Fuck, now there was a purple splodge on the ceiling.
“I guess that’s nice, that she’d offer to help out an old friend,” Marielle said. “Can you take the weight of the fabric while I hook on these drapes?”
“Sure.”
Nolan blew out a breath as he climbed down the ladder. “Nice” wasn’t a word anyone would use to describe Alexa. Fascinating? Yes. Cunning? Absolutely. But she wasn’t good-natured. Brax used to refer to her as “that little sociopath in the basement.”
Was Marielle nice? Sure. Sometimes too nice. Nolan wasn’t a complete fool—he knew she was interested in more than a client/contractor relationship with him—but after the breakup with Lisanne last year, he wasn’t interested in jumping into another relationship. Lisanne had shattered his heart and nearly tanked his business too, and he needed time to fix up both of them.
But Marielle had offered to help out with the cottage this evening, and Nolan couldn’t turn her down either, not after he’d told Brax the place was slightly more finished than it actually was.
Brax. That smooth fucker didn’t mean to make Nolan feel inadequate, but since their Blackstone House days, Brax had used his share of the blood money to earn a damn fortune while Nolan made less than minimum wage and drove a pickup older than Alexa.
What had she done with her share of the cash?
Back then, she’d spent her money on two things—food and computer hardware. Had she changed? When she first moved in, she’d paid her fifty bucks each week, then given Nolan or Dawson or Justin a shopping list for Walmart along with whatever cash she had left over. Noodles, chocolate, potato chips, not a vegetable in sight. Nolan had started cooking for her because he was genuinely worried she’d get scurvy, and it had become their thing. He’d make dinner, and she’d huff and eat it.
By the time they left Blackstone House, she was getting fresh organic produce delivered weekly, chilled fish and meat couriered in from fuck knew where, and macarons shipped from Paris. Nobody knew exactly where her money came from, and she barely left the house. She told Dawson she was moderating chat rooms, and Brax said she’d mentioned coding work. The only thing Nolan knew for sure was that she kept adding servers to her computer collection, and she’d gotten a guy in to install a cooling system so they didn’t overheat. Oh, and she’d convinced Justin to put a satellite dish on the roof so her internet would go faster.
Nolan didn’t much like computers. All those letters on a screen made his brain hurt. Lisanne used to tell him he was dyslexic, that there were special fonts to make reading easier and he should go to a doctor and get diagnosed properly. But grapevines and dirt didn’t judge, and he made wine by instinct rather than some fancy formula, so what did it matter? Then in her breakup letter, she’d said maybe he wasn’t dyslexic, maybe he was just stupid and stubborn, and he could go join Santa in hell.
Alexa might have the personality of a porcupine, but she’d never once made fun of his struggles with reading. No, she’d sent him voice notes instead of texts, played secretary when he needed to reply to emails, and later, gifted him a fancy tablet that read his messages aloud in her own snarky voice. Then, after he accidentally backed over it with his car, she’d bought him another one and refused his offer of repayment.
Obediently, Nolan held the velvet while Marielle attached the top to the pole. Alexa had never been a fan of daylight, so leaving the windows bare wasn’t an option, and he didn’t have a basement for her to sleep in. Okay, so there was an old gold mine on the property, but there was no bathroom and no bed, plus she’d need three hundred power outlets for her computers, and— Had he lost his fucking mind? Alexa wasn’t sleeping in a cave.
He didn’t hate her.
He missed hearing her voice, even the electronic version, but when the tablet died three years ago, Robbie Teller had said the parts to fix it weren’t available anymore. And in some ways, he missed the girl herself. When she wasn’t working for ten hours straight, she used to sit and talk with him while he cooked, and far beneath the oh-so serious exterior lurked a dry but very dark sense of humour. Plus she was smarter than he’d ever be, and determined too. After he’d gotten fired from his landscaping job for insulting a client—apparently, refusing to get up close and personal with a bored housewife’s bush was rude—she’d rewritten his résumé and helped him to find a new position that paid more.
Why was she about to walk back into his life after all these years? Had she finally decided to apologise for the lies? Unlikely—Alexa never apologised for anything. Nolan had always defended her when Brax called her a sociopath, but deep down, he wondered if there was an element of truth to the allegation. Alexa didn’t feel guilt the way other people did.
Marielle finished with the drapes and Nolan let the velvet fall, smiling to himself. It looked good, and teal was Alexa’s favourite colour. At least, it had been ten years ago. Teal, deep plum, gold… Jewel colours, she called them.
“Are you nearly done with the painting?” Marielle asked.
“I just want to finish this wall.” And fix the splodge on the ceiling.
“You want to get dinner afterward?” She checked her watch. “The Doodlebug is still serving food for another half hour, maybe a little longer if I sweet-talk Ed.”
When Nolan moved to the Calder Ranch—now renamed Dionysus because he didn’t need that reminder of his father—there had been two places to eat in town: the Golden Nugget and the Doodlebug. Today, there were still two places. The Nugget was temporarily closed, due to either the owner’s sickness or one too many health code violations, depending on which rumour you believed, and at the start of last year, two rich out-of-towners had opened a fancy new place on Main Street, all twiddly food and beige decor. Sanguine, that’s what they’d called it. Nolan gave it six months. Folks around here wanted beer, fries, and a good steak, not twenty gourmet options and a wine menu. Thankfully, the Doodlebug always delivered when it came to a medium-rare T-bone, and their fries were crispy too. Janice Whitman complained that they never changed the oil in the fryer, but the high temperatures would take care of any bacteria, right?
So why did Nolan hesitate to accept Marielle’s invitation?
The last thing he felt like doing tonight was cooking, but he also worried about giving her the wrong idea. No, he just wanted to focus on the business for now. Needed to focus on the business. And dammit, he needed those accounting records. Lisanne used to look after that side of things, and after she left, he hadn’t given the admin side as much attention as he should have done.
“I have leftovers in the fridge,” he told Marielle. “And a bunch of emails to send.”
“Anything I can help with? I’m great at paperwork, and I’d be happy to help you catch up.”
So he could end up deeper in the same hole? Where a woman integrated herself into the business and then almost succeeded in ruining everything he’d built because rural living wasn’t as much fun as she thought it would be?
“You’ve helped plenty tonight already, and I appreciate that. Make sure you bill me for the extra hours,” he added, not because he could afford the additional cost but because he wanted to make their relationship clear.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that. What time is your friend arriving?”
Nolan shrugged. “She’ll get here when she gets here.”
Which was a vague way of saying he had no clue. Brax—who did still speak with Alexa and was acting as go-between—had just said “tomorrow.”
