by Noelle Adams
Sometimes the simplest path was the only one to take.
But, two days later, Andrew was getting cabin fever.
Staying in his room would make the most sense. He’d stocked up on enough ready-to-eat food to last him several days, and he had everything else he needed.
But he didn’t like to be cooped up. There was only so long he could talk on the phone to Morris Provost about the best legal and financial strategy for the inn without screaming in frustration.
So, that afternoon, he gave up and went out for a run.
He doubted Laurel would throw his stuff out again, since she knew he could easily get back inside. If she hired a locksmith to redo the locks with something he couldn’t get past so easily, he would see the work being done, since he wasn’t planning to go far. He had a pretty good sense of her finances by now anyway, and he didn’t think she’d deplete her meager funds with something so unnecessary.
So Andrew took a jog around the property.
It wasn’t a very good place for running—since it was mostly stairs, short flat stretches across small terraces, the garden, and the pool deck, and—in certain places—a length of cliff to scale down since he couldn’t get in the buildings.
He needed exercise, however, and this was better than nothing. He’d prefer to run on the road or out to the beach he’d gone to with Laurel a few days ago, but he couldn’t risk being gone that long.
Laurel was smart. She might think of something he hadn’t to get rid of him.
The day was hot and humid, so by the time he’d gotten around the property twice, he was soaked with sweat. He was planning to go around at least twice more, since he had a lot of energy to burn, but he paused when he heard a sound coming from the small lean-to built against the kitchen wall in which they kept the tools. The tools were all spread out on the ground outside.
It sounded like hammering, so—out of curiosity—he walked over to look into the rickety building, incongruous because it was wood when everything else was made of white-washed stone. At one point, the lean-to had been painted purple, but the color was faded now.
He’d been half expecting Hector so was surprised to find out he was wrong. Laurel was inside, dressed in a red tank top and a pair of faded jeans that hugged her long legs and ass in a very tempting way.
Andrew had cause to notice this fact, since she was standing on a stepladder, hammering a nail into a plank at the top of one of the walls, and her ass was much closer to the level of his eyes than usual.
Her hair was pulled into two braids again, like it had been the morning he’d found her gardening. It made her look young and girlish, which was a sharp contrast to her strength and competence as she hammered with skilled efficiency.
He’d noticed the lean-to was dilapidated the other day when he’d done an inspection of the property, but it bothered him that Laurel was having to fix it herself.
She obviously didn’t know he was standing behind her, watching her, so he cleared his throat softly so he wouldn’t take her by surprise.
She made a startled sound and took an automatic step back, losing her balance.
He jumped forward to catch her before she fell off the ladder.
She dropped the hammer.
It landed on his toe.
He grunted at the sudden pain and jerked in surprise. Since her weight was resting on his, she fell against him.
They both ended up on the dirt floor.
“Damn it, Andrew,” she muttered, trying to scramble off him but not having any success. “Why must you always sneak up on me that way?”
He tried to sit up, but Laurel was sitting on top of him, her ass pressed against his groin. All he could manage was raising his shoulders up by bracing himself on his elbows.
“I wasn’t sneaking up on you,” he objected. “You’re the one falling off ladders and assaulting me with hammers.” His voice was stretched but not with annoyance. His sense of irony had been tickled, and now he kind of wanted to laugh at the awkward tumble.
Her wriggling on top of him was giving his body the wrong idea, however, and he didn’t want her to notice.
“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t startled me.” As she spoke, she managed to climb off, ending up on her knees on the ground beside him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said with a relieved exhale, sitting up fully at last. “You’ll have to try harder to injure me next time.”
His mouth twitched slightly with amusement he couldn’t quite repress, but he didn’t laugh since he didn’t think she would appreciate it.
For a moment, there was an answering smile in her brown eyes. Then she must have remembered how much she resented him. The smile was quenched and replaced by something chilly and bleak.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Getting some exercise. I just heard someone working in here and wondered what it was. Why are you doing this kind of work?”
She frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Shouldn’t Hector do things like this?”
“He does a lot of the handy work, but there’s a lot to do and he can’t do everything.”
“This just needs to be rebuilt. A few quick fixes aren’t going to do it.”
She tightened her lips before she answered, “I know that. But I can’t afford for it to be rebuilt right now, since I don’t have any income from guests. I’m just doing enough to brace up the supports so it doesn’t completely fall down before I can have it rebuilt. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to work.”
She stood up and turned her back to him. He saw her wiping her hands and arms on her jeans, and he realized she’d gotten his sweat on her skin.
For some reason, that knowledge did something uncomfortably primal to him. Particularly since she wasn’t immediately running inside to wash it off.
He hauled himself up, telling himself whatever caveman still lurked inside him shouldn’t be indulged in that way. He was about to leave but glanced back at her one more time.
She was a tall woman, but she looked small as she climbed the ladder. Small and young and alone.
