Pleasure at the thought of seeing her in the place where I spent so much time radiated warmth through my chest. “When I battle the drift in front of the shop door, yes.”
“You said you were updating the website?”
I nodded, but she gave me an expectant look. “You want to see some pictures?”
She snuggled closer. “Why, yes, what a good suggestion, I’d love to.”
Chuckling, I pulled my phone back out of my pocket. I pulled up my album with my project images.My chest nearly exploded from the way her eyes widened and her lips parted.
“You did all those?”
“These are from last year.”
She took my phone and scrolled through. She stopped at a picture of a tree stump and flipped to the decorative end table with a winding wooden base I’d turned it into. “Seriously? You took a log and did that? We’d just make it into firewood.”
“It was Bastogne walnut, and the client asked me to make a design out of it.”
“Do you just make it up?”
“No, I talk with my customers. Send questionnaires. Then I give them mockups. Definitely if they’re providing the resources, I spend a lot of time on each step. There are no take backs once I start cutting.”
“How much did you sell this for?”
The price hovered on my tongue. I knew exactly how much I’d sold the piece for. The customer had also paid for shipping the raw materials to me and for getting the finished product to them. “Eighteen hundred dollars.”
“One thousand eight hundred?” She sat up and twisted toward me. “How long did this take you?”
Having her full attention on me was unnerving. When I was naked and she was looking me over, I’d had the same sensation of wanting to run. “A week.”
“No way!” She enlarged the picture and studied it. “Only a week?”
“Two days to do the physical work, and then drying times for the coatings, plus a few extra hours going back and forth in the planning stages. But it’s not the only piece I’m working on during the week, and little tableslike this are the smallest items I sell.” And by far the cheapest.
“You’re an artist.”
I scoffed.
She gave me a sidelong look and flipped to another picture. A set of stools I’d made out of old barrels. The barrel staves were the backs of the seats and the steel hoops from the barrel had also been repurposed into the design.
“These were in the coffee shop,” she said. “You could’ve charged well over twelve hundred for these but they were only marked for like four hundred dollars.”
“I price lower for local. Besides, I’m just playing around with those.”
“Just playing around?” She enlarged the picture and inspected every inch of the stool. “Just playing?”
“When I’m constrained to a material and to a certain design, then I charge more.”
She smirked. “You charge anyone who’s not from Bourbon Canyon more. I like it. Just what Daddy would’ve done.”
“Your daddy did do it.”
She snickered. The Copper Summit gift shop had cheaper bottles of their bourbon than anywhere else in the country. “Have you made your parents anything?”
I shook my head.
She glanced at me, then clicked out of the album and shut my screen off. “I heard what you told your mom about getting sick of being told what you couldn’t do after the accident.”
I knew she’d heard, but the knowledge didn’t bother me like it should. “I know. You like to eavesdrop.”
