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Before he walked into the house, he pointed to the pile at my feet. “I’m not shelling out for new tulips, so you might want to pay closer attention.”
I narrowed my eyes and imagined what he’d do if I threw a tulip bulb at his head while he was sleeping.
My facial expression made him smile. A real smile too.
His teeth were white and straight. Beneath the stubble on his jaw, there was a crease in the skin.
That also did quivery things to my stomach, and I was glad when he turned toward the house, whistling a jaunty tune as he walked through the door.
When he was out of sight, I picked up the tulip bulb and chucked it in his direction. It fell with an ineffectual thud onto the ground about four feet shy of the front of the house.
The door opened back up, and his head popped out. “I saw that, Cunningham.”
My cheeks were flaming. “I meant for you to, Barrett.”
The door slammed. I stifled a frustrated scream and wondered just how long we could go without murdering each other while we were sharing a roof.
Chapter Seven
BURKE
Since I couldn’t sit on a deck in Florida and let the ocean lower my blood pressure, I felt fortunate that Traverse City was situated along a beautiful—albeit colder—body of water. At the back of the property was the thing that would make the house a destination someday: eighty feet of frontage along the west arm of Grand Traverse Bay.
The fact that it had been overlooked for so long by the people who’d purchased it from Chris’s grandparents was insane, because they could’ve sold it for a fortune.
A single Adirondack chair sat on the patchy stretch of grass that overlooked the rocky-edged water.
It needed a dock. Someplace to sit where you could watch the sun go down over the water with a glass of wine or a pint of beer. It was worth the walk from the house for that too, because sitting there after two wasted interviews and an impossibly long night without sleep, I felt like I was miles away from the world.
Despite the temperature difference here, it did something inside me that I hadn’t experienced sitting in Tansy’s backyard. The tension in my muscles unraveled at a different speed, something calmer and slower.
And for now, at least, it was the only place on the property where I got that feeling.
The change in Charlotte upon my arrival had all my good intentions flying out the fucking window.
That woman was hell-bent on driving me insane.
Maybe my sister was right, and I was just truly inept when faced with a pretty woman who tied my tongue a bit, or maybe Charlotte’s newfound attitude made her incredibly skilled at bringing out the worst in me.
I’d hardly seen her last night; she had slipped in while I was taking a frigid shower (the plumber was due out to the carriage house any minute, thank goodness), and when I returned from getting a bite to eat in town, her bedroom door was closed.
Throughout the night, I could hear the occasional murmur of her voice, like she was making a couple of different phone calls, but she stayed firmly out of sight.
It was for the best, I told myself.
The snarky, snappy interplay in front of the house had a strange undertone to it, something I couldn’t pinpoint, and even though I’d been fully prepared to show up and apologize for the way I’d acted the week before, all those gestures had fled when I saw the spark in her eyes.
So instead of thinking about sparking eyes and a Tigers hat over a messy red braid, I stared out at the water and tried to filter through the absolute disaster of our interviews with the builders.
I’d let her take the lead because both men were there at her invitation.
The first guy never should’ve made the drive. After I gave him a tour through the property and listened to him ooh and aah over things like wainscoting and stamped ceilings and eighteen-inch-wide plank floors, Rob informed us that he would love to take on the project.
In a year. Which was the earliest he had an opening in his schedule.
There was no spark in Charlotte’s eyes after that one.
The second guy was just as disappointing. He’d lost half his crew over the last couple of months, something he had failed to tell Charlotte, and the projected timeline he gave—after the same tour, the same oohing and aahing—was far longer than we were okay with. Closer to eighteen months than ten.
