My hands fly to my cheeks. “Oh, my God. That was my grandpa’s. Guess I never cleared out that cupboard. It could have been up there for years.”
“Pretty sure it doesn’t go bad.” He opens a couple of cabinets until he finds two mis-matched tumblers.
The smile on his face as he heads back toward me says he’s pleased with his find.
“Here you go.” He plonks everything on the coffee table, splashes the amber liquid into the glasses, and hands me one.
The aroma is warm and welcoming. “Must be a couple of years since I’ve had whiskey.”
“Cheers.” He chinks glasses with me.
We both take a sip and “hmmm” in unison.
“Okay, then.” He tucks one foot under him and swivels to face me. “Time to start a story.”
Why is he doing this? There’s nothing about me that could possibly be of any interest to him.
I sigh. “What do you want to know?”
He looks at me with a warmth and softness that makes me want to give up every secret I’ve ever had, going back to when I was six and broke one of my aunt’s precious glass ornaments and said it was her dog who’d wagged it off the shelf.
Owen holds up his glass. “Since we’re drinking your grandpa’s amber nectar, how about you tell me about them. And why you live in their place in the middle of nowhere, knitting and playing snowballs, when you could be number crunching for big bucks.”
There’s a caring, thoughtful tone in his voice. Like he’s genuinely interested. Couldthisguy be the real him? Is the only reason I got a bad impression of him last night because he was frustrated at being lost and stuck?
Shit. Nice Owen could be trouble.
I suck on my lips and sigh. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But only because my grandparents were great people, and everyone should know about them.”
I take another sip of whiskey for courage. “I went to live with them when my parents died.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve.”
“Shit, that is young.”
I nod as I run a finger around the rim of my glass. “Yeah. They lived outside Boston. We came up here weekend after weekend while my grandpa built this place. He’d take me to the reclamation yards with him when he was hunting for cool old stuff to include, like the kitchen tiles and the old railway sleeper for the fireplace mantel.”
My gaze drifts around the room, touching on all the woodwork he lovingly crafted. “I think it was his therapy for trying to cope with losing my mom.”
“He did an excellent job.” Owen raises his glass to my grandpa’s construction skills. “This place is beautifully made.”
I smile and point to the wall over the fireplace. “The panel in the middle there, he got me to carve my initials and the date on the other side before he installed it.”
Owen’s eyes meet mine for a second and my belly somersaults before I look away. “Anyway, then, when I was choosing universities, I thought it would be good to get away from the sad memories here, go to the West Coast and start afresh. I picked accounting because I was good at math. I didn’t like it, but I was good at it. And it would mean a secure job, with a secure income for the rest of my life.”
“A disrupted childhood can make a person think like that.” He sighs. “Guess we had a similar theory. But I went from west to east for school, and you went from east to west.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that we have that in common. Maybe we’re not as different as I thought.
A sip of whiskey warms my throat. “Anyway, I fucking hated accounting.”
The surprised laugh that rolls out of him lights up his face and instantly relaxes me.
As if it’s the most everyday thing in the world, I rest my fingers on his bare forearm and lean closer as if I’m about to tell him a huge secret. “Do you have any idea how boring accounting is?”
He makes no effort to move away from my touch. “Hell, yes. I could cheerfully code all day. But as soon as we could afford to take on a bookkeeper, I jumped at it. I fucking hate bookkeeping.”
