back, then rounding out again to a small, pert ass fit for a pixie. Dr. Pixie.
He was going to hell. He averted his eyes and handed her the bag.
Five minutes later, she reappeared barefoot. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts and a Detroit Tigers T-shirt. Not the same one she had worn the day of the emergency birth.
He nodded at it. “You weren’t kidding about being a Tigers fan.”
“Nope. My grandma went to medical school at the University of Windsor, and she became a fan. I guess I got it from her. In fact, when I decided to leave Toronto and do a stint practicing somewhere else, one of the things that appealed about here is that it’s two hours from Detroit.” She snorted in a way that seemed self-deprecating. “I say that like I’m actually going to go to games.”
“Too busy?”
She started to answer but paused with a contemplative look on her face. “I was going to say yes, I’m kind of a workaholic, but I don’t actually know. This is supposed to be a new chapter.”
“You should make this a chapter that includes Tigers games.”
She smiled—really big, in a way that almost caused a hitch in his breath. Smiles like that also helped unravel the air of otherworldliness she sometimes had about her. They made her seem fully, viscerally human. “Yeah. I should.”
He handed her a glass of bourbon.
“Thanks. I hope you don’t like it on the rocks, because I don’t have any ice.” She spun slowly in place. “I don’t have anything, actually. As you have probably observed.” She was still smiling in a way that seemed at odds with her pronouncement.
He thought back to what she’d said at the salon, about looking at your life and all the crap in it and not recognizing it. He lifted his glass. “To new chapters.”
She clinked her glass against his and strolled over to the door and peered out. “But now, thanks to you, I do have a deck. Honestly, I can’t believe Harold was advertising that pile of junk as a deck.”
“Yeah, Harold Burgess isn’t known for…” He wasn’t sure how to put it.
“Being house-proud?”
He chuckled.
“I was really bummed about the deck situation. Like more bummed than was probably called for. But then you fixed it. But…” She did a slow pivot. “This place is a dump, isn’t it?” She kept turning. “I rented a dump.”
She had. It appeared Harold hadn’t treated his own home any better than his rental properties. The paint on the walls was peeling, and the cracked linoleum in the kitchen had to be forty years old if it was a day. To be fair, the house would probably look better if it wasn’t empty. But there was a general air of shabbiness everywhere.
“Did you not come to look at it?” Toronto was over a three-hour drive, which wasn’t nothing, but when it came to where you were going to live, he personally would have come to check things out.
“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “I just looked at the ad. It seemed fine in the little thumbnail pictures. And I was busy quitting my job and tearing through a moving to-do list.” She sighed and slid open the door. “But really, I took this place because Harold said you could hear the waves from the yard, and you can.” She cocked her head. “Almost.” She stuck her whole torso out the door. “Sometimes.”
“The lake is calm today.” He motioned for her to go out the rest of the way. “You want to go sit on your new deck?”
“I sure do.” The deck was a platform without a railing, so she sat on the edge of it like you’d sit on a step. “Sorry, I don’t have any chairs, either.” She laughed. “I’m such a loser.”
“Oh, come on.” He was pretty sure losers didn’t go to medical school.
“You should have seen me trying to paint my front desk at the clinic today.”
“I did see the aftermath. Did any of that paint actually get on the desk?” He stepped off the deck and leaned against a post in the yard that had probably once anchored a clothesline.
She snorted. “Not enough of it. It looks worse than when I started.”
He almost offered to stop in and take a look at it next week, but he stopped himself. Because why would he do that?
They sipped their drinks. It was a hot evening. Still, too. Not a trace of wind—that was why they couldn’t hear the lake at the moment.