8. Leo
Leo
“Hey Leo?”
I looked up from my coffee toward the stairs. “Yeah?”
“There’s no water coming out of the shower.”
“Did you jiggle the knob?” I called back. “It’s a little finnicky.”
“I jiggled the shit out of it,” Alex replied in a flat tone. “Still no water.”
“Ah fuck…” I muttered, pushing myself up from the table.
I set my coffee down and headed for the base of the stairs, trying to remember if the property manager had said anything about the plumbing.
She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. She’d sent a very thorough email about the local trash collection schedule and approximately nothing useful about the actual mechanics of the house.
“I’ll come take a look,” I called up.
“You know how to fix plumbing?” Alex called back.
“No,” I admitted, already climbing the stairs. “But I can at least figure out what’s broken.”
The door to Alex’s room was open. I stepped in without thinking about it, because we’d grown up sharing a house and personal boundaries had never been a particularly rigid concept between us, and then immediately stopped in the doorway.
Alex was standing in the middle of the room in nothing but a towel.
Which was fine. Obviously. We were stepbrothers. I had seen Alex shirtless approximately ten thousand times in my life. This was not a new or interesting development.
Except that the last time I’d seen Alex shirtless he’d been seventeen and lanky and still growing into his own limbs.
And somewhere in the intervening years, without my noticing, something had changed rather dramatically in that department.
The man standing in front of me now was broad across the shoulders in a way that seemed almost architectural, the muscles of his chest and arms catching the warm morning light coming through the window in a way that was, objectively, deeply unfair.
His blonde hair was damp and pushed back from his face.
A few drops of water were tracking slowly down the center of his chest. The towel was slung low around his hips, low enough that I could see the defined lines of his abdomen angling downward and meeting a light tuft of hair just above his—
I looked at the shower.
The shower. I was here about the shower. That was the entire reason I had come up the stairs.
“So,” I said, my voice impressively normal considering what was happening in my brain, “let me just—”
I crossed the room at a businesslike pace and went directly into the en suite, where I could be alone with the plumbing and not whatever insane thing my subconscious was apparently doing.
I gripped the shower handle and turned it.
Nothing. Turned it the other way. Still nothing.
I crouched down and looked at the base of the unit, then at the wall, then at the small access panel set into the tile beside the toilet that I hadn’t noticed before.
I pried it open. A tangle of pipes. One of them, a narrow copper one, had a joint that looked like it had been weeping rust for the better part of a decade.
“Yeah,” I said, mostly to myself. “That’s not something I can fix.”
“So no shower?” Alex appeared in the bathroom doorway, still in the towel, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed over his chest. The posture did nothing to help my situation.
I stood up and brushed the dust off my knees. “You can use mine in the meantime. But I’ll need to get a plumber out here before this gets worse.” I pulled out my phone and opened the notes app where I’d saved the property manager’s contact information. “I’ll call someone.”
Alex grunted and turned back into the bedroom, and I allowed myself exactly two seconds of staring at the ceiling before following him out and retreating to the far side of the room to make my call.
The property manager, Signora Ferretti, answered on the second ring with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had been anticipating problems since the moment we arrived.
She listened to my description of the broken pipe, said something rapid and decisive in Italian, and then told me in careful English that she would send her plumber, that he was very good, very fast, and that I should not attempt to fix it myself.
“I wasn’t going to,” I said.
She sounded like she didn’t believe me.
“He’ll be there within the hour,” she said, and hung up.
I lowered my phone. Behind me I heard Alex rifling through his duffel bag in search of something. I kept my eyes on the window and the perfectly innocent view of the garden below.
“One hour,” I said.
“Fine. I’ll just use your bathroom,” Alex said flatly.
“Everything’s in there,” I nodded. “There’s towels in the closet.”
“Got one already.”
His footsteps crossed the room and disappeared out into the corridor. I let out a slow breath.
Right. So that was a thing that had happened, apparently.
