Page 15 of A Sinful Gift

Mason carried his prize in his arms as he crossed the perfectly manicured lawn belonging to Blake and passed into a garden of wildflowers and homegrown vegetables. Beyond the garden he saw his home, the rough-hewn timber lodge with a large secondary building behind it that housed his carpentry workshop. She shifted in his arms, her gaze taking in the world around them, and he tried to see his home through Hazel’s eyes.

The last week’s storm clouds hadn’t completely vanished from the horizon. All around them everything was a vibrant green. That was his favorite color. Green was life, it was beauty, it was everything that gave a person hope that all would be well after a storm. Hazel’s eyes held beautiful flecks of green mixed with brown, and he loved that green the best. He wondered if Hazel liked green as much as he did.

Light dappled him and Hazel as they walked beneath the shelter of the ginkgo trees that surrounded his estate. It had taken years to grow them to a decent height, but their leaves in the fall would cover the grass with a blanket of pure gold. Hazel silently studied her surroundings, and Mason would have given anything to hear her thoughts. Did she like the way he’d structured his gardens and the woods around the house, creating a wildness blended with planned beauty?

He climbed the steps of his porch and set her down on her feet. She wore no shoes, but he didn’t worry. He had sanded and polished this deck himself. It was utterly smooth. Mason opened the door and gestured for her to go inside. She went ahead of him, and he stared at the tumble of reddish-auburn hair that trailed down her back. His hand flexed as he resisted the urge to grab her hair and use it to spin her into his arms to steal a kiss. That would of course lead to a lot more than a kiss, and he wanted to show her that what he wanted with her wasn’t just sex. She rubbed her arms and glanced around his home before turning back to him as he closed the door.

“It’s so beautiful. It’s warm and cozy, even though it’s big,” she replied.

“You like it?”

She nodded, a delicate blush blossoming on her cheeks. His heart stuttered. He’d already had her in his arms and in a bed, but this... having her in his home? It touched something deep within him, like she’d cast a stone upon the still lake of his soul and now he was feeling the ripples of her presence. Mason rarely let anyone into his home. It was his private sanctuary. He’d never brought any woman here before. He hadn’t dated anyone seriously in his life. He had spent nights with women in expensive hotel rooms, or at their homes, but he was always gone the next day. This was different. Because this wasHazel. How many times had Blake told him about this woman while they’d shared beers and fished on their lake, or while they’d quietly sipped whiskeys while talking about a particularly long week of work?

Hazel was always on his best friend’s mind, and now she was burned into Mason’s soul. Perhaps he should be afraid, should run, but he always listened to his heart rather than his head, and his heart beat a steady rhythm to this woman’s name.

Hazel. Hazel. Hazel.

“Where do you work?” Hazel asked as she turned her back on him to look around at the room.

Mason’s gaze strayed to her ass, and he admired openly how cute she looked in Blake’s dress shirt and boxers.

“Follow me.” Mason led her through the house and into a glassed-in walkway he’d built that connected the workshop and his lodge. He unlocked the door to the workshop and went in first, hitting the light switch. The main floor was three thousand square feet, and dozens of Edison lights illuminated the various projects he was working on. There was a beautiful four-poster bed for a fashion heiress living in Milan, a dresser for a famous architect from Seattle, two matching desks for a married couple who ran their own business and had recently invested in some private Caribbean resorts, and a boat for a client in Maine who liked to sail. The last project he was currently working on was a cradle. Hazel moved through the warehouse, admiring each piece and asking him questions.

“How did you discover you liked working with wood?” she asked when they reached the dresser.

“It’s kind of a silly story,” he said as he rubbed the back of his neck, heat filling his face.

“Then tell me. The best stories are always a little bit silly.” She said this with a serious face, but mischief glinted in her eyes and put him at ease.

“My sisters had a dresser; it was an old wood thing my mom purchased at a neighbor’s garage sale. We didn’t have much room in our trailer, but we did have a space for something to put the girls’ clothes in. Well, the bottom drawer always got stuck. It had warped over time from exposure to humidity, which wasn’t unusual.” He remembered all too easily—the frustrating summer days when he’d knelt in front of that dresser, his little sisters clustered around him waiting for him to wiggle the drawer free so they could find T-shirts or shorts. How he’d hated that dresser and all the grief it caused him until he figured out how to fix it. He’d tugged and tugged and almost broken the drawer, and his eye had twitched for weeks whenever he’d looked at the damned thing.

“A lot of people don’t use the AC in the summer if they can survive without it to save money. That stuck drawer drove us all crazy. One afternoon, I went to my school’s computer lab and researched online what to do if drawers were stuck like that. I found a bunch of tutorials about using sandpaper and oil. I used my meager savings from my after-school job to buy supplies to fix the drawer. That made me feel like a hero, to walk into that hardware store and buy what I needed to fix the drawer. It was the first time I felt capable of fixing something, and I’ve been chasing that feeling of fixing things and building things ever since. After I bought sandpaper and oil, I wedged the drawer out, sanded the warped areas, and oiled the whole thing up. Most dressers have metal sliders that are pre-oiled now, but this one was so old that it was made entirely of wood.” Feeling that smooth, sanded drawer beneath his palm when he’d followed the training instructions he’d found online had changed him. He’d made something broken work again. And something that he hadn’t realized had been broken within him suddenly felt... mended.

“Wait, how old were you when this happened?” she asked.

“Twelve.” Mason knew what she would say next. She was a lawyer, and a good one at that.

“But you couldn’t work legally at twelve.”

“But I did... sort of. I helped out a neighbor who was on disability. He paid me in cash for chores like lawn mowing and helping around the house. Obviously, only my mom knew about the work I was doing. We needed the money.”

“Oh.” Hazel’s eyes softened, not with pity but compassion, and he saw the flecks of green in her eyes deepen.

“Can you show me how to sand something?” she asked curiously as she stroked the edge of the desk they were standing next to with her slender fingers.

Mason took her hand in his, examining her fingers, and smiled. “I would be happy to.” Then he brushed his lips over her knuckles. He didn’t let go of her hand. It felt too good, too natural to hold her hand with his own. He led her toward the cradle. It was a sturdy design, elegantly carved with wild animals like deer, rabbits, and badgers as well as foxes, to give it a sort of woodland fairy-tale look to it. He wasn’t yet finished sanding the spindle, so he retrieved a piece of sandpaper from a packet nearby, wrapped it around the spindle, and gently moved the paper up and down, grinding it against the wood.

“Do it like that. You try.” He gave her a piece of her own sandpaper and reluctantly released her other hand. She mimicked what he had shown her, moving her hands with gentle motions but hard enough to sand the entire spindle.

“You’ll know when it’s finished because it’s smooth to your touch.”

She sanded for a minute or two in silence, her expression one of deep concentration.

“Do you... do you want children?” she asked.

“Kids?” The single word held a universe of questions as he spoke it.

“Yeah.” She didn’t look at him as she ran her fingers along the spindle, testing its smoothness.

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