by Lily Everett
“No big deal.” He smiled and raised her core temperature by another ten degrees when he reached for the hem of his soaked T-shirt and drew it up and over his head. “I was due for a shower, anyway.”
Penny blinked. Granted, it had been a few years since she’d been face to chest with a half-naked man, but even considering that, she was pretty sure she’d never seen anything to compare to the golden-tan planes and ridges of this man’s perfectly sculpted torso. He looked like a movie star or an underwear model, one of those guys whose whole job rested on their ability to strip down and render ordinary women speechless with desire.
Well, being a handyman required plenty of heavy lifting, she reasoned dazedly, her eyes glued to his pecs. And a flexible schedule that probably left plenty of time for the gym.
Mmm, flexible …
“If you bring me another glass of tea, I promise I won’t throw it on the ground.”
Penny’s gaze snapped up to his face. He sounded repentant, but the look on his face was anything but. Wicked amusement danced behind his shockingly blue eyes. This man had a very clear understanding of his body and its effect on women.
Natural contrariness stiffened Penny’s spine. She wouldn’t be another notch on this gorgeous handyman’s tool belt. “Sorry, no second chances,” she said, the words as automatic as breathing. “House policy.”
Confusion narrowed the sky-blue eyes. “House policy?”
Kneeling to carefully pick up the larger pieces of sharp glass, Penny snorted. “Okay, no. Not house policy, as in imposed by the rich folks that own this place. From what I’ve heard, they’re pretty permissive when it comes to family members misbehaving. No, the one-strike-and-you’re-out stuff is all me. Call it a personal philosophy.”
A lesson she’d learned well and thoroughly, at heavy cost.
“Sounds like a tough way to live. Everyone deserves a second chance, now and then.”
His low, husky voice startled her out of her reverie. Finger jerking, she nicked herself on the corner of a glass shard and pressed her lips together as a droplet of blood welled to the surface. “Not everyone. Trust me.”
Glass crunched softly under his black motorcycle boots as he crouched down to her level. “Okay, you win.” He smiled easily, a man used to using his charm to get what he wanted. “I’ll live without the iced tea.”
Right, they’d been talking about spilled tea, not her life story. Cursing the riptide of her memories for sucking them into these deeply personal waters, Penny smiled back and let him help her to her feet. “Thanks. Give me a second to grab the broom, and I’ll get the rest of this cleaned up.”
Every inch of her was so hotly aware of his smooth, hard body a mere breath away from hers. Shivering, Penny backed toward the door and the relative safety of the hallway.
He stopped her with another quick smile. “What you said about the family that owns this place. How much do you know about them?”
“The Richie Riches?” Penny blinked. “Not much, except that they have enough money to leave this gorgeous old place sitting empty for years on end. Such a waste. At least they cared enough to hire a caretaker.”
His face cleared as if she’d slotted the final piece into a jigsaw puzzle. “Right, a caretaker. That’s you.”
She laughed. “Of course! What—did you think I was squatting? No, I’m paid to stay here and make sure the house doesn’t fall down while the Harrington boys live the high life in New York City.”
“The high life.” He said it absently, turning back to the partially dismantled toilet, but Penny caught a glimpse of his slight frown in the sink mirror. He looked upset, maybe annoyed.
She could sympathize. “I know. When you work hard for a living, it’s aggravating to be reminded there are playboy types out there who can afford to do nothing but drink and dance the night away. I’ve even heard … oh, listen to me gossiping! Never mind, I’ll get that broom.”
“Wait. What have you heard?”
Thoroughly embarrassed, Penny winced, but when she made reluctant eye contact with the handyman again, there was no judgment in his lean, handsome face. Instead, he looked curious, if still a little tense.
She unbent enough to quirk a half-grin. “Well. I’ve heard one of the Harrington brothers is actually so famous for his partying that he has a nickname in the press: the Bad Boy Billionaire.”
He twitched a bit, clearly as repulsed by the moniker as she was. “Sounds like a douche bag.”
