Fix You (23 page)

             
“Hey…” he said, and her eyes flicked to him, “would it be okay if I…grabbed a shower?”

             
She didn’t blink, but kept digging through her bags. “Sure. There’s clean towels in the cabinet beside the sink.”

             
He went to the truck and grabbed a clean t-shirt from his toolbox, resigned to the jeans and boxers he was wearing. Jess, he noted on his way back through the kitchen, managed to make domesticity look sexy as she knifed open a package of raw steak tips.

             
He had to walk through her bedroom to get to the bathroom – it was tidy, mint green and cream, and smelled faintly of her perfume – and he felt a little bit like an intruder considering all that was running through his mind while he invaded her personal space. He wasn’t a desperate man – had never been one – so he wasn’t going to force her into anything; but he wasn’t content with playing her platonic mood-booster. He’d been wildly attracted to her from day one. Now he was saddled with more than a little bit of affection. He even liked her kid.

             
Keeping things “appropriate” was becoming a painful exercise. Especially given the shaky, breathless look she’d tilted up to him earlier that afternoon.

             
The bathroom he’d remodeled was a study in white, one she’d accented with green towels and decorative glass canisters full of cotton balls and Q-tips. She’d spread a fluffy green bathmat at the base of the shower/tub combo and hung a matching curtain. When he climbed in under the hot spray, he realized the only soap in the dish was green too, and fruity-smelling. In the bathroom she shared with her son, Chris soaped off the day’s grime and asked himself if he was crazy for wanting anything to do with Jessica Walker’s complicated love life.

             
Probably.

             
He dressed, hung the towel on a peg to dry, raked his hands through his wet hair, standing it on end, and went barefoot back to the kitchen.

             
The smell of onions and meat in a skillet slapped him across the face and reminded him that, save the trip to his mother’s almost a month before, he hadn’t had a home cooked meal in a
long
time. He stood in the doorway a moment and watched; he might have installed the kitchen, but the girl in front of the stove, hovering over a steaming skillet with a wooden fork in her hand, transformed the room in a way he hadn’t been able to: she left it breathing and alive.

             
“What are you making?” he asked as he rounded the island.

             
She dumped a handful of greenery into the hissing pan. “Steak tips with onions and peppers,” she said, and spared him a questioning look. “Is that alright?”

             
He was surprised; he’d expected this slender, toned girl to make chicken of some sort. “Perfect.”

             
“It’s my dad’s favorite,” she explained, and it took Chris a moment, watching her profile, to grasp why that was important.

             
She hadn’t known what he would want, had been too hesitant to ask, and instead of falling back on the habits she’d built with her husband, she was making something her dad liked. For him, she’d referenced her father, not her ex. And that felt huge.

             
“I’ve got beer,” she said, gesturing to the fridge. “I took you for a domestic guy.”

             
Was this happening? Had she finally thawed? Or was the stress getting to her and she’d finally cracked? Did crazy look like sweetness on her?

             
Regardless, he was going to roll with it. He found two six packs in her new stainless fridge – Budweiser and Sam Adams – and took a Bud. She, he noticed as he twisted off the cap, had a glass of wine at her elbow.

             
She reached for it and he saw the flicker of her lashes as she glanced at him. He thought her hand trembled as it curled around the glass. “I haven’t cooked in months,” she said in a voice that sounded like she was trying too hard to be casual. “I hope it turns out alright.”

             
“It smells great,” Chris assured, and then he froze, beer bottle halfway to his lips, as he realized that she wasn’t talking about dinner at all. Or cooking either, for that matter.

**

              Jess decided she was going to have to make dinner for Chris every night if her kid stayed this happy. Though she wished he wasn’t so happy about this particular line of conversation.

             
“Off?!” Tyler exclaimed with morbid delight. “It cut his fingers
off
?!”

             
“Clean off.” Chris reached up and made a slicing motion across the tips of his own fingers. “He bled like a stuck pig.”

             
“
Awesome
.”

             
“Now we call him ‘Stumpy.’”

             
“And that,” Jess said, getting to her feet, “is why we don’t play with power tools.”

             
“Chris does,” Tyler challenged.

             
“Well, let’s hope Chris is more adept than ‘Stumpy.’” She gave the contractor a mock stern look. “You’re not going to cut off your fingers, are you?”

             
“No, ma’am,” he promised, smiling.

             
“Good.”

             
She picked up her empty plate and reached for Chris’s. “Put your plate by the sink,” she told Tyler, and he complied, too distracted by his dinner guest to remember that he was angry with her and sulking.

             
“Wanna watch TV?” she heard him ask Chris as she turned on the tap and began rinsing the plates.

             
“Umm…”

             
Something – some hidden knot of anxiety – tightened down deep in her belly at the sound of his hesitance. She’d already taken a knife through the lines of propriety tonight, but could still, in a pinch, argue that a simple dinner was a show of gratitude and nothing more. But if he stayed…if they all ended up in the cozy little office space she’d turned into a TV room…then what? How would that look to prying eyes? How would it
feel
to her?

