by Jeannie Watt
“Do whatever you need to do,” she said. “I’m just happy you’re here to help.” She swung her drill in one hand. “If it wasn’t for the time crunch, I’d take over from here, but I can’t finish this alone.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Tess and Stevie will be here this weekend to putty over the screws and sand, but I don’t trust them on the seams.”
“You can say it. You need me.”
She made a face at him, a half-hearted effort at best, but it conveyed that she liked it when he was flippant. When he wasn’t, when things got more personal between them, she tensed up. She did a decent job of hiding it, but they’d spent enough time at each other’s throats for Danny to recognize what was going on, and he wasn’t certain what to do about it.
Whatever it was, he’d think before acting. His time with Felicity was short, and he couldn’t afford to screw up.
“Any big plans for tonight?” he asked as they simultaneously began untying their aprons.
“I’m not going out with my coworker.”
“Knife to the heart,” he said, following her to the entryway where they dropped the drills into the chargers and hung the aprons.
She gave him a smirking smile and shrugged into her coat, zipping it to her chin. “I’ll just head home and continue my rigid ways there.”
“Kind of got you with the rigid thing, didn’t I?”
She gave him a withering look then pulled the bandanna off her head, stuffing it into her pocket. “I was being facetious. I’m not rigid.”
He merely lifted his eyebrows, and she put a palm on his chest, pushing him a couple of steps backward. Not as pleasant as the light touch of her hand to his cheek earlier, but he rather enjoyed it.
“See you tomorrow, Felix,” he said with a laugh.
She made a show of straightening her coat. “Yes. Your turn for donuts. I’ll pass on the cookie.”
*
Rigid.
No way. Rigidity meant that you couldn’t adapt as new circumstances arose, and Felicity most certainly could do that, as she’d demonstrated when Sean had pulled the plug on their relationship, leaving her alone in the new city she’d moved to for him.
Knowing this, she should have been able to laugh off the remark/judgment, but it stuck with annoying tenacity, giving her no choice but to come up with a way to demonstrate her extreme flexibility…or at least a minor bend here and there.
She couldn’t think of one. She had a project to finish in too short a period of time. Demonstrating flexibility would slow her down.
“Am I rigid?” she asked her dad, who was deep into a basketball game.
“What?’ he asked, tearing his gaze away from the game and blinking as if suddenly realizing that he was on planet Earth.
“Am I rigid?”
He gave her the cautious look of a man who’d been asked about one teenage fashion choice too many. A wrong answer and he was a dead man.
“You’re…”
“Focused. Right?” Felicity gave him an expectant look.
“I was going to say driven.”
“Hm.” She cracked open one of the pistachios in the bowl she held in her lap. “Not the same as rigid, which means that once you come up with a plan, you stick to it, regardless of new developments and common sense.” She was only rigid on certain matters. It was not a character trait.
“You aren’t rigid.”
“Thank you.” She popped the nut into her mouth as her dad yawned. It was going on ten o’clock and time for her to go to bed, since she’d decided to arrive at work the same time as Danny the next morning.
Danny who was not home yet. She’d checked when she’d opened the pistachios not that long ago. How did the guy function with no sleep?
It didn’t matter, as long as he did.
“Dad, I’m calling it a night.”
“Sleep tight,” he said, looking up from the game. She was almost to the hall leading to the bedrooms when he said, “It’s killing me to not be able to work with you.”
She turned back. “I know, Dad. I’m glad I’m able to do it.”
“Everything is okay with your job?”
It was the second time he’d asked, and her father didn’t make a habit of repeating himself. “It’s all good, Dad. If it weren’t, they’d be in contact.”
“Good.” He inhaled deeply. “So you’re pretty happy there?”
He was getting that look in his eye and she hesitated, then came back into the living room. “You know I can’t change jobs for a couple of years,” she reminded him gently. She’d given up being vested in her former company’s retirement when she’d followed Sean to Seattle three years ago. She wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.
“Golden handcuffs,” Pete muttered.
“Uh…I think I need to be a top exec to qualify as golden.”
“Base metal?”
She laughed. “Closer.”
“Handcuffs all the same.”
She smiled and headed down the hall. She understood her dad wanting her back in Holly with the rest of the family, but her hands were tied—or handcuffed—until she was vested in Lockwood’s retirement plan. Almost thirty and no retirement to speak of. The kicker was that it was her own fault for bending her own rules, the first of which had been to provide for her future.
That’s what she got for not being rigid.
*
Danny was just shrugging out of his coat when headlights cut across the front of the high school. Since it was only a few ticks past five thirty it couldn’t possibly be his night owl boss.
But it was.
“You’re early,” he said as she came through the door.
“This is just me being flexible about my start time,” she said with a casual shrug, but the sleep-deprived timbre of her voice ruined the effect. She pushed back her choppy blond hair, making it stand up in a way that Danny found rather charming, and her makeup-free eyes made her look softer, more vulnerable.
