Page 10 of Oops I Fell For The Lumberjack Next Door

"Deal."

He steps inside, and my kitchen gets smaller. Immediately. Physically. The man takes up space without trying. He moves carefully around the counter, ducks under the drying rack I hung from the ceiling for my salvaged books, takes the mug I hand him without complaint. Our fingers don't touch. I make sure of it.

Tinsel tries to follow him in. I block the door with my foot.

"Your dog stays outside."

A whimper from Tinsel. A pointed look from Briggs. "He's gonna sit there and cry."

"Then he'll have something in common with me after I look at my floor again."

That almost gets a smile out of him. A twitch at the corner of his mouth. He hides it behind the coffee mug.

We move the bed first. The air mattress is light, but the old metal bed frame I found in the back room when I moved in takes both of us. He lifts his end with one hand. I use two. The frame scrapes across the floor, revealing the damage underneath.

It's worse than the dinner plate hole. Now that I can see the full section, there are soft spots running in a line toward the wall. Briggs crouches, presses his palm flat against the boards. Three of them give. He stands, looks at the ceiling, looks at the floor, does some calculation I can't follow.

"Joists are fine. It's just the subflooring. Moisture damage from a leak upstairs, probably years ago. I can cut out the bad section, sister a couple joists for support, lay the new boards. Half a day, maybe less."

"How much."

"For what."

"For the lumber. The time. I'm paying you."

"You're not paying me."

"Briggs, I can't keep letting you fix my house for free. That's insane."

He stands up from his crouch. Slowly. Which puts him at full height in my bedroom, barely two feet from where I'm standing, close enough that I can see the grain of sawdust still caught in the hair on his forearms.

"The lumber's scrap from a project I already finished. It's sitting in my barn doing nothing. If you want to pay for materials, you can buy the screws. They're about eight bucks at the hardware store in town."

"Eight bucks."

"If you want the premium ones. The cheap ones are five."

My mouth is fighting me. It wants to smile. I won't let it.

"I'll buy the premium ones."

"Big spender."

He goes to get the lumber. I make more instant coffee, which is terrible, and spend the ten minutes he's gone standing at the kitchen window watching him load boards from his barn onto a hand truck. He rolls them across the tree line in two trips. Tinsel follows with a stick, tail wagging, convinced this is a group activity.

Princess Buttercup watches from the windowsill. Her tail curls around her paws. She purrs.

"Stop it," I tell her.

She purrs louder.

When Briggs comes back, he brings a circular saw, a pry bar, a measuring tape, and a carpenter's pencil behind his ear. The saw goes on the front lawn, which currently has no porch above it. He kneels in my bedroom, marks the bad section, cuts the boards free with a hand saw to avoid dust inside.

I'm supposed to be working. There's a manuscript on my laptop that's due in two weeks. An indie romance author whose dialogue tags need serious help. Instead, I'm sitting on a box in the hallway watching Briggs Holloway rip out my bedroom floor, and I'm thinking about things I absolutely should not be thinking about.

His hands. How he holds the pry bar, knuckles wide, tendons visible under tanned skin. The concentration on his face when he measures. He mouths the numbers to himself. Pencil behind his ear like someone's grandfather, except nothing about the body attached to that pencil reads grandfather.

He's filled out since college. At twenty, he was tall and lean. A runner's build. Now he's broader. Heavier through the chest and shoulders. Eight years of hauling trees and splitting wood have done something to his frame that my body keeps noticing even when my brain tells it to stop.