Chapter Seven Jack
Chapter Seven
Jack
I’m not surprised to find Emily Walker outside my house. I am, however, surprised to find her dressed like this. A cream-colored silk top and matching tiny shorts, trimmed with lace—neither covered up enough by the jean jacket—and those damn cowboy boots. The same ones that I was staring at when I had to buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of soup from the market and then drive an hour to drop them at a food bank.
Red. The boots are red. They match her nails.
“Why are you out here without a shirt?” she asks, sounding like an indignant debutante and making me wonder if her head is in a similar space as mine.
We are standing in front of each other as a man and a woman—not teachers. This is… new. And the surge of attraction racing through my system is also new.
“Does it bother you?” I ask with a taunt.
“It’s impolite.” I think she’s blushing.
“But coming over to your neighbor’s house in absurdly thin satin pajamas is better?” Oh, judging by her narrowed green eyes, she did not like that. Emily loves to dish it out but can’t stand to have her own morality confronted.
Apparently I’ve just awoken the beast. The pink splotches on her cheeks are gone. Her hands move to her hips. Shoulders set. She will strip naked right now just to prove to me that my barb didn’t land.
“From the rumors around town about you knocking over an entire display at Harriet’s Market just so you could get a good look at my legs, I’d think you’d be excited to find me in an absurdly thin PJ set.” She tips her brows. “Yeah, I heard.”
So much for buying their secrecy.
“I couldn’t help but stare.” I pause and smile. “They just looked so real for a humanoid. Your person does incredible work.”
“He might be able to find you an actual heart if you want me to ask.”
“Nah—I prefer mine frozen and cold.”
Emily steps a little closer and my bare skin prickles. “Why are you doing construction right now, Jackson?”
I give her a look that implies how obvious it is. “Because this house is so dilapidated that if I don’t work every chance I get, it might collapse on my head.”
Her eyes widen slightly. “Please tell me you are not doing your own renovation?”
“Who else would do it? A woman who has nothing better to do with her time than annoy the shit out of me called my contractor and asked him not to take the job. And while she was at it, she told the whole damn town to stay away from me too. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Emily blinks and looks to the side, clearly biting her cheek to hold back a smile. Vindictive woman. “I take it you couldn’t find a different crew to take it on?”
“Oh, I did—but they’re not available anytime in the next six months.”
Not a lick of remorse on her face when she looks in my eyes. In fact, she shrugs and her chin dimples. “Oh well, I guess you’ll just have to sell the place and move. I hear the North Pole is nice.”
I hold up my trusty hammer. “Why? I’ve always wanted to build a house. Looks like I finally get my chance.”
Her smile falls. “You can’t do this renovation yourself, Jack.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re a teacher, not a contractor. Have you ever built anything in your life?”
“If you saw my Lego creations as a kid you wouldn’t be asking me that question. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a wall to finish working on.” I head back around the house and up the porch stairs, making it to the landing before I hear the click of Emily’s boots following behind.
“You’re going to do more work tonight ?” she asks.
“Yep.”
“No. You can’t. It’s too loud for me and Ducky to sleep.”
“Who the hell is Ducky?”
She’s trying to peek around me to see in my house. “Ducky is my cat.”
I find this endlessly amusing. “Why do you have a cat?”
“To cook in my soup for dinner tomorrow.” She rolls her eyes dramatically. “She’s my pet! Why else would I have a cat?”
Sometimes it’s so hard not to fully smile around her. Not to bust out laughing if I’m being perfectly honest. But I don’t because that would just go to her head and make her think she’s won this round. ( Which…maybe she has. )
Something else I shouldn’t do: notice how the hairs at the back of her neck are curling up. Her bangs too. She always wears her hair perfectly styled to school. But right now, and like the day I saw her with wet hair, it’s messy and waving in every direction. A little frizzy. And it’s so damn charming. Emily orchestrates and micromanages every facet of her life to perfection, but she can’t control her bangs against humidity.
I have the strongest urge to wrap one of those curls around my finger.
“I didn’t take you for a pet owner.”
“And I didn’t take you for someone who would present his nipples to anyone on the other side of his front door, but here we are learning new things about each other,” she says, gesturing to my shirtless body. And again, I’m having to smother my laughter. Judging by the sparkle in her eyes, I think she is too.