A thing I was going to file directly into the category of thoughts I was not going to have, right next to ever speaking to my ex again or going skydiving.
None of those things was going to happen, and whatever my brain had started doing the moment I walked through that doorway was strictly and completely off limits.
Alex was my stepbrother. He was also, currently, a man going through a catastrophic life implosion who had only recently stopped sleeping on his own floor. He was not a viable target for anything. Not even passing interest. No.
I went downstairs and poured myself a second cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and tried to be very mature about the entire situation. I told myself it was just loneliness, nothing to worry about.
The plumber arrived in forty-five minutes, which was frankly impressive by any country’s standards. He knocked at the front door and when I opened it, I had to perform a small internal recalibration, because the universe, it seemed, had decided to torment me today.
He was tall, dark-haired, somewhere in his early thirties, with the kind of jaw that belonged on a Renaissance sculpture and warm brown eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled.
He was smiling now, actually, a wide open smile that suggested he found the world generally agreeable.
His work shirt had the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
His forearms were the kind that made me weak at the knees.
And the bulge in his jeans… well, that made me want to get on my knees for completely different reasons.
Multiple times probably.
“Ciao,” he said. “I am Matteo. Signora Ferretti sent me.”
His Italian accent was soft around the edges.
He’d probably spent a lot of time around English speakers working for a property manager.
His English was smooth and round, but it still held that musicality that was distinctly Italian.
He held up a small toolbox as if to prove he really was who he claimed to be.
“Yes, hi,” I said, my voice ticking upward. I cleared my throat. “My name is Leo. Come in, please.”
He stepped inside, and I took a step back, which brought me to approximately the correct distance from him and also gave me a moment to perform a quick internal assessment of my own behavior.
I had been single for two months. But it had been far longer since I’d given myself a chance to satiate my physical needs.
I was in Italy now. It was warm, and I was still nursing a hangover and I was now in the villa that I’d bought for my ex-boyfriend.
These were all extenuating circumstances that made me wonder if I should shoot my shot with this guy.
After all, what happened to living la dolce vita?
“The bathroom is upstairs,” I said, gesturing toward the staircase. “It’s the en suite off the first bedroom on the left. There’s a pipe joint that looks like it’s been rusting for years. I think the seal has gone completely.”
Matteo nodded, following my gesture with those warm brown eyes before bringing them back to me. “This house, it is old,” he said, with the kind of easy acceptance of someone who had been fixing old things his entire life. “Old pipes. Old everything.” He smiled again. “But beautiful, no?”
“Very beautiful,” I agreed, my eyes attempting to wander. And I was absolutely not talking about the house.
He smiled before he headed for the stairs and I followed him up.
Because it was my house and I needed to show him where the bathroom was and definitely not because I wanted to get a good look at his ass in those tight jeans.
He moved with an unhurried confidence through the corridor, pausing at the doorway while I reached past him to push it open, which brought me close enough to catch the smell of him.
Castille soap and lemons. He just smelled like Italy itself.
I stepped back immediately and gestured at the access panel. “In there. I pried it open already.”
Matteo crouched down in front of it, setting his toolbox on the floor, and examined the pipes with the focused attention of someone who genuinely loved their work.
His shirt pulled tight across his shoulders when he leaned in.
I looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was lovely. Very old plaster. Fascinating.
“Si, si,” he murmured to himself, reaching into the access panel. “This joint, she is finished. I have the fitting.” He glanced back at me over his shoulder, and caught me looking, though thankfully I had redirected my gaze to the wall in time. Probably. “Maybe forty minutes. Not long.”
“No rush,” I said, leaning against the doorframe with a degree of casual ease that I felt was commendable under the circumstances. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”
He smiled up at me, and honestly, it should’ve been illegal to be so beautiful. “Coffee would be wonderful. Thank you, Leo.”
He said my name the Italian way, both syllables equally weighted, and I decided I needed to go downstairs immediately before melted into the floorboards.