Maybe they got up without me waking them, she considered.
Stranger things had happened.
Her heart was still pounding in her head when she heard music playing. The upbeat chords of “Brown Eyed Girl” were drifting up from downstairs.
“Ricky! KJ!” she called out as she hurried down the stairs.
“They’re at school,” Kade shouted from the direction of the laundry room.
Relief spread through her. She hadn’t single-handedly screwed up Ricky’s perfect attendance record. It was short-lived, however, when she rounded the corner and saw the autopsy that Kade was performing on her dryer. The machine was pulled out from the wall and the top of Kade’s head was peeking up from behind it. There were parts and tools laid out on the floor.
She took in the scene and panicked. “What are you doing?!”
“The boys told me it was broken.”
“It was temperamental,” she defended, “but it worked!”
His only response was to sing along to the song that had been featured in her dream. When he did, her lady parts sang right along with him.
No. Down girl.He’d lost the right to cause her to flutter. She was banning herself from having any physical reaction to him.
She stood taller and cleared her throat. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
The moment the question left her mouth she winced. She hated that she sounded like a nagging wife. It was mainly the nagging portion of that title that she took issue with, the wife part sounded great. And that just pissed her off more.
“Yeah,” he paused before explaining, “I looked up a YouTube video.”
“A YouTube video?! It worked before, but now… Do you even know how to put this back together? Because I don’t. This isn’t a Lego project, I need that dryer!”
“Wow.” Kade stood from behind the machine and Ali’s legs went wobbly.
Kade McKnight was always disarming, but Kade McKnight first thing in the morning was almost too much to bear.
His dark hair was disheveled just enough to make someone, not her of course, but someone, think that it might look like that after he’d been rolling around in bed. The five o’clock shadow that he’d been rocking the day before was now a midnight scruff that somehow managed to score a gold in his sexiest feature Olympics. He wore a white cotton T-shirt that would be basic on your average man, but on Kade it became a work of art, perfectly chiseled like a marble statue of a Greek god.
No. Physical. Reactions, she reminded her traitorous cells that had all come alive with heated lust.
The intensity of his emerald stare forced her to step back, stopping only when she felt the cool surface of the wall against her shoulders and ass. His eyes pinned her there, just like his body had done in her dream. The small space they were occupying suddenly felt even smaller and she came to the conclusion that the drive to KJ’s class hadn’t been a fluke. Arousal induced claustrophobia was a real thing. This was the second time she’d suffered from it.
He leaned forward and splayed his hands on the top of the dryer as he spoke in a controlled, measured tone. “I was kidding about the YouTube video. Of course I know what I’m doing. I’d never touch anything I don’t know I can fix.”
Nothing he was saying was even remotely sexual, but her brain translated it as being just that. Maybe it was the confidence with which he spoke, or maybe it was the deep, rough quality in his voice, or maybe it was just the way he said the word touch, that lit up her body like a pinball machine in the hands of an arcade champion.
Swallowing proved difficult as her throat became constricted with pent-up lust. She broke eye contact then, knowing it was the only way to save herself from ending up on the floor in a puddle of desire. That’s when she saw her phone sitting on the washing machine. Seeing the device snapped her out of her swooning state.
It might’ve been early in the morning before she made it to bed, but she vividly remembered checking her email before her head hit the pillow. Next week was spring break, which was the start of Whisper Lake Rentals’ spring/summer season. She had eight days before the rental shop and equipment had to be ready. Her handyman, Amos, was scheduled to come into the shop today to work on the plumbing and general repairs. She’d shot off a quick checklist for him in way of confirmation yesterday and she’d checked to see if he’d responded to it. He hadn’t.
Amos did great work, but since he’d become semi-retired, getting him to show up for jobs had become something of a crap shoot. She remembered being irritated that up until three-thirty this morning she hadn’t received a message confirming their appointment. So, if she was sure that her phone had been in her room then, the question was how had it ended up here?
Ali took a step and picked it up as she voiced her inner musings out loud. “Where did…? How did this get here?” she asked.
“I took it,” Kade answered.
Her eyes flew to his, expecting him to be kidding. But his expression told her he wasn’t. What in the hell is he up to?
***
“You took myphone?” Ali asked with confused indignation. She shook her head dramatically and the motion caused a thick strand of hair to fall over her right eye.