She cleared her throat, jerking back toward the computer. “You said you spend every morning in the workshop. But sometimes you go somewhere and come back all…” She waved a hand, leaning in even closer to the screen. “Sweaty.”
Dell huffed a confused laugh. Yeah, a couple times a week, he made it a habit to run on the beach with the dogs before retreating to the workshop. Well, with all the dogs except Young, whom he still didn’t quite trust to stay with the pack. He felt most at home within the foothills, but he never wanted to forget—to stop appreciating—that he lived by the ocean, too.
Anyway, he didn’t know what that had to do with bookshelves.
“If you don’t want me building your bookshelves, Mae, that’s fine. It was just an offer.”
Her fingers paused above her pink keyboard.
“Could I send you some of the ones I’ve been looking at? See if you’d be up for the designs?”
“That’d be a good place to start, yeah. But I can do anything.”
“What’s your going rate?”
His rate? He scratched at his beard. Contemplated what to tell her. He’d been planning on just doing it for his own personal enjoyment. And he didn’t need money. But he understood Mae’s desire to be taken seriously as a businessperson.
“Cost of materials,” he eventually said with a shrug.
“That’s it?”
“Wood’s pretty damn expensive these days.”
“I know. I just got the Gutierrezes’s invoice.”
She kept staring at him.
He shrugged again. He wasn’t going to beg to make the damn bookshelves if she didn’t want him to.
Eventually, she bit her lip again. Her eyes softened when she asked, “Could I come with you to look at lumber?”
Dell’s mouth opened and closed. That…was a reasonable request, he supposed; Mae should obviously pick out the kind of wood she wanted. But damn if that didn’t sound like some kind of seduction to Dell’s ears.
Going to the lumberyard was Dell’s private time.
Even though…admittedly, almost everything he did was his private time, but whatever, it was fucking different.
“Okay,” he eventually said, the single word stumbling awkwardly out of his mouth.
Mae smiled at him again. Her dimple punctuated her left cheek like an exclamation point. “Thank you,” she said.
And before Dell could stutter any more about this now-strange situation he had somehow gotten himself into, he left.
eight
“Why doyou go all the way to Tillamook to buy lumber? Newport has to have some options.”
Dell glanced in his rearview mirror before backing out of the drive.
The real answer was that the employees at the lumberyard outside Tillamook never gave Dell shit about his nails. An employee at the place in Newport had, once. And even though, in general, Dell didn’t find Tillamook a necessarily more welcoming place than Newport—like any city, even on the coast, he preferred to simply avoid it when he could—he had learned you could never fully trust the way any place anywhere would treat you. So he stuck to the places that worked. Let go of the ones that didn’t.
“I like the place in Tillamook.”
Mae grunted.
They’d only been in the truck for five minutes, but Mae’s grumpiness was apparent. Dell tried to ignore it. Just like he tried to ignore his awareness that this was the first time she’d ever ridden in his truck. That he was closer to her, now, than he generally let himself be for any serious amount of time. That she’d be close enough to smell and touch for the next hour.
“I want to say something you’re going to give me shit for,” she said five minutes later, once he’d navigated onto 101.
