And had ideas of entertaining, all of his own.
“Jesus!” Nick said, more of a prayer for help and understanding than anything else. “What am I supposed to do about that?”
And he couldn’t even go for a decent run, because when he opened up the door to do that, he saw Audrey lurking behind a tree at the house next door, looking for him, no doubt.
Nick slammed the door and wondered if he could wait her out.
Didn’t the woman have to go to work? Or take care of her kids? Did she have nothing better to do than stalk him?
He’d either have to find a way to avoid her, by finding out her schedule and running at a different time, or convince her he wasn’t interested, and he’d bet she hadn’t heard that from many red-blooded American males. It might be hard to convince her it was true.
“Damn,” he muttered.
He was mowing the grass later that morning when Lily pulled into her driveway and got out of her little SUV, neither of her kids in sight.
He waved and kept on mowing, wanting the job done before it got too hot. But then he saw her open the back of her SUV and start wresting with a pile of wooden trim, and he cut off the mower and went to help.
“Here,” he said, coming up behind her and catching an errant piece that was dragging on the ground. “Let me help.”
“Oh.” She whirled around, but the trim wasn’t all the way out of the vehicle and didn’t quite move with her.
Nick had to move fast to keep it from going all over the place and from hitting the ground and getting scuffed up.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, wondering if she was naturally jumpy or a bit of a klutz.
“No. You didn’t. I just…forgot I was holding all that and then…well, you know the rest.”
“I’ve got it. Let me carry it in for you,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face with his forearm and hoping the trim didn’t slide out of his hands.
“Okay. Thanks.”
She fished out her keys and headed for the back door, leading him through the kitchen and into the dining room, the top half of the walls freshly painted a muted gold tone and ready for the wide, white trim.
“Anywhere here is fine,” she told him.
He piled the wood in the far corner. “You doing all this work yourself?”
“Yes. I like it. I used to be an interior decorator, but I found out I liked making all the decorating decisions myself, much better than following someone else’s orders, and I like doing the physical work on a house myself. So after the girls were born, I started rehabbing houses and selling them.”
He looked around at the room in progress and the kitchen that she’d obviously already done. “You do good work, Lily,” he said.
“Thanks. How are you? How’s Jake?”
“Jake’s…as good as can be expected, I think,” he said. “But what do I know? How do you think he is?”
“Sweet. Smart. Eager to please,” she said. “He offered to mow my lawn in exchange for another batch of fudge.”
“Hey, sorry—”
“No, it’s great. I get tired of mowing the lawn, especially by this time of year. Believe me, it’s worth a lot more to me than a plate of fudge to have someone else do it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.” She walked into the kitchen and grabbed a couple of glasses from the cabinet. “Would you like something to drink? You look like you’ve been out there in the heat for a while.”
“Water. Thank you.”
She handed him a glass, which he downed in one, long swallow. She watched as he did it, looking like she wasn’t quite sure what to make of him or if he made her uneasy or something.
But then she just smiled and refilled his glass again.
“So, if it’s all right with you, I’ll make a deal with Jake? Food in exchange for lawn-mowing duty?”
“Fine with me. Just don’t let him take advantage of you or your time.”
She shrugged, smiled a bit nervously. “I like to cook, and it’s just as easy to make something for five people as it is for me and the girls. What’s his favorite meal?”
“I don’t even know,” Nick said. One more thing he didn’t know about kids in general and this one in particular. “I mean, I haven’t found anything the kid won’t eat. I do remember being at my sister’s a year or so ago, and she’d made a pot roast. Jake ate plates full. I came into the kitchen not an hour and a half later to get something to drink and found the pan of leftovers still on the stove, cooling I guess, and Jake was eating out of the pan. Kid’s got no manners when it comes to food, and that he could be hungry again after eating so much at dinner…”
Nick just shook his head in wonder.
“Okay,” Lily said. “A pot roast, it is. Everything else going okay?”
Nick hesitated, needing to talk to someone, but…Lily?
He didn’t know her that well, and as open about their sexuality as some women were these days, he suspected Lily wasn’t one of them. She seemed sweet and a little shy, and Jake had volunteered that she hadn’t been divorced from her husband for that long.
Nick just couldn’t see asking her how she handled her sex life with two little girls in the house.
“I’d like to help, if I could,” she said, all sweetness and earnestness.
Nick frowned, thinking he could at least find out a little more about Audrey Graham to help him avoid her.
“Well…” He hesitated. “I don’t think there’s any easy way to say this, and I really don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but…”
Ahhh!
Lily thought she was going to die of embarrassment right there on the spot.
He knew!
He knew she’d been practically slobbering all over him, and he wanted to talk about it?
“Ahhh,” she whimpered.
She didn’t mean to. Not out loud at least, but she must have, because suddenly, he looked concerned. He took her by the arm and said, “Lily? You okay?”
“Yes,” she lied and not at all convincingly.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes. Really. Just go ahead. Tell me. It’s about—”
“Audrey Graham,” he said, looking like it pained him to even say the name to her.
“Oh! Audrey?” Lily smiled, so relieved she could have fallen to her knees and said a prayer of gratitude right then.
She’d been certain he knew she’d been all but drooling over him while he moved in and then while he’d been doing yard work the other day. She was so grateful it hadn’t gotten that hot yet, and he still had his shirt on this morning.
Him shirtless in her kitchen was probably more than she could have handled.
“Yes, Audrey. Did you say something about her running every morning?”
“Yes,” she said.
Did he want to watch?
Because the woman was certainly putting on a show.
Her outfits got skimpier by the day. She must have gone shopping after Nick moved in.
Someone