Chapter 6
Presley
Wednesday afternoon I was on my patio, deeply engrossed in an Ethiopian coffee grower’s website, when I realized someone was standing on the other side of the table from me, and I startled.
“West,” I said on an exhale. “You scared me.”
“That wasn’t my intent.”
I glanced around, taking stock of my surroundings, realizing the construction racket from inside had stopped. The shadows of the trees on my lot were long, and though the sun was still up, it was no longer beating down on the dock directly. In fact, the dock was now in shadow.
“Mind if I sit?” he asked.
I gestured to the chair dumbly, taking in the sight of him.
He wore dark gray cargo-style work pants and a black tee with the small Dawson Construction logo on the side of his chest. His thick chest with well-defined pecs was discernible through the shirt.
He looked like a man who’d labored all day: dusty, a little dirty, a hint of sweat on his chest, and yet so appealing, even though he’d removed his tool belt.
I checked the time on my phone as he sat. “It’s ten after five?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I narrowed my eyes at the ma’am, and he laughed and shrugged.
My stomach rumbled with hunger I hadn’t previously noticed.
“Where were you when I came out here?” he asked. “I’ve never seen someone so focused in all my life.”
“Ethiopia.”
His brows shot up.
“They have some of the best coffee in the world,” I explained. “I’m researching suppliers.”
“You’ve been out here for hours. I’m surprised you could concentrate with the noise.”
“I was locked in on my research. I guess I missed lunch.”
He tilted his head at me. “Didn’t you just come up with this coffee idea yesterday?”
“Yes.” I picked up my extra-large Vietnamese iced coffee from Bronson’s for another sip but realized it was empty. Even the ice was gone.
“Is there a hard deadline for something?” he asked.
“No, but I have so much to learn.”
“You found good coffee?” He gestured to my empty cup.
“I drove in to the shop I used to live across from to meet with Renny Bronson, the owner. That woman’s a wealth of information, and she generously gave me two hours to pick her brain.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“I love being busy.”
He nodded, but he looked as if he was biting down on a response. “I found someone to take on your after-hours project,” he said instead.
“Yeah?” I shoved down the disappointment that it wasn’t him and reminded myself of my priorities—to get my shop built out and opened. Not to get sidetracked by this tower of man muscle.
“If we can make the schedule work,” he said, “I’m in.”
I wanted to do a fist pump, but I held on to my composure and kept it professional. “What schedule would work for you?”
I could be flexible if it meant West would do the work. Not because he looked like he did. Not because he kept popping into my head when I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I wanted him on the project because I trusted his construction abilities.
Or maybe all three of those reasons, I thought with a private smile.
“My mom and her husband live in Nashville and will take the girls on weekends. I can get a babysitter two evenings a week, possibly three. I’ve got some conflicts this Saturday and next that we’ll have to work around.”
“I’ll make it work,” I said without hesitation. “You’re hired.”
“We haven’t talked money yet.”
“What’s your hourly charge?”
He named a dollar amount.
“I’ll pay you double that.”
His brows shot up, and he studied me, as if waiting for me to change my mind.
“You’re taking time away from your kids, plus paying for extra childcare,” I said. “This is important enough to me to make it worth your time.”
“I appreciate that.”
I clapped my hands together once, practically bouncing in my seat, eager and excited and beside myself with optimism because he’d said yes. “When can we start? Do you have any time tonight? We could go by the shop and start figuring out more specifics.”
He checked his watch and frowned. “I need to relieve Allie, get my girls dinner, spend some time with them before bed.”
I wilted back into my chair, belatedly realizing it wasn’t realistic to think he could pivot on a dime and spend his evening working on my project. “Of course. Don’t mind me. I’m just excited and hyperfocused. I can research the rest of these suppliers on my list tonight instead.”
He chuckled. “Don’t forget to eat.”
“Right,” I said, absently thinking I hadn’t stocked up on groceries since moving in. I’d grabbed a lot of carryout so far and existed on that, cookies, popcorn, and wine.
The number one reason I’d just changed my entire life—address, career, goals—was to take better care of myself. I might not be a health wizard, but I knew cookies, popcorn, and wine were not doing it.
“Dammit,” I bit out, disgusted with myself.
“Sorry. Guess that’s not my business,” West said, seeming like he was about to stand.
“That wasn’t directed at you,” I clarified. “Nothing to apologize for. I do need to eat. I suck at this.”
“At eating? Or not working too much?”
“Ouch.” This guy didn’t really know me, had just met me three days ago, and was spot on with that guess. “I’m trying to get better at that but failing.”
“What would happen if you waited until tomorrow to research suppliers?”
“I’d sit around tonight, antsy and nervous because I could be researching suppliers.” It was an honest response, and I knew as it spilled out of me, it was the wrong answer. “I’m not so good at moderation.”
“What do you do to relax?” he asked.
I gazed out at the pretty lake, where a small boat carrying a fisherman was trolling past my dock. What do I do to relax?
With a self-effacing grin, I said, “I have no idea. I haven’t had time to relax since middle school.”
“Why do I think you’re serious about that?”
“Because I am. I couldn’t afford to relax when I was in finance. I barely had time to sleep.”
“You can’t keep doing that for too long,” he said.
“That’s why I’m here, at least in theory.”
“You moved to Dragonfly Lake to relax?”
“Right. To slow down.” I picked up my tall coffee cup, then remembered it was empty.
I closed my eyes, hesitating before saying more.
I hadn’t told anyone this before. West seemed like a safe sounding board.
Low stakes, unlike Chloe, who’d ride me daily to slow down and take a weaving class or something equally hellacious if she knew what was going on.
“My mom died of a heart attack at age fifty,” I started.
He let out a low whistle. “That’s young.”
