was teal cotton instead of leather and brass tacks. The light and airy vibe felt like Brooke, like she’d translated her personality into the room.
“Thanks. But there’s no rest for the wicked. Or dummies who buy old houses. Come on.”
I followed her to the bathroom, noticing the other changes she’d made since I’d last been inside. She was obviously leaving the small foyer for last. It still sported old wallpaper and outdated light fixtures, but the walls leading upstairs had been freed from the faded floral wallpaper and given a coat of the same paint from the library. The room opening off the right of the foyer already had new paint, baseboards, and refinished flooring too.
“What will this space be?” I asked, pausing at the doorway of the empty room.
“Not sure yet. Maybe an office. I’m not big on formal living rooms, so I’d just as soon have any company come visit me in my TV room or the kitchen.” She moved up the hall leading out of the foyer and paused. “This is the guest bathroom. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but I think if I climb into the tub and work from there, we should be able to both fit.”
I joined her at the doorway and realized immediately that she had been humoring me when she’d allowed me to join her. The space was too small for both of us to work comfortably. I’d be underfoot, but I didn’t want to give up and go home. Not after I’d imagined a day of working with her in the house. Making up for my suspicion of her. Getting to know her.
“I’m not going to crowd you into the bathtub just so you can give me something to do. Is there anything else you’ve been wanting to tackle? I want to help for real, not get in your way.”
“Anything else I want to tackle? That’s a long, long list,” she said with a sigh.
“Give me the most annoying job on it, the one you’re dreading doing.” I’d much rather hang out where she was and work, but I liked the idea of being useful somewhere in her house more than going back to Gran’s to get spoiled while Brooke overworked herself alone.
“I mean, they’re all the jobs at the bottom of my list for a reason,” Brooke said. “They’re the worst jobs that I haven’t been able to force myself to do.”
“I’m game,” I promised. “Send me in, coach.”
She cast a doubtful eye at me. “I mean the really bad jobs.”
“You know what I do for a living, right? I dig up the worst kind of dirt on the worst kind of people. There is nothing in this house that can be worse than that.”
“Oh, really? How about removing wallpaper?”
“Tell me what to do. I haven’t done it before, but it can’t be that bad.”
Brooke answered with a snort. “Wait here. I’ll get the stuff. You just uttered famous last words.”
She disappeared down the hall and I heard the back door open. I Googled “how to remove wallpaper” while I waited for her. The process didn’t look too complicated. And I hoped she would assign me the foyer and hall. That way we’d be working next to each other.
She came back a few minutes later with a plastic painter’s tarp, a paint scraper, and an oversized spray bottle. She set them down and dug a small object from her back pocket. “This will score the wallpaper,” she said, handing it to me. “Lay down the tarp, then run this down the wallpaper but not too hard or I’ll have to putty it before I paint. Then peel it off and let it fall to the tarp. It’s disposable, so I’ll bundle it up and throw it all away.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Oh, you sweet, innocent man. This is going to suck. You can tap out anytime you want to because there are a hundred better ways for you to spend your Saturday, and all of them start with you running away fast.”
“I can handle it.” I flexed as a
joke but caught an appreciative glint in her eye before she shook her head.
“It doesn’t take strength, it takes patience. So much patience. Wheelbarrows of patience. Most of the paper won’t come up very easily. Once you’ve peeled away everything you can, there’s still going to be patches that cling to the wall like they were welded there. But let’s get you through the initial removal first, and if you survive, I’ll explain how to do the next part.”
She laid the paint scraper in my hand and turned toward the bathroom, but I reached out to catch her fingers and hold her in place with a light pressure she could break with no trouble.
“I’m patient, Brooke. I won’t tap out.”
She glanced down at my hand holding hers and slowly slid hers from my grasp. “I know I don’t teach English, but I’m almost positive there’s some subtext there.” She ran her freed hand down her braid, pushing it behind her and meeting my eyes. “If you’re here to help, I’m happy to have it. But if you’re here for anything else...”
