Chapter 19 – Chrissy
Chapter
Nineteen
CHRISSY
Henry clapped his hands once, the sound sharp enough to slice through the murmur of voices and clink of coffee cups at the breakfast table.
“Ladies. Eyes on me.”
The dining room fell quiet so fast it made my ears ring.
Fire popped in the massive stone hearth.
A dozen different perfumes tangled in the air with espresso and woodsmoke and nerves.
I shifted on the edge of my seat, acutely aware of the sore spots every time fabric dragged over the bruised, tender skin of my ass.
I forced myself not to think about why I was sore.
“Welcome to day two of the Wedded to Stonewood retreat,” Henry said, looking us over like he was inventorying weapons, not women. “Yesterday was about first impressions. Today is about what you can do with what you’re given.”
A few of the other contestants perked up, like he’d just promised them a shopping spree.
“As you’ve realized, this lodge is… quite large,” he went on. “Parts of it are updated. Parts of it are… less so.” His mouth curved, just a little. “Each couple will be assigned a room that has fallen into disuse. Your task is to refresh it.”
He let that sink in for a beat.
“You’ll be judged on creativity,” Henry continued.
“On vision. On how well you work with your partner to transform your space into something fit for Mr. Stonewood’s home.
You may request supplies from staff. You may request their assistance moving furniture or hanging curtains.
Do try to keep your requests within reason, however. ”
There was a ripple of excited whispering at that — transform, vision, judged — the magic words for women who watched too much HGTV and thought personality was a word you could paint on a wall.
My stomach did a slow, nervous roll. I could scrub a room. I could make something clean and functional on a shoestring budget, but I didn’t exactly have an interior designer mode I could switch on.
“Remember,” Henry said, voice smooth as polished stone, “Mr. Stonewood values taste, effort, and resourcefulness. We are not bringing in professionals. This is your work, your room, your impression to make.”
He didn’t say anything about the people we’d have to go through to get it done.
I zoned out as he handed out the assignments, until he said, “Number Eighteen.”
I stood up a little straighter as he called out my number, and I nodded.
Henry’s gaze found me.
“You and your partner will be working in the library,” he said. “Mei from housekeeping will assist you as needed.”
The word library hit me like a little jolt of electricity. Of course, the one thing in this house I would die to see up close was the room I might potentially fuck up if I didn’t do this right.
Movement at the edge of the crowd drew my eye.
Jacob stepped forward from where he’d been standing with the other staff, sleeves rolled to his forearms, his dark hair mussed and pushed back from his face in a way that was both messy as hell and insanely attractive.
In a strange sort of way, he looked like they’d carved him out of the same bones and beams as the lodge.
His gaze flicked over me once, quick and hot, there and gone. My bruises tingled like they somehow came alive in his presence, even though someone else’s hands had given them to me.
God, what would it be like to have Jacob’s hands on my body?
No, Chrissy. Stop that. You’re going to get yourself eliminated like an idiot if you aren’t careful.
“Mei?” Henry said.
A petite woman in a neat black-and-white uniform stepped up too, offering me a small smile.
“Please escort them to their allocated room,” Henry said. “Good luck, everyone. You’ll have until this evening. When the bell rings, all work stops. Mr. Stonewood will be evaluating what you’ve accomplished.”
The way he said ‘evaluating’ made it sound less like a grade and more like a courtroom verdict.
Mei gestured toward a side corridor.
“This way, Eighteen.”
“I wish you could just use my name,” I sighed, stepping away from the sofa.
Jacob fell into stride beside me, his boots silent on the polished floor. I could feel him there more than see him, body heat and the faint scent of sawdust and pine tar and cold air.
The further we got from the great room, the quieter it became.
The muffled hum of conversation faded behind us, replaced by the creak of old wood and the soft whoosh of the heating system.
Hallway runners muffled our footsteps. Portraits of stony-faced dead Stonewoods watched us pass with bored disapproval.
“I’ve always liked the library,” Mei said, glancing back at me. “It just hasn’t been used the way it should in quite a few years now.”
“Ben doesn’t read much,” Jacob said, voice low, like an involuntary comment slipped out of him.
Mei shot him a quick look.
He cleared his throat.
“Mr. Stonewood,” he corrected. “He does most of his work in his private study these days. The library was his father’s room of choice.”
There was something in the way he said father that made the hair on my arms lift. I didn’t push. My business at Stonewood Lodge was already complicated enough without poking at ghosts.
We stopped at a pair of heavy double doors. Mei opened one and stood back, letting me go in first.
The library smelled like dust and old paper and stale lemon furniture polish left over from some long-ago cleaning spree.
My boots sank into a faded oriental rug.
Three of the four walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves, dark wood lined with books in varying stages of dusty disuse.
A fireplace sat opposite the door, its mantel cluttered with picture frames and knickknacks, all wearing a fine gray coat of dust. Heavy curtains covered tall windows, one pulled halfway open to let in a thin blade of winter light.
It was beautiful, but tired… the kind of room that would be perfect if someone just remembered it existed.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
Jacob huffed a soft sound beside me.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m betting she’ll clean up decent when someone puts the work in.”
Mei smiled at us, but her dark, almond-shaped eyes were unreadable.
“You may request items from storage,” she said. “Extra lamps. Curtains. If there’s paint in the color you want, we can bring it. But there is no guarantee we’ll have everything.”
“So we should pick our battles,” I said, still turning in a slow circle. “Got it.”
She tipped her head, studying me.
“What do you want to start with?”
