Chapter 19
BLAKE
Ihate plumbing. I hate PVC, I hate Teflon tape, and I hate water. Give me a chisel and a piece of walnut any day. Water has no respect for history. It just ruins things.
I’m on my back, staring up at the underside of the guest bathroom vanity, trying to save a piece of red oak that’s survived eighty years only to be murdered by a slow-drip leak.
This was supposed to be a simple restoration. Strip the seventy layers of paint off the wainscoting, refinish the original vanity, bring the wood back to life. Instead, I found the rot. Soft, spongy wood that crumbled under my thumb like wet cake.
I’m just about to cut the corroded pipe when I hear the front door bang open.
"Honey, I'm hoooooome!" Reid’s voice booms through the hallway, followed immediately by a sound that makes my stomach drop: Laine’s laugh.
Great.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, the wrench slipping in my sweaty palm. I’m covered in dust, I smell like mildew and tea tree oil, and I’m currently losing a war against a P-trap. The last thing I need is an audience.
Especially this audience.
"Jesus," Reid says, appearing in the doorway. He’s wearing a neon orange beanie that I’m ninety percent sure belongs to a traffic cone. "It smells like a wet dog and an antique store had a baby in here."
"It's dry rot," I grunt, sitting up and wiping my hands on a rag. "And the drain pipe disintegrated when I touched it."
"Blake Moore, destroying property values since 2008.
" Reid grins, stepping over my legs to hop up onto the edge of the bathtub, perching there like a gargoyle in sneakers.
The man never just sits, and right now, I'm damn close to tapping the middle of his chest and knocking him into the tub.
"Good news, though. I brought reinforcements.
And by reinforcements, I mean the woman who actually knows how to use power tools without swearing at them. "
Laine steps in with a shy smile and a little wave. She's not wearing construction gear, just jeans and a navy sweater, but she's looking at the exposed wall with a critical eye, hands already moving toward the mess like she's ready to dive in and figure it out.
Christ, she's beautiful. Even with her hair pulled back and no makeup, she's the kind of beautiful that makes my chest tight. Makes me want things I've got no right wanting.
I look away, focusing on the wreckage of the drainpipe. This is exactly the shit I can't be doing. Can't be laying here thinking about how good she looks, how easy it would be to just... No. I'm not going there. Not with her. Not with Reid's girl.
Goddamnit, I was doing so well staying away from them.
"Hi Blake," she says. She waves to the vanity I’ve been cursing at. "Is that original quarter-sawn oak?"
I blink, jarred out of my mental spiral. Most people would just see 'old brown cabinet.' "Yeah. Trying to save the veneer on the side panel."
"Tricky," she notes, stepping closer and crouching down to get a better look. "Once the moisture gets behind the glue, it bubbles. You have to inject new adhesive with a syringe to get it flat again."
How the fuck does she know about syringe injection for veneer repair?
"I'm going to be the Site Safety Supervisor," Reid announces. He pulls a bag of gummy worms out of his pocket. "Laine, you're on precision demo. Blake, you're on... brooding and pipes."
"I don't brood," I mutter, reaching for the pry bar.
"You're brooding right now. You're brooding at the drywall.
" Reid throws a gummy worm at me. It bounces off my shoulder.
I pin him with a dead ass stare, but of course it has absolutely no effect on him.
"Eat the worm, Blake. It'll raise your blood sugar.
You get grumpy when you're low. See. Grumpy face. It's starting already."
I pick up the worm, and fling it at his head, hitting him right in the middle of his forehead.
He wobbles for a second, but unfortunately manages to keep his perch.
The bathroom is small—maybe six by eight—and with Reid on the tub and me on the floor, there isn't much room but Laine manages to slide in next to us, and picks up my scraper.
"If you want to save that trim," she says, pointing to the baseboards I was dreading removing, "we should score the paint line first so it doesn't peel the paper off the drywall. Do you have a utility knife?"
She’s right. And she’s asking for the right tool.
It would be easier if she was talking out of her ass.
Then I could send them away so they don't fuck anything up.
But she sounds like she knows exactly what she's talking about, and if I have to do this myself, I may just say fuck it and tear everything out, which would feel good today, but would piss me off every time I look at this bathroom after that.
I hand her my spare blade—my good Japanese one, not the cheap hardware store one. "Be careful. It's sharp."