“No ulterior motives, I promise. Just trying to make up for digging into your business.”
“The flowers were enough,” Brooke said.
“They weren’t. I’m so used to having to do metaphorical dirty work that I couldn’t see the obvious when it was right in front of me. I won’t make that mistake again. And I figured the best way to atone is to do your literal dirty work. You’re doing me a favor by letting me.”
She shook her head. “All right, if you really want to. I’ll be cursing at tile if you need anything.”
She disappeared into the bathroom. I decided to start on the wallpaper closest to her. “Brooke?” I asked, as I looked for the first seam to begin ripping.
“Yeah?” She was only a few feet away even though I could only see the soles of her shoes. She must have already knelt to do her work.
“Why Lincoln? And teaching high school? And this old house?”
She was quiet for a while. Finally, she said, “In college, I wanted to go into biology because I find life so interesting. I like looking at the building blocks of it, understanding how it all works. I ended up on a career detour after I lost a friend, and—”
I waited, but she didn’t continue. “Brooke?”
She crawled backwards out of the bathroom and sat on her heels in the hallway, watching me for a few seconds. “How much did you find out about my past in your investigation?”
“Ellen Brown set me straight on a lot of it,” I admitted. “But I’d like to hear about it from you.”
She seemed to consider that for a minute before disappearing into the bathroom again. Just as I wondered if she’d decided to ignore my question, her voice floated out to the hall.
“I wanted to make a difference. I thought I’d get into research, find a cure or two.” She laughed. “Like it’s that easy. Anyway, my roommate died from using a faulty vape. I kept telling her not to vape at all, but she insisted it was way better for her than smoking. Then she got a lung infection, and she didn’t recover. I took a semester off because her death was this reminder that life was really short, and I wanted to make sure I was making it count.”
“And you decided politics was the answer? I think that brings a lot of idealists to DC.”
“No, I wasn’t interested in politics. But I felt like I’d failed Chelsea, my roommate, because I couldn’t talk her out of vaping. So I decided to make it harder for the vape industry to hook young people, and I spent my semester off researching the industry, the growth rates, the demographics of users. It was disturbing. I wanted to make sure no one else on my campus would become their victim either by getting sick or losing someone like I did. And I started lobbying my state delegate to get a law passed that banned the sale of flavored vape products in Virginia, since that’s how they hook new users. They were pretty much marketing straight to kids.”
“And that’s when you caught Ellen Brown’s eye?” I asked.
Her head popped out of the bathroom. “She’s great, isn’t she?”
I nodded, and she disappeared again.
“She convinced me to do an internship with the delegate’s office the following summer,” she explained before giving a soft but audible curse.
“You liked it that much, huh?”
“Sorry, no, I can’t get this tile piece to line up right.” She fell quiet for a moment, then I heard a small, satisfied grunt, and she picked up the thread of the conversation. “I did like working for the delegate. And I thought if I brought my science background to work with me in her office, I could do some good work around all kinds of related issues. Public health, the environment.”
“So you got into politics like thousands of idealists all over the country.”
“Idealism isn’t a bad thing.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
She poked her head out. “Your tone did.”
I thought about it. “I think we need idealists. But reality is hard on idealists. When I come across a newly arrived true believer on the capital scene, ready to devote their lives to public service, I already see the impending slow-motion wreck of their ideals unfolding in their future.”
She rose and walked far enough out of the bathroom to lean against the wall and study me. “And it makes you cranky.”
It wasn’t a question. The characterization made me yank extra hard at a piece of wallpaper. “Cranky is for old people. I’m not cranky.”
“Which word should I use? Cynical?”
I ripped another long strip of wallpaper away as I considered the number of young political staffers I’d seen bruised and sometimes beaten by the reality of Washington politics. “Tired. It makes me tired.”
“Why stay?”
