The crew split up, each of them tackling different tasks in the house. He didn’t tell Pepper about this, knowing she’d balk, but he’d had it set up from the very first day. After he’d visited her Sunday and assessed the damage, he knew this was a bigger job than just the two of them could handle. He’d gone straight to the firehouse to see what the others could do to help. The guys he worked with were all too happy to do what they could, especially with the promise of pizza in return.
The work went a lot quicker with additional sets of hands. They had pulled down all the Sheetrock from the bedroom walls and were hauling it outside when Travis finally pulled up. They all worked to bring in the new sheets of drywall and stack them inside while Mack worked on the wiring in there. In just a few hours, they’d installed the new window, gotten the electrical outlets working again, and rehung the drywall panels on the walls.
They were taping and mudding the seams when Pepper came into the bedroom to examine their progress. The smile on her face was priceless. It made every bit of the sweat and mostly self-inflicted pain of the last few days worth it.
“Well,” she said, “Kyle and I have fixed the leaky faucet and the hot-water heater is shipshape. It’s about noon. I was thinking of running up the street to pick up pizza and drinks. Will you guys be ready to take a break when I get back?”
A chorus of yeses answered her.
“Great. Any pizza requests?”
“Meat,” someone shouted, and his response was echoed enthusiastically by the others.
“All right, I’ll be back.” Pepper smiled at Grant and gave him a wink before she disappeared into the hallway.
Kyle picked up a trowel and started mudding seams with the others. Once they heard the front door slam, he turned to Grant with a curious expression on his face. “So tell us, Grant, what is this all about?”
Grant frowned and continued to smooth mud across the wall. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Kyle chuckled. “Come on, man. We’ve worked together for almost three years. Since that time, I’ve seen you mow through half the single women in this town. Not once have you done any hard labor for one, and you most certainly never recruited us to help.”
That was true, but Grant didn’t want to talk about it. He had a reputation of being a ladies’ man, and he didn’t want them to know that he had a soft underbelly exposed where Pepper was concerned. “None of my other dates paid four grand for my services. I want her to get her money’s worth.”
Paul wiped the sweat from his brow and smoothed over the last piece of tape. “Couldn’t you just give her four thousand dollars’ worth of orgasms?”
“Well, I could,” Grant said with a wicked grin. “And I still might. But this was more important to her.”
“You like her,” Mack said as a statement of fact.
Grant shrugged. “I do. There’s not much more to it right now, but I do like her.”
“Oh, how the mighty has fallen,” Travis wailed. “Could it be true that the great Grant Chamberlain has fallen prey to the clutches of a woman at last?”
“Big talk,” Grant muttered. “Considering two of you are married, one is divorced, and one is engaged, I’d say you all are experts of falling prey to women. But I think it’s a little early to be writing a eulogy for my bachelorhood.” The guys snickered and went back to their chores, but Grant found himself struggling to focus on the drywall. Their jabs had struck a chord with him.
Grant had lived every day of his life since he was eleven worried that one day, he would turn into his father. He wasn’t sure if his mother knew the truth and turned a blind eye, or if she lived in blissful ignorance, but he knew if his father’s infidelity became public, it would hurt and embarrass her. He couldn’t bear for that to happen to his mother or to whatever woman had the misfortune of marrying him.
The guys ribbed him about Pepper, but the idea of getting serious with a woman was unnerving. He didn’t want to turn into his father and hurt the woman he loved and the family they’d built. Grant loved women. His father loved women. If he was the chip off the ol’ block that people always jokingly said he was, he was at risk of making the same mistakes. Grant refused to do that to someone and decided early on that if he couldn’t be faithful, he wouldn’t get in a committed relationship.
It was an easy fix, at least until Pepper came into his life.
Grant could feel her pull on him. It was as though Pepper had hooked him and was reeling him in like a bass on an invisible fishing line. No matter how much he fought, he felt himself getting closer and closer. But unlike an unfortunate fish, Grant liked it. His original quest to bed Pepper just wasn’t enough. Now that he’d spent real, quality time with her, he wanted to keep doing it.
That meant facing his fears of being just like Dear Old Dad.
It also meant potentially hurting Pepper if things didn’t work out. He hoped he could be monogamous, but he’d never tried. What if he failed? His falling for a woman was just fun and games to the guys, but it was a serious concern for him.
Grant’s ears perked up at the sound of the front door creaking open and slamming shut. “Pizza!” Pepper called from the living room.
Everyone put down their tools and shuffled one by one into the bathroom to wash up before they ate. Grant was the last in line, giving himself plenty of time to consider his coworkers’ words. If they could see that what was going on between the two of them was different, it must be. His grandmother seemed to see it, too, and had gone to a lot of trouble to make this relationship a possibility.
Was he falling into Pepper’s clutches? And if so . . . did he really mind?
As the sun set on an extremely productive day, Pepper stood in one of her newly renovated bedrooms and just shook her head.
“It’s amazing. Just a few days and we’ve done what I couldn’t do in almost a year.”
They’d made leaps and bounds today, even with the other guys at the house for only a few hours. After lunch, Travis and Paul went home to get some sleep before their next shift at the firehouse. Mack and Kyle helped clean up, and when they finally got a call about a car accident on the interstate, they left for the day. She and Grant had completed mudding the drywall and finished up alone.