“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to, but I want to.” The way she gazed at him with her pouty bottom lip made him think about the panties again.
He wondered if electroshock would help him with this little problem. He got up. “Sure, but nothing fancy. I better get to work.”
“Me too,” Sarah said, rising from her chair.
He winced. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t you give me that look.”
“What look?”
“The girl-needs-to-stay-out-of-my-way look.”
Check him out, male chauvinist pig of the year. “Of course you can help. What do you want to do?”
She smiled, and she might as well have coldcocked him for the way it temporarily stunned him. “I’m going to put the baseboards back on in the living room. Stone already painted in there, but I bought new boards. They have cool edging to them.”
So she’d picked out fancy baseboards but didn’t want a new roof. Okay, he’d let her have that one. Not going to judge. “Do you know how to use a nail gun?”
If he wasn’t mistaken she blinked twice as if to signal help me but her lips didn’t move to say those words and the hell if he’d be accused of being a chauvinist.
She nodded. “Yep. I watched Satan use it.”
While that didn’t mean she could use it herself, Matt went over to the nail gun he’d brought over and handed it to Sarah. He reminded himself that while trust didn’t always come easily to him, he did trust Sarah. Mostly. The rest of it he was working on.
“Thanks. I’ll just go get dressed in my construction outfit first.”
He almost asked, but thought better of it. If she had a special outfit she wanted to wear that was probably a good idea. Maybe some steel-toed boots or something that could protect her from catastrophic injury. He was on board with protecting her from injury. A few minutes later, he was going through his tools when she emerged from her room wearing what surely was from a page in a fashion catalog. And sue him if he still thought she looked blazing hot in khaki carpenter pants, a light-colored blouse, boots and protective eyewear. Nice touch with the protective eyewear. He felt better already. She carried with her a small toolbox in one hand and the nail gun he’d given her in the other.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“So you are.” He felt a grin coming on. “Sometimes I wear old clothes, but what you’re wearing is good, too.”
“Everything was on sale,” she said as though this explained everything. “Forty percent off with free shipping.”
She walked away from him and while he considered getting her set up, that might look like he didn’t have enough faith in her, so he hung back and let her do it all herself.
Have a little faith. Trust, Matt, trust.
Yeah. Still working on it.
Trust issues and him went way back, so it was no wonder that even with good friends he still occasionally wound up verifying. It had cost him a relationship or two in his past, but after Joanne his trust when it came to women had been compromised almost permanently.
A half an hour later, he still hadn’t heard the sounds of nail gunning in the living room so maybe Sarah was still lining up the boards. Or possibly trying to figure out a way out of this while saving face. He tacked in the last wood floor slat and determined he’d go in and pretend he only wanted to check out her great progress, then underhandedly find a way to assist her before she impaled herself.
He heard a strange whirring sound, immediately followed by the sounds of a nail gun...being operated at the rapid-fire rate of a machine gun.
Shit. Not good.
He dropped everything and ran to the living room, where he found Sarah on the ground, wearing her safety glasses, legs spread out, holding the nail gun away from herself as it shot nails out like it was possessed by the demonic soul of an assault rifle.
Fuck. Heart pounding in his ears, he yanked the electrical plug from its socket then dropped down next to her, worried because she looked shell-shocked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m s-sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Explain what the hell happened.” He took the nail gun from her.
“I don’t really know. Maybe it jammed? Everything was going well, and then...and then...” Her safety glasses slightly askew, she pushed them up with her finger.
Thank God for the safety glasses. “Doesn’t matter. Just please tell me you’re okay.”
“Fine, but a little humiliated. This looked so easy. I read all the instructions. Well. Most of them.”
He let out an uneven breath, and took a good long look at the wall. The wall Stone had painted not long ago with a shade of brown had nails all over it in interesting random patterns.
“You killed the wall.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, crap.”
Yeah. It was okay, he told himself over and over again. She wasn’t hurt, and that was the main thing. Instinctively and possibly without much thought, he pulled Sarah’s back to his chest. They both sat on the ground of the living room floor staring at the massacred wall for several silent minutes. Finally, she leaned her head back and told him she was sorry another dozen times.
“Maybe you should stay away from power tools for now.”
She nodded slowly.
This would be an interesting couple of months, if they each lived to tell about it.
* * *
“HONESTLY, MATT, YOU look exhausted. Let me help,” Sarah said. “Please.”
“I’m good,” he said from the top of the ladder where he was fiddling with the wiring coming out of her bedroom ceiling.
Good. He was always good.
The man had run himself ragged all week long, working at the airport most of the daylight hours, helping his son paint a fence—she didn’t ask because Matt didn’t look happy about it—and working on her numerous home improvement projects. Being forever banned from using power tools meant that she couldn’t help him much anymore. But no sooner would he finish one house project than another issue would present itself. Either it was a wiring problem or a plumbing problem. Rather than the list getting shorter, it got longer. Just like the summer days.
And Matt got sexier every day. Each time he recited the complex reasoning behind why the house’s electrical wiring had “issues” she’d stare at him, appreciating that he understood her to be intelligent enough to follow was the single most attractive quality about him.
Of course, his most attractive quality changed from moment to moment and depending on what the man was doing. Sometimes his forearms were the single most attractive quality about him. Sometimes his eyes, beautifully dark and edgy. She had to face it—she had a large menu to choose from.
And now tonight he’d finally put in her ceiling fan, and those tentacles falling out of her ceiling would be covered up and stop giving her spider nightmares. She’d run the fan tonight and cool down from the suddenly hot summer nights. They were having a small heat wave.
Unless that was all Matt.
She was still feeling her way around this whole friends-and-roommates thing, thinking up ways to get Matt’s attention other than leaving all her underwear out, flashing him or scaring him with her appalling lack of carpentry skills. So far she’d accomplished all of those without even breaking a sweat.
He stood now on the ladder just under the wires, balancing