The Woodworker Read online

It might be nice – very nice indeed, judging from the strength in his body, muscles built from long hours of manual labor and lifting heavy tools in his workshop – but it wouldn’t be the smart thing to do.

  Sometimes, I wished that I could turn my brain off, give in and let myself make those stupid and impetuous decisions that I know I’d regret later on, once the passion had cooled. I always knew better, kept myself from making that dumb choice. I knew that it was the right thing to do, but it still left me with no stories, no crazy misadventures to look back on fondly. If I just let my brain be silent, leaned in a little closer to Rick...

  With a hint of regret, I clamped down on that wayward urge. As fun as it might be in this moment, I needed the security of this bedroom – and that meant that I couldn’t risk things getting complicated between Rick and myself.

  I tried to keep my attention focused on the movie. In one of those shortsighted moves, Bruce Willis had just crossed a bunch of broken glass in bare feet. Where had his shoes gone? I thought about asking Rick but suspected that he wouldn’t appreciate the interruption. Next to me, he was gazing at the television screen as if spellbound, totally entranced by the film.

  I’d show him. In between interviews for the next couple of weeks, I’d get his business whipped into shape, demonstrate how much more money he could make with my help. He’d apologize for ever doubting me, I’d hold my head high as I found a new place to rent once my insurance check arrived, and everything would work out.

  Maybe then, after everything had settled out, I could contemplate the idea of making a move on Rick, romantically.

  Once all the dangerous loose threads were tied up neatly.

  Rick stirred, and for a moment, I feared that he’d somehow caught wind of my thoughts. A glance at him, however, revealed that no, he was still totally hooked by the movie. “Here comes the really good part,” he whispered to me, slipping one arm around my shoulders as he straightened, leaned forward to better catch the moment.

  I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the warm, comforting weight of that arm against my shoulders, his fingers bumping lightly against my own forearm. I caught a little hint of the man’s smell, a musky spiciness tempered by wood, probably from the sawdust of his workshop. It wasn’t a bad smell in the slightest, although it seemed totally unfamiliar to my own corporate world. I flared my nostrils a little wider, trying to drink it in without seeming obvious.

  On the television screen in front of us, Bruce Willis uttered a cowboy yell as he grabbed a gun he’d taped to the small of his back, pulling it over his shoulders to shoot the surprised Alan Rickman. Rick grunted, and I smiled along with him, as if I knew what was going on.

  The rest of the movie played out, and I watched as Bruce Willis and the police officers proved triumphant over the terrorists – who, it turned out, were really thieves, or something like that. I just enjoyed sitting next to Rick, feeling the heat of his body transferring over to mine.

  Finally, however, he stirred, pulling his arm back from around my shoulders. The blankets fell away from us as he stood up and stretched. “How do you feel now?” he asked.

  “Fine.” Quite distracted, if I was being honest with myself. Distracted in a way that I hadn’t felt for a considerable amount of time, and that hadn’t been satisfied for even longer – but I certainly wasn’t going to say a word about it to him.

  “Any more relaxed?” he pressed.

  More on edge, if anything. I wondered if the walls between our bedrooms were thick enough to muffle any sounds. Somehow, I doubted it – which meant that I wasn’t going to get any relief, not any time soon.

  “Very relaxed,” I told him, standing up. Rick hadn’t bothered with the top button on his flannel shirt, I noticed. I could see the slightest little hint of hair poking out, a suggestion of the broad chest that lay beneath. “I’ll probably turn in to bed soon.”

  “What, already?” Rick crossed the room, plucked something off the bookcase next to the television. He turned around, grinning as he held out the DVD case. I’ve got the next one, too! We could continue the series!”

  “There’s only so much hard dying that a girl can handle at once,” I told him, inwardly rolling my eyes at the thought of another movie. Another two hours of Bruce Willis growling and running around shooting people?

  But on the other hand, it would be another two hours snuggled up next to Rick, feeling his comforting breathing against me as his arm slipped around my shoulders and held me against his strong body...

  No. Spending any more time around Rick might lead to me making one of those poor decisions after all. “I think it’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” I said before I could get in any trouble.

  “Tomorrow,” Rick agreed. “Fine, head off to bed. I might watch it anyway, in between cleaning up in the kitchen.”

  A pang of guilt hit me. “Oh, I forgot. Do you want my help...?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Your whole goal is to try and relax. And I can’t ruin that by having you do all the chores.” He smirked. “Although if you want to handle some of the chores in the future, I could live with that. And you’d need to find a cute little maid’s outfit to wear...”

  I didn’t have any sofa cushions in range to grab and throw at him. Instead, I settled for flashing him a rude gesture with both hands. “Good night, you pig.”

  “Good night, you prude,” he replied, smiling.

  Despite that sexist exchange, I felt strangely light and happy as I climbed the creaky stairs to the little house’s second floor. I closed my bedroom door behind me and changed quickly into my pajamas, crawling into bed and under the thick comforter to hibernate and generate some warmth. Away from Rick’s body, I suddenly found myself shivering with cold.

