“Ceremonial flush?” Gabi laughed as she handed garbage bags of clean clothes to the girls, who’d jumped up from the picnic table as the Briarwood van had emerged from the leafy driveway into the tiny parking lot.
Sam smiled. “Apparently it’s a thing.”
“Yeah.” Eve piped up. “When you complete a plumbing project, after it passes inspection, you do a ceremonial flush.”
“And Luke made you wait till I got back to have this little ceremony?” Gabi laughed as she closed the van doors. “Gosh, I’m honored.”
Madison rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s quite an honor, Gabi. You should be so proud.”
“Oh, but I am.” Gabi squeezed Madison’s shoulder. “A flushing toilet is nothing to sneeze at here. We’re just one step from the Ritz now, girls.”
“Right.” Waverly half sneered, but couldn’t help but let a smile sneak through it. “Come see, Gabi, so we can actually start using the thing.”
The girls tromped down the pathway before her, setting their bags down outside the bathroom, which now had actual walls and a door. As the girls went inside, Gabi walked around the outside, feeling her eyes widen as she ran her hand along the planks, pausing to admire a dead-even row of nails.
“Didn’t think they could do it, did you?” Luke’s voice, soft and deep, startled her from behind. He was close—too close—and the feel of his breath on her ear sent signals to all sorts of places that really didn’t need to be awake right now, thank you very much.
“Um.” Flustered, she turned around to face him, but when she caught his amused smile, words fled her brain.
“Um?” His smile grew, and his dimple appeared. “We’ve been working our asses off all day on this, and I get um?”
“Sorry. It’s awesome! I can’t believe they got it done. You got it done. You all got it done.” She shook her head. Good Lord. It’d be helpful if some blood could return to her brain here.
“Hey, Gabi?” He—damn him—stepped six inches closer, and she found herself nose-to-pecs with his chest. She inhaled, expecting a mixture of sweat and man. He’d been working all day in the heat, after all. But what she smelled was soap, detergent, and was that aftershave? On a guy who didn’t seem to shave? “Don’t move.”
He lifted his hands, deadly close to her body, and a slew of thoughts went careening through her brain while her feet stayed frozen to the ground. Then he slid both hands into her hair, gently, slowly. What was he doing?
“Spider in your hair,” he finally said, stepping back, dangling a huge wolf spider from two fingers. Was it her imagination, or did his voice sound a little huskier than before?
Her hands flew to her hair as her eyes took in the huge black arachnid.
“Don’t worry. They’re ugly, but they’re harmless.” He backed up another step, letting the spider go on a tree branch.
She shivered, but she knew it was more from his touch than from the fear of a spider building a nest in her damn curls.
“Thank you.” Her voice was strangled, soft, and she swallowed hard, trying not to let him know just how strongly her body had reacted to his fingers skating gently through her hair.
“Welcome.” His eyes met hers, then lowered to her lips, then closed as he blew out a breath and turned away. “Okay. Girls are waiting.”
“Right. Girls. Yes.”
Gabi shook her head as she followed him around the bathroom to the doorway. Could she be any more pathetic? Had she thought he was going to kiss her or something? Why would she think that?
She took a deep breath as they reached the doorway, pasting on a bright smile as he turned around to motion her inside.
“Your bathroom, Ms. O’Brien.”
Gabi stepped inside, and her fake smile turned into a real one as she smelled the fresh lumber and saw four new stalls and an open area at the end, where the girls were standing.
“This will be the shower, eventually.” Eve pointed at the walls of the open area.
“Look!” Sam bounced her eyebrows up and down as she swung a stall door open and closed. “Doors!”
“Heck with that!” Waverly pointed inside a stall. “Toilets!”
Gabi laughed at their expressions. “And you guys did all this? Seriously?”
“They did.” Luke leaned against the door frame, arms crossed across the chest she’d almost reached out and touched just a minute ago. She wondered what it would feel like to slide her hands up inside that soft T-shirt, feel—
“Okay, girls.” Sam pointed. “Places, please.”
Gabi ripped her eyes away from Luke, but not before she caught a knowing arch to his eyebrows as he looked back at her. She shook her head, focusing on the girls as they each took up a position in a stall.