That shocked a laugh out of her. She leaned against the doorjamb and admired the play of light over his muscles. It was so sweet of him not to have put his damp shirt back on. “I don’t know the man personally—gosh, I can’t even remember his first name. But apparently he’s quite popular with the ladies.”
“I hate this guy.”
Penny grinned at him. “Don’t sweat it. Any woman who’s worth having would prefer a man like you, who makes an honest living working with his hands, over a guy who cats around enough to be a breeding ground for sexually transmitted diseases.”
His eyes went wide, and Penny felt herself flush. Could she be any more awkward and obvious about her attraction?
“Anyway, I’ll let you get back to work! And, shoot, I’d better get to my other job. I wait tables at the Firefly Café,” she explained. “Hey, if you get peckish later, you should come over to the restaurant. The food isn’t fancy, but it’s delicious.”
“Sounds great.” He stood there, bare chest gleaming and so, so distracting, with a smile lurking in the depths of those ocean-blue eyes.
“Okay. Great,” Penny echoed, flustered by the way she couldn’t seem to look away from him. “So maybe I’ll see you later, um…”
She stopped, shocked at herself. “Wow. Here you are, half nekkid in my powder room, and I don’t even know your name.”
“Dylan,” he said at once. Sticking out a large, square-palmed hand, he cleared his throat. “And I can put my shirt back on, if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“Penny Little,” she replied. “It’s nice to meet you. And please don’t put your shirt on!”
The hint of a smile graduated to full-on wicked smirk. “No?”
Face flaming with heat, Penny soldiered on. “I mean, because it’s all wet. At least let me wash it for you first.”
And if he had to stay shirtless while his tee was stain treated, laundered, and dried on the line in the backyard, well. Sometimes life was hard.
Grinning, Dylan picked up his shirt from the pedestal sink and stepped close enough to drape it around her shoulders, since her hands were still full of glass shards.
“Thanks. Careful though,” he said, hoarse and deep. “It’s my favorite.”
The dark scent of sweet tea and working man surrounded her, and Penny drank it in gratefully. “I’ll treat it like it’s one of my bosses’ custom-tailored wool suits,” she promised.
“No worries,” he said, flashing that charming grin. She didn’t want it to be as effective as it was. “It’s been through worse than a tea bath. It’ll survive.”
Great. The shirt would survive. But as Penny hightailed it out of the powder room and gasped in her first breath of non-Dylan-scented air in minutes, she wondered.
Would she survive this house renovation with her sanity—and her heart—intact?
Chapter Three
The moment the front door closed behind Penny, Dylan had his phone in hand, fingers frantically touch-typing out a query to his middle brother’s frighteningly efficient personal assistant. If anyone had the scoop on the caretaker in charge of the Sanctuary Island house, it was Jessica Bell.
But when the ringing of the phone clicked through to voice mail, it was Logan’s voice in his ear.
“Jessica can’t come to the phone right now,” his brother intoned solemnly. “She’s too busy inserting herself into every aspect of my life and making sure I waste time eating and sleeping instead of working in my lab. When she’s ready to stop annoying me, she can have her phone back. Until
then, leave a message, I guess. I certainly won’t be checking them or passing them along to her, though.”
Dylan hung up before the beep. No extra info from Jessica, then. Fine, he’d have to figure out what Penny Little’s deal was the old-fashioned way—with a generous dose of charm.
He didn’t question his desire to spend more time here, in this house with this woman, and without the heavy baggage of the reputation he’d recklessly built back in New York. Penny Little was interesting. Working on the house was surprisingly interesting, or at least satisfying.
The whole thing felt like a vacation from the boring, predictable cynicism of his real life.
So yeah, he hadn’t come clean about who he was. But seriously, what if he admitted to being the Bad Boy Billionaire Penny despised? That would end things in a hurry. No, he’d decided on the spur of the moment to play this out a little longer, and even though he felt an uncomfortable tickle of guilt at lying to Penny, he shrugged it off.
