EIGHT
CLAIRE HAD GONE TOSPARKS’S office to kill Luke and ended up agreeing to go away with him for the weekend. Something was seriously wrong with her.
She pulled into the driveway of the flip house and climbed out of her truck. Back at the jobsite, she’d gone over the layout for the fifth floor fixtures with her crew in case they managed to finish the main floor rough in. She didn’t think they’d get to it. They were fast, but there was still a lot of work to be done. She didn’t want them stalling out if they did manage to finish. Either way, she could call for an inspection for next week.
Luke’s job was right on schedule – at least her part of it. That left sorting the flip house and with her out of town for the weekend, it would stall which meant she had to make some progress tonight. Still unsure how she ended up agreeing to go away with Luke, she unlocked the deadbolt on the side door and went inside, locking the door behind her. The neighborhood was definitely on the rise but there were still rough patches. It made sense to be careful.
Luke paid her dad’s bill for the whole year – Christ – the day he found out about it. Long before they’d become physically involved. She didn’t want to believe him when he said he’d done it because he could and not because he expected anything from her. It was safer to think he was a prick, but she hadn’t sensed any guile or deceit when he spoke about it. She couldn’t help but believe him so when he’d asked her to go away with him she said okay.
She could make up reasons for why she was doing it or lie to herself about how she felt. The truth was she wanted to go. She loved to travel or at least loved the idea of it. Except for a few family vacations to Nags Head over the summer growing up and one wild weekend on the coast after she graduated from NC State, she hadn’t really gone anywhere. She’d never even been out of the state.
But even more important, she wanted to see where this thing – whatever it was – with Luke was going. After her disappearing act that morning, she decided she was finished running. She was done being a chicken. She’d keep her heart safe, or at least as safe as she could manage. She wasn’t crazy, and Luke wasn’t known as a one woman man, but for now she’d give herself over to this thing they had together. And pray when the time came to leave, she was strong enough to do it.
After she agreed to go with him, she’d practically bolted from the trailer. Fighting with him – hell just being near him – got her pulse racing and her nerves arcing to life. She couldn’t be close to him and not want him, and the last thing she needed was for Sparks or worse, one of her crew to walk into the trailer and find Luke fucking her on the desk. She didn’t trust herself to kiss him and not give him anything he wanted. Not until she burned him out of her system anyway.
She wasn’t a slut, but she’d always liked sex. She’d had her fair share of men, probably not as many as Luke had women, but enough to know that the way their bodies reacted to each other was different. What they’d done together last night was something more entirely. She didn’t even know what to call it. Sex, fucking weren’t big enough words for what she’d felt when Luke was inside her. Moving with her. Shattering with her. He felt it, too. She could tell he did by the way he held her when he came. She planned to do it again, as many times as it took for her to be able to look at him and not want him.
Maybe the weekend would be enough to sate her overwhelming craving for him. Maybe.
Claire wandered through the rooms, checking the progress and mentally cataloguing what still needed to be done. It was early spring, but in the south even March could get pretty warm and the heat from the day had built up in the closed up house, making the air stuffy and hot. It was worse on the second floor, and Claire slid open the windows to try to catch a breeze.
She’d debated replacing the old windows with new energy efficient ones, but it was difficult and expensive to find anything that had near the character of the originals. In the end, she decided to keep the windows with their wavy glass and diamond shaped panes. She fixed the broken cords and weights, replaced a few panes and reglazed everything. The results looked and worked as good as new but maintained the charm of the original house, something she hoped buyers appreciated.
She was so far into this house. It sucked away all her available capital and a sizeable bank loan to buy it and start the reno, but it was still a good investment. If she could finish it and sell it before her profits got eaten up in interest payments she’s make a little money and have enough to start her next flip. She needed to stay right on top of it and maybe catch a break, or at the very least not have anything else big go wrong, but it was totally doable.
Claire stood in the upstairs hallway and gazed down the craftsman style wooden staircase. She squinted her eyes and looked past the bare drywall and construction mess to see the house as it would look when it was finished. Dark oak staircase with simple carved details, the stained glass window back lit on the landing, a reproduction chandelier hanging in the entryway in front of a solid oak front door with leaded glass inset. It would be a beautiful home – one she could be proud of.
