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It was a thinly veiled order.
Even I could see that it was one of those ‘you will tell me or else’ kind of statements.
Which cracked me up immensely seeing as if he’d just gotten here a few seconds earlier, he would’ve known all.
“Yes, dear,” his mother replied. “We’ll stay so they can watch you work out.”
“We want to work out, too!” Ashlie, with her waves of brown hair cascading down her back, said.
“You don’t have any workout clothes,” Will started to say, but Ashlie was already waving her hands in the air. “I do! We do! Everything is shoved into the truck like a sausage!”
Will glanced at me, as if he could use some help, and I smiled.
“How about y’all help me understand what it is he is doing,” I suggested. “Then we can go for something to eat afterward?”
That question wasn’t asked to Will. It was aimed at his parents, who immediately nodded their heads in unison. “That sounds wonderful to us. We’d love to get to know you.”
There was also a hint of underlying curiosity, as well as sadness, that immediately had me clapping my hands with interest. “Let’s do it.”
The girls each came up to my sides, and Will looked at me with a hint of amusement. “Don’t let them talk you into doing anything crazy.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t do crazy stuff.”
Within fifteen minutes of that I was climbing a peg board wall with two tiny little sticks to use as my leverage.
“Not anything crazy, right?” I heard Will call from below me.
I didn’t look down because I knew if I did that I would fall.
And I was so close to getting to the top!
The girls had explained that the point was to use the holes that lined the wall all the way up to climb up using the two wooden sticks. You moved one stick into a higher hole, and so on, until you reached the top. From there you had to have both sticks in the top hole before you could come down.
And my hands were practically about to fall off due to fatigue.
But I was almost…my hand slipped in the hole and I knew I was about to fall.
One second I was at the top, fifteen feet in the air, and the next I was weightless.
I expected to hit the red mat that the girls had helped me move underneath the wall, but instead, I landed in a handsome, sweaty man’s arms.
It wasn’t the fall that took my breath away, but the look in Will’s eyes when I turned around with a smile.
“Did you see? I almost made it,” I teased.
“I saw you nearly give me a heart attack,” he growled low in his throat. “Jesus Christ.”
He squeezed me a bit tighter than he normally would, but I gave him that and smiled when he groaned in his throat.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he whispered. “I haven’t had this much anxiety since the girls were little.”
I snickered. “It wasn’t that dangerous.”
He gave me a head tilt. “How would you know?”
I didn’t.
But there was a mat, and people all around. Not to mention I had the best coaching on how to execute it successfully from two smart little girls that’d done it ‘a thousand times.’
I looked at the man who was looking at me with such devotion and said, “I’m not going to stop doing life just because it’s dangerous. I’ve learned, better than most, that tomorrow isn’t promised. I think you’d do better to understand that now, before you fall head over heels in love with me.”
It was meant to be a tease. But what it came out as was a breathless promise.
“Too late,” he whispered. “I’m already there.”
With that, he let me go and went back to his workout, which he’d stopped in the middle of to rescue me.
I smiled and looked away, but found his parents staring at me. His mom with a glow of happiness in her eyes, and his dad with a warmth to him that was inviting.
I looked back up at the pegboards just as Petra said, “How the hell are we going to get them down now?”
I agreed. Looked like those pegs were stuck until someone taller could get them.
“Let’s go finish watching your Uncle Will and plan on where we’re going to eat.”
• • •
“This place is nice,” Dick said as he glanced around the room of the restaurant we were in. “I like it a lot. Not to mention the inside looks so much better with those walls knocked out.”
I looked around the room, trying to see what he did.
I only saw new décor, new tables, and new chairs.
But you could tell by all the photos on the walls that this place had been around for a long damn time.
“What did it look like before?” Ashlie asked, echoing my inner thoughts.
