Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
On Friday morning, Eleanor was delighted to see an automated email telling her that her order was ready at Nut and Bolts.
The more she’d planned and prepped, the more excited she had grown about the picture window that would make a gorgeous front piece to visitors approaching her bookstore. And finally, finally it had arrived!
She double-checked that the window casing had been prepped according to the directions she’d read online, then hurried over to the hardware store. Her excitement, she reminded herself, was only about the window, and not at all about the store’s proprietor.
It became somewhat harder to convince herself of that once she saw Garrett, even if he didn’t smile a bit. Instead, he just quirked an eyebrow in her direction when she entered.
It was, she reasoned, not her fault at all for finding him handsome.
He was handsome, that much was objective.
Even the whole growly, rugged man with a beard thing worked for him.
It was all too easy to picture him chopping wood or hauling bales of hay, like somebody that would grace the cover of a frontier romance novel.
You read too many books, Eleanor Ridley, she told herself.
“Hi,” she said instead, forcing herself to banish the thoughts. “I got an email that my stuff got here?”
“Yeah, of course,” Garrett agreed, nodding in a way that was almost amiable. “I’ve got it in the back for you.”
“You know,” Eleanor said as she followed him through the store. She was babbling. Why was she babbling? She didn’t have a reason to be nervous around Garrett, even if he was handsome. “I was impressed that you had an automated email thing set up. You don’t see that a lot for small shops.”
“What, because you think I’m too dumb to work a computer?” He tossed the words over his shoulder like a grenade. Eleanor gasped and backpedaled.
“No, no, of course not!” she exclaimed. “I meant… well, of course you can do it! That kind of thing is so easy these days. Not that you need it to be easy to work it, obviously. I think you’re perfectly competent—oh my goodness, Garret Wilder, are you teasing me?”
He’d glanced over his shoulder at her about midway through her ranting explanation, and the gleam in his eye had made his intent unmistakable.
“Couldn’t help myself,” he said, humor in his voice. She wished he would turn around fully. Was he smiling? Surely it would be a nice smile. “After all, we were almost set to have a mishap-free encounter. Wouldn’t want to break our streak, would we?”
“You are incorrigible,” she told him… but she was laughing too.
Her purchases, the doors and the prized picture window, were bundled together, carefully wrapped in layers of protective packaging, her name written on the outside in careless block lettering. For some reason, the thought of Garrett scrawling ELEANOR made her blush like a schoolgirl.
“Amazing,” she said. “I’ll just—”
She broke off as she tried and failed to lift the bundle.
When she looked over at Garrett, not a little embarrassed, he was once again looking amused. He wasn’t quite smiling, but that little crooked half-smile did look rather appealing on him.
“Need some help?” he asked mildly.
She lifted her chin. “If you please,” she said primly.
Garrett, of course, made lifting the package look like child’s play, which did not make Eleanor wonder about how his muscles bunched and worked under his worn flannel shirt.
Instead, she focused on making sure the route back to her car was clear for him, hurrying in front to open the door from the storage area, then out through the front of the store.
She pressed her keys to open the trunk of her car and…
“Oh no,” she said, aghast. How had she not thought of this? All her planning and she’d not once thought of the transportation issue. “It’s not going to fit.”
Garrett grimaced, looking at the package, the car, and then back again, as if somehow this would cause the dimensions of one or the other to change.
“Nope,” he agreed. “Doesn’t look like it.”
Eleanor wanted to smack herself in the forehead.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “I guess I’ll go rent a truck or something?
” Did she even know where the closest rental place was?
Having to drive there and then back here would cut into her day, and she’d really wanted to get this window in place today…
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Garrett said. “I’ll grab my truck and take it over.”
His gruffness belied the generosity of his offer so much so that, for a moment, Eleanor was taken aback. He was already turning back toward Nut and Bolts when she protested.
“No, wait!” she said. “I can’t let you do that! You have a business to run.”
He shrugged. “I’ll leave a note.”
Eleanor had never really felt that Indianapolis, which she’d always seen has having a local energy, was a massive city, but boy did she feel like a city girl sometimes.
“But what if somebody wants to come buy something?” she asked.
He looked confused by the question. “They’ll come back,” he said.
“But—”
“Stop arguing, Eleanor,” he said. “It’s no big deal. I’ll drive the stuff over, help you put it up, and then I’ll come back.”
She didn’t know how they’d gone from him offering to deliver her purchases to offering to help her install them, but he was glowering at her in a forbidding way that dared her to just try to object.
She drew in a deep breath and summoned her manners.
“Okay, well, thank you, then,” she said. “I would very much appreciate the assistance.”
She didn’t think she was mistaken in assessing that Garrett looked pleased that she’d given in.
He quickly locked up the store, indeed leaving a note that simply said, Back soon. Call if you need something. She again did not think about his muscles as he loaded the window and doors into the back of the car and competently buckled them down so they wouldn’t shift around while he drove.
“You’re good at that,” she observed.
“You know, it does come up every now and again in my line of work,” he said dryly.
She gasped. “Teasing! Teasing again!”
His smile was swift and fleeting, but she’d been right. It was brilliant.
Drat him and his handsome features.
On the short drive back to her house, Garrett’s car just a few lengths behind her, Eleanor sternly lectured herself about keeping cool and not ogling this nice man who was offering to help out of the goodness of his heart.
