Her conversation with Anna seemed to play through her head again. He’s a wonderful man who’s been through a terrible tragedy. But he’ll get through it. Have a little faith.
She understood grief. Understood and accepted it. Despite their marital problems toward the end, she had mourned Kevin’s death for the children’s sake and for the sake of all those dreams they had once shared, the dreams that had been lost along the way somewhere.
She understood Will’s sorrow. But she also accepted that she had missed him these last few weeks.
He hadn’t been far from her thoughts, even as she went about the business of living—settling into the school year, getting to know her new students and co-workers at the elementary school, helping Simon and Maddie with their schoolwork.
She glanced out the window at his workshop, tucked away behind his house beneath the trees. How many nights had she stood at the window, watching the lights flicker there, wondering how he was, what he was thinking, what he might be working on?
She was obsessed with the man. Pure and simple. Perhaps they would both be better off if she just stayed up here with her daughter and pushed thoughts of him out of her head.
She sighed. She wasn’t going to, because of that whole being-a-fool thing again. She couldn’t resist this chance to talk to him again, to indulge herself with his company and perhaps come to know a little more about the man he had become.
She opened Maddie’s door and found her daughter still sleeping, her skin a healthy color and her breathing even. Julia scribbled a quick note to tell her where she was.
“I have the other walkie-talkie so just let me know when you wake up,” she wrote and slipped the note under the other wireless handset on Maddie’s bedside table where she couldn’t miss it.
She spent one more moment watching the miracle of her daughter sleeping.
It was exactly the reminder she needed to wake her to the harsh reality of just how cautious she needed to be around Will Garrett.
Girlhood crushes were one thing, but she had two children to worry about now. She couldn’t risk their feelings, couldn’t let them come to care any more about a man who quite plainly wasn’t ready to let anyone else into his life.
She would walk downstairs and be friendly in a polite, completely casual way, she told herself as she headed for the door. She wouldn’t push him, she wouldn’t dig too deeply.
She would simply help him with his project and try to bridge the tension between them so they could remain on friendly terms.
Anything else would be beyond foolish, when she had her children’s emotional well-being to consider.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN SHE RETURNED to Anna’s apartment, she found Conan sleeping on his favorite rug but no sign of Will. His tools and the boards he had brought in were still in evidence but Will wasn’t anywhere to be found so Julia settled down to wait.
A moment later, she heard the front door open. Conan opened one eye and slapped his tail on the floor but didn’t bother rising when Will came in carrying a small tool box and a container of nails.
He faltered a little when he saw her, as if he had forgotten her presence, or, worse, had maybe hoped it was all a bad dream. She was tempted again to abandon the whole idea and return upstairs to Maddie. But some part of her was still intensely curious to know why he seemed so uncomfortable in her presence.
He obviously wasn’t completely impervious to her or he wouldn’t care whether she hung around or not, any more than it bothered him to have Conan watching him work.
Was that a good sign, or just more evidence that she ought to just leave the poor man alone?
“Are you sure there’s not anything else I can bring inside for you?” she asked. “I’m not good for much but I can carry tools or something.”
“No. This should be everything I need.”
He said nothing more, just started laying out tools, and she might have thought he had completely forgotten her presence if not for the barest clenching of muscle along his jawline and a hint of red at the tips of his ears.
She knew she shouldn’t find that tiny reaction so fascinating but she couldn’t seem to stop staring.
She found everything about Will Garrett fascinating, she acknowledged somewhat grimly.
From the tool belt riding low on his hips to the broad shoulders he had gained from hard work over the years to the tiny network of lines around his eyes that had probably once been laugh lines.
She wanted to hear him laugh again. The strength of her desire burned through her chest and she would have given anything just then to be able to come up with some kind of hilarious story that would be guaranteed to have him in stitches.
“Since you’re here, can you do me a favor?” he spoke suddenly as she was wracking her brain trying to come up with something.
“Of course.” She jumped up, pathetically grateful for any task, no matter how humble.
“I need to double-check my measurements. I’ve checked them several times but I want to be sure before I make the final cuts.”
“I guess you can’t be too careful in your line of work.”
“Not when you’re dealing with oak trim that costs an arm and a leg,” he answered.
“It’s gorgeous, though.”
“Worth every penny,” he agreed, and for one breathless moment, he looked as if he wanted to smile. Just before the lighthearted expression would have broken free, his features sobered and he held out the end of the tape measure to her.
He was a man who devoted scrupulous attention to detail, she thought as they measured and re-measured the circumference of the room. He had kissed her the same way, thoroughly and completely, as if he couldn’t bear the idea of missing a single second.
Her stomach quivered at the memory of his arms around her and the intensity of his mouth searching hers.
