“Maybe,” he said, eyes still on my face like the rail had never existed. “But we’ll have to dig the rot out first. If you pack beauty on top of rot, it looks fine and fails when it matters.”
He could have been talking about wood. He could have been talking about me. Either way, the words lodged under my sternum, sharp and true.
“We?” I asked, too quick.
He leaned one shoulder back against the post, a casual sprawl that made the shirt stretch over his chest and my thoughts disintegrate. “I’m here,” he said. “And you shouldn’t be under a porch alone with a pry bar. I’d hate to watch you disappear through the step that already wants your ankle.”
“You noticed that.”
“I notice most things.”
I swallowed. “Of course, you do.”
His mouth did that not-smile again. “Pass me the pry bar.”
I obeyed. He took it lightly from my hand and crouched, jeans pulling tight over thighs that had no business being legal. He scribed along the soft seam, checked the joist with a knuckle, then looked up at me from that lower vantage like he knew exactly what he was doing to my oxygen supply.
“Hold the rail,” he said.
I did, bracing as he levered the old section free. The wood came up with a wet sound that made my nose wrinkle. He tossed it aside, exposing the damage. “You were right to catch it now,” he said. “Another month of storms and this would’ve taken a body with it.”
“Comforting,” I muttered, and held harder.
We worked like that for an hour—him doing the strange ballet of force and finesse, me learning where to stand and when to press and how to not be in the way. He let me do what I could, let me try, corrected when necessary. His hands were steady even when mine weren’t. When I got stubborn, he let me fail justenough to want to listen again, then put the tool back in my palm with patience that didn’t feel like charity.
Every accidental brush sent heat skittering along my nerves—his forearm grazing my shoulder as he reached for the caulk gun, his hip aligning to mine when we both leaned into the rail, the hot whisper of his breath against my jaw when he said, “Level,” and angled the tiny bubble between the lines with me. It was intimacy disguised as instruction. It was a lesson in a language I’d pretended I didn’t speak.
We took a water break only because the sun demanded it. I swallowed greedily, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist, then realized I’d smeared a stripe of sawdust across my cheekbone like war paint. He stepped in, thumb lifting to brush it away. I went still. His hand was big, warm, rough. He touched me like he’d earned it—carefully, decisively, without apology.
“There,” he said, voice gone soft and gravelly all at once. His thumb lingered for one extra heartbeat, the pad catching on my skin. My breath snared.
“Thanks,” I said, and the word came out breathless enough to give everything away.
We looked at each other like the air between us was the only thing keeping the house from catching fire.
He cleared his throat first, stepped back an inch that felt like a mile. “You hungry?”
It was the wrong question. Or the right one. “Always,” I said, and didn’t mean food.
His eyes flicked to my mouth again, then down to my hands gripping the rail as if a storm were blowing. He leaned in, just enough to make me dizzy for a second.
“Hazel,” he said, and my name in his voice turned everything inside me to liquid. “If I kiss you now, I don’t stop at one.”
My pulse thundered. The honest thing was that I wanted that like air. The practical thing was that I had a to-do list and a life and a house that was listening to us.
I tried for humor. “Is that a warning or a promise?”
“Both,” he said, unblinking.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The porch stretched under us, solid now. The rails we’d fixed gleamed with the kind of pride only earned by sweat and the right screws.
Maude’s voice floated from the kitchen window, right on time—the universe’s chaperone. “Lunch!” she called in a cheerful sing-song that might as well have been a church bell.
Gideon’s mouth curved, slow and ruined. He straightened, stepping back just enough to stop the room from tilting. “Saved by Maude,” he said.
“Temporarily,” I shot back before I could caution myself. The word hung between us.
He reached past me to set the level on the sill. His arm caged me in for a breath. The littlest brush of his beard skimmed my temple when he said, in a voice that made my knees weak, “We’ll finish after.”
