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“Twenty-four.”
“What year was the house built?” she asked.
When he didn’t answer, she glanced up. Zach’s focus was on the far wall, where her pencil sketches of various buildings around the town were hanging.
“Zach?”
“Your talent is wasted,” he murmured, still looking across the room. “Your talent is hanging on walls where people won’t see it.”
Sophie gripped her pen. “I didn’t do those sketches to gain recognition. I did them because it’s relaxing, almost therapeutic for me.”
Okay, not almost therapeutic, they were therapeutic.
When his heavy-lidded gaze landed back on her, Sophie willed herself not to fidget in her seat. Those eyes could make a woman go weak in the knees, though, and she knew full well what that mouth could do.
“When did you take up drawing?”
So he wanted to get personal? Was this Zach extending that proverbial olive branch?
“After the accident.”
The silence in the room enveloped them and she knew he’d been instantly thrust back to that night, because he glanced down at his scarred hands. Those beautiful hands that had broken glass in the truck to get her and Liam out.
Those hands that had slid along her skin only days ago, leaving her aching for so much more.
Before she could say anything more, though she wasn’t sure what she could say, Zach jerked and pulled his phone from his pocket. When he glanced at the screen, he closed his eyes and sighed.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
He laid the phone on her desk without answering it and eventually the vibration stopped.
Sophie glanced between the cell and Zach, who had settled back into the seat as if moments ago he hadn’t been silently dealing with his own personal hell.
The phone started vibrating once again.
“Ignore it,” he told her. “It’s my neighbor.”
Sophie remembered the very voluptuous woman she’d spotted the other day. “Apparently it’s an emergency.”
Zach shook his head. “No, it’s not. She’s starting to become a nuisance.”
Zach was one of the sexiest men Sophie had ever known. He had that mysteriousness about him, he had the body carved from perfection. It was no wonder women were literally begging him for attention. But Sophie wouldn’t beg and she certainly was no match for someone so flawless and beautiful as Zach’s very obvious neighbor.
When the cell vibrated again, Sophie reached across the desk. “Hello?”
“Um . . . I’m looking for Zach Monroe.”
Sophie smiled across the desk to a stunned Zach. Never in her life did Sophie recall a time when his eyes had been so wide with utter surprise as they were now.
“He’s busy at the moment,” Sophie replied. “Can I take a message?”
“And you are?”
Sophie couldn’t help herself. “The woman he’s with right now. Are you a client?”
There was no response from the neighbor as Zach eased forward in his seat. Sophie sent him a wink, suddenly feeling a bit saucy. This wasn’t her. She was quiet and reserved and didn’t get in the midst of other people’s issues.
