Toby
“How is he even your friend if you’re sending him a bacon sandwich? You never let the rest of us eat bacon sandwiches.”
Harry rolled his eyes and pressed the foil package into my hands. “Fat lot of good that does anyone. Do you think I don’t know you lot are down at KFC the moment my back is turned?”
“Howdo you know?”
“Because Joe leaves the wrappers in his van, his coat pockets, and just about everywhere else.”
Harry looked genuinely pained, and I felt sorry for him and his one-man mission to feed his family and friends on a diet that didn’t consist of fried chicken and bad chips. I also appreciated that he’d packed me a sandwich too. Living alone, I often forgot about breakfast until I was halfway to work. Sometimes, I forgot to go home in the first place.
I took the sandwiches and added them to the pile of stuff I had to cart over to the cottage in a wobbly wheelbarrow. The Pilates teacher had moved in the night before. Harry had said he might come to the house for dinner, but he hadn’t shown up. No one seemed surprised, especially Rhys, who seemed to know him better than Harry.
“Cole’s spiritual as fuck when you get to know him, but he’s moodier than Joe when he wants to be.”
At the time, I couldn’t work out if he was telling the truth or trying to wind Joe up. The latter was more likely, and Rhys had always been good at it. Either way, it didn’t make much difference to me. I didn’t spend a lot of time at Harry’s clinic, so once the cottage was complete, if the mysterious resident was as solitary as Rhys claimed, I’d probably never see him.
With that in mind, it left my head that he’d actually be at the cottage when I got there. I trundled into the orchard with the wheelbarrow, my concentration taken up with keeping the contents in place. It had been a few months since I’d spilt ten litres of paint somewhere impossible to clean, and I wasn’t in a hurry to piss Joe off that much again anytime soon.
So much so that I nearly ran over a human leg. “Whoa!” The wheelbarrow lurched sideways, sending brushes and rollers sliding onto the dew-damp grass. A tub of white paint followed, and I lunged for it, catching it in the nick of time.
The clumsy movement knocked me off balance. I stumbled to my knees, but instead of wet grass, I landed on squishy foam, and my shoulder collided with hot, hard flesh.
“Motherfucker.”
It took me a moment to realise the growled curse hadn’t come from me.
I blinked and found myself face to face with high cheekbones, a city-boy beard, and forest-green eyes that were too beautiful for me to tell if the gaze swimming behind them was amused or annoyed.
“The fuck are you sitting on my lap for?”
Okay. We’ll go with annoyed then. I scrambled to my feet. Being upright gifted me the perspective I’d lacked in a heap on the ground. I stared down at the man attached to the spectacular face and my heart skipped a beat. Stretched out on the black foam mat, he had long legs and lean arms. Strong shoulders and... perfect feet. Seriously, I was transfixed by them. In a world where I was surrounded by riding boots and wellies, I rarely got to see anyone’s feet, and until this moment, I hadn’t realised how much I was missing out. Straight toes and elegant bones. Damn. My hands itched to touch them—
Jesus. What’s wrong with you?
I had no idea, but the longer I stared at the man and his pretty feet, the harder it became to look away.
He cleared his throat. Reality kicked me in the nuts.Brilliant.I was making an idiot of myself for the second time in the space of four and a half seconds. “Uh. Sorry. I didn’t see you down there.”
“Clearly.”
Again, it was hard to tell if the bloke was laughing on the inside or about to get up and deck me. “In my defence, I wasn’t expecting to come across anyone lying on the grass.”
His sexy frown deepened. “Well, get used to it. This is a great space for working out with the early morning sun. I might bring some classes down here.”
“You’re the new Pilates coach?”
“Yup. Cole Maguire.” He sprang to his feet like a cat but didn’t extend his hand, which I was glad about. I’d always hated the custom of holding hands with a stranger, even for just a few seconds. Add in the fact that Cole was sexyAFand my palms were sweating up a storm, and I was pretty relieved that he seemed to have no intention of touching me.
And disappointed because my oversexed imagination knew no bounds when it came to making me feel like a hormonal teenager.
Rattled, I stepped away and retrieved my paintbrushes from the ground. “I’m Toby.” I kept my eyes down. “I’ve come to paint your walls.”
“I figured. I was expecting you, just not so intimately.”
Intimately.My blood rushed again. Thankfully, I had my dad’s floppy dark hair, and it chose just the right moment to fall into my face and conceal my flushed cheeks. I couldn’t cope with this shit. When I’d first come to work on the farm, Joe had been the only hot bloke around, and he never said words likeintimately. I missed those days in no way whatsoever because he was so much happier now, butseriously.Did every man Harry brought to the farm have to be so sinfully fucking attractive?
Maybe it was just me. Maybe I was so sex deprived that, at this point,anyman would float my boat. Whatever. All I knew right now was that Cole’s close proximity was making me fit to implode.