Finally, she sighs and glances over my shoulder to where I left my front door cracked open. “At least let me see what you’ve done so far.”
Emily takes an advancing side step, but I match her, barricading her from going any farther. In no way can Emily Walker go into my house right now.
“You’re really not going to let me see?” Her eyes are wide, mouth slightly parted in disbelief.
“Nope.”
“That proud of your work?”
The state of the house has nothing to do with it. Okay, well, maybe it has a few things to do with it. But the main reason I can’t let her in there is that nothing escapes Emily’s notice. She pays ruthless attention to detail and has the memory of a steel trap. Wouldn’t be surprised if she told me she has a photographic memory actually. Which is why I have no doubt that Emily will walk into my house and immediately scent her way to my room, currently littered with sticky notes full of scene ideas for the book I’m due to begin writing soon. Not only that, but books one through three of my Echoes in the Dark series are lying on my bed from where I just scoured through each of them trying to find the one line I needed to reference for the scene I’m writing. She would put two and two together in no time. Less than no time, knowing Emily.
I guard the door, hoping my bare nipples are enough to scare her off. “It’s not safe for you in there. There are nails sticking up all over the place.”
Her suspicion grows. “I would think you’d like nothing more than for me to go inside and accidentally impale myself so you wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.”
“Tempting. But if you died there’d be an investigation and all that. It would take too much time away from the renovation.”
“Fine.” She turns away. “If it’s really that dangerous I don’t want to go in.” Her boots clip-clop back toward the porch stairs and I follow like a bouncer escorting her away from the club.
Of course, it’s a mistake on my part, because the moment I leave my post, she fakes me out and darts around my body, right through my front door.
“ Dammit, ” I mutter, hurrying in after her—half expecting her to have somehow teleported directly into my bedroom and skipped the living room altogether. But when I get inside, I nearly run straight into her back. She never made it past the living room.
She’s standing here, slack-jawed, blinking at the space. “Jack!” She breathes out my name in awe. Not in awe of how incredible this project is. In awe of how terrible it is.
“To be honest,” she starts, as if she’s not always brutally honest with me, “I was only joking when I thought you were ashamed of your work. You’re one of those people who are good at everything they do, so I didn’t expect… this. ”
“I think there might actually be a compliment in there somewhere?”
She’s eyeing the kitchen area. “You don’t have a stove. Or a fridge.”
“Overrated appliances. Have you ever had peanut butter?”
I close the front door and take a few slow steps in her direction (aka closer to my bedroom door) so I can slip by her and close it before she notices. At least that’s what I mean to do. Except at the sight of her, I can’t move. I’m frozen here, watching Emily Walker assess my new-old house and I realize that possibly for the first time ever in the history of our acquaintance, we are completely alone. Not only that, but I’m not wearing a shirt and she’s in the flimsiest pajamas I’ve ever seen. The satin is so thin it’s practically sheer. And the bottoms are cut high. Or maybe it’s just that her legs are so long they seem skimpier than the average shorts.
God, if it weren’t for that jean jacket…
No. Never mind.
Because I don’t want to be attracted to Emily. I don’t want to find her absurdly beautiful. And I don’t want to know why during my months in Nebraska after Zoe and I split, I kept finding myself wondering what Emily was doing at random moments in the day. Even feeling uncomfortable with the prospect of never seeing her again. I hoped it was just because I was bored without my sparring partner, but now, having that memory paired with the attraction curling around my spine, I’m not so sure anymore. What if it’s because I missed seeing the glint in her poisonous-green eyes and the curve of her cherry-red mouth?
Those eyes slide to the wall where I’ve sledgehammered away the inner drywall down to the studs. “Well, this explains all the noise,” she says, then cocks her head to the side as she inspects the new studs I put in. “I think those are supposed to be standing at a ninety-degree angle.”
“They’ll be fine.”
She whirls around and she’s closer than I realized. She smells good—a fact that’s going to be difficult to forget after this night. “This is a house you’re going to live in, Jackson. It can’t just be fine. What if the roof collapses in on you because you haven’t properly installed the studs in the walls?”
“Then you’ll get your wish.”
Something flashes in her expression. Almost like hurt or regret or worry. It’s gone before I can decide. She blinks several times. “I don’t want…” She pauses and takes a breath. “If you can’t hire someone to do this, move out and sell it to someone who can.”