"I'd hope so." She takes it, her fingers brushing mine for a fraction of a second and tingles travel up my arm. My reaction to her is so fucking inconvenient. She's Reid's girl. Smarten the fuck up.
We fall into a rhythm. I tackle the plumbing—the ugly, necessary work—while Laine handles the wood. She’s gentle with it. She works the pry bar behind the trim slowly, listening for the creak of the nails giving way, careful not to snap the eighty-year-old oak.
A lot of people just rip and tear. They don't care about the grain or the age. Laine treats the wood like it matters. Fuck if that doesn't make me like her even more.
Getting the fuck out of this room, and away from her would be the smart move. But I can't do it. Because of the project. I have to finish what I start. I can't walk away, even if it might save me from her.
Fuck my life.
I try to focus on Reid lying in the empty bathtub, feet up the wall, being annoying. But it's like trying to focus on a mud puddle when there's a rainbow right in front of you.
"You're doing it right," I say after a few minutes, the words slipping out before I can check them.
She looks up, a smudge of dust on her cheek and grins. "High praise from the master craftsman."
"I'm serious. Most people would have snapped that miter joint by now."
"I told you," Reid says around a mouthful of candy. "She's a keeper. I bet you five bucks she gets that whole wall down in ten minutes."
"I'm not betting on your girlfriend's manual labor, Reid."
"Coward. Ten bucks says she finds a dead mouse."
"Reid," Laine warns without looking up. "If I find a mouse, I'm throwing it at you."
"Kinky."
Her laughter is low and a little raspy.
Sexy.
Rein your shit in, Moore. Don't go there.
I keep my head down, working on the pipe threads, trying not to listen to how easy they joke around. It feels like home. It feels comfortable. It's everything I don't have but wish I did.
We work for another hour. The air gets thick with dust and heat.
Every time I move to grab a tool, I have to be hyper-aware of where Laine is so I don't bump into her. It’s exhausting.
Not the work—the work is easy. It’s the constant, low-level panic of trying to keep my distance in a room the size of a closet.
Eventually, Reid climbs out of the tub. "Okay, morale is dropping. I need to go to the hardware store for the pipes you wanted. And real food, because worms are not a meal, apparently."
"Get Thai," Laine says. "Extra spicy."
"You got it. Blake? You want your usual?"
"Yeah."
Reid leans down, kisses the top of Laine’s head, slaps my shoulder, and bounces out of the room. A minute later, the front door slams, and the truck engine roars to life.
The silence that follows is sudden and heavy.
Just the scratch of the utility knife and the faint hum of a lawnmower in the distance..
I focus on the shut-off valve. Lefty loosey, righty tighty. Just do the job.
"Blake?"
I freeze. Her voice is soft, lacking the playful edge she uses with Reid.
"Yeah?" I don't look up.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
She sets the scraper down. "Have I done something to upset you?"
The question hits me so hard I nearly drop the wrench. I finally look at her. She’s sitting on her heels, arms wrapped around her knees, looking at me with this furrow between her brows.
"What? No. Why would you think that?"
"You've been... scarce." She picks at a loose thread on her jeans. "Ever since that night I came over for dinner. Reid thinks you're just busy with the new restoration contracts, but I get the feeling I might have overstepped. Invaded your space.".
My jaw tightens. She didn't overstep. That's the problem.
It started at the dinner. The three of us around the kitchen island, Reid telling some exaggerated story about a frequent flyer, Laine laughing so hard she almost choked on her water.
For an hour, I forgot to be the miserable bastard in the corner.
She looked at me when she laughed, dragging me into the joke, and for a second it felt like we'd been doing this for years. Like I belonged there.
Then trivia night made it worse.
The bar. The crowd pressing us together.
Her looking up at me with that flushed face and those dark eyes, and my hand on the bar behind her — not touching, but close enough to feel the heat off her skin.
My eyes dropping to her mouth for a fraction of a second before I caught myself and shut it down.
I white-knuckled my glass the rest of the night. Watched Reid kiss her cheek. Watched her lean into him. Watched them be exactly what they are — a unit — and felt like the rot behind the drywall. There, but something you'd rip out if you knew about it.
After that, I stopped coming home before midnight. Took on the Seattle mantel. Slept in the workshop when I could get away with it. Not because she was annoying or intrusive.
Because every time I walked in the door and they were on the couch, or cooking together, or laughing at something on Reid's phone, I wanted to sit down next to them and stay.