Chapter Nine
Bailey keyed her code into the front door lock and held her breath. Her HVAC guy hadn’t given her any guarantees, but she’d held out hope throughout the long day that he’d made it by, fixed the problem, and she would be greeted with a blast of cool air when she walked into the house.
Fingers crossed, and tossing out a prayer to whichever god worked best, she pushed open the door. And was greeted by muggy heat and Nash, sprawled out on the bare hardwood floor, watching TV in his boxers and nothing else.
He glanced up, hair damp from either sweat or a recent shower, a beer bottle wet with condensation in one hand.
She’d been half expecting it—more than half—but it was still a crushing disappointment. “The HVAC guy didn’t show.”
“No, he showed.” Nash sat up with a wince, his hair flopping limply over his forehead. “He just couldn’t fix it.”
Bailey wanted to whine, but it wouldn’t do any good. Kicking off her shoes, she nudged them to the side and shut the door behind her. “What’d he say?”
“You want the good news or the bad news?”
“Hell.” She let her bag fall to the floor with a thump. “Give me the good news first.”
“The repair is covered by your service contract, so you’ll only have to pay for the part, which is a hundred bucks.”
Relief that she wasn’t looking at a repair bill in the thousands was huge. But… “What’s the bad news?”
“He has to order the part, and it might take two weeks to get it in.”
“You’re fucking kidding.”
He shook his head. “He said he’d put a rush on it, and he thinks it’ll only take two or three days. But they’ve been having issues with their supplier, so two weeks is worst-case scenario.”
She could feel the whine building. “I can’t sleep in this heat for two more weeks. I was barely functional today.”
“I can sleep fine, I just can’t work,” he countered. “I sweated through two Zoom meetings today. I’m going to have to go into the office until the air conditioning gets fixed.”
“You cannot sleep fine,” she accused. “You tossed and turned all night last night.”
“That was because of you, not the heat.” He pushed to his feet. “I’m getting another beer. You want?”
“Yes, please,” she said weakly, and was glad he was already walking away and couldn’t see the way she’d sagged against the door because all the starch had gone out of her knees.
She’d managed to ignore the fact that he was mostly naked when he was sitting by concentrating on the bad news, but now that he was upright, all those muscles bunching and shifting in his legs and ass when he walked and in his arms when he opened the fridge and pulled out the beer, it was much harder to ignore.
And it wasn’t doing a damn thing to cool her down.
He walked back into the room, seemingly oblivious to her sudden distraction, and passed her a beer. She took it, doing her best to look normal and not lust-filled, and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “What do you mean, you couldn’t sleep because of me?”
He just looked at her, his eyes what-the-fuck wide, and she blushed. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” He took a long pull of his beer. “We probably shouldn’t do that again.”
“Probably not,” she agreed. It had been frustrating, sleeping next to him, and if she was going to keep to her no-sex-till-the-bang rule, they definitely needed to keep to their separate beds.
But she’d also found it comforting.
“You should bring your mattress down here,” he suggested.
She jerked herself away from uncomfortable thoughts. “What?”
“Bring it down here,” he repeated, gesturing with his beer. “Move the couch back, or over, and put your mattress on the floor until the AC is fixed.”
“It would be cooler,” she allowed, then sighed. “But the thought of hauling it down here, then hauling it back up makes me want to cry.”
“I’ll help.”
She looked at him. “You would?”
“Of course I would.” His eyebrows jerked together in a scowl. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad.”
“You look mad,” she argued, and he did. He looked mad and grumpy and hot and half-naked, which she was supposed to be ignoring but it was right there, the half-nakedness, it all its thick, hairy, half-naked glory, and it went so well with the mad and grumpy that she started feel hot.
Well. Hotter.
“I’m not mad,” he repeated. “I’m annoyed that you think I won’t help you move your mattress, like some asshole.”
“I never said you were an asshole.”
“You implied it.”
She snorted. “If I thought you were an asshole, I’d tell you.”
“Well, that’s true,” he said grudgingly and bent to set his beer on the floor. “Okay, come on.”
She set hers next to it. “Where are we going?”
“To get your mattress,” he said, exasperated, and started for the stairs.
She scooped up her shoes and trailed after him, trying to remember what state she’d left her bedroom in that morning.
She’d been in hurry—she’d overslept, having left her phone, and its alarm, in her bedroom overnight—so there was some disarray.
