She studied him for a long, serious moment. So long he felt a bead of sweat form on his forehead.
“Have you ever thought about just being you?”
Her question hit him straight in the chest. Most people liked his charm, not realizing that he used it to hide the truth—that ever since his career imploded, he’d felt like a fraud. For a guy whose career depended on being laser focused on the goal, he now felt as if he was caught in a riptide, not knowing which way was up or down. His world had been thrown completely off-kilter.
Sometimes he felt so lost it caused his throat to close and his heart to pound out of his chest. His therapist called it panic attacks. He called it hell. Not that anyone knew. So far he’d been able to keep the anxiety at bay until he was alone. Taters would start whining when one started coming on, as if warning Decker to take a deep breath. Sometimes it worked, other times the anxiety over the direction of his future was too much to contain. When that happened Taters would sit by his side and lean against him in a show of support.
“What you see is what you get,” he lied.
“Who are you trying to convince?”
“You,” he said, and her cheeks turned the lightest shade of pink.
“Why?”
“If you have to ask that then I’m doing something wrong.” Which was a problem, because he didn’t know where the miscommunication was coming from. He’d made it clear that he liked her. Hadn’t he? Maybe not, because she was still wary about his intentions. “Bottom line, I like?—”
“Shhh.” She held up a silencing finger. “Do you hear that?”
He couldn’t hear anything over the way his heart sank when she’d cut him off right as he was about to tell her the truth.
“All I hear is you avoiding the conversation.”
“No. Listen.”
When he was able to shift his focus away from her, he heard it. A gushing sound. No, it was more like a rushing.
“Shit.”
They both took off in a sprint toward the noise. It was coming from the office where his bed was set up. Before they even opened the door, he knew what the gushing was. The wake of water coming out from beneath the office door was an indicator that they had a leak.
He opened the door and that’s when the reality of the situation became clear. An inch of water covered the hardwood and was rising by the minute.
“It’s coming from the bathroom,” Poppy said.
Without another word they were shouldering their way through the adjacent bathroom door, each fighting to get there first. It was the toilet. The pipe connecting it to the wall looked as if it burst.
“I’ll turn it off at the base,” she said, dropping to her knees and crawling behind the toilet. “You call someone to get wet vacs and fans out here to suck up the water. The wood is toast, but I don’t want the water to warp the sub-floor.”
Or drop into the garage. Which was subterranean and sat directly below them.
He watched as she twisted the valve to stop the flow. Only it was like she was at the mouth of a hydrant with a thimble. She twisted and twisted with no luck.
“It’s stuck.”
“Here let me try.”
“Why? Because I’m a woman and not strong enough? I’m telling you, it’s like it’s been glued.”
Decker gently lifted her by the waist and set her aside, then shoved his oversized body into the undersized space between the vanity and toilet. No matter how much strength he used, the valve wouldn’t budge.
“See.” She was right. It was stuck. “How could you not hear this? You were in your room just an hour ago.”
“And it was fine. How is this my fault?” Without another word he turned to leave. She caught his arm. “Seriously, we aren’t even going to talk through a plan?”
“You don’t want to talk, you want to be right, and I can already tell by those big, save-this-house eyes, you’re wrong. So can we put a pin in this and agree to fight later?” he said. “The water is already dripping through the floor and I don’t want it to waterlog and have Sheetrock bursting into the garage.”
“You’re just going to leave me here to what? Wait for the big man to fix the problem?”
