“Maybe he doesn’t know how to get here,” Lucas said.
“He has his phone, and GPS will lead him right to us.”
She went out and got the cleaning supplies from her Jetta, which she’d parked in the unattached garage. She was eager to get started on the house.
After setting the supplies inside the door, she gingerly picked her way up the stairs. Because she was afraid they wouldn’t hold her weight, she made Lucas stay in the living room until she’d scaled them first. But they seemed sturdy, so she let him come up.
Fortunately, the bedrooms weren’t as bad as the living room. There were no broken windows, no water damage, no rat droppings. She tried to tell Lucas that his room would soon look as good as the one back home, but he wasn’t buying it. He trailed slowly after her, so dejected he could hardly put one foot in front of the other, but he didn’t want to be left in a different room, either.
The rumble of a large engine sounded as they were checking out the laundry facilities, which were—along with a plethora of spiderwebs and Lord knew what else—in the musty, unfinished basement.
“There he is!” Lucas exclaimed and ran up to greet him.
Natasha took a few seconds to compose herself. She didn’t want Mack to know how disappointed she was in the condition of the house, just as she didn’t want him to know that she wasn’t bouncing back as readily as she’d hoped from everything that’d happened in LA. She didn’t have a lot left, but she had her pride.
“This is it?” Mack said, as she met him in the living room.
“It won’t look so bad once I get it fixed up,” she replied.
He removed his sunglasses. About six-two, he had powerful shoulders, dark hair and large brown eyes that were currently filled with doubt. “Really? Because it looks like a bulldozer would be the best way to fix it.”
“It’s structurally sound.” She wasn’t sure she fully believed that, but she preferred to pretend that she’d known what she was getting into when she rented this place—that it hadn’t been the act of a woman so desperate to escape her current situation that she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire. She had to convince him that she was going to be fine so that he’d leave. The sooner, the better. Then she could get on with the business of rebuilding her life, wouldn’t have to deal with the conflicting emotions he evoked.
He’d been with her for three days, and she still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d come. To help, certainly. He’d done plenty of that. But why did he want to help her? That was the question. Since when did what happened to her matter to him?
Actually, that wasn’t fair. Mack, like his brothers, had tried to look out for her during those few years when her mother was married to his father. He was the baby of the family, so although she was nine years younger, she was closest to him in age. After she graduated from high school and confessed her love for him, however, he’d pulled back a great deal. Although he’d continued to check in and let her know he cared about her, and she would visit him and his brothers whenever she returned to Whiskey Creek, he wouldn’t allow their relationship to go any deeper, especially after that one night during Victorian Days. And after she got married, she’d actually heard from his brothers—Dylan, Aaron, Rod and Grady—more than she heard from Mack. She wasn’t even aware of how he’d learned that her life had imploded. The news hadn’t come from her own lips. If she could’ve hidden it from him, she would have.
It was possible he’d read about it, though. It’d been such a shocking and horrible situation; the media had been all over it.
Or her mother could’ve told him. Although Anya had divorced Mack’s father years ago, she was still in Whiskey Creek. Mack and some of his brothers still lived there, too, where they ran the original location of their family business, Amos Auto Body. Knowing her mother, Anya stayed because she considered them the only family she had, and even though Natasha doubted they felt the same way, they continued to help Anya whenever she got down on her luck.
Natasha refused to lean on them the way her mother did. She preferred to stand on her own two feet, had decided long ago that if she couldn’t have Mack’s love, she’d at least have his respect. That was why it was so difficult to let him see her now. This should’ve been a moment of triumph, when she faced him as a practicing pediatrician who no longer needed him.
Instead, because she’d hired the wrong nurse, she was standing amid the rubble of everything she’d established so far.
“Well, structurally sound or not, I can’t bring in the furniture,” he said, hooking his thumbs into the waistband of his faded jeans, which had a hole in one knee, as he surveyed his surroundings. “Not until we get a few things done in here, anyway. And—” he wrinkled his nose “—it stinks.”
“That’s a skunk,” Lucas piped up. “Oh, look! A potato bug!” He dropped down on his stomach so he could examine the insect crawling on the floor.
At least he wasn’t by the rat droppings.
“I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll check under the house to see if we have a dead animal there. It’s probably nothing, just residual spray—”
“Which means we can’t do anything about it,” he broke in.
“It’ll fade with time,” she said. “And I’ll work around the furniture, once we bring it in, so that you can take the truck back to LA.” After all, she didn’t have that much; her ex had taken their bedroom and living room furniture and their washer and dryer. “I can get this place fixed up on my own, a little at a time.”
He gave her a look that said she must be crazy. “You want me to leave you alone with this mess?”
“Why not?”
“Have you ever put in a window?”
She had no idea what she was going to do about the window. She’d poured everything she had into becoming a doctor. When would she have had the time or the opportunity to learn anything about home improvement? “I can probably get the landlord to handle that much.”
“You told me the lease you signed was ‘as is.’ That the landlord had no money for repairs, which is why he gave you such a sweet deal.”
“That’s true, but...he can’t leave me without a window.” The landlord had mentioned that the house needed work, but this was ridiculous.
“Why fight with him when I can fix it?” Mack asked.
“Because it’s not your job to fix it. I can hire someone.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “With what money?”
He’d been there when she’d tried to rent the truck and her debit card had been rejected. She still cringed when she remembered him stepping forward to front the money.