Once she finally banished her admiring thoughts about the hardware store owner, however, Eleanor found that there was another worry that sprang to her mind. What would Garrett think of the renovations she’d started? He hadn’t exactly been full of praise when she’d tried to fix her kitchen…
She fiddled nervously with her keys as she got out of her car and walked up to the front porch, the picture window’s destination obvious in the tarp-covered window frame.
“Listen,” she said. “This is absolutely an in-progress type of thing, so just temper your expectations…”
She opened the door, wincing a little at the drop cloths lying in one corner and the paint rollers propped up to dry on a spare piece of newspaper.
She had always prided herself on keeping her home orderly.
It had been something that had become more important to her as Jeremy had grown more independent and her days as a stay-at-home mom had grown less hectic.
In retrospect, she also knew that she’d worried about keeping the house just so because Brian had expected it, had treated her housework not as an accomplishment but as a given.
Her ex-husband, she knew, would have been horrified by the current state of Eleanor’s home.
Garrett, however, was giving the space a thoughtful, appreciative nod.
“Huh,” he said. “I like the colors. Makes the space feel bright and open.”
Eleanor’s nerves flitted away. She grinned. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “You could… well. Don’t let me stick my nose in your business.”
“Oh no!” she exclaimed when he shook his head a little sheepishly. “Please. Stick your nose in my business. I am totally out of my depth with the renovations and you’re the expert. Having your advice is way better than learning all my home improvement information from YouTube.”
She thought he might have paled a bit when she revealed that she was learning from internet videos, but it was hard to tell.
“Okay,” he said carefully. “Well, you can take down some of the doors that separate the rooms. You probably won’t want to use them much, and it will give you a little more space.
Plus, this little section here?” He indicated a section of the wall that jutted out into what had been the house’s entryway before Eleanor had begun her conversion.
“I’d check first of course, but I’d bet my hat that piece isn’t load bearing.
You haven’t painted it yet, so you could knock it out, if you wanted. Give yourself a little more room.”
“Breaking down walls might be a bit beyond my skills, YouTube or no,” she admitted sheepishly.
He shrugged. “I could help, if you wanted. Or you could leave it. Having it there makes the spaces more distinct, which can be good. There are definitely times I wished I could break the sections of my store up a bit more. It’s just one big square, though.
A house like this offers a lot more possibility… ”
He trailed off, sounding almost wistful.
“Have you ever worked on this kind of building before?” she asked, sensing that she needed to tread carefully. “For yourself, I mean.”
For a moment, Garrett didn’t answer, instead busying himself with propping the bundle of glass and wood securely against a wall. Eleanor worried that she’d overstepped. After a few more seconds, however, he cleared his throat.
“I almost did… or I guess I did the reno, yeah, but then never got to live there.” He squared his shoulders as if gathering his courage to speak again. “I was supposed to get married, about ten years back. But my fiancée decided she didn’t want to go through with it. With me, I guess.”
Eleanor felt a twist of sympathy and discomfort in her belly. Gosh, she had overstepped, however accidentally. And from the way Garrett was grimacing, this wound might be old, but it was not healed.
“Man,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know our situations aren’t exactly the same, but I do know how badly it stings when someone who has promised to love you suddenly reveals that they just… don’t anymore.”
Garrett cleared his throat aggressively.
“Yeah. Well. It’s not all bad.” He turned back to the waiting window, the tarp covering fluttering a little in the breeze.
“I mean, that kind of betrayal really teaches you that the world isn’t all butterflies and sunshine, doesn’t it?
It teaches you to be on your guard, always. ”
She swallowed hard against a lump in her throat. His cynicism sounded as though it was laced with bitterness and pain, and hearing it made her heart break for him.
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand Garrett’s impulse to hide himself away from the world.
It had been her first instinct when Brian had blindsided her with the news that he wanted a divorce.
But there was a big difference between holing up in her bedroom for a long weekend and from pushing everyone away for a decade…
and she was beginning to realize that all of Garrett’s gruffness was designed to do just that, to keep everyone else at bay so that he didn’t risk getting hurt again.
Still. It wasn’t her place to push too hard. So she kept her voice noncommittal and airy as she replied, busying her own hands with unwrapping her new doors and window.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, woof, divorce can definitely make you feel that way. But if I’d blamed the whole world for the way Brian treated me, I’d never have come to Magnolia Shore.
I wouldn’t have made my new friends. And I wouldn’t be opening this bookshop.
” She shrugged. “Maybe there really are silver linings to every rain cloud.”
When he didn’t answer right away, she hazarded a peek in his direction. He was still staring at the place where the window would go, but his expression was absent, as if he was considering what she had said.
She didn’t rush him. It took several long moments for him to speak.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said after a while. “Maybe I’ve been holding on for too long.”
She met his piercing blue-green eyes. Her heart felt like it stuttered in her chest as they held one another’s gaze.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Maybe.”
Their gazes remained locked for a beat longer, and in that beat, Eleanor asked herself a thousand questions about what this man might be like, about what a friendship between them might look like, if only he let himself become open to the possibility.
Then he cleared his throat, and her questions disappeared like a puff of smoke.
“I’ll get out of your hair,” he said, sounding nearly reluctant. “Good luck with the repairs.”
He departed, leaving Eleanor with a busy mind as her hands occupied themselves in making her dreams a reality.