Page 65 of Trick or Tease

We worked in efficient silence, loading boxes onto an old wheelbarrow Billy kept in the barn. Garrett didn’t complain about the dust or worry about his clothes getting dirty. He just got to work, the same way he had yesterday.

“This should be the last of it,” he said, settling a final box into the wheelbarrow.

“Good.” The word came out sharper than I’d intended.

We wheeled the boxes out to the trail that led up to the old Hogan house. I tried to focus on the task at hand instead of the way Garrett kept positioning himself close enough that our arms brushed when we both reached for the same decoration.

“Where do you think this should go?” he asked, holding up a plastic skeleton that was supposed to look like it was clawing its way out of the ground.

I pointed to a spot about ten feet up the trail. “There, by that old stump. It’ll look like it’s emerging from the roots.”

He nodded and walked over to set it up, but instead of moving on to the next decoration, he lingered, adjusting the skeleton’s position with more attention than it really required. When I moved to hang some fake spider webs from a low-hanging branch, he reached up, his body brushing against mine as he hung the web.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

He seemed to be there every time I turned around. In my personal space.

“You don’t have to help with every single thing,” I said, finally turning to face him as I tried to stake a foam tombstone into the ground. “I’m sure you have important lawyer stuff to do.”

“This is more important right now.”

I looked up from where I was kneeling beside the fake grave marker and found him watching me with that same intense focus he’d had yesterday before everything went sideways.

“Is it?” I asked, hating how breathless I sounded.

He crouched down beside me, ostensibly to help position the tombstone, but his hand covered mine on the plastic stake. “You know it is.”

The contact sent electricity shooting up my arm, and I jerked my hand away like I’d been burned. “Don’t.”

“Sabrina—”

I grabbed another decoration from the box and stalked toward the next marker, but of course he followed me. Because apparently telling me he wanted to keep things platonic didn’t actually mean he was going to act platonic.

“When are you going back?” I asked.

I felt like I needed to remind him of what he said. He wasn’t going to be around for long, so no point in starting something.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’m going to stick around for a bit longer and help get things off the ground.”

I took a deep breath. That was not what I wanted to hear. It didn’t help anything. Didn’t he know that?

“If you’re sticking around a bit, we need to talk,” I said.

I was not going to keep doing the awkward dance. Life was too short for bullshit. Granny had said something along those lines. And I was going to take her advice.

24

GARRETT

My stomach dropped. I was not usually a nervous guy, but it was never good when a woman said, “We need to talk.” Especially when it was a woman I had such complicated feelings for. The four words that struck fear into the heart of every man who’d ever lived.

“Look, Sabrina—” I started, but before I could figure out what the hell I was going to say, Billy’s voice interrupted us.

The fucker had an uncanny knack for interrupting at the worst times. Cockblock. Fuck. I was going to put a bell on his ass.

“How’s it looking over here?” he called out, jogging up the trail with Lucy right behind him.

Sabrina immediately busied herself arranging plastic tombstones, but I caught the flash of frustration that crossed her face. We would have to finish this conversation later, which was both a relief and torture.