“But I would prefer to be dressed like this. Too bad the guy you were looking for didn’t arrive.”
I shrugged. “A man like that would be entirely too high maintenance.”
“So you prefer someone a little more ... down to earth?”
I drank him in: His shirt had a new rip, dirt streaked his sweatpants, and a smudge sat beside his nose. Not at all as Trista had described him. Did Blake Malone have a not-so-evil twin?
“Uh-huh.”
So articulate, Stella.
He lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe away sweat, and I sucked in a breath at the flash of abs.
“Yo, lovebirds. Get to work,” came a cry from the site manager. “Wait! Who are you?”
She pulled me aside to question me, politely blessed me out for being late, and then put me to work next to Malone, which was both a reward and a punishment.
I hit my thumb with my own hammer at least three times because he was that distracting.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but it felt as though each time I took a peek at him, he looked away suddenly, as if he had been studying me, too.
“Wanna grab a pizza together?” Malone asked when we reached the apartment complex. I’d offered to give him a ride home, and he’d accepted that, as well as my story about how the volunteers must’ve knocked on the wrong door.
“Yes, but no,” I said.
We got out of the car, and he looked at me as if I had three heads. “You don’t like pizza?”
“No, I like pizza.”
“You don’t like me?”
“No, I like you,” I said, my words surprising me with their truth. “Maybe I like you a little too much.”
An eyebrow arched over his aviators. “And that’s a problem?”
By now we stood in the breezeway, each poised in front of our respective doors. I weighed whether honesty was the best policy.
“I just got out of a long relationship.”
“Ah.”
“And I promised myself that I would wait before I got into another one.”
He leaned against his doorframe, and I was reminded of why women love to watch actors lean and to read about men leaning. Malone leaned especially well, with his arms crossed and his biceps straining at the cuffs of his T-shirt.
“I was just offering pizza,” he said, his voice as innocent as his expression was not.
“Offering to get ‘just pizza’ with someone whose name you don’t know,” I said. “Right.”
“Yes, because it’s the neighborly thing to do,” he said. “Besides, I do know your name. You’re Stella Stark. I bet you’re the one who doesn’t knowmyname.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You’re Blake Malone.”
Was it my imagination, or did he flinch ever so slightly? I guessed hitting on a woman while technically still married would do that to a guy. Flinch or no, he definitely frowned for a split second before recovering his composure. “Yeah, but I prefer to go by Malone.”
Maybe he felt guilty?
Not that he was wearing a wedding band.