He turned again to leave but then shook his head. There was another stepladder lying on the ground outside—a three-step one rather than the five-step one she was using. He opened it and moved it over to the wall where she was working.
She was trying to hold the new brace up with one hand as she hammered it in with the other. It was a very difficult maneuver and shouldn’t be done by one person.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, as he climbed up the other stepladder and reached for the plank to hold it in place.
“You need help.”
“I don’t need help. Go away.” She glared at him, a nail in one hand and the hammer in the other. He was holding the piece of wood in place now.
“Since I believe this property belongs to us, I’m more responsible than you for the upkeep. Why shouldn’t I help?”
“Because I don’t want you to.”
“That’s not a good enough reason. You can do it with me, or you can not do it at all. I’m not going away.” He had to force his voice into a basically even timbre, since he was growing increasingly annoyed at her irrational stubbornness.
He’d never met anyone who was so clear-sighted about some things and so obtuse about others.
She stared at him for a long minute, indignation simmering in her eyes. Then she made a face and muttered, “Fine.”
Together, they added the extra braces to the walls.
Andrew made the mistake of making an idle comment about how a property of this size needed a lot of upkeep. Laurel took his perfectly innocuous words as an insult, assuming he was hinting at all the things she wasn’t doing well on the property.
So she demanded that he tell her everything he thought was wrong.
He never should have told her. He knew better. He was never so unwise in dealing with people, always instinctively knowing what they wanted to hear.
He was annoyed again by then, however, at her insulting assumptions about him, so he blandly listed all the issues he’d noticed in his inspection earlier that week.
It was like he’d made fun of her child.
“You arrogant ass,” she gritted out. “I know about all of those things, and there are good reasons for them not being done. Tourists come here for the quaint character, and that would be destroyed if I rebuild the stairs from the road as some kind of modern monstrosity. The wall belongs to the place next door, so I can’t build it up higher to mask the noise from that place. The water just started to act up, and I don’t have money to get the work done because, thanks to you, I haven’t been able to take in paying guests this season. And I have a whole plan for expanding two of the buildings to add more guestrooms, but that’s a huge renovation and I haven’t had the chance to do it yet. So don’t you dare stand there and act all superior, as if you could take care of this property better than I have.”
Andrew didn’t respond to her tirade—just kept working and wondering what had happened to his lauded people skills. He’d known his comments would upset her, but he’d said them anyway.
Somehow, for some reason, she’d really gotten under his skin.
To try to redeem himself, he asked what she had in mind for expanding the buildings. She peered at him suspiciously and, evidently believing his question was genuine, she explained everything she’d planned.
They were good ideas. She’d obviously put a lot of time, thought, and research into them. He told her so, but she didn’t appreciate his condescension.
At least, that was what she told him.
After that, Andrew just gave up on conversation. Despite the conflict, they worked well together. She clearly knew what she was doing and, like everything else, she did it with an efficiency that left no wasted time or unnecessary steps.
They’d gotten more than halfway done when she surprised him by saying, “When did you learn to do this kind of work? I wouldn’t have thought a Damon would know anything about handyman work.”
“My parents weren’t rich, and I didn’t move to my uncle’s until I was almost eleven.”
“Oh. Well, your parents might not have been billionaires, but I can’t believe you had to do a lot of manual labor as a kid.”
He gave a half-shrug as he picked up a board and held it in place so she could hammer in the nails. “They weren’t on the brink of poverty, no, but I did normal chores.”
“Mowing the lawn and taking out the trash?”
“Pretty much. One summer, Harrison got it in his head that he could make a lot of money by mowing all the yards in our neighborhood.” He smiled at the memory, feeling uncharacteristically nostalgic. “He bullied me into helping. He made me go around and drum up business, since I was more outgoing than he was. I was too young to know how much work we were in store for, so I asked everyone. You wouldn’t believe the number of yards I’d lined up to mow every week. I was so stupid. The first week we started, it took all day every day to get them done.”
“So what did you do?” she asked, her expression less hostile than it had been.
He shook his head, strangely ashamed to admit what his nine-year-old self had done. “Harrison wanted to do them all, no matter how much work they’d be, but I wasn’t about to spend my whole summer working.”
“You managed to get out of it?”
With a huff of laughter, he admitted, “I came up with a plausible sob-story about how I just couldn’t do it and begged our neighbors for forgiveness. They all believed me.”
“I guess, even as a kid, you could talk people into believing anything.”
He cut his eyes over to her, but she didn’t look cold or accusatory. Just ironic and faintly amused. “I guess. We all have some sort of talent.”
“You should have gone into sales.”
“And what? Become a used car salesman?” He didn’t intend for the question to sound bitter, but it did.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, her lowering her brows. “But there are a lot of things you could have done that used your gift. It’s something most of us aren’t any good at. I’ve always been clueless with people.”
