Erica dropped the cord and smacked her forehead once he was out of sight. Her lips mouthed a prayer for mercy, and then she stumbled after him. If she could barely survive a conversation in his shop, how would she last through an entire visit like this?
“Why? You like Savage Garden?” she questioned, composed and casual.
“Never heard of them. Just sounds like a nice song.” As soon as the kitchen was in sight, he let out a low whistle at the mess.
“I was just about to grab towels from upstairs.”
If it were possible, the kitchen looked even worse than a moment ago when she went to answer the door. Erica frowned and wondered if she had bitten off more than she could chew.
Dominic began to roll up the long sleeves of his button-up shirt. The muscles and veins on his forearms rippled, and she tore her eyes away to avoid staring. “Why don’t you go get those?”
Without realizing it, Erica was already down the hall and rushing up the stairs to get the towels like an assistant. Once she was at the top of the stairs, she stopped and gave herself a perturbed look in the bathroom mirror. Why on earth was she obeying him like a trained dog? First, she let him just waltz into her home, and now she dashed around at his bidding? She shook her head and let out a long breath.
Just let him help. He’s trying to be nice.
She gathered up the set of old, frayed towels she reserved for projects or dirty jobs and hurried back downstairs. Dominic was in the middle of drying off the last of the new piping pieces with a dish rag when she dropped to her knees to sop up the puddles. He grabbed one of the towels she offered and started on the other side of the kitchen where the water had spread.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said as she pushed the coarse cloth across the floor.
“I know, but I want to.”
Erica huffed a laugh. “It seems like a lot of people around here really like to help.”
“It makes people feel good when they know they’ve helped someone out who needs it.”
“But I don’t need it.” Erica picked up her dripping towel and glanced around for a spot to put it. “I know what I’m doing.” A pause of silence provoked her to meet Dominic’s gaze, so touched with restrained laughter that she bristled. “Well, I do!”
“Then why don’t you go hang that on your back-porch railing. The sun will dry it out.”
That was actually a smart idea, but she refused to say it aloud.
After a moment, she thought of another plan. She dropped the towel, ducked into the pantry, and pulled out her mop bucket. Erica set it under one of the open pipes, then plopped the soaked towel in the porcelain sink.
Dominic laughed. “Did you really just do that?”
She wouldn’t look at him and went to work on putting the piping pieces together with the rubber washers provided in the kit. “It was just as good of an idea as yours.”
Dominic dropped his towel into the sink along with hers. “You just made more work for yourself. You’ll have to wash out the mop bucket before you clean the floor with it again. And you’ll have to move the bucket to clean out the cabinet.”
Once again, he had a point, but she was glad for the lack of irritation in his voice. If he had scolded her instead, she might not have stayed so calm.
Suddenly, she heard her mother’s reprimand in her ear.Stop being so difficult. It wasn’t like her to be so prideful that she’d completely go out of her way to ignore a sound suggestion. But when Dominic ordered her around, telling her to get the towels and then what to do with them, something came over her. Sheneeded to prove to herself that he couldn’t control her, even if it meant doing the opposite of what he told her.
With an exaggerated sigh, Erica went to the sink and scooped up the towels to take them outside like he had originally told her. “Get yourself together,” she muttered to herself once she was outside. “He’s just trying to help.”
Dominic, with all the charm that seemed to come just so easy and natural for him, wasn’t trying to be patronizing. He was trying to be a gentleman, and she should have let him. What was wrong with her? This was a great opportunity, and she was ruining it. Was that what she wanted? To scare him off with her stubbornness? She already knew she had some self-destructive tendencies, but this was a new level of bullheadedness.
After she hung the towels over the railing, Erica turned and walked back into the house, shoulders back and chin up. Like turning the pressure valve on an overheated machine, she did her best to loosen her defenses without totally opening up. That would definitely ruin everything.
Dominic squatted in front of the existing piping to make sure the measurements were precise, some of the new PVC in his hands. She had already measured and cut the PVC earlier, but she let him do what he wanted without a word of protest.
“You probably don’t even need to replace this,” he said, his eyes still on the plumbing. “The metal seems to be in fine condition. You could just give the P-trap a good washing and reinstall it.”
Now that the floor was somewhat dry, Erica was free to sit cross-legged beside him and watch his deft hands make quick work of the assembly. “I don’t want it to rust out later.”
“I have the same pipes in my house. They shouldn’t rust.” He shrugged. “Rot, maybe, but not rust. You can have rot with the PVC too.”
Erica held back the impulse to argue. Her stare trailed up his arm, to his muscled shoulders, and her stomach clenched at the way they bunched and moved beneath his shirt as he twisted the nuts around the joints. If she had no self-control at all, she would have reached out to touch those muscles and see if they were as rock-solid as they looked. She had never been this close to a man while he worked like this. At least not one so ripped and undeniably handsome. What really fascinated her was the calm, resolute quality of his eyes, confident and so sure of himself in every way.