  This was good, I told myself. He’d agreed to let me help him with his business, and it would give me something to do while waiting to hear back from my job applications. Additionally, I had to admit, now, that I felt a bit guilty for how I’d taken advantage of him to get this room in his house for a rock-bottom low rate. Yes, he’d also agreed to it, but he’d done so because I taunted him. I’d won that negotiation, yes – but in business, I generally didn’t need to see the losers from the other side of the negotiation table every day when I woke up, and before I went to bed each night.

  I’d do this for him, to pay him back for letting me stay here. That way, I wouldn’t feel any obligation to do anything more. Our relationship would stay professional.

  With a smile on my face, already starting to imagine some of the improvements that I could make, I drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eileen

  * * *

  Strangely enough, once I’d agreed to help Rick, time seemed to fly by. Before I knew it, two weeks had passed, all in a span of what felt like seconds.

  I knew, of course, that time felt like it was moving faster because I now had a project. That didn’t make the project any less frustrating at times.

  “Are you serious?” I groaned, as I dug deeper into the overflowing file box that Rick had dragged out of a closet. “How long have you been letting all of this pile up?”

  He shrugged, managing to make the expression both obnoxious and endearing. “I don’t really worry about them. I pay them if they keep on sending notices.”

  I gestured to the growing pile of bills that I’d extracted from the box. “So some of these are paid, at least? That’s a small relief.”

  “Yeah.” He grinned at me. “But there’s bad news with that, Ellie.”

  I opened my mouth, intending to tell him not to call me by that nickname. The threat of bad news, however, overwhelmed my irritation. “What’s the bad news?”

  “I don’t have any record of which ones got paid and which ones didn’t.”

  He laughed as he raised his hands, warding off the barrage of pillows. “Come on!” he protested. “It’s not that bad – it’s not like any of them are taking me to court!”

  “Probably only becau
se you’re just a small fish!” I shuddered at the thought of what would come next, of tracking down Rick’s bank statements to work out which numbers matched up to invoices. Either that, or I’d have to start contacting the companies, finding out which ones considered Rick to be in good standing, and which ones had his account sitting very firmly in their “overdue” column.

  “Small fish?” he repeated, eyebrows rising. “Ellie, there’s nothing small about me!”

  I put a bit of extra oomph behind the next pillow, managing to hurl it past his defenses to smack him in the face. “You’re disgusting!”

  He just laughed. Since I’d agreed to help him, I hadn’t yet seen Rick in a bad mood – not once. I’d occasionally catch him standing in the doorway of the living room where I’d set up my impromptu office, just leaning against the doorframe and watching me. He always seemed to be smiling – probably, I groaned to myself, because he’d suckered me into taking on a task that would make most accountants faint in horror.

  My brief irritation for Rick passed quickly, replaced by determination as I dug deeper into the seemingly endless box of papers. These bones of Rick’s business showed a massive, tangled mess, but I wasn’t going to let this monster defeat me.

  Bit by bit, as piles of paper grew on the coffee table and then split enough times to cover much of the floor, I started to make sense out of what had happened to the money flowing through Rick’s business. It took a long time, with lots of rearrangements of the paper piles, but the fog was starting to lift as things began to make sense.

  “How’s it coming?”

  I glanced up at the man, smiled as I saw the gift he offered out to me. “Thanks,” I said, accepting the glass of wine. “I think I’m starting to have a couple breakthroughs.”

  He dropped onto the sofa, making puppy dog eyes at me. “How much do I owe? Am I going to need to sell a kidney?”

  His hangdog expression made me laugh. “It’s actually not as bad as I feared,” I admitted. I pulled myself up from the ground with an effort, wincing as stiff legs unfolded. I didn’t think that I’d been sitting for long, but the bright midday sunlight shining in the windows had been replaced by the red, ruddy burn of twilight. “You’ll only need to sell a finger or two, at most.”

  “How’s that?”

  I gestured out at the sea of papers. “There are plenty of accounts where you’ve got an unpaid balance,” I began.

  He patted the seat beside him on the sofa. “Doesn’t sound good.”

  “But,” I continued, “there are also quite a few where you’re still owed a balance, or where you overpaid. If I go to the extra effort of hunting down that money, I think you should get back most of what you still owe. Overall, you’ll come surprisingly close to breaking even.”

  “What you’re saying,” he said, eyes twinkling as I sat beside him, “is that my accounting method has been working the whole time?”

  “No!” I wagged a finger at him, careful to not spill my wineglass’s contents. “It doesn’t work that way! The money that you owe is to entirely different people than the money that you should be getting back!”

  “I think you’re just trying to cover up the success of my method,” he insisted.

  “I’m not!” I took a gulp of wine, gave him my strongest, most commanding look. When I’d been at Integrated Technologies, a look like that was enough to send my underlings scurrying for reports and accomplishments to appease me. I’d once forced another vice president to dash wildly for the bathroom, in fear that he might lose control of his bowels.

  Against Rick, the look rolled off like water off the back of a duck.

  Instead, I found myself caught by his face, looking into his green eyes. I could smell the sawdust on his shirt and jeans when I took a deep breath. If this was my house, I would have raised a protest about that, telling him to go change before he dirtied my couch.