But she’d done her annual clean out just before her birthday, and that meant it was good enough.
She walked up the stairs behind Nash, watching his butt flex in the thin blue boxers, then almost rammed face-first into it when he stopped dead on the top stair.
She dropped back a step and slapped a hand on the railing, and told herself the heat in her face was weather related. “What the hell, Nash?”
“Why isn’t there a door on this room?”
“It’s a converted attic,” she reminded him, staring at the small of his back.
His boxers had ridden down, exposing the dimples low on either side of his spine that had always driven her mad with lust. His skin was damp with sweat, and she started to look away—her self-preservation instincts weren’t completely dead—then something else caught her eye.
“Did you know you have an ingrown hair on your back?”
“No, you can’t pick it,” he said immediately. “Attics can have doors.”
“Yeah, well, the designers of the 1926 Sears Crescent didn’t think an attic door was necessary. It’s just a little one,” she wheedled, leaning close to peer at the hair in question. “Barely under the skin. I can get it with my fingernail.”
“No.” He reached back and hitched his boxers up, hiding the hair behind blue cotton. “Attics can have doors.”
“Spoilsport,” she muttered.
He walked into her bedroom. “It’s a safety hazard.”
She rolled her eyes and climbed the remaining steps into room, grimacing at the heat. It was like a blast furnace. “It is not.”
“It is,” he insisted, turning to frown at her, grumpy and mad again. “If a fire breaks out downstairs and you don’t have a door to close, it’s going to get to you that much faster.”
“Fire is not going to break out downstairs.” She tossed her shoes in the direction of her closet, starting to feel mad and grumpy herself. “And if it does, I have smoke detectors.”
“You should still have a door, and keep it closed when you sleep.”
“You don’t close yours when you sleep.”
“Can we just get the mattress already? I’m sweating my ass off here.”
“You’re the one who decided to play Smokey the Bear,” she pointed out and moved past him to strip the duvet off her bed.
“Smokey the Bear is for forest fires,” he said, just, she was sure, to be contrary.
She tossed the duvet and the top sheet to the floor, leaving the fitted sheet and mattress protector in place, then snatched up the pillows. “I’m starting to change my mind about you not being an asshole.”
He grinned at that, all the grumpy disappearing in a flash of teeth and dimple. It did not, unfortunately, make him less hot.
“Just grab the damn mattress,” she ordered.
With her on one side and him on the other, they wrestled it off the box spring and up on its side.
“Why doesn’t this thing have handles?” Nash asked, grunting as he fought to keep the wobbling mattress upright.
“Because it was on clearance.” Bailey used her hip to brace her side, then nudge it forward. “They don’t put the fancy mattresses with handles on clearance.”
“Jesus, it’s fucking heavy.”
She would have agreed, but she didn’t have the breath for it. They shoved and scooted the slab of memory foam, flaccid and heavy, to the top of the stairs. Stopping to pant, one shoulder wedged against it, she wiped a hand over her dripping brow. “I say we just push it down.”
“I feel like I should object to that, but I’m too hot to figure out why.”
“Then push,” she told him, and put her back into it.
They managed to get it down the first stair, and for a moment it looked as though it would slide smoothly on its edge down the wooden stairs. But halfway down it slowly slumped over, hit the wall, and stopped moving.
She stared at her clearance mattress, now folded in half and filling the stairwell. “Well, fuck.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“Just shut up,” he muttered and walked down the three steps to where the mattress waited, limp and unmoving. He shot her a glare over his shoulder. “Are you going to help or not?”
“Not,” she muttered, but stomped down the stairs to squeeze in beside him.
“I’ll go high,” he said, raising his arms to grab the top of the mattress. “You go low.”
“Fine.”
But the hallway was narrow—apparently the designers of the 1926 Sears Crescent also hadn’t figured on more than one person going up or down at one time—and with Nash’s big body taking up most of the space, there was no room to face forward.
So she turned, tucking her right shoulder against the mattress.
Unfortunately, that put her head in his armpit. With her face all but smashed against his ribs, she huffed out a breath. “This is ridiculous,” she muttered, then grunted when his elbow hit her ear. “What the hell?”
“Sorry. That tickled.”
It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t a thousand degrees in the stairwell. “Just push,” she ordered, and leaned into the mattress while he did the same.