“Ready, set, flush!”
In unison, the four toilets flushed, and Gabi crossed her fingers, hoping everything actually worked. After how much effort they’d put in, she’d hate to see one of the pipes burst open, or see water come gurgling out of one of the bowls.
Each of the girls watched her own toilet, and Gabi would have laughed at their rapt attention had she not been just as invested in the process as they were. And then there was a collective whoop as they realized they’d done it.
“They work!” Eve’s eyes went wide. “We actually did plumbing, and it worked!”
“Oh, goodie.” Madison rolled her eyes for effect, but Gabi could see pride peeking through her bluster. “Now we’re qualified to help Hank in the dorm.”
“That’s a great idea.” Gabi nodded. “Hank could use some weekends off. And if you girls know how to handle this stuff now, maybe we could give him some time.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Waverly wagged a finger. “What happens at camp stays at camp. No one will know we got excited about toilets, understand?” She turned a slow circle, pointing at each of the other girls, and Gabi and Luke laughed.
He pushed away from the door frame. “You should be excited. You worked hard, and now you have a set of flushing toilets. And if I’m not mistaken, I might have seen Gabi smuggle some ice cream into the freezer the other day. Anyone want some?”
The girls whooped and headed for the dining hall, but then Madison turned around, a glimmer of humor in her eyes.
“So now do we get to do a ceremonial burning of the outhouse?”
* * *
“Chow time!” At eight o’clock the next morning, Luke stacked pancakes on a plate, then set them on the counter with a platter of sausages.
The girls barely lifted their heads.
He raised his eyebrows. “We commence work in thirty minutes. You can do it with fuel on board, or without. Your choice. I don’t care one way or the other.”
Grumbling ensued, but all four of them pushed up from the table and came to fill their plates. Gabi watched as each of them took more food than she’d ever seen them eat at school, and she smiled as she realized they were hungry because they’d actually been burning calories doing something other than sniping at each other.
“Where’s Piper this morning?” she asked Luke as she plucked a sausage link from the platter.
“She’s too busy with work right now to give us weekends. I figured I’ll do breakfast, the girls can get their own lunches, and maybe you could do dinner—if that works for you.”
“Sure.” She cringed. “As long as you like pasta.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Not a cook?”
“I live at a boarding school where an executive chef prepares our meals. Not a lot of opportunity to learn, unfortunately.” The words came out of her mouth before she had time to consider how they sounded, but it was too late to reel them back in.
He didn’t take the bait, which she found odd, but somehow comforting. “What about when you were a kid? Didn’t your parents ever teach you to cook anything?”
She shook her head. Ha. She wasn’t sure the kitchen at any of her homes had ever been used by anyone but caterers.
“Um, no. I lived at Briarwood then, too.”
Luke turned. “So have you ever not lived at Briarwood?”
“Briefly.” She shrugged. “I went to Wellesley before I came back to work there, which—I know—sounds totally cliché.”
“I didn’t say it.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t have to. I could feel you thinking it.”
He pasted a bored expression onto his face as he held out the spatula. “Pancake?”
“Just so we’re clear”—she took the pancake—“I’m not some boarding-school princess who doesn’t know how to tie her own shoes.”
“I assume you’ve got shoes covered. We can work on the oversensitive piece next. And maybe we need to teach you how to cook while you’re here, so you don’t starve if the executive chef goes on vacation?”
“Very funny. I can actually cook enough to stay alive.”
“What’s your specialty?” He raised one eyebrow in challenge.
She shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know that I have a … specialty, so much.”
“All right. Say it’s a chilly Sunday night in the fall. You’ve had a long weekend, and you just want a nice dinner. What would you cook yourself?”
“Lucky Charms. Isn’t Sunday-night cereal a universal thing?”
“No, though I applaud your taste in breakfast-for-dinner.” With his foot, he opened a cupboard under the griddle and pointed at a giant box of the cereal.
She laughed. “No way.”
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
“Luke, you make your own granola.” She shook her head. “I did not peg you for colored marshmallows.”
“A guy’s gotta have his weakness.” He smiled, and her stomach did a flippy thing that scared her.
