Eight.
Shea
Low ceilings, warm light, a long oak bar polished to a shine by decades of elbows.
String lights loop across the rafters, and there’s a small stage in the back corner where a guy in a flannel is tuning a guitar while a small crowd begins to form.
The whole place smells like woodsmoke and fryer oil and faintly of… dirt? But it works.
Tavern Nine is aggressively charming in a small-town, middle of nowhere sort of way.
I changed my outfit three times, and I’m still not convinced what I’m wearing is suitable for a bar-based work meeting: wide leg, dark wash trousers, a cognac silk cami that does extraordinary things for my complexion, if I do say so myself, tucked in and paired with the cropped leather jacket.
Heeled ankle boots because I don’t actually own a pair of flat ones, a fact I’m only now confronting as a personal failing.
Gold hoops, curls down. I know I look great, it’s just…
Ugh. Why am I second guessing myself? Because it’s a date. No, it’s not!
The hostess seats us at a high-top near the back, and I hop up, arranging myself, then rearranging, then decide that too much arranging is a form of being self-conscious, so I force my hands flat on the table.
This is a business meeting. I have a folder. There is a tab system.
I’m as prepared as anyone could be for a potential-restoration-show-pilot.
Tyler eyes the folder without a word.
“Don’t judge,” I snark at him, my nerves getting the best of me. “Some people prefer to stay organized, Tyler.” Referencing our earlier fight over the mess of shoes cluttering our shared living space at the resort.
He rolls his eyes, then glances past me. “He’s here.”
My spine straightens so fast it’s practically audible.
Rhett comes through the door with a roll of paper under one arm, and I watch the room adjust around him. A hand lifts from the bar, someone calls his name, he answers without stopping, just a nod, a word, a squeeze of a shoulder as he passes, and the whole thing takes eight seconds.
The moment tells me more about this town than two days of walking it have.
Everyone knows him. Everyone likes him. And he doesn’t seem to notice either fact. Or, he does and has known for so long it doesn’t phase him in the slightest.
He changed. Not dressed up, but…changed.
Dark, long-sleeved henley pushed to his forearms, jeans that aren’t dusty work jeans, hair still damp at the edges.
He shaved. Not entirely, just enough to try, and something about that small evidence of effort does something to the underside of my ribs as a fashion designer slash stylist.
He spots us and that rationed smile makes an appearance as he strides this way. “Hey, Shea,” he says, sliding onto the stool across from me and setting a roll of paper down. “Tyler.”
“Not-Plumber Guy,” Tyler says in greeting, popping in an earbud like his work here is done.
The waitress arrives and takes our drink order alongside a few appetizer plates per Rhett’s recommendation. Then, the plans come out. Rhett unrolls them across the table, weighting one corner with the salt shaker and one with his beer. I lean forward and my jaw drops.
He’s drawn my house.
Not printed. Not clip-art’d into some software template.
Drawn. Clean pencil lines, careful lettering, dimensions marked in a tight, blocky hand along every wall.
The kitchen with the partition gone. The upstairs with the ensuite tucked into the dead space over the stairs, which I would not have thought of in a thousand years and is obviously the only place it could ever have gone.
“You did this…today?” I say in awe.
“Rough pass.” He turns it toward me. “Nothing’s final.”
“You did this today.”
He shrugs one shoulder, and I realize he doesn’t know. He genuinely doesn’t know what it does to a person to be handed proof that someone spent their afternoon taking her seriously.
I stare down at the plans so I don’t have to look at him. Is it hot in here? I take a sip of my mojito. “Explain this part to me,” I manage, clearing my throat as I point to the angled island.
And he does. He talks and I ask and he answers, and somewhere in there the folder gets opened and the tabs get used and it becomes clear that we’re in sync.
He has opinions and he defends them, but when I push back on the kitchen island—too big, it’ll crowd the window, the light’s the whole point of that room—he goes quiet, stares at it, and then pulls out a pencil and redraws it smaller right there on the paper.
“Better?” he asks.
I nod, and we move on, and my whole chest is doing something complicated about it.
I’ve spent my entire life pitching. To my father, to buyers, to clientele, to people who simply nodded while waiting for me to finish. I have never once been listened to this efficiently.
“That reminds me.” I dig into my folder and pull out the contract I printed at the resort’s business center this afternoon, along with a blank check. “If we’re really doing this, I want it official. The first contractor mishap taught me that lesson.” I laugh awkwardly.
