May, 2019
It, he decided as he stepped through the door of the Smoothie Queen, clomping loudly on the checkerboard floor and calling out Cady’s name to keep from surprising her, was quite an unusual way to spend a day off.
After a lecture from Emma, Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa (both separately and together) – oh, and Chris just because he knew he could get away with it and he thought it was hilarious to get away with scolding his older brother about anything at all – Gage finally decided that he’d have set days off each week. Two whole days, back to back, every single week where he wasn’t expected to show up at the bakery and count inventory or fulfill an order or bake a single thing.
Thank God Sugar was back from maternity leave – this unheard of laziness on his behalf simply wouldn’t be possible without her there to take over the reins those two days. At least that part was taken care of. But as for two days off, in a row, every single week…Well, he wouldn’t lie, not even to himself.
It was…nice.
Unfortunately, all of this free time was also becoming boring as hell.
The first week, he’d read books. All of the books he was always going to read “someday.” Unfortunately, he’d never been one to read book after book, and even the classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, could only hold his interest for so long.
The second week, he decided to switch it up and binge-watch TV instead, ripping through every single episode of The Great British Bake Off he could get his hands on. This quickly backfired on him, however, when he realized that this just made him more restless and anxious to be in the kitchen, mixing up his own concoctions, and anyway, was it really too much to ask the gods that he be born in the UK so he could’ve competed on the show? A few of the mistakes that the contestants had made were just so…so amateurish. He could beat some of the contestants with one hand tied behind his back.
He was choosing, of course, to firmly ignore the fact that it was a show where one of the requirements to participate was that you be an amateur. Just because you had to be one didn’t mean you had to act like one.
It was now Week Three of this two-days-off-a-week experiment, and he was quite sure he was going to go insane. He just wasn’t meant to have this much free time on his hands to do absolutely nothing at all, no matter what every person in his life seemed to think.
Everyone except Cady, that was. When he’d originally told her the plan, she’d simply raised one eyebrow and then had blandly wished him the best of luck. No vanilla glaze he’d ever whipped up had dripped as much as her sarcasm did off those words.
It really wasn’t fair that a woman he just met five months ago apparently knew him better than anyone else in his life, and maybe even better than he knew himself.
But all of that was why he was there at the Smoothie Queen that Wednesday morning. Cady had asked him who she should hire to do some carpentry work for her – after her electrical debacle, she’d become almost painfully insistent upon getting recommendations before hiring someone to so much as sneeze in her shop – and instead of recommending any number of handyman companies around town who’d jump at the chance for a small project like this to fill in the gaps between the larger projects, he found himself offering his own services. What else was he going to do with his Wednesday and Thursday this week? He was down to arranging the cans in his pantry by alphabetical order – he’d already done them by height – and after a five minute debate of whether “tuna fish” belonged with the T’s or the F’s, he’d decided that maybe something else to occupy his time might be a good idea.
A little woodworking would do the trick.
After his purposefully noisy entrance, Cady came walking up through the swinging doors from the back, an easy sway and grace to her steps as she shot him a pleased smile. He tried to force his body to ignore the appeal of that smile. His little feral kitten, all claws and hissing and angry, had finally started relaxing around him in the hardest-won fight of his life. He wasn’t about to send them hurtling back to square one by letting his errant dick lead him around. Cady had so firmly friend-zoned him, he was a little surprised she didn’t make him wear t-shirts while around her that said things like, “I own beachfront property in the Friend Zone” or “King of the Friend Zone.”
Actually, if she thought she could get away with it…
“Hey, Cady!” he said with a matching friendly smile of his own. “Reporting for duty as promised.”
“Thank you again,” she said – again – shooting him a grateful smile as she shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, unintentionally thrusting her perfectly proportioned tits forward as she did so. He gulped and forced his eyes up to her face. He’d simply never look below her neck ever again.
That was a totally doable and realistic plan.
Totally.
