Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
HAZEL
You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said to the cat. “You belong to him?”
Why did I feel like I was being Punk’d? I whipped my head left, then right. No sign of Tucker. Which didn’t mean a damn thing. That man had been the undisputed hide-and-seek champion of our teenage years—and, okay, also adult years apparently. If he didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be.
I called out into the dark night: “If you’re out there watching me like some creepy perv, I swear—” I ran out of words. Couldn’t think of a punishment cruel enough.
“Mew.”
I looked into those sweet, manipulative eyes and sighed. “Maybe you really are his cat and you’ve just wandered off to use one of your nine lives.”
A rumbling purr filled the quiet night.
Crap. She was adorable. So, like a total sucker, I hugged her.
The purring intensified, though it caught in her throat every few beats, like a rusty old engine trying to start in winter.
I sighed. “He’s probably worried about you. You need to go home.”
Either I was hallucinating, or she batted her eyes at me.
“Look, the note says I can’t feed you.”
The cat took a few steps. Limping steps. My heart cracked.
“Are you hurt?”
“Mew.”
That was all it took. I scooped her up and brought her into my van, before opening a tuna packet and dumping it into a bowl so I could check out her leg while she stuffed her face like she hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Her leg was perfectly fine. No injury.
When she finished the tuna, she licked her chops and then her lady bits before strutting toward me.
With zero limp.
“You’re the cutest little scam artist I’ve ever met, and I work in construction. I’m beginning to see why you need a note pinned to you.”
She purred like a freight train at my feet, blinking up at me with those see-all eyes.
“You just want more tuna.”
She blinked again. Then, as if to prove her case, brought back the limp like she was auditioning for a daytime soap.
“Oh, no,” I said on a laugh. “Not falling for that again. You’ve got to go home. He won’t want you over here. We don’t…get along.”
The cat tilted her head.
“I mean, we did once. But it’s ancient history, and I’m trying hard not to make waves, okay? So you gotta scoot.”
She did not, in fact, scoot.
She meowed.
And I fed her more tuna.
“Sucker.”
I turned to find Tucker’s brother Caleb standing on the sidewalk, tatted-up arms crossed, mouth serious, but eyes smiling through the glasses he never remembered to clean.
Once a hockey god, and still built like one, he’d been the older brother I’d never known I wanted.
It’d been cemented back in high school, when he’d once punched a guy for calling me emo, even though it’d been entirely accurate.
“I’m no sucker,” I said.
“You fed Tucker’s ridiculous cat. The old-lady thing wears a sign for a reason, you know.”
“She’s so skinny! I thought she was starving!”
He snorted. “She trolls the neighborhood nightly, demanding food. Then she goes home and yaks in Tuck’s shoes.”
That made me laugh.
Caleb’s smile hit his mouth. “You ever going to tell me what your problem is with him?”
“Sure. When hell freezes over.”
He crossed the grass and settled onto my dad’s porch swing, patting the spot next to him.
I narrowed my eyes but sat. “What are you even doing here?”
He gestured to his sweats. “Was on a run with Tuck.” He set us swinging, but I immediately planted my foot to stop the motion.
He snorted. “Forgot you get motion sick if you so much as turn in a fast circle.”
“You’re an actual menace,” I muttered, pressing on my already-tumbling belly.
His laugh was pure older brother.
“You’re evil.”
“I really did forget,” he said.
“No problem, as long as you aren’t attached to those shoes…”
He pulled his long legs as far from me as he could get. I should throw up on them anyway.
“You finished the Henderson job for us today.”
I nodded, keeping my panic about getting more work to myself. I hadn’t been back all that long. Not long enough to build a reputation. Or at least undo my teenage reputation.
“So…you doing okay with your dad?”
I was hoping this wasn’t a personal question but a business one.
Because Caleb was second-in-command at Colburn Restorations, and my dream gig would be to continue contracting with them.
They paid well. Treated people right. Expected perfection and gave respect—which for me, a woman in a man’s world, meant everything.
“My dad and I are doing fine,” I said. “We have an arrangement.”
“Which is?”
“We ignore each other as much as possible.”
A corner of his mouth tipped up. “How’s that working out?”
He was fishing, and I was going to be honest and keep my fingers crossed it didn’t bite me in the ass.
Did I have to swallow a lot of pride when Dad felt the need to tell me how to do my job every other second?
Yes. Was swallowing my pride my favorite hobby?
Hell no. But there was only one right answer here. “It’s going…great.”
He studied me. “So, if you had to work directly with him again on a different job, could you? Especially since you’re living with him.”