He wasn’t hurting anyone. In fact, he was saving Penny from the embarrassment of realizing she’d bad-mouthed him and his entire family right to his face. Plus, Penny was getting the help she needed with the house repairs. Everybody won.
Syrupy afternoon light was pouring through the newly polished windows by the time Dylan had made his way through the first quarter of the to-do list Penny had left. Some of the tasks were self-explanatory—it didn’t take a genius to wash a window, just a good ladder and a guy with zero fear of heights. For the rest, well, thank God for Google. And the local hardware store.
He’d gotten a fair number of tips from the tall, athletic woman behind the counter. For instance, apparently crumpled-up newspaper was the only way to get glass clean with no streaking. She’d talked herself out of a sale with that one, since Dylan had been about to buy a bundle of microfiber cloths, but she didn’t seem to mind.
This whole island couldn’t be more different from the urban rush of Manhattan. And Dylan had yet to see more of Sanctuary than the quaint “downtown” area bordering the town square where his grandparents’ house stood.
As he located the leaky pipe under the kitchen sink—number five on The List—Dylan rolled his sore shoulders and admitted to himself that as unusual as the situation was, he’d needed this.
Man, when he got back to Manhattan, he was asking for a refund from his personal trainer. The strenuous daily gym routine hadn’t prepared him for a full day of manual labor. Dylan’s muscles ached. But it was a good ache, a clean, pure soreness that let him know he’d used his body well today, and he’d likely sleep well that night.
And something about the blend of mindless, repetitive actions like hammering the loose floorboards on the front porch back into place combined with figuring out the intricacies of nineteenth century plumbing had allowed him to completely tune out all the stress and drama he’d left behind in New York.
With a contented sigh, Dylan wedged his shoulders into the under-counter cabinet hiding the leak and started tinkering.
A thud from out in the kitchen behind him startled him into cracking his head on the edge of the cabinet. “Crap!”
“What the hell are you doing?” The sharp male voice had Dylan backing out of the cabinet on his hands and knees, wincing against the sting of his bruised temple.
A teenaged boy stood next to the oval eat-in kitchen table, hands on his hips and backpack on the floor beside his scuffed sneakers. That must have been the thud Dylan had heard.
Who was this kid?
“Well?” the boy said, narrowing his light hazel eyes and putting his big puppy paws on his skinny hips. Whoever he was, he was packing way more attitude than his lanky frame could back up. He had the weedy, gawky look of someone whose body was growing and changing so rapidly, he was having a hard time catching up to it.
Dylan remembered how that felt. Remembered, too, the horrible awkwardness of being caught between childhood and manhood, teetering on the cusp and trying desperately not to fall on his face. The memory of how he’d coped with it all—badly—prompted Dylan to stand up straight and wipe his hands on his jeans.
Holding out his still-smudged right hand, man to man, he said, “I’m Dylan. I’m the handyman. And you are?”
The kid slowly reached out and shook Dylan’s hand. His scowl lightened a bit as he unconsciously squared his shoulders.
“Answer my question first,” the kid said stubbornly, crossing his arms over his chest.
Dylan tugged the creased, water-spotted list out of his back pocket and waved it in the air. “I’m the guy who’s been working his way through this list for the last seven hours. Does Penny Little know you hang out here when she’s at work?”
Dylan and his high school buddies used to break into empty apartments to smoke and raid the absent owner’s liquor cabinet. This kid, in his baggy polo shirt and too-short khakis didn’t exactly look the type, but you never knew.
Giving Dylan a look that clearly communicated searing scorn, the kid said, “Uh, yeah. Since I live here.”
The snark made Dylan bite down on a smile—sarcasm didn’t sit well on the young, unlined face, with those bright green-gold eyes. Eyes the same unusual color as Penny Little’s.
With a sense of dawning comprehension, Dylan said, “You’re Penny’s … brother?”
Another look of withering disgust. “No. I’m her son. Matthew.”
Dylan blinked. “Wait. She’s married?”
“Divorced.” Matthew again crossed his arms over his thin chest belligerently. “You’re pretty slow.”
