Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
AUSTIN
Her laugh. That was the problem.
It cut through the lull of my afternoon, a bright, musical sound carried on the breeze from her porch as she talked with someone on the phone.
It landed straight in my gut like a lead weight.
I stopped my sweeping motion, the orbital sander humming uselessly in my hand, my knuckles white where I gripped it.
The porch railing I was working on didn’t need sanding.
I’d refinished the whole damn thing a year ago.
The wood was as smooth as sea-worn glass.
But I needed to do something, needed to burn off the restless, angry energy that had been rushing through my veins for days.
Iris Holloway had taken up residence in my brain, an uninvited renter who refused to pay rent, ignored all eviction notices, and apparently redecorated the place with images of her own damn self.
It had been several days since I’d helped her with that siding job, days since we’d shared those turkey sandwiches in her ancient, yet somehow homey kitchen.
And the way she’d looked at me like I was some kind of puzzle she was determined to solve.
Days since she’d looked up at me with those wide, earnest blue eyes, a smudge of something—flour?
drywall dust? who the hell knew with her? —on her cheek.
And the kiss.
Son of a bitch.
That was always where my thoughts snagged, replaying in my head with the relentless persistence of a bad pop song you couldn’t get unstuck, like those Sutton Vale tunes Brenna loved.
Iris’s initial surprise, followed by that answering heat from me that had ignited from nowhere.
The pull of her surprisingly strong hands gripping my hair and bringing me closer.
Giving up, I dropped the sander on the floor and went back inside where I couldn’t hear her. I moved to the kitchen sink and poured myself a glass of water, drinking it in a single shot. Yet my gaze found the window and the shadowy mansion barely visible through the vegetation.
The new contractor hadn’t started yet, a delay that left Iris puttering around next door, mostly on her own, tackling whatever ill-advised projects she could conjure up to fill the time.
And because I was apparently a masochist, or just losing my goddamn mind, I’d found myself helping with more of these minor catastrophes in the interim. Small things, really.
Or so I told myself.
Each brief, neighborly interaction was a fresh form of torment.
Her laugh, when she’d nearly collided with a paint can, was a bright, unexpected sound that lodged in my memory, replaying at odd, inconvenient moments.
The way she’d bite her lower lip when she was concentrating on some complicated instruction I was giving her about, say, the proper way to use a pry bar without taking off a finger or demolishing an entire load-bearing wall.
The curve of her neck when she bent over the sketches for Heron House that were always spread across her kitchen table.
How her blonde hair caught the beams of sunlight.
I was losing it.
My iron control was fraying at the edges, unraveling thread by stubborn thread.
My routine was shot to hell. I was now timing my trips to my truck, my pointless inspections of my damn hibiscus hedge, to moments when I might catch a glimpse of her and exchange a few words.
Me! Exchanging words!
One afternoon, a package for I. Holloway had been misdelivered to my porch. Probably more books on how to turn a crumbling mansion into a charming B&B with nothing but pluck and a glue gun. Or perhaps it was a bulk order of G-rated swear word substitutes.
More importantly, that box was a legitimate reason to go over. My heart hammered against my ribs with a force that was entirely disproportionate to the simple task of returning a misdelivered parcel.
She answered the awful front door looking surprised, a little flustered, her blonde hair escaping a sunny yellow bandana in soft tendrils that clung to her damp forehead.
She’d been painting something, judging by the streaks of pale blue on her arm that somehow managed to look artistic.
The faint, sweet, chemical smell of latex paint clung to her.
“Oh! Austin. Hi.” Her expression quickly gave way to a pleased, unguarded smile that somehow managed to rearrange the air in the room.
I felt her gaze on me, not a quick, nervous glance, but a deliberate, appreciative sweep.
It traveled from my face down and skated across my shoulders.
Then her eyes moved back up, pausing for a noticeable moment on my mouth before she seemed to realize what she was doing.
She glanced away then, a faint blush staining her cheeks, but the message had been sent.
And received. It had landed squarely in my core, a knot of heat that hardly ever went away these days.
