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“Great, even the birds are sick of my complaining,” I chuckled under my breath.
I turned my head to notice the ducks from the lake had climbed up onto the shore. They huddled together under the shade of a tree and had grown very quiet. I could have sworn they were staring straight at me.
“Don’t mind me!” I shouted out to them. “I’m just over here having some kind of identity crisis. But the good news is now I’m talking to ducks instead of just talking out loud to myself. So, that’s a new development.”
“Hello?” a man’s voice sounded suddenly, startling me.
I jumped and spilled what was left of my coffee down my legs and the front of my robe. As I rushed to wipe away what I could with the dry parts of my robe, a figure appeared from around the side of the house.
My gaze lifted to catch none other than Mr. Fix-It himself standing there. Derek Mullins.
10
MELODY
“Sorry to startle you. I tried knocking, but no one answered,” Derek explained as he walked closer.
I laughed and waved my hands over my body, “Well, we’re even now.”
He cracked up a little as his eyes drifted over the coffee stains down my robe and pajamas. I was glad I didn’t look like such a hot mess this time in terms of matted hair and smudged make-up, but I was hardly put together. It was too early for that.
Derek looked around, likely trying to spot who I might have been talking to before he walked up. His eyebrows flinched when he saw the ducks, but then he shook his head and turned back to me. “Mind if I come up and talk to you for a moment?”
“Sure,” I sighed. I was giving up on looking sane or attractive to this guy. He was like a curse, and every time he showed up, something seemed to go wrong. But then again, maybe that was just my life in general lately, with or without him around.
“Let me just go change into something not covered in cold coffee, if you don’t mind,” I said as I showed him inside through the back sliding doors.
I dipped into the guest bedroom and threw on a pair of yoga pants and a sweater, quickly piling my hair into a bun on top of my head. When I returned, he greeted me with a whistle. Not at my outfit by any means, but directed at the house and all the work I had done the day before.
“Wow. This place cleans up nice,” he nodded in approval.
“I clean when I’m stressed,” I grinned. “Which has been very beneficial to this old house.”
He walked around slowly, studying the walls and floors and anything else he could lay his eyes on. As if he hadn’t just examined every inch of the place the day before.
“So, you had never been here before now?” he prodded, looking confused by the fact.
“That’s right,” I answered bluntly. I tensed up with defensiveness. I knew how it sounded, and I didn’t need anyone else guilt-tripping me over it. I was doing plenty of that all on my own.
“Coffee?” I offered.
He held his hand in the air with a polite smile. “No. Thank you, though.”
As he circled through the open dining and living room area, my eyes drifted to his biceps that bulged out from under the sleeves of his shirt. Today his t-shirt was dark blue, but that didn’t make it any harder to see the well-defined six-pack and rock-hard pecs he was hiding underneath.
“The other day in the coffee shop, you said something about fighting fires. You were joking, right?” I ventured to ask. I would be leaving soon, most likely, so why not satisfy my curiosities about this painfully gorgeous guy? Especially if he was going to be randomly stopping by, uninvited.
“No, I’m a volunteer firefighter,” he replied.
“Of course you are,” I quipped breathlessly, feeling my knees wobble. I thought I might faint. It didn’t seem fair or possible to squeeze that much sexiness into one human body.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, nothing,” I waved with an innocent smirk.
I made a mental note to myself to look up the local fire station online later. If they had one of those fundraising calendars like they did back in New York, where all of their hottest firefighters posed shirtless, I was definitely buying one.
“Anyway, sorry to barge in on you like this,” he said, finally getting to the point of his visit. “I was just coming by to see if you’d made up your mind about the estimate we gave you. I, uh, could tell you didn’t take too kindly to the prospect of having to stick around town while we finished the job.” He paused and seemed to choose his next words carefully. “You’re obviously in a big hurry to get back to more important things in New York.”