Andrew felt uncomfortable by the conversation but didn’t really know why. While he was relieved she’d stopped acting like she hated him, he would rather not discuss something so personal with her, especially after the argument they’d had a few minutes earlier.
So he shifted the tenor of the conversation by drawling, “Well, if all else fails, I could always become a handyman.”
She chuckled as she hammered in a nail. “So when did you learn how to do this stuff?” she asked as she climbed down her stepladder.
Andrew climbed down too. He wished he wasn’t dripping with sweat. He found a dry edge of his t-shirt and pulled it up to wipe his face.
When he’d done so, he noticed that Laurel had turned away, staring down at the toolbox with a strangely stiff expression. Maybe she didn’t appreciate his rather crude attempt to rid himself of perspiration.
Shrugging it off, Andrew replied, “I helped my dad build us a tree house. I actually enjoyed it.”
Laurel had turned back to look at him, and her expression softened unexpectedly. “I guess you were sad to leave the tree house when you moved to your uncle’s.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It was one of the worst things. I was a kid, and that tree house felt really important. I got it in my head that I had to build another one on my uncle’s estate. He would have had some of his staff do it for me, but that wouldn’t be the same. I wanted to do it myself. So he got me all the supplies, and I picked out the best tree. Harrison wanted to help, but I wouldn’t let him. It had to be mine.”
“So how long did it take?”
Andrew looked away from her, a weird pressure in his throat. “I never finished it. It was so hard, and I was just a kid. I worked on it for weeks and weeks, but then I just… quit.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t sound disapproving or patronizing. She sounded sympathetic. Her understanding washed over him, like it was something he desperately needed.
He met her eyes, and then he couldn’t look away. She seemed to know him—for real, with all of his loose ends and broken commitments.
Instinctively, he leaned forward, raising a hand to cup her face. His body reacted to the wave of feeling, but it was a hunger far deeper than lust. He tilted his head down, wanting to kiss her, needing to kiss her.
She swayed toward him, her eyes focused up at him with an expression that matched his own feelings—as if she were surprised, almost awed, by the emotional connection they’d made.
But, before his mouth closed on hers, she jerked away.
She moved so quickly she stumbled, and he instinctively tried to catch her, his mind a blurry haze of jarring emotions. She jerked away from his touch as if he’d burned her.
It was like a slap in the face.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, obviously upset and confused. “Sorry. I’m just… I need to get inside.”
She’d dropped the nails sometime during her clumsy jerking away, and now she leaned down to pick them up.
She gave a sharp cry as she reached out for one. Then her body twitched, as if she were trying to straighten up but couldn’t. She choked out another cry.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, shaking off his response to the interrupted kiss in automatic concern.
“Nothing,” she gritted out, trying to stand up, more slowly this time.
She managed, but her face twisted in pain, and her skin had gone dead white.
“Damn it, Laurel, what happened?” She looked unsteady, so he reached out to brace her with an arm around her waist.
“Nothing.” She looked almost angry now but was obviously in pain. “Just a catch in my back. It will be fine.”
“It doesn’t look fine. You need to lie down.”
“I will.” She pulled away from his arm but must have jarred herself ag
ain. She whimpered and had to grab his arm for support. “Damn it,” she muttered, her skin damp now with perspiration.
He put his arm around her. “I’ll help you inside so you can lie down.”
“I don’t need your help,” she insisted, trying to pull away.
“What the hell is wrong with you? You do need my help.” He was at his wit’s end, and the impatience was evident in his voice. “Stop being ridiculous and let me.”
She glared at him, but she was obviously not in the physical condition to resist. He braced her as they walked very slowly back into the main building of the inn.
“Has your back bothered you before?”
“Occasionally. If I work too hard.”
He rolled his eyes. She seemed to work too hard every day of her life. It was like she thought she was some invulnerable machine. He didn’t say anything, though, since it was obviously hard enough for her to keep walking.
“It will unclench if I can just lie down,” she rasped weakly.
“Okay.” They’d made it to the kitchen door, so he opened it and gently helped her in. “You can’t get up to your apartment. Isn’t there a guestroom on this floor?”
“Yeah. The key’s in my…”
She trailed off because he’d found the set of keys in her pocket and pulled them out. She told him which was the master key and he opened the door. It was a small room with a twin bed and one big window.
He helped her over and eased her down on the bed on top of the covers.
She lay panting, her face white and a glistening of tears in her eyes. She didn’t look at him.
“What can I get you?” he asked.
“Just find Agatha. She knows how to help me.”
“I can—”
“I don’t want your help,” she interrupted. “Just get Agatha.”
There was no reason to be offended or hurt by her rejection, but he was.
“Thank you,” she whispered, as if the words were ripped out of her. She turned her head away from him.
He stared down at her for another moment. Then left the room to find Agatha.
Chapter Seven
Laurel opened her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling.
