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Within twenty minutes, Nana is dozing in the warmth of her screened-in porch. The wrought-iron couch with faded cushions sits under three large windows, and the sunlight’s warmth makes this the perfect spot for a catnap.
I might kill for a nap myself, having not slept well last night in the old double bed I once shared with my sister. The room is a throwback to a time long gone. The four-poster bed. The three-drawer maple dresser. The chest of dolls. I had to throw a T-shirt over the china babies to settle my heart rate and hope to sleep despite them watching me. The room held not only antique furniture but years of memories, like a timeline of my life, captured in photographs. Silver frames and wooden stands held image after image of Grace and me as kids. Glancing over them, I recalled the one person missing from them: my mother. Her death was over twenty years ago, yet I still ache from her passing.
Shaking away my thoughts, I return my focus to the yard and sense someone watching me. I glance up at the roofers who haven’t seemed to pay me any attention. I’m just a haggard-looking creature fighting the weeds in this overgrown garden. My once-tight ponytail now hangs loose, and lax tendrils escape the band as I struggle with my mission. I swipe at my forehead with my wrist and feel the sensation of eyes on me again.
As I pitch forward and reach for the next victim of vegetation removal, I spy two blue eyes the size of miniature saucers through the scraggly bushes lining the back of Nana’s property. Tilting my head this way and that, I see my observer is none other than the child I waved at yesterday.
Despite her father’s ire, I wave at her again.
She runs away.
Well, that’s that. You’re even scaring the children, Emily. I push back the hair sticking to the side of my face and lean forward to pull the next weed in question.
Only, I feel eyes fall on me again and the distinct sound of hammering has stopped.
Bracing a hand against my forehead, I look up at the man peering down at me, blinding me like Helios, the Greek god of the sun. However, his eyes are not directed at me, but on the child returned to the edge of the bushes opposite me.
“Hello,” I call out.
She doesn’t respond, and for a second, I decide that’s a good thing. She shouldn’t speak to strangers, only the longer she looks at me, the more unsettled I become, and I crane my neck toward the playhouse.
“Would you like to play in the playhouse? Do you know my nana and her rules?”
The child with blond braids and another pretty dress of yellow stares back at me. Without a word from her, I continue.
“If you bring my nana a handful of flowers, you can play in her playhouse.” I nod in the direction of the old two-story but child-sized home built by my grandfather for Grace and me. It looks just as dilapidated as the rest of this place with a missing shutter and the white paint chipping in all kinds of places.
When I turn back for the little girl, I see her eyes match that of her father’s. Sharp. Denim. Intense. Yet there is a hesitation in hers that isn’t present in his glare. She wants to come over to my yard for that playhouse.
“I’m Emily. Emily Post of Chicago,” I announce as I had yesterday in her father’s shop. “You’re right not to speak to strangers. But now that I’ve told you my name, you only need to tell me yours and we won’t exactly be strangers anymore.”
She stares at me on my knees in the grass, hands covered in dirt and wearing a sweaty shirt to match.
Real smooth, Emily. You’re a kidnapper in the making. I’m ready to give up my suggestion when she drops to her knees and starts for the underbelly of the bushes.
My eyes instantly snap up to the man walking his way to the edge of the roofline like he’d be willing to jump in order to prevent his daughter from coming into Nana’s yard.
I wave at him as if he hadn’t seen me before.
“It’s okay with me if it’s okay with you. She can play in the playhouse while I work, or maybe I’ll put her to work,” I tease as her blond head pops out from under the bushes and she makes her way into the garden like a giant rabbit.
“I’m Emily. Emily Po—”
“I know who you are,” he calls down to me, like a god speaking to a peasant.
Well. Fine.
“You can see her from there.” There’s a question in my tone. He’ll be able to watch her, to ensure the weed-whacking woman doesn’t make off with his kid.
As his child slowly stands before me, those matching eyes of his meeting mine, I’d guess her to be around five or six. I smile and hold out my hand, reintroducing myself.
She only stares at the offering.
Shrugging, I decide it’s equally smart not to touch a stranger, and I dismiss the thoughts wiggling into my head of all the strangers I’ve gone to bed with too quickly or dated on a whim.
“You can go in the playhouse if you wish, or maybe you’d like to help me. I think the plants who survived my pillage could use a drink of water.”
Again, the child stares at me like I have two heads or am speaking in an unknown tongue.
Okay then.
“If you’ll grab the hose and tug it back here, I’ll turn on the water.”
I’d already assessed the rusty spigot at the front of the garage. I turn my back on the yard as the child passes me with the rubber tubing in her hands, lugging it like it’s the weight of a fire hose.
“Nice work,” I mutter as I round the corner of the garage and reach for the spigot. My hands slip over the rusted metal, and I grunt and groan, hoping the energy in my voice will budge this thing. I raise a foot, bracing it on the paint-cracked siding, and attempt to twist again.
“I just . . . need . . . a little more . . .” An arm reaches around me, and I drop my foot, twisting as I step back and slam into a wall of chest. My hands brace against him, sweat-laden and smelling like sunshine, sunscreen, and all man. My fingers have a mind of their own, and they coast down his pecs and trail over his abs before I come to my senses and pull my hand back.
What the hell was that?
An electrical current ricochets between us, but the connection drops as soon as I release his skin. Holy God, that was intense—and kind of nice—but it would be totally inappropriate to attempt again. That is, to touch him as I just did, with more of an exploratory stroke than simply catching myself against him.
“What are you doing?” I snap as if I wasn’t the one just touching him. Placing one hand on my hip, he leans around me, and with the flick of a wrist, turns the spigot. Despite the rush in my ears of my heart racing, I hear the water release into the hose.
When Jess pulls back, righting himself before me, his eyes roam down the front of my shirt. The swell of my breasts sticks out a bit over the lip of the large shirt, exposing a black bra underneath the sheer white material. Then he turns his head as if what he sees disgusts him, and my eyes catch on the short stubble along his jaw. Compared to his lighter colored hair, the fine facial scruff is a bit darker, giving him more of a laborer look than the day before. And I want to labor with him.
Stepping back with the thought, I knock the back of my knee into the spigot and bite my inner cheek from the sting.
Damn, that hurt, but he isn’t leaving much space between us, taking up all the oxygen rushing from my lungs.
“Her name is Katie,” he says, his voice rough like it was yesterday. “She’s five, soon to be six, and she doesn’t speak.”