Chapter Eight
The knock came promptly at eight in the morning.
I was midway through a partially stale bagel, hunched over the kitchen table like a gremlin, and Easton barreled into the foyer with a round of ear-splitting barks.
“Easton!” I hollered, nearly tripping over the chair leg as it caught on my pants and careened to the floor. He paused, apparently calculating if I needed assistance, before breaking out into a series of howls at the offending door.
Rhett looked mildly terrified when I greeted him, bent over in the doorway as I tried to wrestle Easton into submission.
“Sorry,” I mumbled in his general direction, “He’s friendly, I swear. A little too friendly.”
To prove my point, he writhed in my arms, knocking into my jaw and sending me stumbling backward. I righted myself just in time to watch in horror as Easton sprinted in a circle around me, gained speed, jumped, and hurtled through the air with impressive agility for a dog with weight issues.
Rhett grunted on impact.
“What’s this one’s name?” He managed as Easton wriggled in his arms and left a trail of slobbery kisses down the side of his face.
“Easton.” I tried to keep from laughing as I ushered him inside and shut the door. “I’m so sorry, I’ve never seen him do that—” When I turned, I could swear I nearly fell over.
Rhett sat on the floor, a wide smile on his lips as Easton burrowed into his lap and flopped onto his back.
He leaned forward and whispered something, then proceeded to laugh quietly to himself and scratch Easton’s belly.
There was something boyish about the joy on his face—gone was the silent storm of a man who seemed hellbent on impassively fixing everything in his path.
And Easton melted right into him like cotton candy in a puddle. He’d always been a good judge of character, too. I still remember how he nipped my crush’s ankle out of nowhere at my graduation party. Later, I found out that I was far from the only girl he was talking to.
Something warm swelled in my chest as I looked at the two of them.
Warm? What was wrong with me?
“So… you like dogs?” I nearly squeaked. My breath caught in my throat when he looked up.
Rhett’s smile felt like finding a candle in a blackout. Whatever the feeling, it was dangerous.
“I love dogs,” he responded, returning to Easton when he whined for attention.
Readjusting my sock after nearly falling twice in under sixty seconds—a personal best—I ambled into the kitchen and hastily shoved the rest of breakfast in my mouth.
Rhett followed quickly after and leaned against the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
I turned away from him and pounded my chest, trying to cough as quietly as possible as I choked the dry bagel down.
My eyes flew wide and watery as I fanned my face. I probably looked like a lunatic—red faced, heaving, my back to him as if he couldn’t hear the egregious choking noises. First, my dog decided to practice a new mixed martial arts move on him. Now, he’d have to perform CPR. Or was it the Heimlich?
The bagel finally slid down my food pipe after I had mentally written my obituary: Death by breakfast.
“Would you like any—” My gaze caught on the toppled chair as I cleared my throat, pretending like I wasn’t recovering from a life-or-death experience. “Water? Er… hot chocolate?” I propped it back up as gracefully as I could manage and whirled on my heel.
A flush of embarrassment spread across my cheeks as his eyes dragged from my mismatched fuzzy socks, to my too-long pajama pants, and finally, the same hoodie from yesterday. But why did I care what he thought? He was my handyman. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Water is fine,” he replied. “I thought we agreed on eight?”
Well, he could always be counted on to cut to the chase.
At the sink, I washed one of the two mugs I used, dried it, and strode to the fridge for filtered water.
“Well, yes—” I positioned the door so he couldn’t see how empty it was.
“—Bluebell Cove is a little… sleepier compared to what you’re used to, I guess.
Call it Bluebell Standard Time.” My laugh died as I straightened in time to see his jaw clench.
“I’m sorry,” I quickly added, slamming the fridge closed and setting his water on the table. “Here, have a seat.”
Rhett peered out the kitchen window for a moment before sitting at the table. “It’s not you. There’s just a lot on my plate right now,” he said.
The guilt ricocheted around my chest like a bullet. I was quickly becoming accustomed to the fresh level of intensity.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated quietly.
