Page 20 of Changing Tides

I look back toward the cottage.

Interesting.

“Now, don’t go sniffing around your nana’s new tenant and pissing her off,” he warns.

I turn back to him and grin. “Nana, pissed at me, her precious grandson?”

He shakes his head. “You overestimate your cuteness, son. You aren’t the snaggle toothed, towheaded baby she doted on anymore.”

I gasp. “I’m still adorable. Just ask her.”

He just shakes his head.

“Seriously, I don’t know the whole story, but from what I’ve gathered, listening to your grandmother and Ida Mae’s clucking, she was married to some hotshot in New York City, but they divorced last year. She took a job with the sea turtle rescue here in town, and she and their daughter will be here until sometime in November.”

“Then what?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I guess they go back to New York.”

I sit back against the warm metal of the chair that’s been baking in the sun. “November, huh?”

He points his finger at me. “I know that look. You keep your hands to yourself.”

I raise my arms in the air in surrender. “You got it, Gramps. Hands off.”

We spend the rest of the afternoon building a roof on the hollow oak tree, attaching a door with a tiny window and flower box, and building a step for what is now a fairy house in the middle of the old garden.

Now and then, I glance up to see the curtains sway in the window facing the garden.

Is she watching?

I imagine her big blue eyes trained on me as I work in the sun. Her teeth sink into her plump bottom lip as her gaze slides across my body.

Fuck. I need to get laid.

It’s been months since my last relationship sank. If that’s what you want to call the three weeks I spent with the granddaughter of Brewster Cartwright.

Brewster is the billionaire CEO of Cartwright Motorsports and Carolina Automotive. The ninety-five-year-old entrepreneur and race promoter, who owns a huge beachfront mansion on the east end of the island, is not my biggest fan.

My friends and I worked for him and his family on their yacht when we were younger, and I admit, I was a bit of a rascal back then. Chasing girls and drinking my paychecks away.

Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at that age?

When he found out his precious Alexandria was spending her nights on my boat, he was livid. I tried to tell him that I’d grown up and wasn’t the same fuckup I was five years ago, but he wasn’t hearing any of it.

All it took was a good dressing-down from him, and Alex was a ghost.

I can’t say I blame her. If my grandfather were worth billions and he told me to cut someone loose, I’d be gone too.

Still, that was a damn good three weeks. Little does old Brewster know, but his little Alexandria is a wildcat, and come to find out, my boat wasn’t the only one she’d been spending time on.

Nana shows up with a box of painting supplies, and she paints a vine of ivy and tiny pink and purple flowers on the door of the treehouse while Gramps and I secure a small deck off the cedar shake pitched roof and add a set of spiral steps around the back.

“It’s adorable,” Nana declares once we’re finished.

I look over the structure, and it does indeed look like an enchanted tree home for fairies.

“Anything else I can help you guys with before I leave?” I ask.

---