More like I was sleeping twenty feet away like some deranged driveway troll. But I knew what he was asking, and my heart stuttered with a hope I wasn’t even sure I believed in. “Yes, I could work with him again.” I kept my eyes on his, waiting.
“We’ve got a new big job starting up.”
“The Sonoma project.” I nodded. Town had been buzzing about it.
The restoration was massive—a two-story brick building from the early 1900s in downtown Star Falls, complete with arched windows, original crown molding, and creaky wood floors that told a thousand stories—and it would all be turned into an artist co-op.
“Yes, the Sonoma project,” Caleb said. “You’re damn good at what you do. We could use someone with your caliber of skills.”
I blinked at the unexpected validation. A warm bloom of pride settled low in my chest. “That means a lot, coming from you.”
“Good. You up for the finish-work contract? It’s a big one. Time and materials plus a percentage of the profit.”
This was a no-brainer for me. Being paid for hours worked ensured I couldn’t get screwed if the project went over budget. And a percentage of the profit? I’d died and gone to heaven. “Yes. Absolutely yes.”
“And you’re sure you can take on a big project like this, from start to finish, and not have problems with Bill?”
That he even had to clarify…it stung. “I won’t let you down.”
Before I could say more, another voice came from the shadows.
“Her word is gold.”
Tucker.
Air stalled in my lungs. Those words. That voice—low and steady, but sharp enough to pierce steel—could still undo me.
Caleb raised an eyebrow. “Eavesdropping?”
Tucker stepped into the puddle of light from the porch and shrugged.
Caleb narrowed his eyes. “You two have been doing your damnedest to make it awkward for the rest of us since she got back.”
Accurate. Up until yesterday, I’d been seriously avoiding Tucker. And he’d been letting me, which, honestly, I’d taken as an insult.
“Which one of you two is going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m simply reminding you that we take care of our own, always,” Tucker said, folding his arms.
Biceps. Forearms. Both corded with strength. Why were forearms even allowed to look like that? They were clearly a threat to my mental health.
“Agreed,” Caleb said. Was that amusement in his voice?
I glanced at him and realized he’d caught me staring at his brother. Crap.
He stood. Stretched. “I’ll email you the specs,” he told me, then bumped shoulders with Tucker on the way out.
I was still spinning over the phrase we take care of our own, always when Tucker met my gaze, his own dark, hooded.
I felt unprepared for the sheer overwhelming physical presence of him. He wasn’t SF fire personnel at the moment. He wore battered cargos and a Colburn Restorations T-shirt, just regular guy clothes, but he carried himself with the calm authority of a man who could command a room by blinking.
But it wasn’t his biceps or jawline that did me in. It was his quiet, focused listening—the kind that made you feel like you were the only thing in the world that mattered.
What we’d had…it defied labels. It’d been a living, breathing, soul-deep thing humming between us. We’d been each other’s escape hatch, a safe harbor in every storm.
And now?
Now the whole thing still simmered between us like it had never left. And that scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know what to do with it. Or the fact that no one had ever made me laugh the way he did. Or think.
Or get mad.
And that it was all still right here when clearly neither of us wanted it? I had no idea what to do about it.
And…I was still holding his cat like she was my emotional-support animal. “I think Caleb just hired me for a new project with Colburn Restorations.”
“I know,” he said. “We voted on it.”
I blinked. The Colburns were all-or-nothing. Two of three wouldn’t have won me the job. “If there was a vote, how did I get the job?”
“It was unanimous.”
I almost swallowed my tongue. “Well then. That’s…” I was stunned. “Thank you.”
He shrugged like he hadn’t just knocked me off my axis by admitting that not only had he stood up for my character, he’d voted for me.
“So,” I said, changing the subject like I always did when I was uncomfortable, which praise always made me, “I had a great chat with your cat.”
He eyeballed the thing in my arms. “I see that.”
“We discussed that she’s sweet, manipulative, and convinced she’s royalty.”
He choked. “Sweet?”
“Oh, right, you don’t know sweet from sour.”
He didn’t argue that point. “I know you can read, and yet you still fed Her Fluffiness.”
“Her Fluffiness?”
“Short for Her Royal Highness, Queen Fluffiness the First, Sovereign of the Sunbeam Patch.”
I stared at him, and he grimaced, like he was actually embarrassed. Tucker said, “I found her abandoned on a jobsite, injured. Broken ribs, leg. I got her to the vet. She still limps when she begs for food because she knows I can’t stand it if she’s hurting.”