“Thank you, for the ride,” she finally said.
She gave it a moment, hoping he would say something, do something, but when he didn’t, she turned and began to walk next door to the ADU.
“Do you want to come in for a drink?” he asked when she got a few feet away.
“No.” She glanced over her shoulder, then repeated the same line he’d given her the first night they met when she thought he was rejecting her invitation to come inside. “I don’t want a drink.”
19
AJ helpedPoppy out of her coat and then hung it on the coat rack beside the door. Hearing her callback to the first night they met was putting a lot of ideas in his head and he was having a hard time,literally, not cupping her face backing her against the wall, and showing her just how much he’d missed her.
“Wow, this place is really cute.” He watched as she headed straight to the built-in bookshelves on either side of the divider between the family room and dining room. “The woodwork is phenomenal.”
That was exactly what had caused him to book the Airbnb from the photos he’d seen online.
“My house, the house I bought, is a craftsman. I’m going to be renovating, trying to bring it back to life.”
“You bought a house?” This was the first he’d heard of it, but then again, why would he have heard anything?
She ran her fingers over the shelves like they were priceless jewels. “Yeah. I figured it was time to grow up. And I’vealwayswanted to live in Hope Falls. The housing market is crazy, the prices just keep going up every year. And the nanny position comes with room and board, so…”
“I can help you.”
She spun around. “What?”
“I can help you renovate.”
“Oh, that reminds me, did you play handyman the night you stayed?”
He nodded.
“Why? Why did you fix all that stuff?”
“They all needed to be fixed.”
She stared at him and let out a little huff of laughter. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It is simple. People complicate things.”
“They sure as shit do.” She turned around and ran her fingers over the ornate wood detailing on the corbels.
As much as AJ was enjoying this conversation, he was having a difficult time not walking over and stripping her out of her dress. The material molded to her like a second skin, accenting her curves in all the right places. At dinner it took a Herculean amount of self-control not to lean over and whisper in her ear how sexy she looked as he dragged his knuckles softly across her collarbone before letting his fingertips dip down between her supple mounds and…
“I appreciate you offering to help, but this is going to be amajorproject,majorrenovations.”
Fuck.He was doing it again. This woman drove him to distraction. She drove him fucking crazy.
“Okay.” He was in town until the first of the year, and he had no plan on taking on any private contracts while he was still technically on active duty because he would have to get them approved by his commanding officer, and it honestly wasn’t worth the headache.
“You can do home renovations?” she questioned.
“I worked construction in college. Papou taught me a lot growing up, and then my therapist freshman year thought itwould be good exposure therapy to be in a loud, dirty, chaotic environment I couldn’t normally function in.”
Poppy’s eyes widened and filled with concern. “That sounds… horrible…for you. I’m so sorry.”
Some peoplesaidthey were sorry, AJ could tell Poppywas.
“It wasn’t bad, actually. It helped. I would have never made it through basic or half of my deployments if I hadn’t done that. I learned coping skills I still use today. I was able to tolerate being on-site with noise cancelling headphones, and the work itself was satisfying. I enjoyed creating something from nothing. And it turned out I had an aptitude for it. A lot of construction is math. After a year, I had the opportunity to apprentice under a master woodworker, which I did, so I was able to learn an even more specialized craft. Our junior year, Niko got his real estate license, and we started flipping houses. It was his plan B if baseball didn’t work out. He thought we were going to be the next Property Brothers.”