My brain tried to spin off in eight directions at once. Paint. Rearranging furniture. Finding somewhere to put a reading chair near the window. Then I looked at the thick layer of dust on the nearest shelf and felt the tickle in my throat just from breathing.
“Cleaning,” I said firmly. “There’s no point making pretty plans when the floor’s going to cough up a plume of dust every time someone walks on it. Do you have dusting stuff? And what about a vacuum for after we finish dusting this place from the top down?”
Mei’s eyebrows went up the slightest bit.
“Yes,” she said. “In the supply closet. I can bring you what we have.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jacob said. “We can haul more that way.”
My pulse skipped. I pretended it didn’t and nodded.
“I’ll… start opening things up, and get some light in here.”
They left together, quiet conversation disappearing down the hall. Alone in the library, I crossed to the windows and grabbed fistfuls of heavy curtain, tugging them back until the rods squealed and cold gray daylight flooded in.
Dust motes exploded in the air like a blizzard of tiny ghosts.
I coughed, covered my mouth with the back of my hand, and laughed at myself.
“Okay, Granny,” I muttered under my breath. “Guess you weren’t far off telling me books collected souls instead of dust.”
The memory of her — sitting in her recliner, hands folded over a blanket, eyes going glassy more and more often as the days went by — stabbed under my ribs. I shoved it down and focused on the room at hand.
We’d clean first, then focus on warmth and little touches that made it feel like someone lived here again.
I was still mentally rearranging furniture when Jacob and Mei came back loaded down with a folded stack of sheets to throw over the furniture before we started dusting, a caddy of spray bottles and polish, and three feather dusters that looked like they had seen some things, including better days.
“Where do you want these?” Jacob asked.
“Sheets over the furniture so it doesn’t get more dust on it as we’re going. Once we’re done, we’ll vacuum the remaining dust off the furniture, too,” I said, taking half from him.
My fingers brushed his forearms, and heat fizzed up my skin like static. He set the caddy and dusters on the nearest table, biceps flexing under rolled sleeves. I tried very, very hard not to stare.
“I’ll oil the rolling ladders so we can start with the highest shelves first and work our way down,” he said.
The rolling ladders were older than I was, but looked sturdy enough. He tested the rungs himself before scrambling to the top and spraying penetrating oil on the rollers.
“You good with heights?” he asked, glance cutting toward me.
“Yeah, but sometimes I’m a little clumsy, so keep an eye out,” I said. “If I start screaming, just be ready to catch me.”
One corner of his mouth tugged up.
“I’ll be ready.”
We fell into a rhythm faster than I expected.
I climbed, dusted, and wiped down the higher shelves while Jacob handled the lower ones and anything that needed real muscle.
Mei came and went, bringing an extra rag here, a different cleaner there, hauling away trash bags as they filled.
We pulled the curtains all the way open, dragged a side table closer to the window, straightened frames and set aside anything too ugly or broken to save.
It was satisfying in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time.
More than that, it was honest work and visible progress.
With every pass of the duster, cloth, and vacuum, the room brightened around the edges.
It didn’t look like a neglected museum piece anymore.
It looked like it might be waiting for someone to curl up with a book and a cup of coffee or tea.
“You do this a lot?” Jacob asked at one point, eyeing the way I’d propped books on their sides to break up the uniform rows. “Rearrange other people’s lives?”
“If by ‘this’ you mean clean up other people’s messes, then yeah,” I said, coming down a few rungs. “My life’s basically one big disaster recovery project. At least this room doesn’t talk back or forget my name.”
He snorted.
“Low bar.”
“Exactly.” I hopped off the last rung and flexed my sore hands. “I’m aiming for achievable goals.”
His gaze snagged on my left hand for a fraction of a second, on the simple silver ring with the green stone sitting where a wedding band would go. Something unguarded flashed in his eyes, then vanished.
“You picked a good one,” he said roughly.
My chest tightened around my next breath.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I did.”
I wondered if he knew I meant him, not the ring.
Mei breezed back in, arms full of something white and ceramic.
“We found a lamp in storage,” she said, setting it carefully on the side table. “It only needed a new shade, and there was this vase. It used to be in here a long time ago.”
“It’s pretty,” I said honestly. Blue and white, with little painted flowers twining up the sides. “It feels… right in this room.”
She smiled, pleased, and adjusted its position so it sat a little off-center beside a framed photograph. An older man in a suit stared out from behind the glass, his features eerily similar to the ones from the big portrait in the foyer.
Ben Stonewood’s father, I guessed.
Grief pricked the back of my throat for someone I’d never met. I tamped it down. This house had enough ghosts, and I didn’t need to feed them my emotions.
We kept going. We took turns beating the rug at one end, sending up clouds of dust that made all three of us cough and swear.
Jacob moved chairs with infuriating ease while I held the corners and pretended I was helping as much as he was.
Mei found extra pillows and a folded throw in a linen cupboard and brought them in to drape over the armchairs near the window.
The library came back to life piece by piece. Frosty winter light pooled on polished wood. The rug’s pattern emerged from the grime like something being restored.
For a little while, I forgot this was all a challenge, so a man behind a camera bank somewhere could assess whether or not I was wife material. A man who’d fucked me raw last night, no less. And I wasn’t on birth control.
My life had been so hectic the past few years and my boyfriends kept falling off the face of the earth, so there was really no point in spending the money on the birth control pills when I wasn’t getting laid anyway. But now? Now I—
A raised voice, faint but sharp, cut through my thoughts.