It was Day Two of his days off for the week, or as he had begun to call it, Hell on Earth.
Not because he was bored. No, that definitely wasn’t it. He felt many a thing yesterday, but boredom was not amongst them.
How was it that Gage could get (almost) any woman he wanted eating out of his hand (sometimes quite literally) without breaking into a sweat, but one tiny Cady Walcott was completely immune to his charms?
It just wasn’t fair, honestly.
Maybe it was because it’d been so long since he’d tried to charm a woman. During culinary arts school, business school, and then working at the Sweet Spot bakery for two years to fulfill the requirements set out by his grandparents before he could take over their bakery, he’d been the guy. Every waitress (and half the waiters) flirted with him. He was well liked, and he had no end to the number of women he could convince to join him in bed when he put a mind to it.
Then he’d moved up to Long Valley and taken over the bakery and…the last four years just passed by in a blur of cooking and paying bills and dealing with high schoolers who didn’t have a clue what it meant to work, and trying to dodge the latest matchmaking attempts from his meddling sister, and so maybe, somewhere in there, he’d forgotten how to be attractive to women.
He pushed his glasses up the brim of his nose absentmindedly.
Hey, maybe it was the glasses. He pulled them off and looked at them for a moment. Were they Woman Repellant?
He shoved the glasses back on with a groan. If Cady was so shallow that she wouldn’t date him because of his glasses, then he didn’t want her anyway.
But he knew why Cady wasn’t even bothering to look his way. She’d already told him exactly why it was that she didn’t trust any man over the age of 12. But he somehow naïvely believed that this would only apply if she were worried about the guy in question raping her, and surely, surely by now she’d learned to trust him.
Right?
Well, here went nothing. Another day of working beside Cady, listening to her laugh, watching her wrinkle her nose up as she thought, his palms itching with the desire to tuck the curly wisps of her hair behind her ears as they flew around her face…
And then not touching her at all.
Like he said, Hell on Earth, Day Two.
He pushed his way through the glass door of the smoothie shop, and forced out a cheerful, “Good morning!”
Which, he later reflected, it was a damn good thing he’d said good morning before he saw her, because as soon as he did…
All breathing stopped. All speaking stopped.
How was it that women thought that they were ugly when they’d just thrown their hair up into a messy bun and pulled on a pair of old, ripped jeans and a tank top? Because Gage was sure of one thing if he was sure of anything at all, and that was in that moment, Cady probably thought no guy would look at her twice, and that she was happy about this fact. She wanted to be guy proof.
But those tears in her jeans – not expensively destroyed jeans that cost $200 down at the Boise Mall, but rips and holes that came from doing actual, honest-to-God work in them – showed small patches of skin, covering more than they revealed but his imagination was happy to supply the missing pieces and…
Whoa, boy. Down. Cady would appreciate you touching her like she’d appreciate licking an electric fence set to high.
“Hey, Gage!” Cady called out cheerfully, turning carefully on the ladder, a small paint can in one hand and a brush in the other. She had a careless streak of white paint across her nose and Gage’s thumbs itched to rub it off.
Casually, he shoved his hands into his back pockets.
“You’re already hard at work,” he observed, and was thrilled to hear his voice coming out all normal and shit, like he wasn’t fighting a boner of monstrous proportions in that moment.
Not bad, Gage. Not bad at all.
He’d woken up at four that morning – after years of early mornings, his body refused to get on board with the idea that sleeping in was a possibility on his days off – and had forced himself to clean out his fridge, scrub his kitchen floors, and do a load of laundry, all before coming to the Smoothie Queen. No reason to act anxious and excited to please. He could play it cool, even if it killed him.
Which it just might.
All of this meant that he was arriving at the Smoothie Queen at the insanely late hour of 8:30. He was rather proud of himself for lasting that long. There at the end, it’d either been drive to the Smoothie Queen and get to work, or start arranging his canned food alphabetically, and he still hadn’t decided if tuna fish should go under T or F—
“I’m a morning person,” Cady said with a shrug, jerking him back to the present. “When I get out of bed, that is,” she said under her breath.
Gage’s eyebrows hit his hairline at that.
When she gets out of bed? Does she normally not get out of bed? She’s been coming down here to work every day. Is that something she—
Even as he scrambled to put the pieces together, her face turned a brilliant red and she waved her paintbrush dismissively. “I mean, of course I get out of bed!” she said gaily, and much too loudly. “Every day!”
Curiouser and curiouser…
But in the end, Gage decided to swallow his questions and let her think that he hadn’t noticed her slip of the tongue. He’d figure out a way to casually ask her about it later.
Of course, how to casually bring up a topic like that – Do you regularly not get out of bed? Are you depressed? Do you have suicidal thoughts? – was a whole different ball of wax.
Well, he’d let Future Gage figure that one out.
“You’re making the trim look damn good,” he said, bluntly changing the subject and putting them both out of their misery. Looking relieved, she nodded enthusiastically.
“It’s a shame to paint real wood,” she said with a sigh, “but it’s been so dinged up and beat up over the years, what with the water damage and…I don’t even know. It looks like chew marks?” She laughed again. Her laugh…he could listen to it all day. “But unless mice have learned how to crawl across the ceiling, I’m pretty sure it isn’t teeth marks. But whatever it is, I figured some smoothing over with wood putty and then painting would hide the sins, as my dad used to say.”
Gage turned back to his workbench where he’d left his tools the day before. Not staring up the ladder at Cady’s ass was probably a real good idea right about then. “You don’t talk about your parents much,” he said as he began to put his workbench into some semblance of order. “Do they live in Boise?”
It was quiet for a long heartbeat, and then—
“Yes.”
Except her voice was flat and hard when she said it, and surprised by the sudden change in emotions, Gage’s head whipped up to look at her. That “Yes” sounded like Old Cady – the one he’d first met – and he hadn’t seen that version of Cady in so long, he’d almost forgotten what she sounded like.
But Cady was staring intently at the wood trim she was painting, her brush moving back and forth as she worked her way down the wall.
Still, she said nothing more, and Gage realized that he’d inadvertently stumbled into No-Go Land. She climbed carefully down the ladder, moved it over several feet, and climbed back up. Still not another word.
One thing about Cady – you always know where you stand with her. Playacting is not her strong suit.
“Wanna listen to some music?” he finally asked in the strained silence. Anything to create some noise between them.
“Oh. Sure,” Cady said, but he could tell her mind wasn’t on the question. “I have a radio over in the corner that you can pair with your phone if you want.”
Gage put on some Blake Shelton – everything was better with Blake in the house – and got to work on recreating the beautifully carved counter so he could cut out the damaged part and slide in the new. If he did it right, no one would ever know the difference.
Making an item as beautiful and perfect as it’d been before it was broken…there was something truly satisfying about that.
If only Cady would let him help her, too.