He was not fooled.
“Am I going to find you curled up asleep in the corner?”
“No.” She swallowed a yawn. “I just need a little more coffee and I’ll be safe to use a drill.”
“We’re taping joints today,” he reminded her. “Joint knives, mud trays.”
“You pick your tools, I’ll pick mine.”
He laughed. “Right.” Felicity rarely looked vulnerable, but early in the morning, before she’d sharpened her knives for the day’s battle, she did.
“How can you be so cheerful?” She pulled her arms out of her coat sleeves.
“It’s a gift.”
“For safety’s sake, and I mean your safety, you should work upstairs, and I’ll work down here.”
“You don’t want to talk,” he guessed.
“Not for a while,” she affirmed. “What time is your appointment?”
“Eight. It shouldn’t take long.”
“I’ll be ready to talk by then.”
“You seem to do okay by seven,” he pointed out—the time she’d arrived the two previous days.
She fixed him with a deadly stare, suggesting a predator about to attack. “You’re playing with fire, Danny.”
“Right. I’ll just head upstairs.”
He balanced the rolls of paper tape on the lid of the five-gallon bucket of compound, then picked up the mud tray which held the various widths of joint knives and the trowel with his other hand. “See you in a couple hours,” he said cheerfully.
“Yep.”
Danny shot one last look in Felicity’s direction as he started up the creaking stairs. She was staring into space, as if wondering where to start, but after he reached the second floor and snapped on the lights, he heard her go into action, the joint knives clattering as she rummaged through them. A blast of music followed, and he smiled as he recognized the popular tune from their high school days. She skipped it and brought up a more recent song.
Not in a nostalgic mood.
He pried o
pen the bucket of joint compound and filled his tray, then moved the ladder into position to start taping the top joints. First, he applied a layer of compound over the wallboard seams, then pressed the tape into the wet mud. After that, he skimmed another coat of mud over the top in two strokes. Later, after sanding, he’d feather on the final coats which would render the seam invisible. It was exacting work and there were a lot of seams to be done, but thankfully, Pete—or Zach—had already completed nearly half of the upstairs offices, giving them a fighting chance of getting the interior prepped for painting on schedule. If Felicity’s sisters showed up to spackle the screw holes tomorrow, it’d be a massive help.
Half an hour before he was due to meet the window repair crew at his warehouse, the stairs creaked as Felicity came to the second floor. He paused, trowel in the air, as she topped the staircase.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said.
“Do what?”
“You’re never home when I go to bed. How do you function the next day?”
“I guess I’m used to running on fumes.”
“It’ll catch up with you.”
“I know. I’ve crashed before.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.” He ran his blade down the seam. “It’s why I changed careers.”
“I’ve yet to burn out professionally.”
“Because you appear to have set healthy boundaries.” He glanced at her. “No offense, but that surprises me, given the all-or-nothing attitude I’ve come to expect from you.”
“Life is a little different than a water balloon fight,” she said with a half-smile before lifting her coffee to her lips. She never seemed to run out of the stuff.
“Yet at times eerily similar.”
Her eyes crinkled with amusement. Felicity was now officially awake.
She pushed a few strands of hair off her forehead. “I admit that I started my career gung ho, putting in crazy hours when no one else was.” She met his gaze ruefully. “Acting exactly how you would expect me to act. However, I had a wise mentor who convinced me that killing myself wouldn’t help the company or me. And she pointed out that companies take advantage. They’ll milk you for all you’re willing to give, and lot of them don’t reward you for it. They simply come to expect it.” She leaned her shoulder against the wall. “Did you experience that?”
“No. I was part of a tech startup right out of college. My partner and I burned the candle at both ends for a couple of years. It paid off.”
“But not enough to stick with it?”
“Let’s just say I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I didn’t. After that…I don’t know…I started seeing the world differently. I decided to leave California and come back to Idaho and make my life here.” His phone chimed and he put down his trowel. “I have to leave.”
“Right. I just wanted to see where you were so I could calculate our progress.”
He’d covered a good amount of ground over the past few hours. Enough that he felt okay about leaving for an hour. He used his trowel to scrape the excess joint compound from the tray back into the bucket, which he sealed.
“Do you simply not talk in detail about your life? Or is it me?” she asked.
“Hard to talk when we’re working on opposite ends of the building or on different floors.”
“Do you think I’m purposely keeping you at arm’s length?” Her voice held a note of incredulity. “Because I’m not.”
He gave her a look that said he thought she was.
“If I am, it’s in the name of efficiency.” She flicked a crumb of joint compound that had dried on her hand toward him and it bounced off the lid of the bucket, hitting his sleeve. “Imagine working in close proximity with wet mud at the ready.”
He stood, brushing his hands down the side of his pants while holding her gaze. “Temptation can be a problem.”
Felicity cocked her head at him, as if uncertain as to whether she’d read his tone correctly.
He gave the bucket lid one last tap with the rubber mallet. “I have to go.”
