Love and Neckties - Lacey Black Page 0,52

to my lady bits, he heads over to the driver’s side and gets in. He has no idea what he’s in for, or that I’m about to turn his perfectly organized little world upside down.

***

After we got the truck unloaded at Mary Ann’s, we make our way to Samuel’s home. I’ve been here before, but never actually inside his place, so I’m anxious to see how the oldest Grayson lives. If I had to guess, I’d say white walls, bland oak furniture, and not a speck of dust in sight. I’m pretty sure his shirts are hung by color and material content.

He opens the door and waves me in. The moment I step inside, I burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” he asks, glancing around at his immaculately clean house.

“This is exactly as I pictured it, Sammy. I bet your socks are color coordinated in your drawer too, right?” I ask. When I glance his way, his ears turn red, quickly followed by his cheeks.

“I like clean,” he grumbles, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“And white, apparently.”

Samuel sighs. “Let’s get your things into the guest room. We can start with some of your laundry so we don’t have standing water anywhere,” he says, turning and heading back out to the car.

For the next fifteen minutes, we unload my belongings, including our luggage, and bring them all into the house. The guest room consists of a full-sized bed with basic blue and green bedding and a single dresser and nightstand combo. There’s plenty of room along the closet wall to stack my stuff, which is what I do as we bring it inside.

“Feel free to use the dresser and the closet,” he says. He glances around the bare room, void of any knickknacks or pictures on the wall or…well, personality. “Make yourself at home. I’m going to unpack and start to reheat the vegetable pot pie Mom sent home for us.”

For me.

She put it together as soon as her son called and asked to store my things in the garage. She loaded it with carrots and celery, corn and potatoes. Mary Ann was pulling it from the oven when we finished unloading my furniture, wrapped it in a towel, and sent us on our way. Man, I love that woman.

I take the dry clothes we pulled from my dresser drawers and closet and start to fill the ones in the guest room. Next, I unload my suitcase, tossing my rumpled dress onto the floor in the closet. There’s no bathroom in the guest room, so I take my bath products to the one across the hall. The first thing I notice is the scent of his soap. It’s familiar and leaves me a little dizzy. Whistling a little tune, I set my pink razor, shampoo and conditioner, and luffa and bodywash beside his expensive brand of bodywash and shampoo. I grab the back and start to read the fine print, instantly pissed off at what I read.

Tossing them in the trash, I head to the kitchen, where I find Samuel at the oven, dishing up the pot pie. “What the hell, Samuel?” I thunder, placing my hands on my hips and tapping my foot on the gleaming tile floor.

“What?” he startles, spinning around and holding a plate. It’s also when I notice he’s wearing an apron. Sure it says “Kiss the Chef,” but it’s an apron, for heaven’s sake.

“What are you wearing?”

“An apron,” he replies, glancing down in question. “Why?”

“Oh, no reason, Martha.”

“Martha?”

“Stewart.”

Samuel rolls his eyes and turns back to the task at hand. When he has both plates dished up, he takes them to the table, where he’s already set two glasses of ice water. “Are you just going to tease me about my apron, or did you have something important to discuss?” he asks, untying the black and white apron and hanging it from a hook beside the refrigerator.

“Oh, I have something very serious to discuss, but why are you wearing an apron? You know you’re thirty-six, right, and not eighty?”

Samuel sighs as I take a seat and place my napkin on my lap. “I wear it to protect my clothes from food splatters. This may sound completely foreign and too refined for you, but there’s a whole demographic of people who like protecting their clothes,” he says.

The moment the words leave his mouth, I drop a forkful of food down my shirt, so I bring the material up to my mouth and suck the vegetables off.

“See what I mean?”