to replace it since she was only going to be in town for two years, but she had stopped in at Andersen’s Lakeside Hardware to ask if, theoretically, a person could paint over fake wood paneling. She’d had an odd encounter with the owner, an older man named Karl, who had assured her that yes, she could paint over the paneling and had amassed the necessary supplies but then refused to take payment for them.
But something had gone wrong. The primer had seemed like it was going on funny, but then she’d thought, what the hell did she know about primer? So she’d plowed on. And who knew? Maybe the problem wasn’t the primer so much as the fact that she was spectacularly bad at painting. She’d tipped over the can at one point, and in her attempt to right it, her entire left arm had ended up covered.
But whatever. She was standing in the kitchen staring at Jake, and it would be weird to keep doing that. It would also be weird to pretend she hadn’t seen him. So she slid open the door.
He had returned to the saw or whatever it was, so his back was to her. His tanned, muscly back. A fact she noted with clinical detachment. Mostly.
He turned on the tool, but he must have sensed her presence, because he stopped it right away, turned around, and took off the protective glasses he’d been wearing. Slid them up on his head, actually, like sunglasses. His hair looked like it had begun the day in a bun, but enough of it had fallen out that the glasses were actually holding a fair amount of hair off his face.
“What are you doing?” she finally said, before her brain could catch up to what a stupid question that was. What do you think he’s doing? Practicing his ballroom dance moves?
“Rebuilding this piece-of-crap deck.”
“That was fast. When I asked if you could do my deck, I meant sometime in the not-too-distant future.”
He shrugged. She kept waiting for him to follow that shrug with some words, but none came. “Okay, well, what do I owe you?”
“Eh, it only took me a couple of hours.” He started putting his shirt on. She wanted to tell him not to do that, but that would be wildly inappropriate. Clinical detachment.
“It only took you a couple of hours?” she echoed dumbly. In her imagination, which admittedly was based on nothing—she didn’t even watch home improvement shows on TV, as evidenced by her painting failure—building a deck was something you measured in days, not hours.
“Yeah. I’m just throwing a quick cap over what’s here. It’s a shortcut. If you owned this place, I’d pull out the old rotten stuff and start from scratch.”
“You would?”
He squinted at her for a moment. Because she was acting like a simpleton, mindlessly repeating everything he said in the form of a question. Maybe he was onto something with all the silence. If you didn’t talk to people, it probably cut down on the frequency with which you had to listen to them say idiotic things.
“Sorry. I guess I should have checked in with you before I started. I just had this pile of scrap wood”—he gestured at the deck, which looked like an honest-to-God deck and not at all like a pile of scrap wood—“and a free afternoon, and…” He shrugged.
Ugh. She was being weird. Coming across as ungrateful. She was just so surprised. It was like she had wished aloud for a deck one day, and the next day, voilà! Deck!
And for some reason, she was inherently skeptical when someone did her a favor. Instantly on the defensive. Wondering what the secret agenda was. How she was going to be made to pay later.
Was that the kind of person she wanted to be?
Okay. She smiled. Started over. “Jake. This is amazing. Thank you.”
He smiled back. Which made her feel good.
So she said some more. “Honestly, I was out-of-proportion disappointed about the deck situation. And it’s been a long day.” She held up her paint-splattered arms, and he chuckled. “So this is a lovely surprise.”
“Well, give me five minutes to lay this last plank, and you can inaugurate your new deck.”
She was imagining pouring herself a drink and doing exactly that. Should she ask him to join her? He’d rebuffed her last time. Well, what the hell. “I plan to—with a bourbon. You’re welcome to join me.”
For a second she thought he was going to say yes, but then