             
“Please?” Tyler said.

             
Jess held her breath, passed a sponge across her white china.

             
“Only if your mom says it’s okay,” Chris said, and she cursed internally, wanting to turn around and smack him. Of course he made it
her
call; now any gossip or poor decision-making was her fault and her fault alone.

             
She turned, sponge still in hand, and pegged Chris with her sweetest, most insincere smile. “I don’t know, Chris. Do you
want
to stay and watch TV?”

             
“Yes!” Tyler said, bouncing on the balls of his feet, trapping Chris; how could he say no and crush her kid?

             
He shot her a look that congratulated her fast thinking. His half-smile was wry. “Sure.”

             
She returned to her dishes, listening to them embark for the TV room, trying to convince herself that she hadn’t taken things too far tonight. She’d just had dinner with the man for God’s sakes! She hadn’t slept with him.

             
Yet
.

             
The thought – the single, wicked word that passed through her mind – stilled her hands beneath the running water, lodged her breath in her throat, and scared the hell out of her. In the brief seconds she’d spent forming the word, she’d been slammed with the insane thought that she might actually…

             
No!
She couldn’t allow herself to consider that, even in jest. The consequences would be too serious. She had months ahead of her in which she had to work with the man; she couldn’t so much as let her imagination wander.

             
Scowling to herself, she stowed the dishes in the washer, rinsed out the sink, put away her pans, and topped off her glass of Pinot. She folded the dish towel with precise creases and set it at an angle on the butcher block counter. Then there was only one thing left to do: gather her traitorous wits and join the boys.

             
The little office was a narrow rectangle, one of the long sides devoted to a window that was, at the moment, screened with a sheer drape. She’d managed to wedge the saddle leather loveseat from her old house into one of the short sides, and the flat screen was hung on the wall opposite. It was cozy, or, at least, she normally thought so. Tonight, with Chris taking up most of the loveseat, it looked cramped. Jess lingered in the threshold a moment, sipping her wine, taking in the scene. Tyler was stretched across the rug on his belly, watching the screen with rapt fascination.  It took her a moment to notice that Chris was paying that same kind of attention to her, and was ignoring the cartoons.

             
She started.

             
“You gonna stand there?” he asked, and thumped a hand on the cushion beside him.

             
Stepping carefully over his long legs that occupied the space between the sofa and coffee table, she settled against the arm of the loveseat, as far from him as possible – which wasn’t far – and shot him a dark look through the muted blue light cast by the TV. “Why do you do that?” she asked.

             
His brows lifted.

             
“Stare,” she bit out, her sudden flare of indignation made all the worse by her thoughts in the kitchen. “It’s
rude
.”

             
“Do you want me to stop doing it?” he asked innocently.

             
“Yes.”

             
“What if I like staring?”

             
“Then you’re rude
and
creepy.”

             
He snorted. “You don’t think I’m creepy.”

             
“Don’t I?”

             
“Would you invite a creep to have dinner with you and your kid?”

             
“Okay, scratch that. You’re just
rude
.”

             
His grin, white teeth flashing, left her in need of a fortifying sip of wine. “Thanks for dinner.”

             
“Oh, it’s too late to make up for your rudeness now,” she said, and felt her anger spike, twist…and become something else. Something that made her want to smile. She fought the urge.

             
“You can’t forgive me?” he teased.

             
“Never.” She tipped her wine glass back and drained the last three swallows.

             
“I’m so awful you have to get drunk just to be around me?”

             
Her lips twitched. “Very drunk.”

             
He straightened away from the back of the sofa. “You want a refill, then?”

             
She handed over her glass, warm and pleased and not at all because of the wine. “Please.”

**

              She put Tyler to bed an hour and a half – and two glasses of wine – later. Then there was a man sitting on her loveseat. And she was alone with him.

             
She returned from one last bedtime story and a goodnight kiss to find that Chris had found the remote and was now watching one of the
Die Hard
s. Bruce Willis was slogging through snow, so she was pretty sure it was the second one. She’d expected her dinner guest to see himself out while she tucked her baby into bed; but here he sat, working on a fresh beer, relaxed and unhurried.

             
Should I?
she wondered, eyes going to the vacant seat beside him. She felt shaky and uncertain again, like a teenager who had no idea how to compose herself in the company of a cute boy.

             
Cute
– did she think he was cute, now? Yes. As Delta had said, he probably had chest hair and tan lines and that whole “man” thing going on. He was nothing like the man she’d married, but attractive in his own, more masculine way.

             
With a deep breath and a surge of high school trepidation, she returned to the loveseat. “My sister loves these movies,” she said as she curled her legs up and tucked her feet beneath her on the cushion.

             
“And you don’t?” he guessed.

             
“I can watch them.”

             
“Here.” He waved the remote in offering.