“Hold still,” he says, his voice low and focused.
“I am holding still.”
“You’re vibrating.”
I am vibrating on a molecular level, but still.
“That’s just my natural state of panic. Plus, it’s roughly four hundred degrees up here, and I think my body is trying to escape through sweat alone.”
His hands work methodically at the tangles, and I try very hard not to notice how his forearms flex as he manipulates the wires with a competence that screams he’s good at other things too, or how his jaw ticks with concentration in a way that makes me want to trace it with my finger, or how a bead of sweat is slowly making its way down his neck in a path I suddenly want to follow with my tongue, which is absolutely not helpful right now.
Did I just say that?
“This is impressive,” he says, freeing my wrist and moving to work on the lights around my ankle. “I’ve seen crime scenes with less complex knot work. You could teach a class.”
“I aim to please.”
He crouches down to work on my ankle, which puts him entirely too close to entirely too much of me. This should not be as distracting as it is.
“You know,” he says conversationally, “most people would just ask for help instead of creating an elaborate light sculpture in an attic.”
“Most people are quitters.”
“Most people have functioning survival instincts.”
“Where’s the fun in that? Also, survival is overrated. Darwin had some good points, but he never worked in a resort like this one.”
He looks up at me, and those soft brown eyes are entirely too close to my face, close enough that I can see the darker ring around his iris and the laugh lines at the corners that suggest he smiles more than he lets on. “Fun. Right. Because getting strangled by decorative lighting while conducting illegal searches is everyone’s idea of a good time.”
“Technically, I work here. So it’s not illegal; it’s just... an enthusiastically thorough employee orientation. I’m currently learning about storage solutions.”
His mouth twitches. It might be the beginning of a smile, or he might be fighting an aneurysm. With him, it’s hard to tell.
“There,” he says, freeing my ankle with a final twist and standing up with the fluid grace of someone who definitely works out. “You’re liberated.”
“My hero,” I say, carefully extracting myself from the remaining lights and trying not to think about how his hands felt on my skin. “How ever can I repay you? I don’t have much, but I can offer you a free pass to our green pool or possibly a slightly used cinnamon roll.”
He frowns at the thought. “Stay out of trouble for more than five minutes.”
“Where’s the challenge in that? Also, have you met me? Five minutes feels ambitious.”
He shakes his head, and this time I’m sure I catch the ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You’re impossible.”
“I prefer enthusiastically challenging,” I counter.
“I prefer walking disaster with a questionable talent for finding evidence.”
I pause for a moment because that last part sounded almost like a compliment. “Evidence?”
“You were looking for information about your mysterious owner, weren’t you?” He says it like a statement, not a question, because I guess I’m that transparent.
I debate lying, but the heat has melted my ability to be deceptive, and also, he just rescued me from Christmas decorations, so I feel like I owe him some honesty.
“Maybe.”
“Find anything interesting before you got attacked by festive decorations?” He gives me a look that suggests I try honesty this time.
“Just a lot of broken pool equipment, some tax returns from 1987 that I’m pretty sure are meaningless, and what I’m pretty sure is a family of geckos running a small real estate operation in the corner. They seem very organized.”