He frowned. “You apologize too much.”
I opened my mouth with a response, but was cut off by the piercing squeal of wood as he looked down and wiggled the chair back and forth.
My blush returned with a vengeance as he muttered something under his breath, knelt on the floor, and began inspecting the legs.
He proceeded to pull out his phone and shine a flashlight on the underside of my furniture.
Rhett looked comically serious as he glanced over his shoulder at me. “Georgie, all of these are broken.”
“Not necessarily broken. More like… on their last leg.”
His lips twitched. “Was that a pun?”
“Depends. Did you think it was funny?”
Rhett sighed and shook his head in apparent disbelief at my comedic prowess. However, I was too busy mentally patting myself on the back to notice that he had stood and begun to swing the chair over his shoulder.
“I understand if you don’t like puns, but you don’t need to steal my furniture,” I babbled.
He pushed a loose hair from his eyes—I decided that I very much liked when his hair wasn’t gelled in place—and reached for the other chair. “Not stealing,” Rhett grunted as he lifted it over his other shoulder. “Fixing.”
I followed him uselessly to the door, where he turned and raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Will you make sure Easton doesn’t get out?”
Words failed me once more as the dog in question nudged my knee. I grabbed his collar and watched as Rhett set down a chair to open the door. “I’m gonna… go change,” I said to his retreating back as he carried my furniture down my porch.
Upstairs, I flung open my closet in record time. My options? A dress I hadn’t worn since prom, two pairs of lumpy sweatpants, and an oversized Spirit Club t-shirt from high school.
Easton plopped onto the bed, head tilted a little too judgmentally for my taste. “Don’t look at me like that,” I hissed, tossing a shirt back into the pile. “You didn’t see how his hair did that thing.”
It was official. I sounded ridiculous.
Finally, I yanked out my canvas overalls—splattered with an array of pottery glazes, but the closest thing I had to a convincing manual labor outfit. I layered them over a striped tee, pulled my hair into a ponytail—complete with my favorite bandana—and turned to Easton for approval.
He sneezed.
“Perfect,” I muttered flatly.
When Easton and I returned from my bedroom, my kitchen was devoid of any furnishings. Rhett leaned against the opening to the living room, tapping relentlessly on his phone. I cleared my throat. He pocketed it, and I did a tiny spin while lifting my arms wide.
“Is this Rhett approved?”
That familiar lip-twitch morphed into a gentle smile. “That’s a little more shop appropriate than the fuzzy socks.”
I rolled my eyes and gave Easton a kiss on his nose. “I’ll be back later, okay? Aunt Rachel will come by to play with you.”
He panted in response and licked my hand.
The faded red truck parked outside my house looked old enough to be vintage. In the bed, Rhett had managed to fit all four chairs and the table into a perfect Tetris formation.
“We’ll need to drive slow,” he murmured, motioning with his chin. “I didn’t have any straps.”
“That’s fine,” I replied as he opened the passenger door. “But I promise you don’t need to fix my furniture—I don’t really use it that often, and when I do, it… still does its job.”
“Barely,” Rhett commented.
“Well I can still sit in it, so it works.”
“Georgie.”
I smacked myself in the forehead with a groan. “And you just said that you have a lot on your plate! Let’s take this back inside—”
“Georgie,” he cut in again with a sigh. “Please get in the truck.”
Speechless, I glanced from the furniture, to him, and back to the furniture.
Rhett had already committed to fixing Marigold’s for free, and now he seemed determined to load even more work on his back because I was a human whirlwind of chaos.
That guilty feeling would stick around as long as I kept letting people help me.
I needed to figure out how to get them to stop. So, I drew on a smile and jumped into the truck.
We drove in silence for what felt like ages.
The morning breeze filtered through lowered windows, the perfect mixture of summer warmth and the creeping chill of autumn.
I stared at the rich green of the white oaks swaying above us.
It was too early to spot any foliage painted with the reddish-brown hues of a season change, but I still searched the treeline every chance I got.
