Emboldened slightly, I get up from the stool and walk over to the living room shelves. They’re filled with photographs of Chloe and Jake together and Chloe by herself. There are a few with another man and a couple of young kids, and I have to assume it’s Garrett, Sarah, and Hayden.
And Garrett is hot as fuck, pardon my French, but holy hell. He has a thick, dark beard, dark brown hair, piercing ice-blue eyes, and the kind of muscles all the guys I used to see at the gym would literally sell their souls to the devil to obtain.
Man. I don’t know the she-witch Bethanny, but she better get her shit together because if Garrett goes on the market, women all over the fucking planet are going to Lose. Their. Shit.
Lawd. I look at the huge veins in his forearms and his hands on his daughter’s shoulders…
He has to be the centerfold in Firefighters Illustrated or something.
I move on to the next shelf and find a picture of him and Jake together. I swear to Jesus, I think I come a little in my panties.
It’s like…almost inhumane to subject someone to that much hotness in one picture.
No joke. I’m surprised just having it in here hasn’t started a house fire yet. I wonder if they lock it away when they put up their Christmas tree since it’s such an incendiary object.
At the very least, they should have a fire extinguisher sitting beside it. Just in case.
I stroll past those shelves to the door next to them. It’s open, so I peek my head in just a little to see what’s inside. It looks like an office/den type of thing with a desk and a computer and a sofa, along with some shelves filled with books and binders.
I tiptoe inside to take a closer look, but it’s just construction stuff about welding and cranes and signaling.
Interesting and necessary, I’m sure, but not exactly worth my very limited snoop time.
I’m not sure when I crossed over from feeling awkward and intrusive to thinking it’s okay to wander his house unattended, but I’m just going to embrace it. I don’t imagine I’ll ever get a chance like this again.
I wander back to the door and back out into the living room and down the side hall to another room, but the door is closed. I’m obviously taking some liberties here, but I think with a closed door, I’d better not. Instead, I turn back to the kitchen and find my way into the pantry and flip on the light.
The shelves are stocked with all sorts of snacks and baking supplies, and when I spot a box of brownie mix on the top shelf, I get an idea. What’s better with ice cream sundaes than brownies?
Nothing.
I grab the premixed box and an egg from the fridge and get to work. I have to poke around a little to find a dish to put the batter in, but it’s not too hard.
By the time Jake walks through the door, I’m sliding a pan of brownie batter into a preheated oven.
“Honey, you shouldn’t have,” he says teasingly, tossing the bag of stuff from the grocery store onto the counter. An unexplained thrill runs down my spine, but I ignore it.
“I hope you don’t mind. I…I found the mix in the pantry, and I didn’t have anything else to do.”
He smiles but raises his eyebrows. “I really thought you would have looked around a little bit. That the journalist in you wouldn’t be able to stop herself.”
“I did,” I admit with a lopsided grin. “I got bored after that.”
He chuckles. “Good, good. And did you find anything interesting?”
“Well…I found out that your friend Garrett is astonishingly good-looking.”
“Oh God,” he groans. “Do me a favor, and do not tell him that when you meet him.”
When I meet him? Am I going to meet him?
Unable to give any credo to a possibility that he probably just threw that out there because he got ahead of himself, I don’t mention it. Instead, I round the counter to take a seat at one of the stools.
He watches me lift myself up gingerly, and his smile disappears. “Are you still feeling sore from the crash?”
I start to shake my head, but it kind of hurts, so I stop.
“Holley, you should go to the doctor. Get checked out.”
“No!” I protest. “I’m fine.” He narrows his eyes, and I change my choice word. “I’m good, Jake. I’ll be good. Don’t worry. I just need a little rest and a brownie hot fudge sundae.”
“Can dessert cure anything for you?” he asks.
“Most things,” I admit.
His eyes search mine. “And what about the things it can’t? What are those?”
The memories his questions spur cause insta-discomfort inside my chest.
I swallow thickly and get up from the stool to escape. At first, I don’t even know where I’m headed, but I figure out an excuse pretty quickly. “I’m…uh…just going to run to the restroom. Yes! That! Be right back.”