Maybe this hadn’t been such a grand idea, the two of them alone here in the quiet hush of a rainy day morning with only Conan for company.
“What do you do when you don’t have a fumbling and inept—but well-meaning—assistant to help you out with things like this?” she asked, to break the sudden hushed intimacy.
He shrugged. “I usually make do. I have a couple of high school kids who help me sometimes. Most jobs I can handle on my own but sometimes an extra set of hands can definitely make the work a lot easier.”
She was grateful again that she had offered help, even if he still seemed uneasy about accepting.
“Well, I can’t promise that my hands are good for much, but I’m happy to use them for anything you need.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized how they could be misconstrued. She flushed, but to her vast relief he didn’t seem to notice either her blush or her unintentionally provocative statement.
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
He paused after writing down one more measurement then retracting the tape measure. “Robin was always after me to hire a full-time assistant,” he said after a moment.
This was the first time he had mentioned his wife to her on his own. It seemed an important step, somehow, as if he had allowed himself to lower yet another barrier between them.
Julia held her breath, not wanting to say anything that might make him regret bringing up the subject.
“You didn’t do it, though?”
He shrugged. “I like working on my own. I can pick the music I want, can work at my own pace, can talk to myself when I need to. Yeah, I guess that probably makes me a little on the crazy side.”
She laughed. “Not crazy. I talk to myself all the time. It helps to have Conan around, then I can at least pretend I’m talking to him.”
He smiled. One moment he was wearing that remote, polite expression, then next, a genuine smile stole over his handsome features. S
he stared at it, her pulse shivering.
She wanted to leap up and down and shriek with glee that she had been able to lighten his features, even if only for a moment, but then he would definitely think she was the crazy one.
“Maybe I need a dog to take on jobs with me, just so I don’t get a reputation as the wild-eyed carpenter who carries on long conversations with himself.”
“I’m sure Sage and Anna would consider renting Conan out by the hour,” she offered.
He smiled again—twice in as many minutes!—and turned to the dog. “What do you say, bud? Want to be my permanent assistant?”
Conan snuffled and gave a huge yawn that stretched his jaws, then he flopped over on his other side, turning his back toward both of them.
Julia couldn’t help laughing. “Sorry, Will, but I think that’s a definite no. You wouldn’t want to interfere with his strenuous nap schedule. I guess you’ll have to make do with me for now. I just hope I haven’t messed up your rhythm too much.”
“No. You’re actually helping.”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised!” she exclaimed. “I do occasionally have my uses.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”
She managed a smile. “No problem. Believe it or not, I’ve got a pretty thick skin.”
They worked in silence and Will seemed deep in thought. When he spoke some time later, she realized his mind was still on what he’d said about hiring an assistant.
“Sometimes Robin would come with me on bigger jobs to lend a hand, until Cara came along, anyway,” he said. “She started to crawl early—six months or so—and was into everything. She barely gave Robin a second to breathe for chasing her.”
Again, she sensed by the stiff set of his shoulders that he wasn’t completely comfortable talking about his family. She wasn’t sure why he had decided to share these few details but she was beyond touched that he was willing to show her this snapshot of their life together.
“I can imagine it was hard to get any work done while you were chasing a busy toddler,” she said.
He nodded. “She wasn’t afraid of anything, our Cara. If Robin or I didn’t watch her, she’d be out the back door and halfway to the ocean before we figured out where she had gone. We had to put double child-locks on every door.”
He smiled a little at the memory but she could still sense the pain around the edges of his smile. She couldn’t help herself, she reached out and touched his forearm, driven only by the need to comfort him.
His skin was warm, covered in a layer of crisp dark hair. He looked down at her fingers on his darker skin and she thought she saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed.
“Maddie was like that, too,” she said after a moment, lifting her hand away.
“Maddie?”
“I know. Hard to believe. She was a much busier toddler than Simon. She was always the ringleader of the two of them.”
She smiled at the memory. “When they still could barely walk, they used to climb out of their cribs in the night to play with their toys. I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it so I set up the video camera with a motion sensor and caught Maddie moving like a little monkey to climb out of hers. She didn’t need any help but Simon apparently wasn’t as skilled so Maddie would climb out and then push a half-dozen stuffed animals over the top railing of his crib so he could use them to climb out. It was quite a system the little rascals came up with.”
He paused in the middle of searching through his toolbox, his features far more interested than she might have expected. “So what did you do? Take out all the stuffed animals from the room?”
She made a face. “No. Gave in to the inevitable. We bought them both toddler beds so they wouldn’t break their necks climbing out”
“Did they still get up in the night?”
“Not as much. I think it was the lure of the forbidden that kept them trying to escape.”