The question startled me into pausing and looking straight at her. She was studying me, her head tilted slightly, like I was a microscope specimen. “Why stay in my job?”
“You sound like you hate it. Just quit.” She disappeared into the bathroom like she hadn’t suggested something completely farfetched.
“It’s not that easy.”
“No,” she agreed, her voice slightly muffled. “But it is simple. You make a decision, and you walk away. It’s making the decision that’s the hard part.”
“I know you’re speaking from your own experience, but it’s not easy or simple for me,” I said. “Besides, I don’t want to quit.”
“So you stay and get crankier, working inside a system you hate.”
“I don’t hate the system,” I corrected her. “I dislike the way a lot of powerful people game it.”
She was quiet for a long time before answering. “Me too.”
I knew she must be referring to whatever had happened with her and Senator Rink, and I wanted to say something comforting. Or at least something that condemned the predatory creep. But she hadn’t specifically brought up the assault, and we didn’t have the kind of connection that gave me the right to comment on it, no matter how well-intentioned.
Time for a change of subject. To what?
“So removing wallpaper does kind of suck.” My segue was about as subtle as the loud chipping I was doing with the paint knife.
“You can go home any time,” she said cheerfully.
“I didn’t say I wanted to.” It miffed me that she was still ready to dismiss me. I’d only managed to peel away a little of Brooke’s exterior, making less headway with her than I had with the wallpaper, and I was now equally invested in both projects. “You didn’t say why you bought your uncle’s place.”
“I fell in love with it,” she said. “I had a chance to stay here for a couple of months when I was going through a rough patch, and something about Creekville spoke to me. I think it’s the opposite of DC in every way, and it came at exactly the right time.”
“I don’t know about that.” I kept my tone light. “Gran is always full of gossip about the old guard in town, and I get pretty regular rundowns on the political drama of the mayor and city council.”
Her answering laugh m
ade me smile. “You got me there. But I guess the difference is that everyone here is genuinely trying to make Creekville better, not get their personal slice of the pie. I’ve heard people talk about a sense of community, but this is where I’ve felt it. This town is the real deal.”
“Gran loves it,” I acknowledged.
“You don’t?”
“I don’t not love it. I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve been in town. But mostly I come here to hang with Gran, so even though she’s lived here my whole life, I guess I don’t really know the town that well.”
“I’m still learning it too, but I can tell you some things I know.”
“Go ahead, shoot.”
“Everyone smiles,” she said. “They all say hello. And once you’ve done business with one of them, they know enough about your story to bring it up every time after that. But it’s a good thing. Like when I bought a can of paint at the hardware store and Grace asked what I was working on. Now she’s my unofficial renovation consultant. Or Bixby’s Bakery. Taylor Bixby knows my order as soon as she sees me walk through the door, and it’s ready at the register before I say a word.”
“What’s your order?” I asked. “Wait, no. Let me guess.” I considered her low-key style of dress, her drink preference the night at Gran’s house, the simple tastes she’d shown in her renovations so far. “Americano,” I guessed. “And a blueberry muffin.”
She appeared in the hall. “How’d you know?” Then her expression fell. “I guess that’s a pretty boring order, isn’t it?”
“It’s not that. I’d describe it as classic.”
“I think what you’re saying is that I’m predictable.”
“No.” I studied her, taking another inventory of her fine features, the light wash of freckles across her nose, her healthy summer glow. “You are anything but predictable.”
A tinge of pink rose in her cheeks and she disappeared into the bathroom.
“I’m getting something different tomorrow anyway,” she called. “I don’t like being predictable.”
“Let me guess, you’re going to switch it up with tea and a scone?” I laughed when she gasped and her head popped back out. “Don’t be so shocked. I do this for a living. I kind of have to know how to profile people. You do start to see patterns in types of people, but it doesn’t make you predictable.”
Kiss Me Now: A Romantic Comedy Page 11