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You just want to see how it’s going, she told herself. You don’t need to see him.
But, of course, she saw both. Half her kitchen ceiling stripped to the bare tin, and Carson Vance stripped down to a T-shirt, standing on the ladder, the muscles of his shoulders and arms flexing as he scrubbed at a stubborn spot.
He didn’t hear her walk in. The radio was on, blasting some rock station out of Syracuse. She got a glass of water from the tap and leaned against the counter, giving in to her impulse to watch him because she couldn’t give in to any of her other impulses, and every girl needed a vice.
Carson was hers.
His body had changed over the years, broadened and filled out. When she’d met him, he’d been slim, just growing out of skinny. Tall men took awhile to reach their finished size. Now he was beautifully proportioned, his back an inverted triangle that drew the eye down to his ass, his arms long and powerful, with a wingspan that made her jealous.
After a lost period of ogling, it began to sink in what he was doing. Working with oven cleaner. Bare-armed. Two small windows stood open, and both the hood on the stove and a spare fan sucked the dangerous fumes out of the room, which suggested Carson wasn’t entirely stupid, but his eye protection and gloves and long-sleeved shirt were heaped up on the kitchen counter, and she hated to think of all that golden skin stippled red and raw with chemical burns.
“Don’t you have any sense?” she snapped.
He wobbled, grabbed at a rung, then whipped around and fixed her with a narrow-eyed glare. “I’m not the one surprising the man on the ladder.”
“Oven cleaner is dangerous. You’re asking to get scarred or go blind, working up there with no
sleeves or glasses.”
“That would be true if I were working with oven cleaner.”
“You’re not?” The smell of it hung in the air.
“No. Finished two rounds of stripping; now I’m cleaning it off with mineral spirits. This part’s pure elbow grease. Not dangerous.”
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his arms. “Guess it makes you hot.”
He climbed down from the ladder and turned down the music so they wouldn’t have to shout. “Guess it does.”
When he stopped moving, he was three feet away from her, separated by nothing but empty air. That was when she realized her mistake. She’d meant to just pop in and pop out again, not to engage him in conversation. Now she was stuck in her kitchen with an irritated Carson, whose T-shirt stretched across a chest that tugged at her hands like a magnet.
The whole thing was so ridiculous. Julie had been with other men. She’d fallen in love with Jason Kaas and would’ve married him if their relationship hadn’t imploded in a flurry of navel-gazing and recrimination a few months before the wedding. She’d had long-term boyfriends, short-term affairs, a memorable fling with a traveling businessman who stayed at the B&B five or six times. And then Leo, comfortable Leo, and their on-again, off-again, might-as-well-have-a-dinner-date-and-hook-up-again thing.
And yet here she was with Carson, staring and wanting like she always did. One barbed exchange from across a room, and she got wet. Carson was her weakness, her drug of choice, and she wondered how much of her life she’d spend trying to kick the habit. Was it because he’d been her first, or was it something else?
He got himself a glass of water and drained it in six long swallows while she tried not to watch him and failed.
Something about the sight of his throat muscles working set a tuning fork vibrating inside her. The life in him. The energy. She wanted to set her hand over his heart and feel it beat, tuck her nose against his neck and smell his skin as she found his pulse with her lips.
Always, he did this to her. Always.
She tore her gaze away. “The ceiling’s coming along really well.”
A lot of it was still a peeling mess, but he’d exposed and cleaned about half of it, and four or five strips of bare tin shone with a dull glow that exactly matched her fantasy of how it could be.
“You like it?”
“It’s great. How did you get it all glowy like that?”
“Polished it with steel wool.”
“Doesn’t that scratch?”
“Very fine steel wool. Have a little faith, woman.”
It gave her goose bumps when he called her “woman.”
She needed to leave.
