Chapter 25
Pane
Rowe spends the next week running away from me. Every time I enter a room, she exits faster than a jewel thief escaping the scene of the crime in a Ferrari.
It’s killing me. I want to talk about what happened, about that kiss. Whenever I close my eyes, I still feel the burn of her on my lips. But Rowe doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.
She thinks I’ll be just like all the other men who’ve abandoned her.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I will be. Maybe as soon as all this is over, I’ll feel the pull to leave, to return to my life.
Where will that leave her?
What does it matter if she won’t talk about it? We can’t even kiss, because when we do, she runs like a chaos goblin in the other direction.
Rowe is like a wild animal I’m slowly coaxing to eat out of my hand—extremely distrustful, prowling at the dark edges of the perimeter. But eventually she’ll come around.
At least, I hope so.
Because the ache in my heart from being with her day in and day out, without doing anything about it, is excruciating. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
The guys notice, too—about Rowe, not about my heart.
So much so that it’s become a running joke between Ron, Isaac, and McCauley. They place bets on how fast she can escape a room if I’m in it.
“Rowe, can you take a look at this?” I call out.
Ron and Isaac built the front desk using old doors Ron found in the barn. He had the notion to turn them into a counter, but skirted around telling me, hemming and hawing. Finally, I pointed out everything he’d fixed at the house, and Ron confided in me about his idea. I told him to run with it.
So both men sanded, polished, and finally nailed the slabs together. It’s beautiful, a breathtaking piece.
Rowe’s going to love it.
Isaac wipes the counter with a rag. “I give her three seconds before she scatters like a caught fox.”
“Nah. More like five.” Ron eyes the counter to make sure it’s square. “She’s gonna like it.”
“I say thirty seconds for her to fawn over the piece, throw a ‘looks good’ at Pane, and then hightail it back to painting,” McCauley says as he pulls up drop cloths from the floor.
Isaac winks at me. “Whatever caused this thing between the two of y’all, you may need to do it again to get it out of your system.”
“Classy, Isaac—and nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened to what?”
Rowe appears in the doorway. She wipes the back of her hand across her cheek, where a line of slate-colored paint is smudged.
“Uh, nothing,” Isaac mutters.
She smirks. “Doesn’t sound like nothing.”
I shoot him a scathing look. “It’s that nothing happened to this beautiful front desk. What do you think? Ron and Isaac built it.”
“I supervised,” McCauley jokes.
She steps into the room, making sure to give me a wide berth, and whistles. “Wow. Y’all did great. It’s elegant and original.”
“Just like this place,” I murmur.
