her body bent nearly in half, her feet shuffling backward, her denim-covered bottom leading the way. He wasn’t aware he did anything to give himself away, but suddenly Addy froze. A moment passed. Then, instead of rising to a stand, she turned her head and glanced around her bent elbow.
Her green eyes caught Baxter’s gaze.
With a yelp, she leaped a couple of feet into the air. Upon landing, she spun to face him, her hand covering her heart. “You scared me!”
Oops. He should apologize, Baxter thought. That’s what he’d come to do, after all, though not for startling her. He’d come to talk about That Night. That Night he’d thought he’d purged from his mind until seeing her yesterday afternoon.
She frowned at him. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
He took a step into the room. “Hello?”
Without a greeting of her own, she returned to dragging the box from the closet. It was unclear how heavy it was, because Addy was such a little thing he figured a ream of copy paper could make her break a sweat. His mother had worked hard to instill in him good manners—even though he might have ignored some of them after That Night—so now he moved quickly to come to her aid.
“Let me help,” he said, reaching around her. She ignored him, though, her backward trajectory putting that cute ass on a collision course with his crotch. It was Baxter’s turn to leap.
She gave him another around-the-elbow glance. “I’ve got it.” With awkward tugs, she dragged the carton toward the room’s table, then left it to return to the bowels of the dim closet.
He followed her, noting the stacks of cartons inside. “Do you want all of them out?”
Rather than answering the question, she said, “I’ve got it.” Again.
It annoyed him. He was here to make things right between them and her stubbornness wasn’t helping. His arm bumped hers as he shouldered past. “Just point to the one you want.”
At her silence, he threw a glance over his shoulder. “Well?”
She had an odd expression on her face. Then she cleared her throat. “Honest, I don’t need your help. They’ve been in there a long time, Baxter. They’re dirty.”
“I’m not afraid of a little grime.”
“Really?” She tilted her head. “Because you look a little...prissy.”
Insult shot steel into Baxter’s spine. He played mean and stinky roundball with his old high school buddies on Saturday mornings. He regularly signed up for 10K races—beating his own time the past five outings—and just last month he’d participated in the Marine Corps’ mud run. Nobody he knew had caught him taking that yoga class and he’d only agreed to it because the woman he’d been dating at the time had promised banana pancakes afterward.
Wait—were banana pancakes prissy?
The internal question made him glare at Addy, even as he noted the self-satisfied smirk curling the corners of her mouth. Without a word, he turned back around and started stacking boxes and hauling them from the closet.
“That’s enough,” she finally said. “This is a good start.”
He paused. After the first few he’d stopped to remove his suit jacket and roll up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. His hands, as she’d predicted, were gray with filth and there were streaks of it on the starched cotton covering his chest. Addy, on the other hand, was hardly marred. With a pair of colorful cross-trainers, she wore soft-looking jeans rolled at the ankle and a T-shirt advertising a film festival in Palm Springs. Her white-blond hair stood in feathery tufts around her head and her cheeks were flushed, but Baxter thought that was Addy’s normal state.
She’d appeared...excitable to him from the very first.
As if his regard made her uncomfortable, she shifted her feet. “Don’t blame me if you’re mucked up. I told you this wasn’t work for a guy in business wear.”
He blamed her for things, all right—sleepless nights, a guilty conscience—but not for the state of his clothing. “What exactly is all this stuff?” He popped the lid off the nearest box and eyed a stack of yellowed paper. “Why would you be interested in it?”
Her pale brows met over her nose. That feature was small like the rest of her and he repressed an urge to trace it with his forefinger. “You must have been in another world yesterday afternoon,” she said.
“Huh?” Baxter knew exactly where he’d been yesterday afternoon. Face-to-face with the woman who had been his singular out-of-character event. His lone antimerit badge. The one and only time he’d gone