“I took this job because it pays well and the last contractor quit.” I kept my voice flat. “I’m not here to save puppies. I’m here to pour concrete.”
She smiled at that—a small, knowing curve of her lips that suggested she didn’t believe me. “Sure. You’re a real hardcase.”
“I am.”
“Uh-huh.” She went back to her notes, but I caught the hint of a dimple in her cheek. Like she found me amusing.
Nobody found me amusing. I made sure of it.
The morning crawled on. I learned things about Gemma Ellis despite my best efforts not to. She’d grown up in Wildwood Valley, one of the few young people who’d stuck around instead of fleeing for the city. She’d worked at the mayor’s office since graduating from the community college two years ago. She was meticulous about documentation but not rigid—willing to accept reasonable explanations for discrepancies instead of demanding everything match perfectly.
She laughed at her own jokes. Quietly, like she was sharing something private with herself. And she had this habit of tucking her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating, a gesture so unconscious and endearing that I wanted to reach across the desk and do it for her.
I didn’t, obviously. I wasn’t an idiot. But I noticed. God help me, I noticed everything.
The happy couples in this town had gotten to me more than I wanted to admit. I saw them everywhere—at the Pancake House sharing breakfast, at the roadhouse dancing on Friday nights, walking hand in hand down Main Street like they’d discovered some secret the rest of us were too stupid to find. The fire captain and the mayor. The guys on the logging crews and their mail-order brides. Even my neighbor, Kross, had somehow ended up with a wife and kids in the time I’d been here.
Love was in the water in Wildwood Valley. Everyone was drinking it. I refused to take a sip.
My parents had been in love once. Crazy, passionate, can’t-live-without-each-other love. I’d seen the wedding photos, heard the stories. High school sweethearts who got married at twenty and thought they’d figured out the secret to happiness.
By the time I was ten, I could barely be in the same room with them. By fifteen, I was the only thing keeping them from divorce—a responsibility no kid should carry. By twenty, they’d finally split, and instead of finding peace, they’d just found new ways to destroy themselves. Dad drank. Mom cycled through bad relationships. Both of them blamed the other for ruining their lives.
Love didn’t build things. Love burned them down and salted the earth afterward. I’d watched it happen. I’d learned.
“You okay?”
Gemma’s voice pulled me back to the present. She was watching me with those warm eyes, a small crease of concern between her brows.
“Fine.” I straightened in my chair, shuffling papers I didn’t need to shuffle. “Just thinking about the schedule.”
“You looked like you were thinking about something a lot heavier than paperwork.”
“I wasn’t.”
She held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then she shrugged and returned to her documents, letting it go. Smart woman. She knew when not to push.
That made her dangerous. The pushy ones were easy to dismiss. The ones who knew when to back off, who left space for you to come to them—those were the ones who got under your skin.
I watched her flip through the invoices, her reading glasses perched on her nose, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she concentrated. That mouth. Full and soft and curved in a way that made me think about things I had no business thinking about.
She glanced up, caught me staring, and raised an eyebrow.
I dropped my gaze to the blueprints. The drainage specs blurred in front of me—meaningless lines and numbers—while my pulse hammered in my throat like I’d run a marathon.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
She was exactly the kind of woman who could make me forget all the lessons I’d learned. The kind who could slip past my defenses without even trying. The kind I could actually fall for, if I was stupid enough to let myself.
Which meant I needed to get through this review, get her out of my trailer, and make damn sure our paths didn’t cross again.
I stared at the blueprints until the lines stopped swimming. Forced myself to focus on drainage and grading and all the safe, boring details that didn’t have warm brown eyes and a smile that could undo years of careful self-protection.
Just a few more hours. Then she’d be gone, and I could go back to my simple, solitary, perfectly controlled life.
I almost believed it.
3