  Now, however, the sawdust didn’t bother me. It was a nice scent, I considered, looking at Rick. It matched the man, seemed strangely fitting.

  He noticed me looking at him, smiled a little. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I pulled my eyes away. What had gotten into me? The man was a mess financially, no matter how he smelled. I reminded myself of my determination to not slip up and make any kind of romantic overture.

  It didn’t help, however, that all throughout the afternoon, whenever my attention wandered from the papers and financial documents in front of me, they turned instead to earlier nights. Rick and I had settled into a routine, of sorts; he’d be out in his workshop during the day while I tried to get his business in order, but he returned back inside each evening. He’d bring me a drink, join me on the couch while dinner cooked, and then put on a movie for the evening. “Your film education,” he’d repeated practically every night, “is sorely lacking and full of holes.”

  I didn’t mind having a drink brought to me. I certainly didn’t protest when he cooked – especially considering how his cooking ability was miles ahead of mine! And although I rolled my eyes at some of the movie plotlines, I never minded when he looped an arm around my shoulders, pulled me in close against his warmth.

  We were just friends, I repeated to myself. As we’d figured out through conversations over the last couple of weeks, we disagreed on just about everything. Everywhere that I had strong feelings, Rick turned out to be annoyingly relaxed and uncaring. He, meanwhile, was a stickler for the smallest and most inconsequential details. Who cared if all the spices weren’t put back in the cabinet in exactly the same order as before? Why did he make such a big fuss about me using a steak knife to spread some peanut butter on toast?

  We seemed to flip back and forth from getting along great to fighting like cats and dogs. Our fights never lasted long, but even those brief flare-ups of emotion left me breathing heavily. Afterwards, no matter if I won or lost the little squabble, I was never quite sure if I wanted to punch the man… or tackle him to the ground and kiss him just so that he’d stop talking.

  The days passed. Little by little, almost without realizing it, I felt myself beginning to settle into this new life that I’d made for myself.

  “Afternoon.”

  I didn’t even need to look up, just held out my hand for the drink. Instead of the smooth wineglass I expected, however, I found a chilled can bumping against my hand, condensation dampening my fingers.

  “What’s this?” I asked, looking up.

  “Beer,” Rick answered, smiling.

  I tried to close my fingers around the can, but he tugged it away. “Not that easy. Get up, we’re going out on a walk.”

  “With the beer?” I put the latest documents aside, pulled myself to my feet. “Is that allowed?”

  “Around here? Oh yeah, nobody minds. Besides, I know most of the neighbors, and they’re all friendly.” He let me take the beer can from his hands, took a pull from a second one he’d kept for himself. “Come on, it’s a nice day, and you haven’t left the house.”

  “I went jogging this morning, which is more exertion than you’ve ever spent,” I said, only adding about half my usual amount of sarcasm to the words.

  He chuckled, led me outside.

  I did have to admit that the afternoon sun felt nice on my face and arms. The lingering heat of the day made the ice-cold beer taste even better; I usually didn’t drink beer, but this one was nice.

  We walked down to the end of the street, turned to the right, and Rick led us to a trail that snaked along the side of a small creek. Tall trees broke up the sun, casting dappled light and shadows down at us, shifting with each slight breeze. Gravel crunched under our feet, birds chirping in the trees as cicadas droned from their hiding places among the rushes on the edge of the small stream.

  “How’s my business coming?” Rick finally asked, breaking the silence.

  “Good,” I said after a minute of consideration. “I think I’ve worked through most of the financial mess that you’ve made.”

  He took a sip of his beer. “So,
what comes next?”

  For a moment, I’d been distracted by watching his throat move, the stubble shifting slightly as he swallowed. “Well, I think that there’s something here, something that could really grow,” I answered.

  “So I’m a success after all?” His eyes twinkled at me.

  “Could be,” I repeated, wagging a finger at him, trying to not pay overmuch attention to those twinkling green eyes. “But it still needs a lot of development.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a business name, for example,” I said. “You’re not even incorporated, you know that?”

  “There you go, using all that fancy business speak again.” He smirked at me, drank the last of his beer, crushed the can in one hand. I found myself momentarily mesmerized by the flexing of his forearm muscles as he performed the gesture. “Why not just name it after me?”

  “Richard Morgan Woodworking?”

  He frowned. “It’s kind of a mouthful, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “What about something simpler?”

  “Such as?”

  I hadn’t said anything earlier, but I’d come up with a few suggestions of my own. “You want something clean, something that catches people’s attention and speaks to the core of what you do,” I began.

  He glanced up at the sky. “Am I getting a full business lecture?”

  “Wood,” I said.

  He didn’t realize I’d offered up my suggestion at first. “What?” he asked after a second.

  “That’s what you should call your business. Wood.”

  “What, just like that?”

  I nodded. “Just like that.”

  He shook his head. “Too short. Sounds like a porn name.”

  “You’re disgusting,” I told him without putting heat behind my words. “Fine. How about The Woodworker?”

  Given how we disagreed on what felt like everything else, I expected Rick to tell me that it was a stupid name, come up with something else. To be honest, I wouldn’t completely blame him – it was his business, after all. I was just the one-time helper, getting him on track.