“I know this isn’t normally something that someone does on their day off,” she continued, “so I really appreciate it.”
He shrugged, shoving his hands into his back pockets, matching her stance in hopes of keeping his hands to himself. “No one in my family seems to understand this, but I like working,” he said. “Not all of it – spreadsheets aren’t exactly the most fun I’ve ever had, and I’m just lucky I can afford to have Jennifer and Bonnie help me with my bookkeeping – but the rest of it, I like. There’s a reason I chose to become a bakery owner. It gives me a sense of purpose.”
He stumbled to a stop then, before he continued his little spiel and said something stupidly personal. He couldn’t remember who he’d last tried to talk to about this sort of thing, who’d actually seemed to understand. Maybe Cady was just good at pretending, but the look in her eye…
It made him think she got it.
“Let me show you what’s going on,” Cady said, diplomatically understanding his desire to leave that topic alone and even better, respecting that desire. “I love these countertops,” she said, walking over to the line of glass-topped counters that ran the width of the store, breaking it up into customer and employee areas. “They’re just gorgeous. The woodworking people used to do…No one does this anymore. Everything is just a veneer of pine over chipboard or something.” She ran her hand lovingly over the carved dark wood. “But,” and she walked through the low swinging door that separated the retail area from the employee section and he followed, “on this side, it looks like someone let water drip down it without cleaning it up or something…? I’m not sure, but it’s in shit shape. This wasn’t just a little bit of water – it was a whole lot of water for a whole long time.”
He crouched down next to the warped wood and took it in. She was right – someone hadn’t just spilled a water bottle here or something. For the water to seep into the lacquered wood, it had to have been something much worse than that.
On a hunch, he looked up at the ceiling tiles above them, and sure enough, he spotted the tell-tale brown stains in the otherwise white acoustic tiles. Confused, she followed his gaze.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. She walked over and stood right next to him, except he was still crouched down on the heels of his boots which meant that his face was now directly in line with her perfectly proportioned (was any part of her not perfectly proportioned?) ass.
Completely ignorant of what she was doing to him, she craned her neck, staring up at the ceiling and then down at the countertop. “Well, duh, Cady,” she muttered to herself. She looked down at him, her mouth quirked up in a self-deprecating smile. “Some business owner I am. Looking up…a new concept.”
It was, unfortunately, not a new concept for him, because he was quickly realizing that this vantage point meant that he was also able to admire the underside of her perfectly proportioned breasts, which were just as perfect from this vantage point as they had been when he’d been looking down on them.
With a grunt, he forced himself into a standing position. He couldn’t follow his new personal rule to not look below Cady’s neck if he was crouched below her and looking up at her. The laws of physics and all that.
“All right, talk to me. What kind of money are you wanting to spend on this project?” he asked, leaning against the countertop casually, trying to get his groin to unclench and act just as casual as the rest of him.
“I don’t know…” she said slowly. “I hadn’t thought about it. What are the different options?”
He rubbed his chin as he thought about it, scratching at the stubble growing there. It was his day off, dammit, and the way he figured it, that meant a day off from shaving, too. The stubble was a little itchy, but he was determined not to give in and shave until Friday. If he was going to be forced to take two days off every single week, then by God, he was going to enjoy those two days by not shaving.
Even if the stubble was driving him insane.
“Basically,” he said after a few more moments of scratching, “it comes down to whether or not you want to match the woodwork on the other side. This side is the employee-only side, so no one but you and anyone you hire will ever see it. You might want to use the money you have to focus on something that is customer-facing and use cheap wood back here just to get the counter back into functional shape. On the other hand, if you’re someone who is bothered by things not matching or if the beauty of something really matters to you, maybe even more than the function, it could bother you to have ugly-ass wood right here that you’re staring at all the time. Do you care what you’re looking at? Or do you care only about what the customers are looking at?”