“Package for you,” I grunted, thrusting it at her, desperate to make the interaction as brief as possible, yet wanting to prolong it. All at the same time. “Came to my place by mistake.”
Our fingers touched as she took it. Just a fleeting contact, skin against skin.
But it was like grabbing a live wire. A jolt, hot and sharp and entirely unwelcome, shot up my arm, straight to my chest, then lower.
I instantly got hard, a raw, insistent physical ache coiling low and tight in my gut, an ache that was both infuriatingly distracting and undeniably, agonizingly real.
Her eyes widened, filled with a sultry heat that almost made me step toward her. The air between us grew thick and humid, making it hard to breathe.
I snatched my hand back like I’d been burned, mumbled something incoherent about needing to check my crab traps, even though it was the middle of the damn afternoon. I retreated fast, the sensation of her skin still searing my fingertips long after I was back in the supposed safety of my house.
What the hell is wrong with me?
The question had become a relentless refrain.
It had been a long, long time since any woman had provoked that kind of immediate, visceral reaction in me.
Years. And certainly not one who represented everything I usually went out of my way to avoid.
Chaos, complication, and the very real threat of emotional entanglement.
I tried to work it off. Took Line Dancer out for a run later that day, even though I didn’t have a charter, pushing the throttles until the twin diesels roared and the hull slammed against the building chop, the salt spray cool and sharp on my face.
But even the vast, indifferent expanse of the sea offered no escape.
Iris’s delicate face was superimposed over the endless blue horizon.
Sleep was no better. When I did manage to drift off, my dreams were a relentless, Technicolor replay of all that had happened and more that hadn’t.
They left me waking in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, my body aching with a frustration that was almost unbearable, the phantom scent of her still clinging to my pillows.
Now it was late afternoon a couple of days later. I was on the verge of heading out to the sander again when Braden showed up in my kitchen. He carried a growler of his latest experiment in one hand, two glasses in the other.
“Heard you were communing with your inner hermit again,” he said, bypassing any greeting and heading straight for my table to pour the beer. “Figured you might need some actual human interaction. Or at least my charming company and some quality craft brew.”
“What do you want, Braden?” I grumbled, not bothering to turn from the window where I’d been staring, unseeing, at the rustling palm fronds.
He finished pouring and handed a pint glass to me.
“Just checking on my favorite brother. You’ve been even more of a ray of sunshine than usual lately.
Which is saying something. Anything you want to talk about?
Like, say, the mysterious woman next door who seems to have you tied up in more knots than a tangled fishing line? ”
I took a long pull of the beer. It was good, hoppy and bitter, but it did nothing to soothe the jagged edges of my mood. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m just in a mood.”
“Sure.” Braden leaned against the counter, taking a sip of his beer, his eyes—those damn perceptive Coleridge eyes—studying me.
“So the fact that you look like you haven’t slept in a week and are currently exuding enough negative energy to power a Caribbean island has nothing to do with the new neighbor who, I’ve heard, is both very attractive and has a rather sweet disposition? ”
“How would you know? You’ve never seen her,” I snapped, then immediately regretted it.
Braden’s grin was slow, wolfish. “A little bird. Or rather a big one. Named Hunter. Who heard it from Brenna. And others who have met her. This is Dove Key, Austin. New people stay unknown about as long as a block of ice on a July sidewalk. I can see why that particular combination of good-looking and very nice would cause this reaction in you. So spill.”
“There isn’t anything to spill,” I bit out, the memory of her tear-streaked face flashing through my mind, an unwelcome pang of what I was pretty sure was protectiveness. “She’s my obnoxious neighbor. And the whole thing is none of your goddamn business.”
“Ooh, defensive.” Braden’s grin widened. “Getting a little proprietary about the neighbor, are we, big brother? Is this more than just a boundary dispute?”
“Shut up, Braden.” My voice was low and dangerous. I didn’t know why I was so on edge, so ready to lash out. It wasn’t just Braden.
It was her.
It was everything.