“If you didn’t like the candlesticks, I would’ve given you the receipt to return them.”
Lainey didn’t glance at him as she reversed out of her spot. “If we’d have given Gina the receipt, she would’ve put the eighty-seven bucks back on the gift card that I’m guessing you got from a concerned aunt who was hoping you’d use it to warm up what I suspect is a very cold and architecturalAmerican Psycho–style apartment.”
Elliot didn’t respond immediately, but just as Lainey reached for the stereo, he covered her hand with his. Something about the unexpected contact sent flutters through her stomach. Elliot moved deliberately, and his eyes looked at her with intent. Every single time. Lainey wasn’t used to being around men who seemed so sure of what they wanted from her, even though—in this instance—what he wanted from her was a second of peace.
Since the moment this man had asked for her number in the rain up until he showed up on her lawn, wanting nothing to do with her, Lainey had fantasized about seeing him again—how those large hands might touch her. How they might gather up her face to press his mouth to hers.What would it be like to be with Elliot? To be wanted by him like that again?The thought exited her mind as quickly as it had entered, like a gasp of air.
“How did you know I used a gift card?” he asked, crashing her back to reality.
Lainey’s momentary disappointment that their physical contact hadn’t sent him into a similarly all-consuming daze downshifted into glee almost immediately, because if there was one thing Lainey loved above all else, it was being proven right.
“You drove over an hour to buy a gift that costs just under a hundred dollars for a woman you don’t like. We passed an outlet mall to get here. There was literally no world in which you didn’t use a gift card to buy those candlesticks.” She glanced over at him. “Hey, no judgment here. I’m not above regifting, but I have very little need for anything Pottery Barn has to offer, and I’m guessing the same goes for you, considering it’s mid-March and you’re only now getting around to spending your Christmas gift card. So I just took your crappy, manipulative gift, and…How did you put it before? I ‘worked it out to give us both what we wanted,’ ” she said, paraphrasing in the big, dumb man voice she reserved for all impressions of the opposite sex.
She kept her eyes on the road, feeling the press of his narrowed gaze against her temple.
“Is this a thing you do?” he asked. “Grift poor, innocent people for a quick eighty bucks?”
“Grift?” she balked. “Who am I grifting in this scenario? Pottery Barn? You? This was a victimless crime. You’re just mad that you tried to outmaneuver me, and I wasn’t so dazzled by a set of silver-plated candlesticks that I’d hand over my house. The only person who got grifted was me, because you were too stingy to spend the entire gift card on your cheap tactic. You have a plan for the other thirteen dollars, by the way?”
His hands raked through his wavy hair and gripped at the roots for dear life. He was completely out of his depth. “I can’tbelieve my dream is being held hostage by a con woman. I’m in a waking nightmare.”
“Gil’s collection of lakeside shacks is your dream?” He looked over at her with palpable despair, and she found herself backpedaling. “I mean, there’s obviously soooo much potential there.”
He dragged his hands down to the nape of his neck. “My brother was right. You know how awful he gets when he’s right? I almost quit my job for this. I work for the federal government. I’m remote. I have incredible benefits. I have a pension! Do you know how many thirty-three-year-olds are eligible for pensions?”
“Other people who work for the government?”
“But notmostother people,” he countered. “And I nearly gave it up to live out the plot of a bad movie.”
She was starting to feel a little guilty. Which was inconvenient. “Hey.” She looked over at the man whose hands were now under his glasses. They concealed his face and made him look like a bear cub waking up from a nap. It was confoundingly appealing. “You can still live out your dream! You have six other cabins.”
“Brad condemned the two that sank in the lake.”
“You havefourother cabins!”
“I took onallof my uncle’s debt and back taxes because I believed I owned a Groff property. You know that the first book report I wrote for school was on a children’s biography of Vincent Groff? I idolize that man.”
“I hear he was very gifted, sexually.”
He lifted his head, eyes locked on hers, appearing to consider whether to address her comment or push ahead.
He settled on the latter. “Do you want to know what the best thing I’ve designed in the last five years is? An atrium for aSocial Security office in Maryland that had to look exactly like another Social Security office in Virginia. This was my chance to make something of my own that could stand alongside the likes of Vincent Groff. But now, I’m never getting out from under this money pit. I’ll have to sell the place at a loss. I’m going to have to move to Delaware and live with my religiously conservative brother and his six children. All of their names start withP, and they think vaccines have microchips in them.”
“Microchips to do what?” she asked.
He sighed and looked listlessly out the car window. “They never know.”
Lainey forced her eyes onto the highway stretched out ahead of her. Her stomach was turning inside out. She felt…bad for him.
God, she was so weak! But she knew the feeling of being financially backed into a corner all too well. She didn’t wish it on Elliot, who, underverydifferent circumstances, she might’ve liked.
In her late-night research on her options, she’d discovered that her tree sculptures likely wouldn’t constitute “substantial improvements” to the surrounding property. She’d never be able to sell the place without having rights to the land it sat on, and discovering the amount of admin it would take to Airbnb the place had left her second-guessing her desire to do that on her own, too.
Lainey let out a sigh. “What if I rented the cabin to you? Then you could turn around and rent it to vacationers. No profit shares or revenue percentages. Just a flat weekly rate.”
She allowed her eyes to drift across his baleful expression. Warmth spread beneath her breastbone. It felt damn near heroic, being the source of that look on his face.
“That could work. For, like, two hundred a month?”
