Fourteen.
Shea
There’s a particular kind of torture in watching a man use a nail gun when you spent the better part of last night learning what else those hands can do.
Rhett’s crouched at the base of the stairs, refitting the newel post we pulled loose on Friday, sleeves shoved to his elbows, forearms doing the thing. The same thing I now have extensive, firsthand, cannot-stop-replaying data on.
Focus, Shea.
I’m supposed to be filming. The camera’s in my hands, red light on, ostensibly capturing B-roll of the staircase restoration for the pilot. Instead, I’ve been filming the same six inches of his shoulder for a full minute and a half.
“You gettin’ all this?” he asks, not looking up.
“Every second.” I do not clarify what this refers to.
He glances back over his shoulder, and the look he gives me is devilishly knowing and does something criminal to my insides. “Come here. Hold this level while I set it.”
I set the camera on the drop cloth—still rolling, because Tyler drilled always leave it running, you never know into me like the tiny director he’s becoming—and cross to crouch beside him.
He guides my hand to the post, his fingers wrapping around mine, warm and rough.
And neither of us is looking at the level.
“This feels very unprofessional, Mr. Montgomery,” I murmur.
“Mm.” His mouth grazes my temple. “Fire me.”
“I can’t. You’re the only contractor in town who shows up.”
“Damn right.” He kisses me, quick and easy, like he’s done it a thousand times in the last twelve hours. And then he’s back to the post like nothing happened, leaving me kneeling on a drop cloth with my heart and vagina singing.
Twelve hours. That’s all it’s been since I stood on his porch and decided to stop talking myself out of him.
And, gosh, I’ve thought about little else since, honestly.
The way he carried me down the hall like I weighed nothing.
The rasp of his voice and the way he took his time like we had all of it, when we don’t.
I shove the final thought down where it can’t ruin a perfectly good morning.
“Found ‘em.” Tyler thunders down the half-restored stairs, headphones triumphantly in hand. Rhett and I spring apart with the guilty speed of teenagers—which is rich, considering the actual teenager in the room is the one who just caught us. He looks between us. “You guys are so obvious, it’s kind of sad.”
I scoff, “Rude.”
“Just film the post,” Rhett grumbles.
“That depends, are y’all done being weird?” He lifts the camera and gets back to filming, but I catch the corner of his mouth twitching. Approval, from Tyler, remains the rarest currency I know.
“Did you just say y’all?” I gasp dramatically. “Sounds like a pretty Whitetail native is rubbing off on you, Mr. California.”
Tyler blushes a furious shade of red but ignores me.
“Ewww, gross,” Rhett teases, and I burst out laughing, earning a smirking eye-roll from the singular film crew.
We fall into an easy rhythm after that. Rhett working, me handing him what he needs. An hour slides by, then two before the staircase starts to look how I imagined it did eighty-plus years ago.
It’s late afternoon when Rhett finally sets the drill down for the day. He wipes his hands on a rag, and asks, “You two got plans tonight?”
I glance up from where I’m sweeping and fight back a smile. I don’t want to assume what he’s about to ask me, but… Who am I kidding? I smile. “None. How about you?”
“There’s a dinner party tonight,” he says, packing up his drill and miscellaneous tools. “Ma does a dinner every Sunday, the whole family. Non-negotiable, been that way my entire life. I was hoping y’all would come.”
“Sure. I’m down,” Tyler speaks, answering for the both of us as he packs away the camera.
My brow furrows slightly, however. “If your mom does dinner every Sunday, then why is tonight a dinner party? Wouldn’t it just be a Sunday dinner?”
Rhett just grins at me. “It’s a surprise.”
I eye him skeptically. “Why do I feel like you’re not telling me something?”
He zips the tool bag. Calm, cool, collected. And I call bullshit. “Nothin’ else to tell, sweetheart. It’s just dinner.”
“You said it’s a surprise.”
“Did I?” He shoulders the bag, the picture of innocence, which on a man his size is frankly absurd. He drops a kiss on my forehead on his way to the door. “Six-thirty. I’ll pick you both up.”
Tyler throws me a look that clearly says just go with it, which is a deeply unsettling thing to receive as guidance from a fifteen-year-old.
I look back at Rhett, filling my doorway with that maddening smirk, and I realize I’m going to say yes to whatever this is. Whatever he wants, really. “Fine,” I sigh. “Six-thirty. But if this is some kind of small-town hazing ritual, I’m putting it in the pilot.”
His grin is the last thing out the door.
