“I can see that,” he says.
This is absolutely none of my business and I need to know everything.Bennie would be so proud.
He might ask “What about a different building?” but it’s too muffled so I crack the window—barely—to hear. Becausea squatting, cheating, lying eavesdropper is who I am now. “I honestly don’t care where I am.”
I don’t need to know what’s being said into his ear to know thatI don’t care where I amis a red-flag line if there ever was one.
“Mhm.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “What’s the market look like there?” This is a business call, and I’d bet all the money I don’t have that it’s regarding the expansion he mentioned. “It’d be more niche, that’s for sure ... yeah ... and more seasonal.”
He’s pacing again.
Frank jumps with a tennis ball in his mouth until Nash pinches the phone between his ear and shoulder to throw the ball across the yard.
“I’d like to move fast,” he says again. “Get it going in some capacity by the fall if possible. I don’t want to bleed money. Especially if we buy a new building ... renting could work ... yeah, I’d run everything. Skeleton staff. Maybe two?”
Pause.
“Mhm.”
Pause.
“Most of the year I’d want to be there. More time here in the summer, I think.”
He chuckles and sits on the edge of a lawn chair.
“That’s what I pay you for,” he says. “Alright, man. Thanks ... yeah ... you too.”
The call ends, and my exhale gushes out of me like floodwaters through a dam.
He tosses the phone on the chair and pets Frank, sipping his coffee while I sift through the information I was just given.
He’s moving forward with expansion, he wants it to happen fast, and he wants to live there. After he told me he didn’t want me to marry someone else and that he could be in Fontain.
There’s no stopping the wind from blowing, I guess.
It has nothing to do with me, but it lands like a personal attack. He wanted to kiss me, I wanted to kiss him. I all but screamed that I’m still in love with him. But here we are.
It’s not steady, it’s him still having the itch to wander.
And yet I can’t stop watching him.
Not as he stands.
Nor as he drops his pants and takes my jaw down right along with them.
Not a scrap of underwear in sight, I slap my hand over my mouth. Nash’s naked body makes me screamholy shit!in the best way possible.
He dives into the pool in a cool naked motion and begins swimming laps, oblivious to the Peeping Tom tracking his every movement as the snare drum of my pulse nearly knocks me out.
I crawl to my phone then back to the window, fumbling for my sister’s number.
“It’s our former sister turned treasure hunter,” Reese says. “I have you on speaker with Remy and Mom.”
They yellhiin unison, but there’s no time for pleasantries.
“I have a situation,” I whisper, closing the window slightly. “An emergency situation. It’s Nash. He’s—I don’t know. Naked in a pool.”
Three screechedwhats make me wince.
