10. Aaron
CHAPTER TEN
AARON
I chuckle at my phone as I strip out of my work clothes and step into the shower, Emma’s text burned into my retinas.
I still can’t believe you laughed at me about that Roll-Up and then ate all of the Pineapple Upside Down Pancake Delight.
“There was no delight in the name of that dessert,” I murmur to myself as I start to scrub my hair clean. “And I didn’t eat it all.”
No, she didn’t like the Spicy Mediterranean Roll-Up, but she adored everything else. Seemingly even me, as she hung all over my arm and pressed in close to me as we wandered down the street on the way back to my truck.
I’ve never wanted a date to continue more than the one last night, and I wasn’t as savvy as Elliott and couldn’t come up with a plan to avoid the doorbell camera. So I didn’t kiss Emma last night.
It’s fine.
We’re new.
And going to our best friends’ rehearsal dinner tonight, thus, why I’m in the shower for the second time today. Good thing I got my bathroom finished this morning. Now, all I need to redo is the front porch, and my house will be pretty livable. I have a few projects still to do, but nothing that prevents me from living well.
The darkness that comes every time I think about Liam getting married hovers over me, despite my attempts to push it away. I’m happy for him—and Hillary. I am.
I just wish I didn’t feel so lost. So replaceable.
My phone rings just as I’m wiping conditioner through my hair, so of course, I can’t answer it. I should’ve put it out in the bedroom, because I hate hearing it chime and zing at me while I’m showering. It makes the usually calming experience a frenzy.
And I use showering to calm myself, so when my phone rings again only ten seconds after it stopped, irritation fires through me hotly.
Thankfully, it doesn’t ring again, but it bleeps out a chime every second or two. Great. They’ve gone to texting.
“It’s probably Momma.” That’s so her MO. Call Aaron and if he doesn’t answer, fire off a million texts at him.
I’d given myself plenty of time to shower before I have to get to Liam’s house for the dinner. He and Hillary are getting married in his orchard, and the dinner tonight, and on Sunday after the wedding, will be in his backyard.
But I rush through my shower so I can get to my phone faster, and that leaves me unsettled and hyper-focused on my device when I needed to be hyper-focused on clearing my head.
Momma has called, yes. But so did Emma, and all the texts that came in were from her too.
We got the packets for the Summer Faire!
Emailed, Aaron. Go check right now!
Holy cow, I can’t believe this.
It’s going to be so great.
The twenty-five thousand dollars is really real!
We have to submit a proposal for part of the park and be responsible for cleaning up that space. Then, they’ll choose someone to win the prize money and base their complete park redo on their design.
This is so exciting!!!
Oh, roots and shoots. I’m never going to have time to do a proper proposal. It’s due the same weekend as Ry and Elliott’s wedding.
My mind buzzes, and yes, I want to run to my email and comb through the packet myself. I smile at Emma’s plant-swears.
Don’t stop believin’ , I send to her, hoping it’ll make her smile. I get dressed in my only pair of pants besides jeans—a pair of navy blue slacks I got just for this wedding. Liam’s as Southern country as they come, and he said I didn’t have to wear a white shirt, tie, and jacket, so I bought a blue, yellow, and black plaid shirt—hey, it has a collar and buttons—for the wedding.
I pull on my cowboy boots again, this time pairing it with my hat, because I know Liam will be wearing his. The man loves hats of all shapes and styles, and I sure hope we can still meet up at the sports bar and watch rodeo re-runs.
My phone rings again, and this time I swipe on the call from Emma. “Go for Aaron.”
“I—” She cuts off, and I chuckle into the stunned silence. “That’s a terrible way to answer the phone,” she says.
“I knew you wouldn’t say hello.”
“You did? How?”
“You used three exclamation points in one of your texts.”
She huffs, and then says, “How fast can you get here? Maybe we’ll have a few minutes to go over the packet before we have to go to the rehearsal dinner.”