Soon, Bluebell Cove would be ignited in brilliant golden shades of ochre, russet, and bright flecks of amber.
With the gentle kiss of a crisp fall breeze came a much-needed pause.
After the lull of August and September, tourists would soon begin trickling in again, Captain’s cider clutched in their hands as their eyes devoured the town while it was washed in a multitude of colors.
I tucked a flying curl behind my ear, dragging in a long breath before resting back in the passenger seat.
“No music?”
Rhett made the last turn out of town and looked at me as if I’d interrupted his own stream of distracting thoughts. “You can put on whatever you like,” he murmured and ran a hand through his hair.
I hesitated for a moment before turning the radio on.
And nearly jumped out of my skin as it began blasting the country music station.
His hand shot out before I could think, adjusting the volume and blindly mashing the buttons until it changed. The tinge of pink on his cheeks was unmistakable.
I bit my lip to silence a laugh and settled on an oldie’s channel.
We were silent for several minutes, the low hum of a Billie Holiday song wafting through the cab as the wind whistled in from outside.
My fingers drummed on my thigh while Rhett’s blush played through my mind again.
I was always flushing and rambling and unraveling around him, and he had remained frustratingly impassive.
But I couldn’t deny that I liked this side of him. I wanted to see it again.
Twisting in my seat, I sent him an innocent smile. “So, the big-city guy likes country music, huh?”
Rhett stopped a little too abruptly at a red light and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Not a bad thing,” I continued. “Just… interesting.”
“I spent every summer here since I could fly alone,” he replied quietly as we turned onto a one-lane road.
I chewed on his response and used the opportunity to study his profile. How had I forgotten that? Rhett may have seemed like he was just passing through, but really, Bluebell Cove was as much a part of him as it was of me. It was completely unfair of me to say anything otherwise.
“How come we never met all those years?” I blurted out suddenly.
Rhett gripped the steering wheel harder as we pulled off the road and onto a dirt path.
The truck lurched and groaned slightly, and he grimaced through the rear view mirror as the furniture jostled.
“It wasn’t really a vacation, Georgie. I’d see the town kids on occasion, but…
” He paused and rubbed his jaw. “My uncle didn’t really know how to be a father. ”
A small house came into view at the end of the road, boasting windows, a door, a wraparound porch, and not much else.
It looked as if it had a fresh coat of white paint, with no decoration in sight except a lonely porch swing in the corner.
Beyond the house, though, loomed a wooden barn that was greater in both size and height.
It stood like a behemoth shadow, yet just as plain and unassuming as its neighbor.
I sucked in a sharp breath and internally smacked myself. Rhett parked on a patch of gravel sometime during my dissection of his home and had been staring at me with a totally unreadable expression.
“Sorry,” I instinctively mumbled, which made him raise an eyebrow. “Did you— you said that he…” There was no other way to ask it. “Your father. Is he not in your life?”
Rhett didn’t appear fazed. He must have been expecting the question.
“The father I have was never a very good one,” he replied. “My uncle was the closest thing that I had—and he really did try his best.”
I took note of the far-off look that surfaced in his eyes as they drifted toward the house beside us. His Adam’s apple worked as he tapped the steering wheel. If I didn’t know any better, it looked as though Rhett Briggs was about to cry.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I all but whispered, my grandmother’s smile suddenly surfacing in my mind.
Rhett rubbed the back of his neck and opened his door in a disjointed motion. “Let’s get to work,” he replied in a strained voice as he jumped out of the truck.
I watched as he turned his back to me, wiped his face with his hand, and began to cross over to my door without so much as another word.
The Rhett I met at Marigold’s only five days ago returned, his features drawing back into inscrutability.
Like a puzzle falling into place, I realized that, for some reason, he was a safe I desperately wanted to crack.
Maybe it was because the parts I did see were things that I understood so deeply it somehow softened the ache. It didn’t matter why—I had scratched the surface, and I wanted more.
As he opened my car door, I decided then and there that Rhett Briggs and I would be friends.
Whether he liked it or not.