Chapter 7
When I turned down the road to my cabin, I came to a small fork in the road where I watched Jay’s truck disappear down toward his mansion on the lake. He was grabbing his tools and would be meeting me back at my place.
I did my best to tidy up the cabin while I waited. But there wasn’t much more I could do to make the place more presentable. It was pretty clean, but there was no fixing the shabby décor or the vintage furniture, which were both in desperate need of an upgrade. It was just going to have to do.
I stepped out onto the porch again just as Jay pulled up to my place with a bunch of tools in his trunk.
He stepped down from the driver’s seat, and his shoes crunched on the gravel as he neared.
“Don’t judge the cabin too much. It’s still a work in progress,” I preempted, trying to make my tone sound lighthearted.
But really, I feared there might be a gun or something underneath the fridge I hadn’t discovered, and I’d have to explain why it was there.
I could only pray I’d gotten all the survival weapons out of the house when I did my deep clean.
“I promise I won’t judge,” Jay said with a slightly amused smile.
I shoved the squeaky door open and led him into the house. It was sweltering inside the cabin, the humid heat coating everything it touched because the AC was broken as well.
“AC broken?” he guessed, and I flushed with embarrassment.
“You don’t happen to know how to fix an AC, too, do you?”
He chuckled. “I don’t know much, but my father used to work on houses. He’s taught me a couple of things over the years. I can definitely give it a try. Let’s start with the fridge?”
I nodded and hurried to guide him into the kitchen, showing him the fridge that had to be at least forty years old.
I cracked a window open for more ventilation while he kneeled down and pulled the fridge out from the wall. It moved with surprising ease, and he started fiddling with the wires and plugs.
I jumped up onto the countertop to watch, biting my lip unconsciously. The whole situation was very odd—having my incredibly good-looking neighbor in my kitchen, fixing the fridge.
I swung my legs on the island, the back of my thighs sticking to the tile.
I’d put on a tank top and jean shorts after changing out of my interview clothes, too hot to wear anything else in the cabin’s heat.
I could feel sweat on my brow and on the backs of my knees.
I reached for the kitchen rag by the sink and dabbed at my forehead.
“So what do you think is wrong with it?” I asked.
“It looks like the compressor is the culprit,” Jay said, getting up from the floor and holding in his hands a metal thing that resembled a small crockpot.
“Is it fixable?” I looked at the refrigerator part, but I had no idea what it did or how to fix it.
“Looks like the coils just need to be cleaned. Do you have some cleaner and maybe some rags?”
I hopped off the kitchen counter to retrieve them. When I returned, I passed him the cleaner and rags, and he set the compressor on the counter and began wiping the grime from the coils inside. I watched him work and kept chewing on my lower lip.
“So why did you move into your brother’s cabin?” Jay asked, his eyes not straying from the compressor.
I didn’t think admitting I was running from my lavish lifestyle in the city because I was tired of my father’s controlling nature and mentally messed up from his best friend/dental associate would be a great first impression. So I went with something more vague.
“Oh, you know, just having a quarter-life crisis at the moment. I needed a change of scenery.”
He chuckled, and the sound filled the kitchen. It had been so quiet the last few days, and it felt nice to have another person in the cabin.
“What about you?” I asked, secretly hoping I’d be able to lead the conversation toward his career. I was still picturing a podiatrist after Emily had said that, and I wanted to get toe warts off my mind if at all possible. “Big Bear doesn’t seem like a place to take up permanent residence.”
“It’s true. Typically, people don’t settle down in this little mountain town, but I own a business here.”
Perfect, I thought. A flawless segue into—
But just when I was about to ask what kind of business he ran, I spotted a flicker of movement across the kitchen floor. I screamed before I could stop myself, then jumped onto the kitchen chair like a squatted duck, hugging my knees to my chest.
“Mouse!” I squealed, and the little creature scurried across the wood floors to a hole beneath the kitchen cabinets.
Jay startled a little at my high-pitched squeal and turned to see the little fuzzy creature just as it disappeared.
“Should you be staying here? Mice can carry diseases—”
“Don’t. Just—don’t.” I shut my eyes and tried not to think about tiny, disease-riddled paws touching everything. “Please, just fix the fridge.”
“You got it, Amapolita,” Jay said, and there it was—amusement threading through his tone again.
My eyes snapped open, narrowing at him. “What are you calling me now? Little Tornado?”
“So you looked up Remolino?” His mouth betrayed him with the slightest twitch.
“Mm-hmm.” I climbed down from the chair, still trembling. “Spill it. What does this one mean?”
“I kinda like the idea of letting you figure it out.”
I glared at him and wanted to ask him where he learned Spanish, but I was too heated not to address the jab he’d taken at me first. “I wouldn’t be living in this dump if it wasn’t absolutely necessary, you know.”
“You could rent a place in town,” he suggested almost nonchalantly.
“You think if I had the money to rent a place in town that I’d be staying here?” The sight of him trying to subdue a smile only made me more agitated.
His grin grew. “Well, the diamond tennis bracelet on your wrist tells a different story.”
My mouth fell open. “I—it’s—not—” I stuttered, realizing I was, in fact, wearing my Tiffany bracelet my mother bought me for college graduation. Nice job, Hope. Nothing says financially struggling like wearing a diamond bracelet.
I could probably sell it and rent a place in town for a few months.
But I wasn’t trying to burn down all the bridges in my life since I’d already obliterated ninety-five percent of them.
Or maybe I was just telling myself that because, deep down, I liked the bracelet and it brought back good memories from a different time before hygiene school. Before the incident.
“You don’t understand,” I finished lamely.
His smile softened to something gentler, and an odd thrill ran through my veins. He wasn’t buying that I was some poor new girl moving into my brother’s cabin next door. He was clever and a bit flirtatious too, in a way that I had to watch out for.
“I’m sure I don’t,” he said, not an ounce of judgment in his voice. “But I’d like to.” He glanced back at the compressor, and I could breathe a little better without his gaze on me. “I’ve learned most things are more complicated than they seem on the outside.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, and when I didn’t say anything, he moved right along. Finishing up with the compressor, he carried it back to the fridge to reinstall it, and within minutes, it was running again.
“Wow, thank you. That was fast,” I said, staring at the now humming fridge in slight awe.
“No problem,” he said. “Where’s the AC?”
I led him into the closet with the AC, and he worked on it for a while in silent concentration. When he finished that, he moved to the furnace—rearranging parts and dusting off copper wires.
Not long after, I heard the whoosh of the air vents sending cool air into my cabin for the first time since I’d arrived.
“Seriously, thank you. I can pay you for your services once I get a job—” I started to say.
He shook his head and gave me another smile. “Don’t worry about it, really. Should we do some yard work while we wait for it to cool down in here? I brought tools for that too.”
“Is it hard for you to live next to a crappy cabin? Is its disgruntled appearance disrupting your perfect forest scenery?” I was pretty certain no one would do this amount of manual labor for free. There had to be a catch.
“Not at all,” he grinned, and I felt that tiny spark of electricity go through me again. “Just want to be neighborly. I know how hard fixing up a place can be.”
“Well, if you’re so insistent, I guess we can start on the shrubs that are basically eating my front entryway,” I said.
Somehow, Jay already seemed to know a little too much about me, and yet I felt like I knew almost nothing about him. Whatever subtle guessing game we were playing, I was clearly behind, and now was my time to get ahead.
“Perfect. Sounds like a plan,” he said, as if to say he was accepting the invisible challenge going on between us.
“After you,” I said.