Except I couldn’t stop staring at her face. At the way herjaw clenched. The stiffness of her cheek and tremble of that chin. That expression—that was humiliation. I remembered that look well. I could practically feel it. The way it burned so hot it hurt to exist.
“Stop,” I said.
She ignored me. She was nearly done.
She tossed a tool into her box.Clank.
“Stop!” I repeated, louder.
She strode angrily to the sink and reached for the flashlight I’d set on the counter, but she was apparently too flustered to grab it. Instead, she knocked it sideways. It skittered off the marble, clattering to the ground.
“Shit,” she cursed. She squatted down to pick it up.
But I was there first.
I bent down and gripped the long metal cylinder, pulling it out of reach. She narrowed her eyes once more, and for a moment, we were in a standoff.
At this angle, with me leaning over her and her poised like a runner on the starting line, I was struck once more by how attractive she was. A little more curvy than the supermodels the magazines loved to matchmake me with. A little plump in all the right places. I could see her squatted down in a lot less clothing, a skirt flipping up in the wind, her lips in an ‘o’ of surprise; her fingers brought up to them in anoopsies!
My dick, ever the obedient fuck, jumped.
I was reprehensible.
“Give me my goddamned flashlight,” she hissed, standing up to meet my eye. It didn’t work. She was still at least a foot shorter than I was. I had to tuck my chin to look at her properly.
“You swear too much,” I said.Hypocrite.
“You prefer your plumbers to be more ladylike?”
She reached for the flashlight, but I jerked it away. I wanted, selfishly, to keep looking at her. To take an inventory ofeverything I saw. A loose bobby pin near her temple. The little bow above her top lip. Something in cursive tattooed to the inside of her left wrist. A name patch, upside down on her tied-up coveralls. I could still make it out.
Winona.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Winona asked, starting to look alarmed again.
What the fuckwasI doing? But the words came out before I could stop them. “Stay, Winona. Fix it.”
Her eyes flashed in surprise at me using her name. Then she glanced down at the still-visible name patch. She was sharp.
She narrowed her eyes. They moved to the flashlight still in my hand. “Lodge itdown, b’y.”
I frowned. “What?”
Winona clenched her jaw, grabbing for the flashlight once more.
This time, I let her take it. What the hell was that?Lodge it down?Was that English?
She slammed the flashlight into her box.
I shouldn’t have said anything. Iwantedher to go. Or I had, a moment ago. Still I heard myself say, “Bill me double whatever Sal offered you. Triple. Whatever.”
“She was already paying me triple my emergency rate.”
“Then triple that.”
Winona’s jaw dropped, but only for a moment. She swung a hand to the still-open cupboard. “You can get this fixed for a fraction of that. Especially since it’s almost done.”
“Does it look like I care about how much it will cost?” It was a dickish thing to say. But I had very likely made more money in the time we’d been in this room together than she did in a year. That was just an ugly fact.
