Chapter Three
What happened to my neat, orderly life?
Bethany sat in the driver’s side of her Mercedes, staring at the busted childhood home of Travis Ford, her sister’s fiancé. She still couldn’t believe he’d given her the house free and clear. Sure, it had been part of his plan to win back Georgie after their epic breakup, but still, the move had been generous, to say the least.
Even though said house was literally falling down.
If they didn’t demolish it themselves, the next stiff breeze would probably do the job on their behalf. Overgrown weeds and gnarled trees all but obscured the view of the house from the driveway and main road. Bethany hadn’t even been inside yet, but the interior had to be even worse.
Starting from scratch was not in her wheelhouse. She usually walked into a fully finished home and applied the final brushstrokes.
What if she buried a sledgehammer into a wall and a colony of spiders burst out like a geyser? Hopefully she could duck in time so they all landed on Wes.
Wes.
What just happened?
Out of everyone in Port Jefferson, Wes was the last person she would expect to volunteer to help her. Sleep with her, yes. Confine himself to close quarters with her and take direction? No. No, she definitely hadn’t expected that.
It was almost as if he’d seen through the bravado that fooled everyone else, straight to the mess beneath. Had that left him no choice but to help, whether he wanted to or not? If that was the case, she needed to do a way better job of masking her insecurities and flaws. Especially from Wes, with whom she waged a constant war of words. And now they were working together.
In the space of a single morning, nothing was neat and orderly anymore.
The road ahead was a dramatic curve, and she couldn’t see far enough into the distance. As a thorough planner, the uncertainty made her feel like a balloon floating aimlessly into the clouds, no idea when she would burst.
Would there be nothing but air inside of her, too?
Bethany jumped when her cell phone buzzed on the console.
When Georgie’s name blinked on the screen, she picked it up and hit talk. “Really? News has spread already? I just left Stephen’s job site ten minutes ago.”
“You know how it works. Stephen told Dad, Dad told Mom, Mom called me like a cat with a cross-eyed canary in her mouth.”
Her nose wrinkled. “That imagery is unsettling.”
“I want your side of the story while you bandy about a glass of wine. I won’t rest until it happens. Is it true that Wes pulled a Zellweger?”
Bethany laughed despite her nerves. “I’ll oblige you tomorrow night at Zumba class.”
“Oh my God. I forgot.”
“Nope. Kristin is torturing us for guessing she was pregnant before she could do a big, dramatic reveal.”
“You guessed, not me, and when is she going to tell Stephen?”
“Probably a split second before you say ‘I do.’ It would satisfy our sister-in-law’s sense of drama. Picture it. Gender reveal by way of wedding objection.” With Georgie laughing in her ear, Bethany checked the rearview mirror in time to see Wes’s truck turn into the driveway. “Tomorrow night, Georgie. There might even be more to tell by then.”
“Are you sure? I was kind of hoping for right the hell now.”
“One does not simply bandy wine before noon.”
“It’s my pre-wedding week,” Georgie disagreed. “Day drinking is not only allowed, but encouraged. I’ve already got Rosie on the other line awaiting a time and locale.”
“Are you avoiding working on your vows?”
“Yes, of course I am!”
Bethany snorted. “See you tomorrow, nutcase.”
She cut off her sister mid-wail and schooled her features, climbing out of her car at the same time Wes unfolded his lean, muscled body out of his truck. Momentarily forgetting about the professionalism she wanted to present, her traitorous gaze wandered up the worn material of his dusty jeans, taking its time moving over his thick thighs and the old gray T-shirt where it brushed his hard-working zipper.
Come on, she couldn’t help but notice the way those metal teeth strained to keep his package from unwrapping itself.
Men from Long Island wore looser jeans.
He was living here now—shouldn’t he abide by the customary wardrobe?
Annoyed at the steam swirling in her belly, Bethany zoomed her attention to his face with resolve, only to catch his knowing wink. “Here I am, boss,” he said gruffly. “Put me to work.”
She was silent for a full minute.
What body language did a woman display when she got wet? Did she press her thighs together or lick her lips? Do not do any of those things. Stand still. Just let the moisture spread and those intimate muscles coil without any outward reaction.
