“Because this way’s better.” His smile and that beard give him a sexy-as-the-devil look that has my breath coming short. “You trust me?”
I sniff. “I wouldn’t be in the woods alone with you if I didn’t.”
The words come out with a lot more subtext than I mean them to.
“I mean,” I stammer, “of course, I trust you.”
His look of amusement makes me go all hot in the face.Gah! Find something to talk about. Quick!
“So… tiny house, huh?” I say, smooth as a pile of rocks. “Where did you get it?” We settle into a comfortable pace. Not a stroll, but also not a rush.
“I built it.”
“Youbuilt it?”
“Yeah,” he says simply.
I scoff. “Well… details, please.”
He narrows his eyes at me as though I’m a strange but intriguing species. “What kind of details?”
“Um, the usual kind? How long did it take you? How did you learn how to do it? What made you decide to build a freakin’ tiny house?”
Beau’s laughter interrupts my litany of tiny house questions.
“Hmm. Well, it took almost two years, and it wouldn’t have taken so long if I’d really known what I was doing, but with something like that, you never really know until you’re neck deep in it—” he says, giving me a look that says,you know how that goes, when I have no clue.
I’ve never even attempted something as massive as building a dwelling. Pitching a tent is the closest I can claim to that.
“And I wanted to do it because I wanted my own place, and renting is ridiculous, but I also didn’t need a twelve-hundred square foot house or a mortgage that would take me thirty years to pay back. Basically, I wanted to own my home outright and not pay for more than I needed.”
I smile at his words and the self-reliance and determination behind them. He reminds me of a modern-day Thoreau—or what little I’ve read by him.
“And where is your tiny house? Do you live, like, in a neighborhood?”
He chuckles. “No, there’s actually ordinances in Lafayette against putting tiny houses in residential areas,” he says, his tone dropping. “And, no, I didn’t know that when I started building, which tells you just how little I actually grasped at that point.”
“Oh no,” I croon in sympathy.
“Yeah,” he says with a good natured shrug. “It all worked out. I found a place for it in the country.”
“In the country?” I immediately picture Broken Bow, though everything I’ve seen so far in this part of Louisiana is nothing like the lush foothills and island-dotted lake that make up the best of my hometown.
“Yeah, in St. Martinville.”
I grin.St. Martinville.“That sounds cute. Quaint.”
Beau bunches his lips together. “I don’t know aboutcute,but it’s quiet and it’s country. My house sits on some property that belongs to a friend of mine. Right between the Vermilion River and two hundred acres of crawfish farm.”
I shake my head. I don’t know what part to focus on first:two hundred acresorcrawfish farm.
“Crawfish grow on afarm?”
Beau belly laughs. “Not one like Old McDonald’s.”
My cheeks turn pink. “Okay, so what kind?”
“They grow in rice paddy ponds.”