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
*
Once again, the old high school felt oddly empty after Danny left. Felicity, who valued her solitude, reveled in alone time, felt…lonely.
Ridiculous.
Was it?
Or was she getting used to having him around?
It was rather freeing to be around someone with whom she could be herself. Her close friends from college were busy with lives of their own, raising children and/or chasing careers. Her closest friend from work had recently taken a job on the other side of the country, leaving her with no one with whom she could be her unfettered, occasionally snarkilicious self.
She could be herself with Danny.
That was why she missed him. She needed to bank these precious moments of being genuine before heading back to the city and her job. Back to being herself, but not.
Back to biting her tongue.
Of course, working in different parts of the building wasn’t using this resource to the fullest, but it was efficient, because it was tempting to spend the day verbally sparring. To return to the default of constantly trying to get the other’s goat.
That was what she’d meant by temptation.
But it hadn’t sounded like that was what he’d meant.
A low, slow warmth flowed through her as she recalled his words, his tone, which had been borderline provocative. But not in the usual way?
Had she been hallucinating due to lack of caffeine?
That didn’t seem possible, since she’d finished off her thermos of coffee before heading upstairs to see him.
He’s playing you. As always.
Right.
Despite her assertion to herself, she didn’t fully buy it. But…she didn’t know what else to think.
Danny was back in forty-five minutes instead of an hour.
“Everything go okay?”
“It did. The windows are being replaced as we speak.”
“In the mystery house.”
“That’s the place,” he agreed.
“Which is located…?”
Frankly, she didn’t care where it was located. If he had to keep things quiet until papers were signed, or whatever, she understood. But it was fun to poke at him. She had no one in Seattle to poke at who would poke back. She kind of missed it.
She definitely missed it.
“I’ll show you before you leave.”
“Really?” That surprised her.
“Yes.”
She narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. “You’re not just saying that so that I leave you in peace?”
“That wouldn’t be honest,” he said in a self-righteous voice, which he followed up with a devilish grin and a lift of one eyebrow.
She scooped up a knife of mud to distract herself from the unsettling warmth that his smile ignited.
“I’d better get to it.” He shrugged out of his coat as he headed to the stairs, and Felicity sucked a breath in between her teeth as she firmly got a grip.
She would not react this way to Danny.
But it appeared that she was.
Chapter Six
Sandra called just as Danny was finishing his last seam of the day. “Have you checked the new windows at the warehouse?”
“Not yet.” He put the phone on speaker, setting it on top of the joint compound bucket before starting to wipe clean his trowel and joint knives. “I’m heading there after I leave the job.”
He’d put in ten hours and then some, not counting the time he’d spent with the window crew that morning, and that seemed like enough.
“Do you want to pick me up? We can look together, then maybe grab a bite?”
“Sure.” He glanced at the time on the phone. “I’m almost out the door.”
“Great. I’m at the coffee shop next to the library.”
“Shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes.”
Danny set the clean kni
ves on the windowsill, then started down the staircase. Felicity was still hard at it.
“Hey,” she said, straightening up from where she’d been bent over, smoothing out a seam. The bandanna she used to protect her hair was once again askew.
Danny couldn’t help himself. He stepped closer and used both hands to straighten it, as Felicity rolled her eyes upward, trying to see what he was doing. “I bet you don’t go out in public with your scarf crooked in Seattle.”
“I don’t wear these kinds of scarves in Seattle.”
“It’s the perfect look for hanging out in pirate bars.”
“My local pirate bar closed.”
“Argh,” Danny said, taking a step back. “I need to take off.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
“So…what time tomorrow?”
“Seven.”
He refrained from commenting on the much later starting hour, but she read the amusement in his expression.
“You can say it,” she said.
“You ruined it.” He let the smile break through. “See you tomorrow.”
“Danny?”
“Yeah?” He stopped at the door, looking back to where she stood wiping her hands on a shop towel, little crumbs of dried joint compound falling to the drop cloth beneath her feet.
“I…” She hesitated, then made a dismissive gesture. “Nothing.”
He gave her another second to reconsider, thinking that it was odd to see Felicity anything less than decisive, then pushed open the door. “See you.”
Sandra was standing just outside the door of the coffee shop when he pulled up, her shoulders hunched against the cold.
“You could have waited inside.”
“I gave up my table and the place is too tiny to loiter. Besides, I like the cool air. My temporary office here has one temperature—hot.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the man I’m renting from controls the heat and he likes things toasty.”
“We have the opposite trouble. The furnace has been a bit temperamental today. We have a guy coming in to see if he can get her to work better so that the texturing material and paint will dry on time.”
Bertha the furnace had been stingy with the heat output for most of the day and eventually quit working altogether, at which point Felicity phoned the city maintenance engineer, who explained how to reset the furnace and promised to send a repair guy. Next week. Fortunately, the reset worked, and they’d had heat for the rest of the day.