I nodded. “Her marriage with my dad was…bad,” I summarized, not wanting to get into how he’d hit her on the regular. “She finally left him when I was ten. She received no support, but we were safe. It’s not easy to feed and clothe two kids as a single mom with no specialized skills, no degree.”
“I was raised by a single mom too,” he said. “She had to work two jobs for my whole childhood. She was the office manager at Skeeter’s Auto Repair during the day and worked nights cleaning businesses.” His love for his mom was evident in his tone.
“Mine was the manager of a chain restaurant,” I said, feeling a kinship with him that surprised me. “They worked her seventy to eighty hours a week, always on her feet, always dealing with staff shortages, employees who flaked, customers who complained. She basically worked herself to death.”
I felt his gaze on me.
“Yes, I was doing the same thing she was except investment banking instead of restaurant management,” I said before he could point it out. “Like I told you, I’m driven, and I had goals. I didn’t notice the similarities. I didn’t take the time to notice.”
“But you must have if you moved here to change.”
“A few months ago, I started getting headaches, but mostly I worked through them. Eventually I had a couple dizzy spells, so I made an appointment with my doctor. My blood pressure was really high. Like, scary high. She put me on meds and bluntly told me I was going to end up with a heart attack or a stroke before I was fifty.”
West grimaced. “She got through to you?”
“She did. I’d already bought this house, kind of on a whim, but she made me realize my job was doing the same thing to me that my mom’s did to her.
Before that, I had this idea that I was making the big bucks, so it was somehow different.
I wasn’t working myself to the bone. I wasn’t on my feet all day, running around, waiting tables.
I had to face up to the fact I was fooling myself. ”
“So you quit.”
I shook my head. “I kept doing what I was doing. The only difference was I was sort of aware that I was doing it. When I stopped for thirty seconds and thought about it. Then one Friday afternoon, my boss was shitty to me yet again, and it hit me. Boom. I was done.”
“You quit on the spot, but it’d been building up,” he said, and I nodded.
“Exactly. I wasn’t the type to quit, let alone with no notice. But when he blew off my career goals again, I could practically feel my blood pressure going up, and I decided fuck this. This is crazy. I need to make some changes.”
“So you quit your job, sold your house, and moved to a small town. Those are pretty big changes.”
“But not enough, it turns out. Because last Sunday and Monday, once I moved in, I had nothing to do except relax, and I was climbing the walls before eight a.m.”
“And Tuesday you decided to open a coffee shop,” he said, sounding more than a little amused.
“I’m my own worst enemy.” I frowned as doubts flooded in. “Did I make a mistake?”
This wasn’t like me. I didn’t question myself. In my former career, there was no time to question myself. I’d always done my research and followed my gut. Trusted my instinct. Blazed forward with confidence.
“Sounds like maybe you need to find some balance,” West said. “What if you tried working eight-hour days instead of fourteen?”
It made sense but… “So if I start at eight o’clock, quit at four, then what?”
“Then you relax.”
I bit down on frustration. If I could relax, I would. “I don’t know how. I can’t sit around and do nothing.”
“What do you like to do that isn’t work?”
“What do you like to do that isn’t work?” I countered.
“I hike, kayak, fish, curl up with the girls on the couch and watch a Disney movie.”
Imagining this burly, gruff man curled up with three little girls under a fuzzy blanket, watching Frozen… I might pay a large sum of money to see that. Especially if he was shirtless.
“I’ve never done any of those things. I’m not sure I’m the nature type, and I know I’m not the movie type.”
“You could take up yoga, do a painting class, learn how to knit over at Fat Cat, rent a boat…”
“Boating’s relaxing?” I asked, intrigued. I didn’t know the first thing about boating or boats, but I did have a boathouse, a dock, and a lake out my back door.
“It’s like going for a peaceful Sunday afternoon drive in the country except better.”
I’d never found driving to be peaceful, but maybe I just hadn’t tried it in the country on a Sunday.
“I bet your girls take up a lot of your time,” I said.
“They do, and it’s not always relaxing.”
I laughed. “Is it ever relaxing?”
“On those rare occasions when they’re all three asleep before I drift off for the night.” A slow smile crept across his face, and I’m pretty sure my ovaries released an egg or two.
“I thought about trying yoga,” I said.
“It’d pass some time,” he said.
He stood abruptly, and I suddenly felt dumb for whining about my stupid problem when he had daughters waiting for him and a babysitter to relieve.
“I better get going,” he said.
“Sorry.” I stood too. “When can we meet to start talking details about the shop?”
“If you can be here tomorrow at quitting time, we could head over then. I can ask Allie to stay until five thirty.”
“I can do that.” We walked through the house together as we talked.
“I can put in a full day on Sunday,” he said. “I promised my girls I’d take them to the Honeysuckle Festival Saturday.”
“I heard about that.”
We reached the door to the garage, stopped, and faced each other. “You’re a resident now. Better check the festival out. It’ll force you to take a break from working, at any rate.”
“True.” He didn’t need to know how everything in me detested that thought. “Tell your cuties hi.”
“Yeah,” he said, but something in his tone told me he wouldn’t, and his openness faded slightly, like a wall went up. “Have a good night.”
I thought we’d gotten to friend-like terms in the past few minutes. We’d bonded over having single moms. I’d told him something no one else knew. But his goodbye felt one hundred percent back to you’re my client.
Because I’d mentioned his girls?
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
Had I said something wrong to them yesterday? Or did he just not want me around his kids?
I’d heard of people not wanting their kids to get to know the person they were dating until they were sure it was going somewhere, but we were working together, not dating.
As I watched him walk to his SUV, my eyes on his perfect ass with every step away from me, a thought popped into my head. Spending hours in bed with a guy like him was one way to get away from working all the time.
Too bad he was giving me signs he wasn’t up for that.