“Both,” she said without hesitation. “It isn’t such a big deal if it’s just something that I’m renting – like my basement apartment is never going to win any architectural awards, you know? I love my landlords, Rochelle and Mike, to death, but it’s just an apartment, and I’m okay with that. But if I’m going to buy something and renovate it and make it my own, I want there to be beauty and function. As a business owner, I’m going to be here a lot. I want to make it into a place I want to be.”
He nodded approvingly. “When I first took over the bakery, I struggled with the lighting back in the kitchen. It’s fluorescent and it’s ugly and there are no windows where I can bring in natural light. I told myself it wasn’t such a big deal and it was better to spend the money on upgrading the mixer than it was to replace the lighting. It’s been four years now, and I hate that lighting just as much as I ever did, maybe more. I keep telling myself that the next thing I’m going to do is replace it, but there’s always something…And that damn fire really set me back. It’s taken the last year just to regain the ground I’d lost after that fire. I had insurance, but it never pays for everything, plus the loss of income…Anyway.” He plastered a determined smile on his face. This was about her, not him. “So don’t let yourself think that aesthetics don’t matter,” he finished lamely.
She nodded slowly, chewing on her bottom lip as she thought, and he had to shove his hands into his back pockets again to keep from reaching out to her. If there was one thing guaranteed to drive Cady away, it would be reaching out to her, unless it was to save her from falling and breaking her neck, and even then, it was debatable.
She might as well have had a giant “Do Not Touch” sign blazing above her head at all times, visible to every guy for miles around.
“Can we match the dark cherry wood, though?” she asked. “And what about this lacquer finish? I love how gorgeous it is.” She trailed her fingers over the wood. “How replicable is all of this?”
This time, they crouched down together next to the countertop as they began to go over her options. She listened intently, asked intelligent questions, and made intelligent suggestions.
In other words, she seemed to know at least something about construction and woodworking. It was on the tip of Gage’s tongue to ask who she’d learned from – a city girl who knew how to run a table saw? He was flat-out shocked, not gonna lie.
But he didn’t want to pry into her background. She could tell him what she felt comfortable sharing, when she wanted to share it. He’d pushed her the night of the party – pushed her hard – and somehow, he knew that he couldn’t pull off a repeat performance. There was only so much prying into her life that Cady would tolerate.
And if he could only ask a limited number of questions, he better be damn picky when choosing. For example, she still hadn’t told him how she was affording all of this, and as a guy who was firmly in the friend zone, he had no right to ask. That didn’t keep him from being observant, however, and he hadn’t missed the fact that she wasn’t acting as if every penny were dear and was all that was between her and starvation, but she also didn’t appear to be spending those pennies excessively.
So just how did someone her age get the money to buy a building, to renovate said building, and have enough money to live off while renovating said building? It wasn’t like he was an old man looking down at her like she was a child – he was fairly sure they were close to the same age, although he’d never asked her – but that just made him more qualified, in his ever-so-humble opinion, to know how much cash someone their age could reasonably be expected to have.
And there was no doubt about it – Cady had a lot more than that.
Just when he thought he had at least a little bit of her figured out, another mystery popped up and proved all over again that she was nothing but one big question mark.
After some last-minute back and forths, they settled on a battle plan, but Gage realized that more than the tools he’d brought with him that morning, there was a whole list of supplies that he needed to make this project a go. “Wanna head down to the hardware store with me? I’ve got a list a mile long of supplies to buy, and I’m going to need your credit card to make it happen.”
She bit her lip hesitantly. “The owner…he doesn’t seem to like me much. Not to mention, it seems like Home Depot or Lowes would be cheaper than Long Valley Hardware prices, right? Wouldn’t it be better to drive to Boise instead?” There was a hopeful lilt to her voice that his dick happily matched. The idea of spending hours in the truck driving to and from Boise and maybe grabbing a bite to eat while there…
But unless his self-control levels had magically increased in the last ten minutes, spending that much time in Cady’s presence seemed like a truly bad idea, no matter what his dick was trying to tell him.