“Hey! Give me a break. You’re what, sixteen? Penny looks—well, she can’t be old enough to have a teenaged son.”
Those eyes he’d inherited from Penny became narrow and suspicious. “I meant you were slow because it’s taken you seven hours to get to the leaky sink.”
Ah. Awkward. Dylan kept his expression serious with an effort. “I take pride in my work.”
Raising his brows, Matthew said, “Oh, man. You are totally perving on my mom.”
“What? No, I’m not,” Dylan denied, feeling his cheeks heat even though he didn’t know what he had to be embarrassed about.
Clearly unconvinced, Matt made a grossed-out face. “Yeah, you are. You called her Penny, you noticed how she looked, asked if she’s single. I’m not an idiot.”
“Look, kid.” Dylan raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry if it freaks you out, but your mom is an adult. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t need you to protect her honor.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway.” Matt jerked his chin in the direction of the door. “Since you’re leaving.”
“What?”
“You can go now. I’ll take it from here.”
Dylan raised his brows. “Yeah? Your mom didn’t say anything about that to me. I wouldn’t want to leave the job half-finished.”
“Not even half,” Matthew sneered. “But Mom isn’t here.”
It sounded like he was grinding his teeth, and his deep voice cracked a little on here. Flushing angrily, he tilted his chin up in a way that reminded Dylan vividly of Penny.
Raising his voice, Matthew grated out, “I’m the man of the house. Which makes me your boss, and I say you’re done.”
A gasp from the other end of the kitchen had them both turning to face Penny, standing in the doorway. The starched pleats of her uniform had wilted over the course of the day, but her curly hair was as bouncy as ever.
“Matthew Emmett Little! I didn’t raise you to be rude to guests in our home.”
Matthew deflated like a pinpricked balloon, but his mouth went hard and flat. “It’s not our home, and he’s not a guest. He works here. Like you do.”
Something around Penny’s tired eyes went taut, but her voice was calm as she said, “Even more reason to keep your sass to yourself. Dylan is here to do a job, and you will treat him with the same respect you’d expect in return.”
Dylan shifted his weight, wishing he could crawl back under the kitchen sink to escape the awful t
ension strung between mother and son.
But when Matthew broke and dropped his gaze away from his mother’s inflexible stare, he looked straight at Dylan. “I apologize,” Matthew said. “You’re just doing your job. But we don’t need your help.”
“The Harringtons sent Dylan down here,” Penny told her son, coming into the kitchen to stand shoulder to shoulder with Dylan. “They hired him. It’s not up to us.”
Matthew struggled visibly for a second, anger and embarrassment at war on his open, young face. “It should be. We’re the ones who live here most of the time! And I told you I would take care of all the stuff on this list, Mom. I can do it. And if I needed help, I could call Dad.”
“Matty…” Penny pressed a hand to the bridge of her nose as if she felt a headache coming on.
“Don’t call me Matty,” Matthew shouted, deep red suffusing his cheeks. “I’ve told you a million times, I hate that stupid baby name.”
With that, he grabbed his backpack off the floor and all but ran out of the kitchen. Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs and down the hallway, punctuated by the slam of a door.
Penny winced, then blew out a breath. “Sorry about that. I’ll see what I can do about getting you combat pay.”
“Don’t give it another thought. Believe me, I’ve seen worse.” Dylan gave her an easy smile, wanting to lift some of the weight off of her slumped shoulders. “In fact, I was worse. Way, way worse.”
“Matty—I mean, Matt.” She pressed her lips together as if chastising herself. “He’s a good boy. But ever since the divorce…”
She cut herself off with a little laugh. “Listen to me rattle on. You don’t want to hear about our problems.”
“Don’t stop on my account. I can’t promise any sage advice, but I’m happy to listen if you want to talk about it.” Shockingly, Dylan realized it was the truth. He saw a lot of himself in Matthew’s troubled eyes. And Penny—she tugged at something in him.
“You don’t have to, just to be nice. I know there’s still a lot of work to finish.”
