Chapter 4 #2
She laughed again and looked down at Loretta as I turned to the trailer purely to look at something other than her.
Sawyer had already unlatched it and was pulling out the first box and I needed to be doing something other than standing in the driveway watching Millie Calloway make friends with my mother's goats.
We got a system going. Sawyer took the heavy boxes. I took the rest. The cottage was small enough that it didn't take long—twelve boxes plus the duffel bags plus the lamp, three trips each, stacked in the living room in a rough order that she could sort out herself.
Millie came in on the second trip.
I heard her before I saw her—the screen door, then her footsteps on the wood floor, then a silence that meant she was looking at the space.
I set down the box and turned around.
She was standing in the middle of the living room looking at the cottage that I had spent two weeks making as right as I could make it.
The freshly painted walls. The ceiling fan turning slow.
The kitchen with the window that looked out over the goat pasture.
The bedroom door open, the bed made up with the good quilt my mother had dropped off last week without commenting on why I needed it.
She looked at all of it.
Then she looked at the boxes already stacked neatly against the wall, and at Sawyer passing through the front door with the last duffel bag, and something crossed her face that she didn't immediately put away.
"You're almost done," she said.
"Just about." I picked up the lamp. "Where do you want this?"
She looked at the lamp. Then at me. Then at the boxes.
"I didn't help," she said.
"You were introducing yourself to the goats."
"I should have been—" She stopped. Looked around again. "You did all of this."
"Sawyer did half."
"Gage."
I put the lamp down by the window because that seemed like where a lamp went and looked at her. She was still standing in the middle of the room, her bag over her shoulder, her hair loose, and she had an expression on her face I hadn't seen from her yet.
“This place…” She exhaled long and low, shoulders dropping. “It’s so beautiful, Gage.”
“It is,” I nodded, gesturing around. “This was actually the first house on the property—my little house my grandparents lived in before the business took off and they could afford to build the big house.”
“It looks brand new.”
I gave her a lazy smile and shrugged. “May have thrown a new coat of paint on a few spots.”
She looked at me. Something in her face was doing the thing I'd caught twice in the parking lot, the thing she put away fast when she noticed it.
"Come on," I said. "I'll show you the rest."
It didn't take long. The cottage was small—that was the honest truth of it, and I'd said so from the start.
Living room, kitchen, one bathroom, one bedroom.
I walked her through it pointing out things she'd need to know.
Where the water heater was. The breaker box.
The window in the kitchen that stuck in humidity and needed to be lifted from the left side.
The kitchen, she liked. She stood at the window and looked out at the goat pasture and the limestone bluffs in the distance and didn't say anything, just stood there, and I stood behind her and looked at the back of her neck where her hair was coming loose and told myself to stop.
The bathroom was fine. Nothing to say about it.
The bedroom was the last room.
I opened the door and she stepped in ahead of me. I followed and immediately understood that I had made an error in spatial reasoning, because the cottage bedroom was not large and the bed was, and two people standing in it were standing close.
She stopped at the foot of the bed. Reached out to touch the quilt. It made her back arch as she bent over just slightly…and it did something to me.
I was ready to get started on this project of ours.
I was ready to get started right now.
“Hope it’s cool enough in here for ya,” I said, as if I was thinking about anything other than putting a baby in this gorgeous woman. “The AC unit is new, house is well-insulated.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Okay.”
Then she straightened and turned just a quarter toward me, licking her lips.
Lord in heaven…
“I’ll let you get unpacked,” I said, and it embarrassed me how hoarse my voice was. “Come back around six—bring some dinner. Then we can—” I stopped. There was no elegant way to say this. “Get to business.”
She blinked.
"Tonight," she said.
"If that's what you want." I kept my voice even. "No pressure. We've got time."
"The contract specifies—"
"The contract specifies we try. It doesn't specify when we start." I looked at her. "You just got here. You don't have to—"
"I want to start tonight."
Why not right now? that feral thing in my chest purred. She's right here. She signed the contract. She said she wants tonight. The bed is three feet away and she just licked her lips and you have been thinking about this woman for two weeks and—
I put my hand on the doorframe.
"Six o'clock," I said again, mostly to myself.
"Six o'clock," she agreed, in a voice that was doing things to me.
I turned and walked out of the bedroom and through the cottage, then out the screen door and into the afternoon heat. Sawyer was leaning against his truck eating an apple and I walked past him without stopping.
"Not a word," I said.
He took a bite of his apple, still grinning.
I kept walking.
Six hours.
I had six hours.
I was going to need every one of them.