“Well, your coffee’s becoming my weakness.” Yes, coffee. “I had no idea camp coffee could taste so good.”
“Camp coffee?” He put a hand to his chest like she’d stabbed him. “You think this is camp coffee?”
“It’s not?”
“Oh, it hurts to hear you say that.” He flipped the last pancake to the platter and shut off the griddle. Then he opened a cupboard near his head and pointed to a canister of coffee grounds she was used to seeing at the little grocery store near Briarwood. “That is camp coffee.”
She nodded. “Does this mean you’re sharing your own personal stash with me?”
“I am, and it’s dwindling rapidly. You drink an impressive amount of coffee.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Job hazard of raising teenagers.”
He did that one-eyebrow-up thing. “Raising them?”
“These girls get dropped off on September first and picked up on June thirtieth, Luke. I don’t know how it is at other boarding schools, because I’ve never experienced them, but at Briarwood, most of the dropping off and picking up isn’t even done by the parents. Most of these girls go home for a week in December, but not all of them. They live at Briarwood. Twenty-four-seven, they live with me.”
“Huh.” He poured juice into two glasses and handed one to her. “I never really thought about it that way. Never pictured your population as particularly … needy.”
“They are, Luke. Just not in the traditional sense of the word.”
“Well”—Luke gathered his own plate and headed for the swinging door out to the dining area—“in my experience, money generally creates more problems than it solves.”
She followed him to a table and sat down. “What is your experience? Because I get the distinct sense that you might rather have seen your camp go up in flames than see it bought by a hoity-toity boarding school.”
He raised that damn eyebrow again. “Your words, not mine.”
“Never mind. I get it.”
He wasn’t talking, and Piper’d said not to push him. As dead curious as she was about his history, for now, she’d stop asking. She rolled her eyes, biting into a pancake. It was crazy-good, especially followed by a bite of spicy sausage. She might just have to take him up on his offer to teach her to cook, if his pancakes were any indication of his abilities in the kitchen.
And if his abilities in the kitchen were any indication of his abilities … elsewhere …
“Good?”
She looked up to find Luke watching her, an amused expression on his face. She put her fork down, wondering just how quickly she’d inhaled the second pancake. Also wondering how well he could read her thoughts.
She swallowed hard. “The pancakes are delicious, yes. Thank you for cooking for us.”
“Breakfast is my specialty.” He winked, but she couldn’t tell whether he’d intended a double entendre, or if she was just hearing one.
“So.” She wiped her lips with a paper napkin and set her plate aside. “You said work commences in thirty minutes. What’s your plan?”
“Showers.”
She smiled widely. “Showers? Really?”
He laughed, rolling his eyes. “If I’d known this was the way to your heart…” Then he looked away, like he hadn’t meant for those words to come out of his mouth.
“Actually, the way to my heart is a big cast-iron tub full of lavender-scented bubbles, but I’d happily make do with a camp shower at this point.”
“Yeah, no tubs here.” He pressed his lips together like he was trying to knock a vision out of his head. “And definitely no bubbles.”
“Does this mean you’re offering to keep supervising my monkeys?”
“God help me, but yes. I think I am.”
Gabi laughed at the expression on his face, then felt a pang of guilt as she pictured the list of things he was supposed to be getting done right now.
“Are you sure you really have time to keep doing this? With them, I mean?”
“Why? You want them back?” He smiled. “Because just say the word.”
“I just feel guilty. You have a huge list of stuff to get done. And before you say it, I know you don’t necessarily like that list.”
“I don’t.”
“An-nd you said it.”
He shrugged. “It’s true. But on that list is a new bathroom, with showers. So I’m still getting stuff done that needs doing. I’m just getting a little more help with it than I expected.”
“Is that how you’re seeing it?” Gabi pictured the pile of bent nails the girls had collected last night when they were done. There was no way this bathroom-building was going faster with her girls involved.
He took a deep breath. “It’s all good, Gabi. Let’s finish the bathroom, and then we can figure out the next steps, okay? I’ve got work, and they need work. Match made in heaven, yadda yadda. And you and me?” He waved his index finger back and forth between them. “We’re not the worst team ever, right?”