“Couple of things,” he said slowly as he forced his brain to think through the situation and not just be overruled by parts considerably south of it. “Nothing will win Mr. Burbank over faster than you spending money in his store. He may not appreciate you quite literally darkening not just the doorway of his business but all of his business, but seeing you shop local will go a long ways in making him willing to move past that. Second, we’d need to take my truck – we can’t fit some of the longer pieces of wood into your tiny Jeep – and my truck doesn’t get the best gas mileage, so by time we drive to Boise and back, the chances of us actually saving money by shopping at a big box store are pretty damn small, not to mention the time wasted just driving.”
He waved his hand dismissively. He didn’t want to make it sound like gas money was going to make or break him, because it wasn’t. Not only that, it wasn’t the true issue here.
“I’m going to level with you,” he said seriously, and waited for her to nod her understanding before he continued. More than anything else, he had to make her get this. “If you’re gonna make it as a business owner here in this valley, the one thing you’ve gotta understand is how much it means to local merchants that you shop here whenever possible. Need a prescription? There’s a pharmacy across the street. Need flowers? There’s Happy Petals just down the street. Almost anything you need, you can find right here in Sawyer or with a quick trip over to Franklin.” He leaned against the counter, one leg crossed over the other as he did his best to explain to a big city girl what it was like to try to thrive in a world of Amazon and eBay and 1-800-Flowers. “The thing is, it’s hard for a small-town merchant because the locals expect them to always be there just in case they need something right at that moment, but they are otherwise willing to wait two days for some giant internet company to send them whatever they need so they can save that fourteen cents. Then when the small-town merchant closes up shop, the locals complain about how there are no shops in town and they have to drive so far to buy anything, without realizing that they were part of the problem to begin with.”
He knew it was a long diatribe. He knew Cady didn’t deserve to get the brunt of that particular lecture, but still…if she was going to fit into small-town life, she had to understand this. Running to Boise for every little thing would kill off her business faster than anything else. If she didn’t think her fellow Sawyerite business owners would notice…well, it was up to him to disabuse her of that notion real quick.
“Wow,” she finally said. “I didn’t know…” She trailed off. “Growing up in Boise, I just didn’t realize,” she continued after a long pregnant pause. She turned her golden brown eyes up to him. “In Boise, no business owner would notice where another business owner shopped, but I’m starting to think that here, they notice if I sneeze and don’t say ‘Excuse me’ afterwards.”
“They do,” he broke in to assure her. “Everyone notices everything. There’s not much else to do in a small town but that.”
“Grand,” she said sarcastically, shoving some wild curls off her forehead. There was one long strand that seemed to be stuck to the side of her face, though, and Gage’s fingers itched to brush that one away too.
He clenched his hands into fists and kept them by his sides.
Nothing would drive her away faster. Nothing.
Perhaps he should look at getting that tattooed somewhere…
“Anyway, it only makes sense that Mr. Burbank would notice if I came back from Boise with my Jeep loaded to the brim with building supplies. Local, it is,” she sighed, not exactly looking thrilled with the idea. He wasn’t sure he could blame her. Burbank was not a fan of hers, and didn’t try to hide that fact from anyone at all, let alone from her. “So, do we drive your truck down to the hardware store?”
He shook his head. “It’s only a block and a half down the street. If we get anything too large or heavy, we can grab my truck and bring that back. But it’s best for you to be seen walking down the street, loaded down with plastic bags marked Long Valley Hardware. Every business owner who sees it will nod approvingly.”
She laughed. “I had no idea buying screws was such a public action,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m sure glad I have you here to help me out with this. After my Watson’s Electric debacle, who knows what other mistakes I might’ve gotten myself into without your guidance.”
Not meeting her eyes, he flashed her a grin while looking somewhere vaguely to the left of her head. “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t help?” he asked rhetorically.
He was beginning to hate the word “friend,” he really, really was…