Page 29 of The Heartbreaker Next Door

Her nose scrunched in the cutest way, as if the idea literally stank. “I’m not going to go back on a deal my uncle made. I didn’t know Walter that well, but I do know he was a man of his word. I’m going to honor that.”

I had not anticipated that. I’d braced for a negotiation, a protracted battle of wills, or at the very least some financial hit to the ranch. Instead, she was being…accommodating. Generous. It left me off-balance, as if there were a step missing on the staircase.

“Okay, on one condition.”

Her eyes narrowed, and I noticed a flush rise up on her cheeks. “What’s that?”

“That I can help with the repairs. If you’re going to use the workshop, I want to be there to oversee.”

“Oversee?” she repeated.

“I’ll supervise any project involving power tools, heavy lifting, or lumber.”

She considered this with a suspicious squint. “You sound like you’ve already drafted the safety protocols.”

“I have them saved as a template,” I stated flatly.

She laughed, and the sweet sound sent goosebumps down my forearms.

Challenge twinkled in her eyes as she narrowed them. “What if I say no?”

“It’s non-negotiable.”

“Are you afraid I’ll burn the barn down, or is this just control issues?”

“It’s not about control, I like to think of it as risk management.”

“That sounds like something someone would say right before they micromanage your entire existence.”

I knew she was joking, but if I could do that, I felt like the world would run a lot smoother.

10

PORCHES, POWER TOOLS, AND PANCAKES

Felicity

Ishot upright, heart hammering as if I’d just sprinted a mile, the ghost of Dean Lockhart’s hands still burning through the fabric of my very real, very disappointing pajamas. I picked up my phone from the nightstand. It was four a.m. on a Saturday. I let out a frustrated sigh as I lay back down. The hour was ungodly. Maverick was still asleep, and this was a prime opportunity for a single mom to catch up on sleep, but my blood was fizzing like it had been carbonated in my veins. And it was Dean’s fault.

The memory of my dream was already searing itself into the part of my brain responsible for both shame and satisfaction. In it, I’d been in the office, finishing up some paperwork. Dean walked in wearing a button-down so crisp it looked illegal in three states, and before I could ask what he wanted, he’d stalked over, yanked the paperwork out from under my pen, and—without so much as a hello—picked me up and laid me down on my desk. My skirt hitched up, his mouth at my ear, his hands everywhere. There was a lot of dirty talk, and at one point I’m pretty sure he’d threatened to staple me to the desk, which, in the dream, was hot. I woke up right before the good stuff that would have sent HR into a tailspin.

My entire body tingled with awareness. When I looked in the oval mirror that was set in the corner of the room, my cheeks were so pink they matched with my Miss Piggy pajamas.

Since I seriously doubted I would be able to fall back to sleep, I decided to channel my, um, enthusiasm into productivity. There was a ton of work to do on the house, and every time I got out any tools, Maverick pretended they were light sabers or swords, or any other weapon his four-year-old mind could imagine. This morning, though, I had a sacred three-hour window before he typically woke up and a driving need to distract myself from the kind of fantasies that would make my therapist’s hair turn white.

So, as I waited for the coffee pot to brew, I watched three YouTube videos about porch repairs, slid on my steel-toed Timberlands, and headed out to begin the big project for the weekend: the porch.

I set up floodlights and my laptop on a folding chair and got to work.

Immediately, I realized the porch had not just been rickety, it had been actively plotting my demise. The bottom step sagged nearly to the ground, and the spindle railings shrugged off wood glue like a personal insult. After a quick assessment, I was sure I needed to replace the bottom step and the railing. I made the rookie mistake of bracing one loose post with my foot while I drilled, which nearly resulted in a disaster and a string of swear words that would haunt the porch until the next renovation. I was about to attempt a complicated maneuver involving a bungee cord, a clamp, and a very optimistic belief in physics when I heard the crunch of gravel and the low, throaty snarl of a pickup truck.

I froze, half-crouched over an uncooperative spindle. I knew who it was without turning around. My heart skipped several beats and then remembered I hadn’t changed out of my pajamas to start work. I was still in my oversized sweats and an oversized shirt with a Muppet character that read Kissy Kissy, Kermy. I flashed back to the dream, but this time I was wearing my pajamas. I shook my head to try and erase the images and nearly smacked my own forehead with the cordless drill as I stood up, trying to look like a woman who totally knew what she was doing and absolutely did not need rescuing.

Dean stepped out of his truck with a rigid, silent efficiency. He carried a cardboard box from Be Mine bakery and a to-go carrier with two coffees. His hair was still damp, I assumed from his morning shower, and he wore a faded t-shirt, jeans, and an expression that landed halfway between suspicion and professional disappointment.

He looked unfairly good for someone who’d just shown up uninvited—jaw sharp enough to cut glass, forearms doing things to a faded t-shirt that should have required a permit. The morning light caught the angles of his face in a way that made me feel personally victimized, which was not helpful given that I was wearing a Muppet on my chest.

There was a particular cruelty in how effortlessly he looked like that—like he hadn’t needed to try, like the jeans and the damp hair and the whole thing had just happened to him.