I chewed on his response and used the opportunity to study his profile. How had I forgotten that? Rhett may have seemed like he was just passing through, but really, Bluebell Cove was as much a part of him as it was of me. It was completely unfair of me to say anything otherwise.
“How come we never met all those years?” I blurted out suddenly.
Rhett gripped the steering wheel harder as we pulled off the road and onto a dirt path. The truck lurched and groaned slightly, and he grimaced through the rear view mirror as the furniture jostled. “It wasn’t really a vacation, Georgie. I’d see the town kids on occasion, but…” He paused and rubbed his jaw. “My uncle didn’t really know how to be a father.”
A small house came into view at the end of the road, boasting windows, a door, a wraparound porch, and not much else. It looked as if it had a fresh coat of white paint, with no decoration in sight except a lonely porch swing in the corner. Beyond the house, though, loomed a wooden barn that was greater in both size and height. It stood like a behemoth shadow, yet just as plain and unassuming as its neighbor.
I sucked in a sharp breath and internally smacked myself. Rhett parked on a patch of gravel sometime during my dissection of his home and had been staring at me with a totally unreadable expression.
“Sorry,” I instinctively mumbled, which made him raise an eyebrow. “Did you— you said that he…” There was no other way to ask it. “Your father. Is he not in your life?”
Rhett didn’t appear fazed. He must have been expecting the question.
“The father I have was never a very good one,” he replied. “My uncle was the closest thing that I had—and he really did try his best.”
I took note of the far-off look that surfaced in his eyes as they drifted toward the house beside us. His Adam’s apple worked as he tapped the steering wheel. If I didn’t know any better, it looked as though Rhett Briggs was about to cry.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I all but whispered, my grandmother’s smile suddenly surfacing in my mind.
Rhett rubbed the back of his neck and opened his door in a disjointed motion. “Let’s get to work,” he replied in a strained voice as he jumped out of the truck.
I watched as he turned his back to me, wiped his face with his hand, and began to cross over to my door without so much as another word. The Rhett I met at Marigold’s only five days ago returned, his features drawing back into inscrutability. Like a puzzle falling into place, I realized that, for some reason, he was a safe I desperately wanted to crack.
Maybe it was because the parts Ididsee were things that I understood so deeply it somehow softened the ache. It didn’t matter why—I had scratched the surface, and I wanted more.
As he opened my car door, I decided then and there that Rhett Briggs and I would be friends.
Whether he liked it or not.
Chapter Nine
The barn gleamed in quiet defiance of its weathered exterior.
Drywall sealed the walls up to the rafters, where rows of utility lights glared down from the beams. Cabinets lined the far end, pegboards above them bursting with every tool known to mankind. Stacks of lumber leaned along the walls, and a few odd machines hummed and blinked and dutifully waited. One corner hid beneath a drop cloth, mysterious and untouched.
“Well,” I drawled as Rhett came in behind me. “It’s… very clean.”
He shrugged. “My uncle liked a tidy space.”
“That explains a lot,” I muttered under my breath after he began to walk away.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, nothing.” Clearing my throat, I followed him to the wall on our left. “Have you ever thought to—I don’t know. Maybe throw some paint up? Or… a window?” The huge fluorescent lights made it feel a bit like being a bug under a magnifying glass in the sun.
Rhett paused beside a large panel of yellowish wood propped up beside him and ran his palm over the surface. “The shop isfunctional. It doesn’t need to look pretty.” Hands in his pants, he nodded toward the plank and looked at me. “This is pine. It’s sturdy and durable, which is why it’s perfect for the booths. We’re going to be making a lot of cuts today—the rest is fairly simple.”
My lips pursed. “You wantmeto cut that?” The morning of near-death experiences flashed through my mind.
His laugh curled around me, a honeyed tone that I could get very used to hearing.
“You’ll be fine. It’s not hard.”
Rhett hauled the panels of wood to a table near the center of the workshop, the pieces taller and wider than even he was. He’d clearly put too much faith in my dexterity. The serrated blade sticking out from a panel of steel could not have been further from a pottery wheel. Sure, I had cut my hands before on a project—but I was never at risk of losing a limb.
He hoisted the first plank onto the table with a grunt and retrieved a measuring tape from the shelf below. My mind continued to reel as he pulled out his phone and an orange pencil, dragging the tape to make the first measurement.
For a blessed moment, I thought he had forgotten about me.