I don’t tell her I usually take thirty minutes in the shower to calm myself at the end of a day, and instead say, “I’m almost ready to leave the house.”
“Great, I’ll see you soon.” She hangs up without saying good-bye either, and I shake my head.
“The things I’m willing to put up with.” But for some of Emma’s sapphire and gold, I am. I totally am.
My mind revolves and stews on the way to the Big House, and by the time I pull into the gravel parking lot out front, a fully-fledged idea has formed.
So when Emma answers the door, a sheaf of papers in her hand, I blurt out, “We should submit a proposal together.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it. Then asks, “What?”
“What?” I lean in the doorway with all the swagger of a bad boy cowboy. Or at least what I assume bad boy cowboys swagger like. “You think you can do better than me at a park clean-up? Sweetheart, I have every tool at my disposal, and I’ve actually done landscaping designs from concept to implementation.”
“I—well—you.” She swats me with her printed packet.
“In fact, I dare you to try to put something together that’ll beat me.” I chuckle. “Won’t happen.”
She shakes her head, but her hair is all pinned up on her head, so it doesn’t sway back and forth. “Down, you bad boy. Come in and talk to me like a human.” She turns and walks through the foyer and into the living room, her hips swaying in a way that’s very, very dangerous to my pulse.
She’s wearing a dark blue dress about the same color as my slacks with plenty of glittery gems on it. The back dips low enough to show me her sexy shoulder blades, and I blink as she disappears from view completely.
“Don’t just stand there staring,” Claudia barks over the doorbell cam speaker, and I swear under my breath and hurry inside the Big House as she adds, “Nice shirt, Aaron.”
“Be nice to him,” I hear one of the roommates say as I close the door, swipe my hands down my sides to dry my palms, and then I commit to entering the living room.
I’ve been here before for parties and such, but it’s completely different now that I’m Emma’s boyfriend. She stands near the corner of the couch, and she’s holding Claudia’s phone away from her as her friend says, “I meant it. It’s a nice shirt.”
Claudia’s eyes come to mine. “Look at it. He’s like a perfect Southern gentleman.”
Every eye comes to me, so now I’m shouldering five pairs of female eyes, and let me tell you, they’re looking at more than just my shirt.
They’re all wearing a dress in navy, and they’re all beautiful in their own way. None as much as Emma, and my eyes gravitate back to hers. “Ignore them, Aaron,” she says with her nose in the air. “Come into the kitchen, and let’s talk for a few minutes.”
I nod my cowboy hat at her friends, the Doberman coming to the surface, as I follow her through the living room and toward the kitchen. “Ry,” I say. “Love the shoes. Claudia, your hair is exquisite. Tahlia, lovely as always.” I actually reach up and touch the brim of my hat with that one. Just one more to go.
“Lizzie, you’re always the best-dressed in the room.”
Thankfully, Emma has already entered the kitchen, so I’m not technically lying.
“Oh, you’re a charmer,” Lizzie says, and the doorbell rings over her light laugh.
“That’ll be Ell,” Ry says just as I duck into the kitchen after Emma.
She’s standing over a few pages she’s spread over the table, and she glances at me as I join her. “Look here.”
“Can I just look at you for a minute?” I slide my hand along her waist and pull her close. “Because you in this dress is somethin’ special.”
She straightens, the surprise on her face melting into something else entirely. “Oh, you think you’re a cowboy because you’re wearing the hat. Is that it?” She reaches up and flicks the brim.
“No, really,” I say. “Heaven is a place on earth when I’m with you.” I grin at her, hoping she’ll get the song reference.
She leans into me. “You’ve used two in one day. ”
“Is that against the rules?”
“Yes,” she says as if she just decided.
“You can’t make them up as we go. You know that, right?”
“You have rules for your truck.”
“ Established rules,” I say.
“Well, this is my house, and I say you can’t use two eighties song lyric references in the same day.” She leans over the table again. “The same hour.”
