Page 24 of Hammered (Dad Bod Contracting 1)
“You’re calling to tell me you want to surprise me?” I ask, laughing.
“Yes. I need your permission. And access inside.”
“What are you doing?”
He chuckles. “Um, well, if I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it? Just…trust me, okay?”
I consider. For all of, like, fifteen seconds. “There’s a spare key.”
“Let me guess—under the welcome mat?”
“Nope.”
“In the flower pot by the front door?”
I laugh. “No! I’m not that stupid, Jesse. There’s a little equipment shed in the backyard.”
“I see it,” he says.
I sit in silence for a beat. “Wait, you’re there now?”
“Well…yeah. No time to get shit done like the present, amiright?”
“I guess. So, in the shed there’s a shelf on the back wall, near the ceiling. Way high up.”
“I see it.”
“There’s an old box of strike-anywhere matches on the left side of the shelf. Inside that is a spare key lockbox…”
I hesitate, because giving a man who is, truthfully, still an unknown—a stranger, if you will—the key to my house…? Am I dumb? Naive? Too trusting? Yes, perhaps. But I just have this feeling about him. An innate instinct that I can trust him.
“Um.” His voice breaks my silence. “The code?”
“Sorry, I just…”
“You know, if you’re not comfortable with me being in your house when you’re not there, I totally get it. Just say so.” He waits a beat or two. “I do hope you feel like you can trust me, though. I know we haven’t known each other long, but—”
“Six-six-oh-eight,” I blurt. “My anniversary. God, I need to change that.”
“Yeah, you do. How about you change it to eight-one-one-eight?”
I frown, not recognizing the date as anything significant to me. “Why? What does that signify?”
“I’m hurt, Imogen. Deeply wounded.” He laughs. “It’s the date we met.”
“Oh.” I’m blushing hard, now, for some dumb-ass reason. “Yeah, that’s a good one.”
“I’m teasing,” he says, still laughing. “Okay, I’m inside. So, can you stay away from the house for a few hours?”
I hesitate. I was thinking of going home after this and changing into a bikini and sunning in the backyard. But why not give him a chance to surprise me? God knows that hasn’t happened enough in my life. Well, good surprises, at least.
“Sure,” I say. “I’m out of a job now, so I’ve got nothing but time on my hands.”
I hear tools clanking, and a rustling as if he’s shifting the phone to clutch it between ear and shoulder. “You’re an RN, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, our big project we’re doing? That custom build in your neighborhood? The wife is a doctor, and she’s actually a department head. The ICU, I think. I could give her a call for you.”
“Not that I doubt a call from you would do any good with her, but—”
“But I’m a construction worker building her house, and why would I have any sway with the department head of a hospital?”
I laugh. “Exactly.”
“She’s mentioned several times how understaffed her department is, just in the course of making small talk while she’s on-site.” I can almost hear the shrug in his voice. “It’s worth a shot, right? If you can get a new job right away without having to go through rounds of submitting your resume, that’d be a good thing, right?”
“It would be amazing,” I say with a sigh. “Sure, give her a call.”
“You’re an RN, with what kind of experience?”
“I’ve worked for the same private practice for the last ten years, and I worked in the ICU in the University of Illinois Hospital for eight years before that.”
“Damn, girl. You’ve been nursing for a minute, haven’t you?”
I blush even harder. “I, um…I started taking college courses during my sophomore year of high school. I worked with counselors at the community college and my high school so I could work out how to take all the prerequisites in the right order so by the time graduated…” I trail off. “No need to explain all that. Point is, yeah, I knew early on that I wanted to be a nurse and went after it.”
“You know you literally cannot bore me, right? Like, it wouldn’t be possible for you to ever bore me.”
I laugh. “I’m pretty sure me talking about how I took anatomy and microbiology and developmental psych and all that would bore you to actual tears. Manly tears, but tears nonetheless.”
I hear tools being set down. “You’d be surprised.” A long, significant pause. “I may not be interested in nursing or whatever, but I’m interested in you, so, therefore, I’m interested in nursing degree prerequisites.”
“Are you sure you’re a real person?”
“‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’” he says.
I frown. “Did you just…did you just quote Shakespeare?”
“Who’d’a thunk it, right?” He chuckles ruefully. “A dumb ol’ blue collar construction bro quoting Shakespeare?”
“No! That’s not—I mean—Jesse, that’s not what I meant.”
He laughs even harder. “Why not? It’s true enough. I didn’t exactly ace my high school English classes. My sister was the book nerd. She was in a production of Merchant of Venice her senior year, and for some reason that particular line has always stuck with me. It’s not like I can sit here and quote Shakespearean sonnets to you or anything, so don’t get too excited.”
