Because he was definitely that kind of guy. The kind that wouldlose a finger, then fix it with a Band-Aid. And it was all these thoughts that pushed her to at least call his name. “Mr. Jackson?” she asked, in a more wavery way than she would have liked. She had to clear her throat and try again.
But he either didn’t hear her, or couldn’t respond.
All she could make out was the hum of what sounded like a refrigerator. The ticking of a clock. Theplinkof water dripping into a sink, almost ominously. And there was nothing to be seen through that small crack. Just darkness, deep and dense, fringed with the dimmest of lights.
It was like looking into an abyss.
She definitely didn’t want to plunge into that.
But she took a calming breath, and gave the door a little push anyway. Just a little one, and with her hand half over her eyes as she did, in case horrors were on the other side.Blood all over the walls, she thought, as she gingerly parted her fingers.
And saw instead a string of fairy lights, glowing and winking at her through that little gap. Like the kind of thing she had in her store, and he had definitely seemed to hate. Yet there they were, pretty enough that she dropped her hand. She stepped closer to them, as if they might disappear if she did.
But they didn’t.
Instead, she saw other, similar stuff.
There was a picture on the wall of a kitten in a flower pot. Then, farther down, another one—a painting of a homely cottage surrounded by honeysuckles, of the sort she had always wanted to live in. It looked the way she wanted her store to be. Like something from a long-forgotten and very romantic fairy tale.
And true, it was hung pretty crookedly.
Plus it seemed to be covering what looked to be a big hole in the wall.
But even so, it threw her a little. As did everything else. Likethe knitted throw over the collapsing couch that looked as familiar to her as the painting had. Or the tiny cushion he had placed in one corner of it. Or the stacks of what looked inexplicably like VHS tapes all over the place.
Though it wasn’t the fact that they were VHS tapes that really boggled her mind.
It was the titles on the covers.
They were all soft and nostalgia-dipped family movies, and gentle romances set in small towns. She saw copies of things likeSplashandWillow, in amongst what looked like the collected works of John Hughes. He seemed to have a thing for John Candy, which she supposed made some kind of sense in one way. The man often played misunderstood losers, as far as she recalled.
But in another way it just seemed incredible.
If she’d been forced to guess what kind of movies he liked before now, she’d have said anything with Jason Statham in it. Or maybe John Cena. Or even just something with the wordsbone cruncherin the title.
Yet somehow there was no bone crunching here.
He didn’t even appear to have a blood-curdling type of hobby, like juggling chain saws or stuffing roadkill and mounting it on his walls. Instead, he seemed to have a thing about fixing music boxes and doing crossword puzzles and oh holy moly, was that some kind of knitting project? It was, it actually was. It looked like he was making a goddamn tea cozy, for the love of heck—and not even in any kind of grumpy colors. No, these were practically pastels.
He almost had a rainbow going on there.
And what kind of person did that make him?
She had no idea. But definitely not the one everybody in town thought they knew. Bare minimum, he was a lot softer and more wholesome than he looked. And in ways she wasn’t quite sure howto process, or even fully believe in. She had to touch the cozy, just to make sure it was real.
Then absolutely regretted it, for two very big reasons.
First: because all it did was prove this was exactly what it looked like.
And second: because she proved it at the exact moment that Jack Jackson decided to stride into the room, and completely caught her in the act. In fact, she actually had his tea cozy in her hands when he found her there. Even though she couldn’t remember picking it up. She’d only meant to lightly touch it, and yet here she was. Fully fondling his secret things with her massively intrusive fingers. Like a thief of his feelings, she found herself thinking, and hated how accurate that seemed.
Hell, it was practically written all over his face.
He looked deeply disturbed by what she was doing.
So much so, in fact, that she dropped his tea cozy. Now his work was sprawled all over the floor, inside out and upside down and probably unraveled beyond repair. She had ruined it, and there was nothing she could do to fix that. She couldn’t even apologize, because the moment he walked in, her brain had just seized up. And not just out of terror or guilt.
No, there was also what he was wearing.