Bethany cleared her throat and focused on preparing her words. This morning might have moved faster than the speed of light, but she’d had some time to think on the drive to her solo flip. She’d always kind of disregarded Wes’s advances as something of a joke being played at her expense. How many times had he made cracks about her age? Sometimes she believed that he was physically interested in her, and other times she told herself not to be sucked into whatever game he was playing. Still, just in case he was really interested in taking her to bed, she needed to manage his expectations.
“Wes?”
“Yes, Bethany.”
“If you volunteered to help me thinking it might be a nifty little inroad to sleeping together, you can forget it. Even if I wasn’t on a voluntary man hiatus, it wouldn’t be happening.”
Her stomach knitted waiting for his response. Why was she so worried he might disappoint her and renege on his offer to help? They didn’t have the kind of relationship where one could let the other down. They didn’t have a relationship, period.
Wes’s expression hadn’t changed a single iota. And it remained impassive as he used a booted foot to push off his truck. “If we’re going to work together,” he responded slowly, “you’re going to start giving me a little more credit.”
“Um, okay? Let me sift through the sexual innuendoes you’ve been making for a month and find this credit you speak of.”
He sliced a hand through the air between them. “Sex is off the table.”
Bethany reared back, truly awkward sounds sputtering in her throat. “It was never on the table, cowboy.”
His skeptical expression said he thought otherwise, but he wisely refrained from voicing his incorrect opinion out loud. “Look. I’m attracted to you, Bethany. Like hell. Would I like to spend a couple sweaty afternoons with you in the sack finding out if you fuck as well as you fight, yeah. I really would. But I wouldn’t use this job as leverage to make it happen. So like I said, sex is off the table now.”
“This isn’t going to work,” she wheezed.
“Because you want sex on the table?”
“Stop phrasing it like that! It’s sex. Not a placemat.” This was already spiraling out of control. “And this isn’t going to work because of the way you—”
“Get under your skin like an itch you can’t find with two hands? Feeling’s mutual and I can’t do anything about that.” He held out his palm faceup. “Keys?”
“Drop dead.”
Wes was already striding past her. “I only spent a year working construction when I was nineteen, but it was enough to know this. First thing you’re going to want to do is give this flip a name. Personalize it. Make it matter.” He reached the front door, stopped, backed up, then kicked it open while Bethany gaped. “How does War of the Roses sound? Seems appropriate.”
Bethany hustled past Wes into the house, careful not to brush against him. “Now who’s making old-timey film references?”
“I’m not too proud to suck up to the boss . . .”
Wes’s voice trailed off when he stepped into the house beside Bethany.
Their sight adjusted to the lack of light at the same time.
“Shit,” they whispered in unison.
They might as well have been standing outside. Bethany didn’t know where to look first. The dirt caking the walls and floor? The boulder-sized hole in the ceiling, complete with tree branches snaking inside and growing along the exposed beams? Two windows were broken. The drip-drip-drip of water came from down the hallway, which was especially ominous because it hadn’t rained in a week.
“We’re calling it the Doomsday Flip.” She sensed Wes watching her.
“We?”
Bethany hedged. “I don’t think I can . . . well, that is to say, surely one person couldn’t tackle this alone, so . . .”
“Hate to break it to you, darlin’, but I don’t think two people can tackle this one. Not if you want to stick to a reasonable time frame.” He squinted his right eye. “We have a hiring budget?”
There was no mistaking the easing of pressure in her chest when he used the word “we.” “Considering Travis gifted me the house, it’s a pretty healthy budget. We can afford additional labor.” She shifted. “But I want to make the decisions.”
He nodded once. “I’m hearing you, Bethany.”
How was this the same man who talked so bluntly about fucking back in the driveway? Who was Wes Daniels? A crass, innuendo-cracking good ol’ boy? An honorable guy who showed up to raise his niece at a moment’s notice and Zellweger’d in front of his bros? He vacillated too quickly between the opposite sides of himself. God help her if there were more layers to this man. Two was already confusing enough.
