Page 20 of Snowbound

“I could go virtual,” she says, sipping coquettishly at her coffee. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was doing it deliberately to wind me up. I look away before she catches me staring at the way her lips wrap around the rim of the cup, the way her eyelashes flutter as she closes her eyes from the steam.

“But people prefer the personal touch. I’m sure you know this too. It means a lot to people if you’re willing to go to them, and with the rates I charge and the amount that people are willing to pay for me, I’d be a fool not to go in person. It’s what I built my business on — the personal touch. It’s what people are expecting. I have no idea what these clients are going to do to my reputation.”

She sighs, slouching in her chair. There’s no doubt her nightmare situation of losing her job flashes through her mind.

“Come on,” I say, getting up so fast I almost knock over my chair.

“Where are we going?” She frowns at me. It looks more like a pout.

“Nowhere, but the fire is on in the living room, and I want to tidy in there before I entertain guests.”

“Tidy?” she echoes. “This place is spotless.”

“Thekitchenis spotless.”

“Do you usually put your guests to work?”

“No, but most of my guests don’t have to earn their keep.”

“Wow,” she says, though there’s a glimmer of amusement in her eye.

We step through into the living room, and I suck in a breath through my teeth. What can I get her to do? Because she’s right, it is tidy in here. I just want to keep her busy enough that she stops digging into my life. “If you want to sort my CD collection, you can,” I say, gesturing to the player and the CDs that are scattered all around it.

I’ve been meaning to put them away for weeks, but I make it a habit to listen to an album every night. And when you want to listen to a different one every night, you end up with a stack very quickly.

“Okay,” she says, no doubt nosy about my music collection. She settles on the floor, then turns to look at me. “How often do you have guests?”

I furrow my eyebrows. “Does it matter?”

“No,” she says, backpedaling from her question. “I was just curious. That’s all.” I think the interrogation is over and I lean over the fire, basking in the warm crackle. Then she asks, “Have you always wanted to be a mechanic?”

I grunt again and poke at the flames. “It’s what I’m good at.”

Not ready to let it go, she asks a few more probing questions, and I give her equally simple answers. It’s not really any of her business who I am or what I do.

“I take it you have family who live here?”

The question catches me off guard, and before I can think, I snap back, “No.”

“No,” she repeats. It sounds like a statement, but I know it’s a question. I should leave it, but reacting has already given her more information I really wanted to, and fair’s fair. She answered me earlier.

“I grew up here,” I give her, hoping that will appease her curiosity. “Tidying by candlelight is something my great-grandma would have approved of.”

Carly chuckles at that. “It does feel a bit like we’re in 1870, doesn’t it?”

“I think they had invented lights by then,” I correct her.

“No,” she says with certainty. “They discovered electricity way before that, in the seventeen hundreds or something, but most people didn’t have electricity in their homes until the nineteen hundreds. Most people used gas before then.”

“How do you know that?” I ask slightly more snappishly than I mean to.

She tilts her head. “It’s just interesting.”

“I probably still have an oil lamp somewhere. My great-grandmother definitely had one.”

“Did you know her?” she asks.

“She died when I was young,” I mutter, staring at the floor. “But I met her. I remember meeting her.”

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