I smile, feeling that warning hum of incoming confrontation build under my skin. In the early days, I used to hate the way Emily made me feel in moments like this: a little unhinged and unpredictable. I am always levelheaded and able to pull anyone out of even the worst of moods. But Emily—she’s always been immune to my kindness. She draws something venomous out of me. And now, I’ve learned to lean into it. To welcome it. With her, I can always say exactly what I’m thinking. “What have I told you about barking orders at me?”
She steps closer, angling her defiant chin up to me. My heart beats firmly against my chest, ready for the fight. “You are not qualified for this renovation. It’s not going to work. And you can’t live on peanut butter sandwiches!”
“Well, now I just have to prove you wrong.” I look at her mouth, trying to see if her fangs have dropped down yet.
And because I’m too distracted by the shape of her bottom lip, I miss the moment her hunter’s nose catches the scent I’ve been trying to hide. As if she were some sort of mind-reading sorceress, her head snaps in the direction of my bedroom door. And there, perfectly visible twelve feet from where we are standing, are the sticky notes, stuck to a corkboard and leaning against my bed. She makes a move in that direction, and knowing I can’t make it around her in time, I do the only thing I can think of. I take her hand.
I don’t just take her hand, though. I accidentally take it gently. Tenderly. The word reverent even crosses my mind. My hand and body are holding on to Emily in a manner that looks and feels worshipful. And an awareness I’ve never known before snaps into place: I have more respect for Emily than I’ve ever had for any other person. What do I do with that?
She feels it in my touch and freezes completely before swinging her gaze to where my fingers are intertwined with hers.
“Don’t go back there,” I say quietly. “Please.”
For three torturous seconds when I wonder if I’ve just handed her ammunition on a silver platter, I study her green eyes. The large freckle at the base of her throat. Her collarbones rising and falling with every breath coming as quickly as my own.
And then she swallows, pivots to face me, and pulls her hand free. She raises it and for a brief second, I wonder if she’s going to slap me. Her index finger taps the rim of my glasses instead. “Are these real?”
I huff a laugh. “Of course they’re real. Why would I wear fake glasses?”
“So when you came back to town you’d look more intelligent than me.”
“I don’t have to wear glasses for that to be true.”
A thrill twists around my ribs as Emily’s hand once again rises, but this time to softly pull the glasses off my face. She tries them on—and although my vision is blurry, I still catch her grimace as she verifies that the lenses are prescription.
Emily holds on to my glasses a beat longer. Her face is still angled up at mine and I wonder if she’s using this opportunity to study me. The back of her hand grazes my bare chest in a touch like a bolt of electricity. It takes me a second to realize she’s signaling for me to take my glasses back from her.
“I’ve never seen you wear them before,” she says, returning to focus as I replace my frames to my face. I see her with 20/20 vision…and the question she’s tiptoeing around too.
“Contacts are easier.”
“Nope. What’s the truth?”
I bite my smile. “You’re a relentless pain in the ass.”
“Thank you.”
I draw in a long breath. “Zoe thought I looked dorky in glasses, so I stuck to contacts. It’s really not some big thing. Happy?”
Her face is a study in expression. Open and intrigued and then a steep slope into angry and protective. “No. That answer makes me very unhappy actually. A partner should never make you feel insecure about your glasses. Especially since you look so…”
The energy in the room is all off. It’s taut. It’s charged. It’s waiting for something.
“Fine. You look fine in them.” She passes me and heads for the door—mercifully never looking back at my room. I should let her go so we can get back to normal as quickly as possible. Put this upside-down night behind us.
“Emily,” I say, just before she makes it to the front door. “Before you go, I want to give you something.”
I once again close the gap between us—though leaving it wider than before—and pull something out of my pocket. I take her hand in mine and she watches hesitantly as I turn her palm face up and then drop my present inside.
“ Ear plugs, ” she scoffs.
I smile and step away to open the front door for her. “You’re going to need those, because I’m going to be in here keeping you up every night this summer while I create the best damn house you’ve ever seen.”
Even though a vicious smile curls her lips, I notice her shoulders sag with relief. She’s glad to have the status quo restored too.
“Jackson, I hope you get a really big splinter under your nail bed,” she says before her cowboy boots carry her back home where she no doubt falls asleep to the thought of running me over with her truck.