by Jen Greyson
I didn’t want to start down that road. Now that I knew we were going to be stuck together for the next three to four days, I wanted to be as minimally volatile as possible. “It’s fine. It’s just awkward and I’m totally imposing, that’s all.” I hated that my voice sounded meek. Avoiding confrontation was so not my thing, but I’d been doing it since the moment I’d met him. He was setting my entire life on its head and I was constantly trying to right it again. I truly did like parts of him, and I’d done nothing but make his life a living hell.
“We’re going to be together for a while. I didn’t really think that through when I brought you here. I just wanted to get off the roads and home.” He sat back and settled his ankle across his knee. “I probably should have dropped you at my office manager’s house.”
I fidgeted. I wished he’d quit apologizing. This was my fault, not his. I frowned. Actually, it was Jeremy’s fault and I was going to give it to him good when I got home—if I ever got home. “This is fine. I mean, thank you, for letting me invade your home. I’m sorry about all this. I should be the one apologizing.”
He smiled and stretched his arms across the back of the sofa. “So tell me what you have against logging.”
I sucked my lips between my teeth. Notes of the jazz music swirled around, blanketing me along with the fire’s warmth. One thing to rail at him while I was chained to his saw, completely different tucked into his cozy sitting area. Standing at Whetman Logging, I had an agenda. I should have had media on the way, and witnesses. Here, I had a lovely expanse of glass and hand-hewn wooden beams.
Teague lifted an eyebrow. “Well?”
While I wavered, the music paused, then restarted with a deep throbbing beat, like some tantric sex mix. My eyes flew to Teague and he scrambled off the couch. Before he could slide the panel away from the hidden iPod dock and skip the song, electric beats joined the throbbing, and a singer sighed and moaned, her sultry voice filling the entire room. Teague fumbled with the faceplate and finally yanked the player from the wall, plunging the room into a charged silence. He groaned and set his iPod on the table behind the couch.
“That’s some sound system.” I was trying so hard not to laugh. That was epic. And a complete boon to get us off our destructive path toward the conversation of all conversations. “And a great playlist.”
He chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. Super.”
“I like your house’s secret technologies,” I offered. “It’s a nice mix of classic meets geek.” Kind of like the owner. Geez, there didn’t seem to be a single topic that would keep me from thinking about him in a sexual and physical way. This was going to be a very long and tension-filled couple of days.
“I wanted to build something that felt like me. I don’t quite fit in either place,” Teague said.
“You mean when you oversaw the construction? You didn’t actually build it.”
His rich eyes bored into mine, warming that spot behind my belly button. “Every log. Every wire.”
I narrowed my eyes. He was totally toying with me. First, he’d been away at college for years, and second, no one builds their own house. Shed? Maybe. House like this? Never. “You didn’t.”
He jogged down the sitting area steps and eased back onto the couch. I hadn’t noticed his jeans when I was freaking out about the steak, but he’d changed into an excellent pair that hugged his ass and made me want to touch the striations in the dark denim. He spread his arms wide across the back of the couch, basically demanding that I measure and examine each dip and curve of his lean muscles as they bunched and flexed beneath his thin sweater. He regained his composure and managed to steer us right back to where we’d been before the sexy segue. “I did.”
Well that didn’t fit at all with where I wanted him. I wanted him to be a big mean CEO I could fight, not this chef-artesian-geek. I crossed my arms. “Well, it’s still nice.”
“Thanks.” He chuckled. “Took me long enough.”
My gaze slid to his long fingers drumming the back of the couch, then drifted back along his arms and over his full shoulders. That body was meant for a keyboard, not an axe, but wow it looked like he’d spent summers swinging one. My stomach tightened and I didn’t want to know more about him, but couldn’t help myself. “How long?”
“Three years. The inside took another year.”
I stood and walked to the fireplace. The rocks making up the face were meticulously placed, and the massive log mantel looked hand-carved. I reached up and fingered the edge, then moved on, taking in the perfection of the window seams, the beautiful lines in the hardwood floor, the perfection where it met the cozy areas of carpet. “Every piece?”
“Well, I skipped hand-making the appliances.”
I ignored the hint of humor in his voice as I studied the rest of the room. At the far end, I peeked through the doorway and noted three doors that probably led to bedrooms every bit as cozy and perfect as the rest of the house. The wood-planked doors beckoned me further, but I resisted. Nestled against the back wall at this end, a wooden table with eight matching chairs anchored the room, balancing the sitting area. “The table?”
“Took a week.”
I’d already seen the kitchen, but gave the cabinets another glance on my way by, noting the rich stain and tiled backsplash with a new appreciation. I returned to the edge of his couch and perched on the far arm. “I’m impressed.”
He watched me over the rim of his glasses. “I didn’t tell you that to impress you. Just a fact.”
“Well, I’m still impressed. It’s very beautiful.”
