Page 17 of Hero Next Door
But I didn’t have time for a relationship, and from what I’d heard, neither did he. Hell, even if I did have time for a relationship, I wouldn’t have one with some cowboy from my home town. I was from Nashville, these days. If I wanted a man, that was where I’d be shopping. Period.
I leaned over the notepad and started making lists of the things we’d talked about that morning and what I wanted to do with the house. Plumbing, check. Paint for the exterior and interior, check. Have the house’s structural integrity checked out, check. Who would I need for that, I wondered. An engineer? An architect?
I started another row of questions to ask Dev the next time I saw him, and then pulled out my phone and got ready to test Arberry’s offerings when it came to construction guys. I’d have to compare numbers, I thought. Get estimates from people who’d travel out here from one of the bigger cities and see if it would be any cheaper. And I’d have to call my bank in Nashville and see how much I could borrow for some sort of construction loan.
I relaxed into the work, feeling the tension in my shoulders start to melt away and my brain focus on the problems at hand. This kind of stuff was second nature to me. The planning. The preparation. The numbers, and putting those with the plans themselves. I’d always been good at this, my brain automatically breaking a problem down into different components and figuring out how they might fit with each other. Scarlett had seen this in me early on and encouraged it, telling me that this business sense would get me far in the world, and she’d been right.
This was one of the things that I’d used to convince Drive In to give me the job I wanted.
And right now, it was giving me the escape I so desperately needed from the emotions Dev had dredged up... and then run away from.
CHAPTER9
Parker
“Let me get this straight. He showed up within minutes of you arriving, yelled at the man you were meeting with, and then volunteered to help you renovate the place. He walked the property with you and made a list of the things you two need to do. And you’re... mad?”
I might not be able to see her, but I could hear the expression on Avery’s face quite clearly.
And I didn’t appreciate how much judgement I saw there.
“You’re skipping a few steps there, Avery,” I said tightly, stirring my hot chocolate and noting the steam coming up out of it. I’d made the milk too hot—I could already see it—and I was definitely going to burn my mouth the moment I took a sip.
I didn’t care. I needed the sugar and caffeine like I needed air. I’d barely slept last night, my brain too busy dissecting every single thing about my current situation to turn off, and this morning I was definitely the worse for wear.
“He shouted at the guy I was trying to make a deal with, shouted at me, and took off in a huff, first of all. The offer to help me renovate was an apology. That’s all.”
“Right. Because busy ranchers who’re on the verge of trying to make something of their ranching career always volunteer that much of their own time just to apologize to someone they barely know,” Avery answered.
The judgement was getting stronger from her end of the conversation.
“What do I know about how people apologize around here?” I asked, letting my annoyance get the better of me. “I didn’t get many apologies when I lived in this town. I wouldn’t know how they do it.”
A loaded silence followed my statement, and I bit my lip to keep myself from saying anything else. Sure, Arberry held bad memories for me. The worst, honestly. But that wasn’t Avery’s fault. She hadn’t even been here for any of it. She’d only heard the stories of what I’d been through.
It wasn’t her fault this place had all my instincts screaming at me about how stupid it was to trust people or depend on them. It certainly wasn’t her doing that the dreams I had last night when I did sleep were more like memories, and contained the worst people I’d ever known.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed, putting my whole heart into it.
When she answered, her voice had lost the note of teasing. “Don’t be. I know what happened to you here. I know how hard it has to be for some random guy to show up and volunteer to help you.”
“I just want to get the property sold and get back to Nashville,” I told her honestly. “This place gives me bad dreams.”
She cleared her throat, and I could hear her doing that thing she did when she essentially cleaned the slate and tried to start over new.
Avery, I thought with a laugh. Always thinking there was a clean start out there somewhere. The girl had lived the most charmed life ever, and the rose-colored glasses she wore were permanent. She’d never met a situation she couldn’t flirt her way out of.
It made her think that the rest of the world looked at life in the same way, and though I loved her for that optimism, I’d also had to work really, really hard to hide the darkness in my own past from her. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that the rest of the world didn’t exist up amidst the clouds and rainbows like she did.
“Right. So you want to sell the place, and I’m guessing you want to make sure someone decent gets it. Not some developer who’s going to tear the whole valley apart. Makes sense to me. Honestly, Parker, it sounds like Dev is giving you the perfect way to do that. I have to admit that I don’t see the problem, here.”
Of course she didn’t see the problem. Why would she?
She’d never dealt with people who promised the moon and tricked you into believing them when you weren’t looking. She’d never dealt with people who gave you solutions... and then knocked you down the moment your eyes were turned.
I wasn’t saying Dev was any of those things, and I certainly wasn’t saying I expected him to do anything wrong. I’d known... well, I’d knownofDev Hawthorne since we were thirteen, and I’d never heard one bad thing about him. For all I knew, he was the most upstanding gentleman in North Carolina.
That didn’t mean I was willing to let myself fall for him. Use him to help me renovate the house? Yes, definitely.