First she had to finish it. The sheet rockers had been in to hang the wall board but she’d asked them to leave the taping and mudding for her. It was dirty time consuming work. If her budget hadn’t taken such a hit with the asbestos and cabinets, she’d have hired it out, but it was something she could handle by herself to save money.
If she worked fast she could get a couple of rooms done before she ran home to throw things into a suitcase for the weekend. That way she could sand and put on the second coat when she got back on Monday. She could sleep when she was dead, she thought, jogging down the steps.
She’d be glad when she could hang the fixtures. She’d wired for temporary power but she couldn’t wait to see the space lit the way it was meant to be. Shoving her trowel and pan into a grocery bag hung over her arm, she started half dragging half carrying the five gallon bucket of joint compound up the steps.
It weighed a ton and took forever, but she managed to get it upstairs without scratching the stair treads. She picked one of the smaller bedrooms, hung her utility light from the loose wire wound up in the box for the ceiling fixture and plugged it and her paint spattered CD player into the extension cord. She cranked a mixture of Adele, Jennifer Nettles and Annie Lenox loud enough for it to drown out her thoughts and went to work mudding and taping the seams between the wallboard.
Packing, she hadn’t put any thought into what she was going to take. Hell, she’d been so thrown by the entire thing, she hadn’t even bothered to ask Luke where they were going. Christ, she was losing her mind.
Luke said they had to go to some kind of opening or dedication, which probably meant cocktail dress. Her work rarely called for anything other than jeans and T-shirts. Claire had a few professional outfits and some church clothes but aside from a slutty club dress she’d bought in a moment of insanity, she didn’t have anything even close to a cocktail dress.
Crap.
She smoothed the webbed tape over the joint and covered it with mud, angling her trowel to make the seam as flat as possible. A smart woman would have left herself time to go shopping before she committed herself to a weekend away. She placed the next piece of webbed tape, cutting it with the blade of her trowel. A smart woman would have at least asked where they were going.Well hell, she thought, smoothing on more mud. She didn’t need the weekend trip to tell her she wasn’t smart where Luke was concerned.
The other women he’d been with would know how to dress for this kind of stuff. He was used to having incredibly beautiful, polished women on his arm. Women who would make other men envy him, not short grubby contractors with unmanicured nails and a wardrobe of Carhart and cotton. Cringing at the thought of disappointing him, Claire accidentally let the trowel slip digging a gouge in what had been a smooth seam.
She shook her head to clear it. When she finished, she’d go home and put together the best of what she had and it would have to be good enough. Right now, she needed to concentrate on the job in front of her. Maybe next time, Luke would pick more appropriate arm candy and take one of his supermodels. She hated the way the thought made her feel and threw herself into what had always served her best, finishing the work.
By the time she finished mudding and taping the first wall, she’d hit her stride. She sangNo More I Love Youswith Annie Lennox, wentRolling in the Deepwith Adele and rocked along with Jennifer Nettles’sThat Girl. The playlist was into its third repeat when she finished the second small bedroom and her growling stomach made her take a break. If she wanted to finish the upstairs, or at least the bedrooms before she went out of town, she couldn’t take time to go out for food. She should have grabbed a sub on her way over.
She dug her phone out of her pocket to call for takeout and was shocked when she saw the time. Half past ten. Well hell, the corner pizza joint stopped delivering half an hour ago. Unless she wanted to waste an hour running around looking for someplace that was still open, she’d just have to work hungry. If she hurried, maybe she could finish by two and hit the twenty-four hour market on the way home. That would leave her just enough time to throw stuff into her suitcase – something she refused to think about again until she was standing in front of her closet – and catch a couple of hours of sleep before Luke sent the car to pick her up. Not ideal, but she could make it work.
Resigned to her growling stomach, she started to tuck her phone back into her pocket when it started to ring. The screen showed a number she didn’t recognized.
“Hello,” she answered, curious to see who was calling her so late.
“Hi gorgeous,” said Luke.
“I thought you were going to leave me alone until tomorrow morning,” she said with a smile, surprised at how her body softened at just the sound of his voice.