“I only used one here, sweetheart.” I move up beside her and look at the pages. “And since you called, I didn’t have time to check my email.”
“They’re being menaces, sending this out on a Friday night,” she says crossly. She points to the page again. “Proposals have to have pictures of some kind. Diagrams. Pictures from other projects that the applicant has done. Blueprints. They can be real or mocked up.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t have anything like that.” She straightens with a huff. “How hard can it be?”
I say nothing, because using mockup software can be a tad difficult if she’s never done it. I tear my eyes from the papers, because I’m not reading the print on them anyway. I can’t seem to focus on it right now.
Now with Emma’s body heat so close to mine, and with the flowery scent of her skin and hair…I can barely remember my own name or why I came here tonight .
“You’ve surely got loads of pictures of your floral arrangements,” I tell her. “I’ve seen your social media.”
She turns those glinting sapphire eyes on me, and I dive in deep. Too deep. So deep, I miss what she’s said until she swats my chest and asks, “Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes.” I blink to get myself back to normal. “A collage is an interesting idea.” I have no idea if she’s said that, but my words appease her. “I still don’t think you can beat me, sweetheart.”
I grin at her displeasure, and feel very Doberman-like as I do.
“You want to bet?” she asks. Then her eyes widen. “Wait. Forget I said that.” She shakes her head. “Claude bet Beckett something, and it was a very bad idea.”
“I already issued you a challenge,” I say. “I dared you to try to do a proposal better than mine while standing in your doorway.” I hook my thumb over my shoulder, as if she’s forgotten where the door is. “Just now. When I got here.”
Her eyes search mine, and I kick up my Doberman smile.
“Well?”
She shakes her head again. “No, I can’t do it.”
“Then I dare you to join forces with me. Let’s submit something together.”
“Aaron, you’re making me tired.”
I’ve heard that before, but I don’t tell her that. “A) You’ve already said you won’t have time to put together a proposal,” I say. “And B) you’ve never done a blueprint or a mock-up. If we work together, I can shoulder the bulk of it.”
She gathers her papers back together and turns to face me fully, cocking one curvy hip away from the table. “And who gets the money if we win?”
I stall, because I hadn’t thought of that.
“Yeah,” she says dryly. “Exactly. Where’s your eighties lyric for that?”
“You said I only get one per day,” I shoot back at her. “I’m just following your rules.”
“It’s time to go,” Tahlia yells from the living room. “Em, we’re going.”
“Okay,” she calls back, and she steps over to her crate and tucks the papers away. She breathes in deep and blows it out as she faces me. “Ready?”
“To go have dinner outside in the evening heat and humidity?” I offer her my arm. “Lead on, my good lady. Lead on.”
I’m putting on a good show of joviality, laughing and chatting and holding my flute of champagne without actually drinking any. I do have to drive home after this wedding, after all. I notice that Elliott doesn’t drink either, and he never goes anywhere without his adorable, tawny dog.
The rehearsal dinner a couple of nights ago went off without a hitch. Yesterday, I spent all afternoon and evening with Emma and “Sir Chills-a-Lot” to finish the flowers for this event, and we’ve been mingling for a half-hour.
But when Liam says, “I need the wedding party to come into the house,” my stomach drops all the way to the ground.
Emma kisses her grandmother’s cheek and comes my way. We’re not walking down the aisle together, because I’m the best man, and I have to walk by myself. My blood already vibrates through my veins because of it.
She loops her arm through mine, and we turn to go up the back steps to the deck. “Will you introduce me to your grandmother later?”
Emma looks over to me, obviously wary. “Maybe.”
“What does it depend on?”
She grins at me outside the established bride’s room where her friends are ducking inside. I have to keep going through the kitchen to Liam’s bedroom, and I’m dreading every step.
“If I have a total eclipse of the heart,” she says with a smile. “Or not.”