The Montgomery place sits at the top of a quarter-mile drive already lined with trucks, a big white farmhouse with black shutters and a wraparound porch facing west, where the last of the sunset is bleeding orange and pink behind the tree line.
Smoke curls from the chimney, every window glows.
It’s something off the front cover of a Country Living magazine.
“Woah,” Tyler says from the backseat, and for once there’s no sarcasm in it.
“This is it.” Rhett kills the engine and glances at me. “Ready?”
“That depends entirely on what the surprise is.”
“Mm.” He’s already out of the truck.
Infuriating man.
He comes around and opens my door before I can, offers a hand down and doesn’t let go once I’m on my feet.
Tyler falls in on my other side, and we make our way up toward all that warm light and the sound inside reaching us before we’re halfway there—music, voices, a baby shrieking with laughter, a dog barking, the roar of a house with too many people in it.
My heart does a nervous dip.
Rhett doesn’t knock, he just pushes open the front door. The noise hits us full force alongside a banner strung across the archway of the foyer in looping hand-painted letters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RHETT!
I stop dead on the threshold. “Rhett,” I whisper-hiss, squeezing his hand.
“Surprise,” he says with a grin, toeing off his boots.
“It’s your birthday? Like, today?” I round on him, mouth open, keeping my voice to a furious whisper.
He spent the whole day working on my house and didn’t say a word—I made him get up at seven in the morning, on a Sunday, on his birthday!
I’m a monster. “How could you not tell me? I didn’t get you anything.
I don’t even have a card, Rhett, I look like the girlfriend who forgot her—” I stop, my eyes widening.
The word out before I can catch it. Heat floods my face.
To my horror, Rhett catches it, too. Something pleased moves across his face, and he leans in close, his mouth at my ear. “Girlfriend, huh?”
My mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water. “T-That’s not—”
“Too late. Heard it.” He straightens, grinning like a man who just won and takes my coat off my shoulders before I can argue. “And I don’t want a thing. You’re here. That’s the whole gift, darlin’.”
Before I can find a single word to throw back at him, a voice cuts across the foyer, “Is that the birthday boy?”
She comes through the archway wiping her hands on a dish towel—a woman in her sixties, silver threading through blonde hair pinned up, a fall-themed apron over her sweater, and a face that is unmistakably a mother’s. She takes one look at her son, then at me beside him, and her whole face opens.
“And who is this?” She tosses the towel over her shoulder. “You didn’t mention your guest was a lady friend, dear.”
“Ma.” There’s a warning underneath something bashful I’ve never heard from him. “This is Shea. And her brother, Tyler. Shea, this is my mom, Julie.”
“Stepbrother,” Tyler corrects on reflex, then mumbles, “Uh, hi.”
His mother drags me into a hug without warning.
And the scent of sugar and butter flood my senses.
“It’s so good to meet you, sweetheart. He’s been a stone about you, I swear.
” She pulls back, hands on my shoulders, beaming.
“And, gosh, just look at you. Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. Come in, come in, you’re letting the heat out.
Tyler, honey, the kids are in the living room and there’s soda in the fridge, help yourself to whatever you like. Dinner will be ready shortly.”
Tyler shoots me a wary look and I give him the tiniest nod. He drifts toward the noise and then the house just…takes us in. I don’t get introduced so much as absorbed. Callie materializes in the kitchen with a shriek, “Shea! You didn’t tell me you were coming.”
Beau nods at me from beside her, a man of few words. Cassidy waves from the island where she’s arranging a cheese board with a toddler on her hip. Another little one, a girl, toddles past while being chased by a broad, laughing man who I can only assume is another one of Rhett’s brothers.
Levi stands off to the side with a beer and a grin in my direction. “There she is.”
A young blonde woman I haven’t met, but looks very much like Rhett’s mother, approaches me. “You are wayyy too pretty to be with my brother,” she says, and Levi barks with laughter. “Hi, I’m Lily.”
She extends her manicured hand and I shake it lightly. “Uh, thank you?”
Rhett huffs. “Fuck off, Lil.”
His sister rolls her eyes. “Just stating facts, bro.” A shaggy-haired little boy suddenly vaults over the back of a couch yelling something about being Spiderman and Lily spins on her heel. “Parker! You are not Spiderman, for the last time!”
It’s loud. So loud. Family and kids and dogs. A fat wiener dog gently steals food from the toddlers as they waddle about. Conversations stack on top of each other as a timer goes off in the kitchen.
It’s pure chaos.
And I love every second of it.