Wes produced a pencil from behind his ear and a notebook from his back pocket, flipping it open to the middle. “Let’s talk floor plan. What do you have in mind?”
You would think she’d never set foot inside a house before. Or logged a million hours listening to Stephen and her father talk measurements and layout. The very fundamentals of construction had been her bedtime stories. Now, given a blank canvas for the first time, as soon as she had a burgeoning idea, she discarded it, mentally citing a reason someone wouldn’t like it. Or it wouldn’t be exactly right. How long had she been standing there in silence, staring at the walls and begging them to inspire her?
“Talk it out,” Wes said, sounding almost bored, but when she glanced up, he was watching her intently.
Bethany swallowed hard and turned in a circle, her sandals making a sifting sound on the dirty floor. “We need it fully gutted, obviously. The kitchen needs to be twice as large, which will mean sacrificing the tiny dining room for a cozy breakfast nook.” She wet her lips. “This is a starter house for sure. Which means kids. Parents needing to watch them from the kitchen at all times. They’ll need extra dining space, so we can put in a chest-high dividing wall to double as a breakfast bar. Can we make the whole front of the house visible from the kitchen?”
“Is that what you want?”
What she wanted was a Yes, that’s a great idea. Apparently she wasn’t getting it, though. “Yes,” she forced herself to say. An answer that required relying totally on her own instincts. “That’s what I want.”
He made some notes on his pad, looking much older with his furrowed brow. “You brave enough to tour the rest of the house?”
She gave him an eye roll. “I think I can handle it,” she muttered, already stepping over some broken glass and picking her way down the hallway.
A rat came careening out of the first doorway and trucked a path right across Bethany’s foot. “Oh! Rat rat rat. No. Noooo!” With her screech echoing off the hallway walls, and potentially putting them in danger of the house collapsing, Bethany turned and scaled Wes’s body like a hysterical rock climber.
He dropped his pad and pencil just in time to accommodate her, his only reaction to raise an eyebrow. Getting her feet off the floor required locking her ankles at the small of his back and if she hadn’t been so squicked-out over her brush with rodentia, she would have noticed he didn’t so much as flinch or strain under her weight. She would think of it later, though. A lot. “First, we exterminate,” she heaved breathily beside his ear, patting him twice on the shoulder. “Can you take me outside, please?”
“Uh-huh.” In the slowest turn ever executed by man or animal, Wes started a sloth-like trek back the way they’d come.
“Can’t you go any faster?”
She ignored the shiver that traveled down her spine when his laugh tickled her neck. “Wouldn’t want to drop you, darlin’.”
“Your arms aren’t even around me. It’s all cling.”
“I just don’t want to lead you on. Sex is off the table, remember?”
“Move! My legs are starting to shake.”
He groaned and wrapped her in his arms, one beneath her butt, the other locking around the center of her back. “Bethany, I’m starting to think you say this shit on purpose to torture me.”
She struggled to formulate a response but couldn’t locate one. Not when synapses were firing in her brain, like coffee had been poured on a circuit board. She’d be lying if she claimed she’d never once wondered how Wes’s body would meld with hers. She’d also be lying if she claimed the reality wasn’t unnervingly better. His shoulders were the kind a woman could press her face into and laugh. They were . . . inviting. Warm. Strong. And they connected to a tan throat with lots of interesting stubble. Too interesting.
“You want me to disrobe for this exam?”
“What?” She jolted and slipped slightly lower in his hold and felt it. Felt his erection through the film of her skirt. Wes hissed, his gait slowing to a stop, and they just kind of hovered there in the entryway, gravity pressing her softness down on his thick sex, his breath rasping in her ear, Bethany’s trapped in her lungs. “Labor,” she forced out. “We need to hire labor. Let’s talk about that.”
The forearm resting on the small of her back flexed—and was it her imagination or did his lips brush her hair? “Labor. Right.”
A tremor meandered through her limbs. “We’ll have to look outside Port Jeff.”