Rhett’s brow lifts. “You printed a contract.”
“I print everything. It’s a real paper-problem.
” I slide his estimate back across the table, where I’ve signed and dated the bottom line.
“There. And…” I click my pen, scribble out the deposit amount we discussed, and hand it over.
“Half now, half on completion, like you said. Don’t spend it all on fried pickles. ”
He takes the check, and I watch his eyes drop to it, holding a beat too long. “Winton,” he says. “Shea Winton.”
“That’s me.” I cap my pen. “Shea Winton, officially your most high-maintenance client.”
He sets the check down on the table between us. “Any relation to the resort up the mountain?”
Oh…
Right. Of course. Small town with exactly one resort, and it has my last name plastered across the entrance sign.
“Yeah, actually.” I reach for my mojito, suddenly needing something to do with my hands.
“My father owns it. He owns a bunch of them, all over. It’s kind of his whole thing.
” I wave a hand, aiming for breezy and landing somewhere south of it.
“We’re staying up there, actually. The suite.
He, um, he set it up for Tyler and me while he’s off honeymooning with my new stepmom.
” I fight not to cringe on the last word.
Rhett doesn’t say anything right away. His gaze moves from the check to me, unreadable, and I brace for…
I don’t even know what. The shift? The recalibration people do when they find out whose daughter I am.
When the dollar signs go up behind their eyes, I stop being a person and start being an opportunity.
But it doesn’t come.
“Huh,” is all he says. He folds the check once and tucks it into his back pocket. He picks his beer back up like nothing happened. “Small world.”
And that’s it. He lets it go. I don’t know why that undoes me more than any reaction would have. I breathe a silent sigh of relief and return my attention to the hand drawn restoration slash minor renovation project we’re now locked in on.
“Do you like to draw?” I ask, following the lines of the back patio with my finger.
When he doesn’t answer right away, I chance a glance in his direction. He’s staring at me, brow furrowed at an odd angle. I smile. “I’m not judging. I only ask because I do, too. Clothes, mainly.” My gaze returns to the house drawn between us.
“Why clothes?” he asks, and I have to laugh.
“I’m a fashion designer and stylist. I work for some big names and big mouths.”
His grin widens. “Ah, that makes so much sense.”
“Why do you say that?”
He gestures to me. “You’re too beautiful for a place like this.”
My heart nearly stops dead in my chest, my face heating.
Before I can respond, however, the food arrives and the man with a guitar in the corner starts up something slow.
Tyler eats an entire basket of fries, and Rhett slides the basket of fried pickles—which are surprisingly delicious—across the table toward him.
By nine o’clock the plans are rolled up and the folder is closed, but neither of us has mentioned leaving.
Tyler’s found the pool table. He is standing in front of it with the grim concentration of someone who’s been trying to land some ball and stick trick he saw online for the last ten minutes.
“He’s okay,” Rhett says. Not a question, exactly.
“He’s fifteen and his mother dropped him in Montana with a stepsister he met a week ago.” I turn my glass in a slow circle on the table. “So. Define okay.”
“Seems like he’s got somebody paying attention to him.”
I snort at that. “He hates me.”
“He seemed to like my pickles.”
I laugh, and it’s louder than I mean it to be, and Rhett’s mouth curves like he’s pleased with himself, like getting that out of me was the point.
Then he asks, “Why this house?”
I glance up. “What do you mean?”
“You could’ve bought anywhere.” He leans back, yummy forearms crossed, and those latte eyes stay right on me. “You bought a hundred-year-old craftsman in a town you’ve never been to. Why?”
I pause for a moment to consider his question. Nobody has asked me that, I realize. My father asked what it cost. My editor asked what it looked like. Callie asked if I’d lost my mind, affectionately. But nobody has asked me why, and I’m unsure how honest I want my answer to be.
“Because somebody built it to last,” I say, my gaze shifting, not wanting to get sucked any further into his suave stare. “Then everybody who came after treated it like it wasn’t perfect to begin with.”
The words land on the table between us and I want desperately to pick them back up.
Rhett doesn’t say anything.
“That sounded very deep,” I say quickly, reaching for my drink with a forced laugh. “It’s really just about the crown molding, honestly, the crown molding in that dining room is genuinely a work of art—”
“Rhett Montgomery.” A woman’s voice, bright and delighted, cuts clean across my spiraling. “You haven’t been out in ages!”