Page 18 of Hero Next Door
Let him anywhere near my heart? Absolutely not.
Which made me really question why the hell I was so excited about him coming over later to help me start working on the kitchen. Because one did not get excited to see someone she’d decided not to care about.
Must be the lack of sleep, I thought, taking another sip of my cocoa. I was feeling tired and that was making me emotional.
Made sense. I’d just have to get more sleep tonight so I wasn’t inclined to think my relationship with Dev Hawthorne was anything more than it actually was.
* * *
“I figure we’ll start in the kitchen,” he said when I opened the door.
I frowned. “That works for me. But haven’t we already had this conversation?”
We had. Early this morning when he texted to apologize for leaving so suddenly after the porch incident and suggest that we get started today by tearing the kitchen apart. The kitchen.
“Well, yeah, but it was the simplest way to lead into this whole working-together thing,” he said, a faint blush rising up on his cheeks. “By saying something you already knew. You know, putting us both on familiar ground.
Right. If he was going to be this awkward all day, it was going to be a very long day. And I was going to have a very easy time remembering that we weren’t actually friends.
“Ooookay,” I said. “Um... coffee?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding way more relieved than he should have.
I wondered abruptly how much time he’d actually spent around women, or if he was always this awkward around them. Granted, the only times I’d really talked to him he was either yelling at someone—or me—or trying to convince me that my house wasn’t structurally sound. Were his defaults either screaming or acting like this was his first time talking to a girl?
That seemed... strange.
When we got to the kitchen, he went right for the pantry, shuffling through until he came out with a bag of sugar and then turning to the fridge for milk. I watched, even more shocked, as he rifled through my things.
“Don’t worry about asking for permission,” I mumbled. “Just help yourself.”
He cast me a narrow-eyed glance, then seemed to realize that he was being rude. “Oh. Sorry, I just figured you didn’t need to be getting me stuff. Don’t need to be waiting on me or anything like that.”
This was getting stranger by the minute.
“Obviously,” I noted. Then I glanced at what he had in his hands. Milk and an entire bag of sugar. “What are you doing, making ice cream?”
It turned out he was not making ice cream.
Unless you counted a cup of milk with three spoons full of sugar and a bare splash of coffee ice cream.
The man who had stormed into my driveway in his enormous truck to shout at a developer and then turned that temper on me, then jumped on my porch until it actually collapsed, took his sugar with coffee and cream.
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. And the laughter got even bigger and more uncontrollable when he took a sip of that concoction and closed his eyes in bliss, like it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever tasted in his life. When he scowled at my laughter and put the mug down like he was actually going to do something about it, I howled even louder, tears coming to my eyes.
“What,” he demanded, “is so funny?”
“You- You- You...” I started breathlessly, trying to control my giggles. “It’s the... the coffee. You’re this big rancher guy and you drink... you drink...”
Coffee that’s more froo-froo than that crap Olivia drinks,I didn’t add.
I couldn’t.
I was giggling again.
And no, I’m not generally inclined to fits of laughter. I don’t giggle, like, ever. But something about the situation, something about Big, Bad Dev Hawthorne and him being in my house for the ridiculously big project we’d set for ourselves and him starting the day with something that could generously be called an all-milk latte...
It was too much.
