Page 31 of So Close

She could tell from the way his gaze jumped away from hers that he’d said more than he’d meant to. And that made something squeeze in her chest—maybe just hope for his humanity?

Okay, so he’d grown up ina shithole. Huh. She guessed she could see it. Beachcrest was successful but not minting cash or anything, and there were all Carl’s investment troubles, and Brynn had alluded to the fact that she and Trey hadn’t grown up with money. That meant Trey was self-made at some point in his history.

It cast things in a different light. The way he talked down about Beachcrest, scorned its shabbiness. His obvious need to gild the world.

“Let me show you what I’m doing, so you can do it yourself next time,” Trey said.

She realized he was asking her to get down on the floor with him and look under the sink. And that—

That would put them very close together in a horizontal position.

“I don’t bite,” he said wryly.

“I’m not scared of you,” she said bullishly. She got down on the floor and slid in beside him. Lying down made her feel shockingly vulnerable. Which madenosense, because he was on the floor, too. But she felt like—like she’d just exposed herownpale white underbelly to him.

Worse, she could feel the heat coming off him, all along the length of his body. If she turned her head …

Don’t turn your head.

“See this? This is the valve handle, and this is the packing nut. So I just wrapped a rag around the nut, gripped it with these—” He produced pliers— “and turned it about one-eighth of a turn. It compresses the rubber, and usually that’s enough to stop the leak. In this case it was. But if it happens again and you can’t fix it this way, you’ll need to disassemble the valve. Or find someone who can.”

“Well, it won’t really matter if Beachcrest is gone, will it?”

The words popped out before she could stop them. She hadn’t meant to let her bitterness show. In order to beat him at his game, she needed to have ice in her veins, like he did. She couldn’t be leaking feelings out all over the place.

“No,” he said, quietly. “No, I guess it won’t.”

She’d expected a note of gloating in his voice, but there was none there. Which was somehow more unsettling.

And then she made the mistake of turning her head, at the same time he did, and their faces were—almost touching. She could feel his breath move over her lips.

She hastily slid away from him, feeling cold all along the side of her body and hating herself for noticing. She stood, and he stood next to her. There was a long moment of almost painful awkwardness, and she burst out with the first thing that popped into her head.

“Where’d you learn about plumbing?”

“I flipped houses for a while.”

“Was that your first business?”

“No. My first business was leaf raking and lawn mowing. Age twelve. My dad sucked with the house upkeep. It bugged me.”

“Because you hate things that are ugly and broken.”

“Yeah.”

He looked away from her, like his compulsion to make things better and more beautiful was something to be ashamed of.

“Then what? After the leaf raking and lawn mowing?”

“That grew into a full-on landscaping company. After that, house painting. Through high school.”

“Then?”

“Contracting. Then the house flipping. Then that turned into real estate development. And then real estate technology. When I was flipping, I’d wished I had an app that would make flipping and other sales more efficient. So I found a guy to develop one for me and turned it into a business.”

“A very successful business, word has it.”

He dipped his head. The modesty of the gesture made her feel like she’d read him all wrong. He wasn’t an arrogant asshole. So why had he come off so much that way in Bob’s? Was the way she saw him tinged by the deep grudge she still bore against Patrick?

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