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Chapter Twenty
CHARLOTTE
“Oh my.”
Daphne joined me at her kitchen window. She sighed happily, but her reasons for gawking and happy sighing were very different from my own.
My aunt was looking at Richard.
I was looking at Burke.
Richard had insisted that a tree in their backyard needed to go, and it was no small task when a one-hundred-year-old oak tree came down.
The tree company had left earlier that day, and when I mentioned to Burke that Richard hadn’t wanted to pay them to cut the tree into firewood, he offered to help.
The help, as it turned out, was a shirtless display of muscles so beautiful that I hadn’t moved from the window at the kitchen sink for about an hour.
“I know,” I sighed.
She nudged me. “How’s that going?”
He lifted his arms, bringing the axe down on the small metal split wedged into the wood. The flex of his stomach muscles had me pressing my thighs together.
“It’s ... good,” I said. My cheeks were warm, and Daphne laughed at whatever she saw in my face.
“I can tell.”
I tore my gaze away and found an empty seat at the kitchen table. “Can you?”
“There is a very particular glow to the skin when you’re with a partner who knows what they’re doing. You and Burke have it.” She hummed, choosing the seat opposite mine. “No blurred lines yet?”
After she asked, she took a long sip of her iced tea, her eyes holding mine over the rim of her glass.
I shook my head. “Boundaries have stayed firmly in place.” More boundaries than either of us had assumed at the outset, but for some reason, I held back that information.
Daphne was peering so intently at me that I fought to hold her gaze. “Okay.”
“You sound like you don’t believe me.”
Daphne set her tea down and shook her head a little. “I believe you.”
“But?”
She gave me a level look. “When you used to imagine the person you’d end up with, what was he like?”
Oh.
In the beat of silence that followed, the axe came down in the backyard, splitting open another chunk of wood.
Thwack.
A clean, hard slice delivered by someone strong and determined. You couldn’t do what he was doing without complete focus and impressive strength.
In light of Daphne’s question, I found myself suddenly viewing the chopping of wood as a measurement of someone’s moral compass.
But, no, we weren’t blurring any linesat all.
“Umm,” I started, ever eloquent, “someone smart.”Thwack.I blew out a hard breath. “Kind. He, umm, he loves the same things I do. Old houses. History. All those things.”