She felt Wes’s internal vibration. One of his hands fisted in her skirt. “Bethany, if you expect me to focus on a goddamn word you’re saying, we can’t be one lowered zipper away from f—”
“Whoa. Don’t finish that sentence.” Wes acknowledging their compromising position out loud had the effect of a paintball to the face. What was she doing? She didn’t even like this man. She couldn’t nail him down as a type—and she never had that problem with men. They were self-involved pretending not to be self-involved, lazy, overly ambitious, or downright liars. Wes? He was just messy. That was the only category he fit into. No, wait, he was also too young. How could she forget that little piece of the pie? With a stern directive to stop being an idiot, Bethany unhooked her ankles, let her legs drop, and pushed away from his tense body. “There was a rat,” she said to defend herself. “He had bloodstains on his teeth and a definite air of menace.”
With a humorless laugh, Wes turned and stamped out of the house, leaving his back muscles rippling in his wake.
He started talking as soon as Bethany exited the still-open door behind him. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll round up some men to put on the payroll.” As he said it, he settled his thumbs in the loops of his jeans, like he was going out to wrangle some cattle in a few minutes. “I can’t be here every minute of the day. I’ll have to leave to collect Laura from school and I won’t feel comfortable leaving you with just anyone.”
Her right eye twitched at his high-handed tone. “You’ll be leaving me with myself, cowboy. A responsible human woman.”
“Bethany, you can make the rules about everything else. But you’re going to learn real quick that I won’t compromise your safety.”
“My God.” She slapped her hands over her face. “This is a scene straight out of a Western. Next you’re going to call me little lady and hock a loogie into a spittoon.”
Wes tossed back his head and laughed.
“I’ll be in charge of hiring,” she said with a tight smile, gliding to her car.
The infuriating man stepped into her path, the humor bleeding quickly from his face. “I’m taking care of it. No compromises.”
She poked him in the right pec. “This feels suspiciously like a macho male ritual where you insinuate yourself as leader of the pack, then make the rules of engagement regarding the available female.”
“Allow me to clear up your suspicions. That’s exactly what this is.”
Bethany blinked at least seventeen times. “We agreed sex was off the table! Even though it was never even remotely on the table!”
Wes crossed his arms. “Doesn’t mean I want it on the table for anyone else.”
A look of wonder wafted across her face. Why was she even surprised by this behavior? One evening several weeks back, while Rosie and Dominic had been smack in the middle of splitsville, the girls had embarked upon a night out in the city that was promptly crashed by the men. Wes included.
A very nice downtown-finance-style gentleman had just purchased her a cocktail and was complimenting her dress when Wes plucked the drink out of her hand and slid the guy a twenty to cover it, his gaze telling him pointedly to Beat it, bitch.
“This chauvinism is unacceptable in the golden age of female superheroes and pegging, Wes.”
She sensed he was trying not to laugh. “You know, I kind of sensed you’d be into tying up a man and prodding him to death.”
Bethany waved her hands. “I didn’t say I was into it.”
“Sure about that?” He tucked his tongue into his cheek. “It was right there on the tip of your tongue.”
“I’d like to shove my foot up your ass right now. Does that count?”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “I’ll do the hiring. You call an exterminator and a landscaper. Carve out some time this week to go pick out materials. Tile, flooring, cabinets.”
Bethany hedged.
“The wedding is coming up this Sunday. No sense in taking on the job of finding a crew when you’re already swamped.”
She could concede this one thing or stand there arguing for another month, and frankly, she was beginning to almost enjoy sparring with Wes a little too much. Best to get out of there now. “Fine. You’re in charge of hiring.”
“Great. Let’s aim to demo next week.”
Bethany nodded and gave him a wide berth as she headed to her car. She settled her hand on the driver’s-side door and stopped, tapping her nails on the white curve. Wes’s eyes were on her. She could feel them. Climbing into her car and driving away without another word would be exactly what he expected, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it just yet. Because as obnoxious as this man could be, she didn’t feel nearly as alone or daunted as she had this morning.
Galling, really.
“Wes?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.” She sniffed. “Okay?”
“Okay.” He winked at her. “We can still pretend to hate each other, if it makes you feel better about accepting my help.”
She brushed her hair back. “Who’s pretending?”
His lopsided smile was a fixture in her rearview mirror as she drove away.
What in God’s name had she gotten herself into?