AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The buzzing faded.
What was she doing here? In his place? His sanctuary? He’d made a point of not telling her about the workshop, precisely because she had invaded enough of his territory already.
‘I want to have a word with you,’ she announced.
Her hair hung in damp strands, the drying ends curling around her face in mad corkscrews. Without the sheen of lipstick and the smudge of eyeliner that she usually wore, she looked not much older than the first time he’d laid eyes on her. The top two buttons of her pyjama top were undone, playing peek-a-boo with the worn vest beneath. She crossed her arms under her breasts, making them sway under her top. Her chin lifted in challenge, and he realised two things at once. Ellie was in a major snit. And she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Terrific.
*
‘Sorry, have I struck you dumb? Because you seemed to be talkative enough during tonight’s meeting?’ The righteous indignation that had been pumpin
g through Ellie’s veins while she got ready for bed was like the lava from a long dormant volcano finally ready to blow.
She’d been waiting for Art to come home for two hours while she lay on her bed and relived tonight’s meeting. And he hadn’t shown.
So if the mountain of macho bollocks wouldn’t come to Ellie, Ellie would damn well come to the mountain.
He’d ambushed her in the meeting. Had done his utmost to make her feel useless and insignificant and insecure. And she wasn’t going to let that pass for another second, let alone another night.
She’d spent the whole of her marriage to Dan avoiding difficult conversations, because she’d been scared of what she would discover, and look how that had turned out?
Even so, she’d planned to be calm and dignified with a hint of steel when she’d ventured out to find Art’s ‘workshop’.
But calm and dignified had got lost somewhere while she’d been stumbling around the outbuildings in the dark, getting her best bunny slippers covered in mud.
The workshop wasn’t what she had expected. She’d assumed ‘workshop’ was guy code for man cave. Apparently not, because Art looked as if he was actually working in his workshop. His thick muscular arms and that blasted tattoo were sheened with sweat, his T-shirt speckled with dirt, the dust on his face giving him panda eyes as he tore off his safety goggles.
There wasn’t a single creature comfort in the cavernous barn, just the overpowering smell of tree resin from the freshly cut lumber and the chemical smell of turpentine.
What looked like the chassis of a trailer stood in the middle of the concrete floor with a wooden frame built on to it. A ladder led to a hayloft, which was piled with wood of all different descriptions and thicknesses. And there was the shell of something laid out on the floor, the wood shaped into curves with a series of clamps. She noticed the sketches pinned to the board above the workbench, along with some photographs of what looked like gypsy caravans. Were they previous projects? She envisioned the finished product from the template on the floor, and realised the caravan had to be one of the ‘sundries’ mentioned in the accounts – the sundries that had managed to tip the balance of the co-op’s accounts into credit. Despite all his downsides – and they were legion – Art clearly had some talents, as Dee had insisted.
The circular saw Art had been using to shave a plank of wood gleamed in the light from the single bulb hanging from the vaulted ceiling twenty feet above their heads. A shudder rippled down Ellie’s spine – was that the blade he’d cut himself on? He was lucky he hadn’t lost a limb.
‘What words do you want to have? I’m busy here.’
The surly statement zapped Ellie’s attention back to the man.
Electrical energy and pissed-off vibes zinged in the air around him. She tightened her arms under her breasts, and felt them sway under her pyjama top. Why had she decided to come out here in her nightclothes?
‘I’d love to know if that stick up your backside is a permanent fixture,’ she said, relocating her temper. ‘Or whether you just shove it up there for my benefit?’
He tugged the goggles the rest of the way off his head, making his sweaty hair stick up in indignant tuffs, and dumped them on the worktable. ‘You need to go, I’m not in the mood for an argument.’
The words were laced with enough restraint of the gritted-teeth variety to send a prickle of warning through the short hairs of her scalp. But the lava bubbling below her solar plexus was having none of it.
‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to behave like such a prick and play “who’s got the biggest penis” with me in tonight’s meeting.’
‘I was not being a prick. I was voicing genuine concerns.’
‘You were rude and obnoxious and unnecessarily confrontational. That makes you the definition of a prick in my book.’
Fury flared, turning his hazelnut eyes to a hot vibrant chocolate. His mouth drew into a tight line, the plaintive hoot of an owl the only sound puncturing the silence.
So they were going to play it that way? were they? The way he’d played it nineteen years ago, not speaking, just glowering, expecting her to figure out what the hell was going on in his head using what? A Jedi mind meld? Or some other kind of freaky psychic ability no woman actually possessed.
Fine. She would speak and he could bloody well listen.