His eyes dipped and roamed over my outfit, and my casual perch on the edge of his couch. I shifted beneath his scrutiny. He seemed almost embarrassed by the attention and my appreciation. Surely people gushed all the time about this house and how spectacular his accomplishment. The room had grown uncomfortably hot and I needed to get us on a safe topic—not that talking about building houses wasn’t as mundane as I could possibly get, but my oversexed imagination kept picturing him shirtless and sweaty as he swung an axe and hammered away. I swallowed, but my throat was still incredibly parched. “And the gadgetry that runs it?”
His eyes sparked and he smiled. “Every bit as beautiful. Want to see it?”
I wavered. I didn’t want to like him, but the nerd inside begged me to relent.
Before I could rebuke his offer, he stood and stretched his hand toward me, palm up.
I stared at it, then lifted my eyes to his. This was dumb. I should be hiding in my room until the airport opened. But even as my mind railed against it, I settled my palm in his. “I do.”
He tugged me off the couch and I couldn’t have been a bigger dork for letting him hold my hand like we were some cute couple hanging out together on a date. That was about as far from the truth as we could possibly get, but I really did want to see what gadgetry he had stowed away and if he wanted to hold my hand doing it, who was I to argue. Sizzles of electricity wrapped around my arm where the warmth of his palm pressed against mine.
On the far side of the dining room table, he slid a hidden door open, revealing a set of metal stairs that didn’t fit with the rustic ambiance of the house at all. Lights flickered to life as we descended, illuminating our path and spilling through the glass walls encasing both sides of the stairwell but not reaching the blinking lights of electronics that hid in the dark. At the bottom step, he pushed a double-walled steel door open and a shush of air slipped out on the seal’s release.
“Clean room?” Even though that seemed a little excessive, I was duly impressed.
“No, just very controlled. I like the temperature to fluctuate as little as possible.”
He raised his arm and waved it slowly, tripping motion sensors around the room so the lights clicked on.
I blinked. Tall servers filled every possible space in the room, bundled together by thick cables. The final row of lights turned on, bathing us in cool, filtered light. This was crazy over-the-top and the o
nly time I’d never seen anything like it was in the computer lab of the IT department at school.
“All this is for the house?” He could run a whole city from here and I couldn’t imagine what he had in the house that required a system like this.
“No, good grief, no. Most of the town runs off this. There wasn’t any infrastructure here until about a decade ago.”
I ran my fingers along the front edge of a server. Even though I wanted none of this to exist, and feared the answer, I asked it anyway. “Then what happened?”
“I graduated and my father passed away.” He panned the room, looking everywhere but at me. I could tell he didn’t like talking about himself and his accomplishments, so that didn’t really fit with why he’d brought me down to show me. Granted, our conversation was struggling, but even this seemed a little excessive. “That was when I came back to run Whetman.”
There was a curious tone to his voice and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Why did he come back? Had running the logging company always been the plan and the timetable just got moved up? More info Jeremy was supposed to be supplying. All he’d told me was that Whetman Senior had been the face of the operation for decades while Junior had been away at school. Now I wanted to know about Teague’s history more than ever. I could ask him, but everything about this chat was making me feel awkward, like it was some sort of pre-date screening.
While he busied himself with a roll of cable and tools on a desk against the wall, I dropped my hand from the equipment and studied him. He was such a curious quandary. MIT grad and logger. Now that he was back here, would one conquer the other, or could both halves of his life figure out how to coexist? Based on what was in this room, I’d say he was doing a damn fine job of making them get along. Too bad we couldn’t figure that out.
He cleared his throat and looked up. “I’ve had to get creative. With our snow totals and lack of sun, there aren’t a lot of alternative power options.”
I narrowed my eyes. That was such a cop-out. “There are if you look.”
“Solar gives me fifteen percent, hydro gives me another twelve, and I’m stuck relying on traditional power for the rest.”
I fidgeted. “Okay, so you’ve looked.”
“Solutions aren’t always as easy as they seem on paper.”
Was he baiting me into this argument? I scanned the room again, noting all the pieces that pushed state-of-the-art to a whole new level. Again, this wasn’t what I’d expected out of Whetman. Everything kept me off-balance. Even if Jeremy had given me his intel, I was pretty sure that none of this was public knowledge. No one knew this room ran the entire town. I turned a slow circle… the whole town probably didn’t even know how this stuff worked and how much Teague did for them. Without him, they’d still be in the Stone Age and relying on archaic ways to do things.
While I scowled and tried to figure out up from down, he went after me again. “Life isn’t black and white up here. One system doesn’t sustain life, whether that’s power, or food, or transportation.” He ran a hand through his hair. I was so confused. He didn’t have to defend himself to me. I’d already made my stand against logging. If I didn’t know better, and if we’d met under any different circumstances, I’d think he was trying to impress me.
I stepped away, feeling claustrophobic. Before I got here everything was so cut-and-dried. Black and white, like Teague said. I didn’t even know what questions to ask him or what points to rebut. Now he was making me rethink the amount of research I’d done about logging in general. I followed the aisle of equipment, stopping to examine a few. None of them gave me a helpful clue to guide the direction of the conversation, so I kept going, stopping at the bank of computer screens at the end of the row. At the other end, Teague watched me close enough that I could feel the heat of it seeping through my clothes. Everything about him made me so on edge.