He laughed—a real, full-fledged laugh. She watched the shadows lift from his eyes for just a moment, saw in that light expression some glimmer of the Will she had known, and she could swear she felt the tumble and thud of her heart.
She was an idiot for Will Garrett, only now she didn’t have the excuse of being fifteen, flush with the heady excitement of first love.
After entirely too short a time, his laughter slid away and he turned his attention back to the project. “How do you feel about heights?”
“Moderately okay, within reason.”
“It would help if you could hold the trim up while I nail it, as long as you don’t mind climbing the ladder.”
“Not at all.”
For the next twenty minutes, they spoke little as they worked together to hang the trim. They finished two walls quickly but the other two weren’t as straightforward. One had a fireplace and chimney flue that Will needed to work the trim around and the other had a jog that she thought must contain ductwork.
As she waited for Will to figure out the angles for the cuts, Julia sat on the couch, enjoying the animation on his features as he calculated. She wondered if he knew how his eyes lit up while he was working, how he seemed to vibrate with an energy she didn’t see there at other times.
At last he figured out the math involved to make sure the moldings matched up correctly. He left for a moment and she heard his power saw out on the porch.
“You love this, don’t you?” she asked when he returned carrying the cut pieces of trim.
He shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“It’s more than that to you. I can tell. I keep remembering how much you complained about your dad making you go out on jobs with him that summer.”
His laugh was rueful, tinged with embarrassment. “I was a stupid sixteen-year-old punk without a brain in my head. All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends and try to impress pretty girls.”
She shook her head. “You were not a punk. You were by far the most decent boy I knew.”
The tips of his ears turned that dusky red again. “Funny, you always seemed like such a sensible kind of girl.”
“I was sensible enough to know when a boy is different from the others I’d met. All they wanted to do was flirt and see how many bases they could steal. They weren’t interested in talking about serious things like the political science class they had taken the year before or the ecological condition of the shoreline.”
“Did I do that?”
“You don’t remember?”
He slanted her a sidelong look. “All I remember is trying to figure out whether I dared try sliding in to second base.”
She blushed, though she couldn’t help smiling, too. “I guess you were just more subtle about that particular goal than the other boys, then.”
“Either that or more chicken.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help herself. To her delight, he laughed along with her and the unexpected sound of it even had Conan lifting his head to watch the two of them with what looked suspiciously like satisfaction.
She remembered Sage’s assertion that the dog was working in cahoots with Abigail.
Just now—with the rain pattering softly against the window and this peculiar intimacy swirling around them—the idea didn’t seem completely ludicrous.
“Okay, I think I’ve finally got this figured out,” he said after a moment. “I think I’m ready for my assistant.”
She pushed her ladder closer to his since they were working with a much smaller length of trim.
As he was only a few feet away from her, she was intensely aware of him—his scent, leathery and masculine, and the heat that seemed to pulse from him.
He wasn’t smiling or laughing now, she noted. In fact, he seemed tense suddenly and in a hurry to finish this section of the job.
“I can probably handle the rest
on my own,” he said, his voice suddenly sounding strained. “None of the remaining lengths of trim are very long so I shouldn’t need your help holding them in place.”
“I can stick around, just in case you need me.”
His gaze met hers and she thought he would tell her not to bother but he simply nodded. “Sure. Okay.”
She was so relieved he wasn’t going to send her away that she wasn’t paying as close attention to what she was doing as she should have been while she descended the ladder at the same time Will descended his own ladder next to her.
In her distracted state, she misjudged the last rung and stumbled a little at the bottom.
“Whoa! Careful there,” he exclaimed, reaching out instinctively to catch her.
For one moment, they froze in that suspended state, with his strong arms around her and her arms trapped between their bodies. Her startled gaze flew to his and she thought she saw awareness and desire and the barest shadow of resignation there.
* * *
WILL STARED AT HER, his heart pumping in his chest like an out-of-control nail gun. A desperate kind of hunger prowled through him, wild and urgent. Though he knew she was far from it, she felt small and fragile in his arms.
He could feel the heat of her burning his skin, could smell that soft, mouthwatering scent of cherry blossoms.
He closed his eyes, fighting the inevitable with every ounce of strength he had left. But when he opened his eyes, he found her color high, her lips parted slightly, her eyes a deep and mossy green, shadowed with what he was almost positive was a heady awareness to match his own.
He should stop this right now, should just release her, push her from Anna’s apartment and lock the door snugly behind her. The tiny corner of his brain that could still manage to string together a coherent thought told him that was exactly the course of action he ought to follow.
But how could he? She was so soft, so sweetly, irresistibly warm, and he had been cold for so damn long.
He heard a groan and realized it came from his own throat just an instant before he lowered his mouth and kissed her.
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