I turned back to the monitors, scanning the data for something I recognized. Squinting, I pointed to the bottom screen. “What’s this?”
“Logging charts.”
“I know that, but why does it show sustainable areas?”
“Why do you think?”
I jerked my head toward him and stared hard, unwilling to look away. I needed to know what he was trying to show me. This time he held my gaze. There were layers here that needed explaining. Maybe that was all he was trying to get at… Well, he had the next thirty-six hours to fill me in. “I guess not everything is quite what it seems.”
“Not everything.” His voice was quiet, nearly another whirring fan in the room.
I tipped my head to the side and studied him. He was all geek, but logging ran in his blood, tainted his every decision like a cancer. I needed to remember that. “Most definitely not you. Now come tell me about this.”
He crossed the room and stood way too close. I couldn’t step away without being obviously affected, so I crossed my arms and gripped my elbows to keep from swaying even the tiniest bit that would let his arm brush mine. He traced a finger over the map covering the monitor. “My father and his father before him understood the limitations of the forest. Back then, he did it to save some forest for me when it was my time. Now I do it because I believe in giving back beyond what we take.”
I flinched and looked at him, searching for the joke in his voice, the mocking tone, but there was just earnestness in the gaze behind those glasses.
He touched my elbow. “Maybe next time you could get your facts straight and save yourself a trip.”
“But Jeremy said—”
“I know what Jeremy thinks. He does this for attention.” His fingers tightened ever so slightly on my arm, and I turned to face him. “Why do you do this, Cassidy?”
“Because I care about the earth.” My head was reeling from all the information, from the server that ran the entire town, to the sustainable maps, to his father’s foresight.
“Why do you think I don’t?”
“Because you’re a logger.” Loggers were bad. They deforested our entire planet, raping and pillaging for resources that we should be so beyond using by now. I’d spent years listening to Professor Callahan quote fact after fact about how much logging took, how it never, ever gave back. My parents encouraged me to study things like conservation biology and environmental management. They’d gone through their own hippie stages, but so much of what they said had always made sense. We only have one earth. He was challenging everything I knew to be true, but I couldn’t toss it all away just because he was cute and had a couple solar panels. There were facts, gosh dangit.
“And I hunt, and eat meat, too, so that lumps me in with all the evil in the world?”
I tugged my arm free and took a step away. I couldn’t think so close to him. Bad enough that he was crowding my mind with all these thoughts, but I couldn’t have him crowding my space, too.
What did it matter to him what I thought?
“Tell me why I’m so horrible?”
I shook my head. “I–I don’t—can we go upstairs now?”
He stared at me, then turned, and led me back upstairs. Behind us, the lights flipped off automatically.
Five
My mind swam with questions. I’d come here with a plan and I’d been the one to bring Jeremy in on my cause, not the other way around like Teague made it sound. Okay, so maybe I didn’t know about all the extra work they’d done to make the operation sustainable, but every company had their sustainable mouthpiece page on their website. That didn’t mean it was a core philosophy that affected their day-to-day like it needed to. New regulations were nearly doubling clear-cut logging of old-growth timber and just because there were laws about replanting didn’t mean it was replacing what they were taking out. I shook my head hard and stumbled on the last stair. Teague spun and caught me as my shin crashed against the hard edge.
Warmth spiraled out from my elbow where he’d wrapped his fingers. After I straightened, he watched me with that hurt look in his eyes again and finally let go. I didn’t want h
im caring about my opinion. He was the bad guy. The guy on the other side of the table. My enemy.
“Thanks.” My fingers rubbed the spot where his had been. I didn’t realize I’d done it until his gaze flashed to my arm, then back up to my face. The claustrophobia was back and I was having a hard time breathing.
I let him step away into the living room but I held back. Outside the snow was still coming down hard. I’d be lucky to escape in three days. At this rate, I might not get out of here until spring. I shuddered. Oh, the conversations we could have…
I nibbled my bottom lip and tried to figure out what to do with myself. I could ask him to show me where I was to sleep and escape to my guest bedroom, or I could ask to rummage through his pantry for some stale potato chips and whatever other non-meat products he might have. He’d cooked veggies with his meat, so there had to be something. I shifted from foot to foot, feeling very uneasy about the awkward silence piling up inside the house in a mimicry of the snow outside.
“You feel like a playing game or something?” He paused at the long sofa table and pulled out one of the drawers. “Gin rummy or chess?”
I blinked, caught completely off guard by the question. Bad enough that my mind was wandering, but now I couldn’t even recover in a decent time frame. “Pardon?”
“I suppose we could watch TV or I could put in a movie, but I’ve always been partial to listening to the snow.”
I glanced out the window. The flakes continued to drift downward, invisible in the darkness, then illuminated for a few feet by the house lights before disappearing again into the growing pile on the ground. Without the music there was a fascinating quiet created by the snow that seemed to muffle everything, and I could almost hear the flakes land. Every now and then a big clump fell from the tree in a muffled whump. San Diego didn’t offer chances to listen to snow, and I hardly ever watched television anyway, preferring the sun and out of doors.
“Or you could tell me more about you.”
