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I bit my bottom lip before an idea came to mind. “You won’t be.”
His eyebrow rose, and I tried not to notice all the wonderful things it did to his handsome face. “I seem to remember you being pretty handy, correct?”
“I fix a lot of cars around town, but I can do pretty much anything. Why?”
“Well, the maintenance company I hired did an excellent job of keeping up the outside of the house, but the inside?—”
“Houses don’t like to sit around,” he stated.
I nodded in agreement. I had a feeling the man standing in front of me didn’t either. “I have a laundry list of things that are either not working or on their last leg.”
“Like the creaky floor?”
I thought about the less-than-stealthy way he’d walked into my house my first night back. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So, what? You want me to be your personal handyman, and in exchange, you’ll go with me to this stupid ball?—”
“Gala,” I corrected him.
“Whatever.” He rolled his eyes.
“Yes, exactly.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” he said.
“What?” I looked up at him.
“I don’t want to go to the gala.” He shrugged. “Like, not even a little.”
“Not even to make your ex jealous?” I teased.
“What makes you think she’ll be jealous?”
I gave him a smug grin. “You haven’t seen me in a dress yet.”
His eyes heated as he took in the length of my body, giving me an instant shiver down my spine. “And after the gala?”
I shrugged. “I’ll go back to Richmond, and we can go back to our own lives. You can say we tried long-distance, or you flat-out dumped me. It doesn’t matter, but at least you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing your ex-wife’s face when you walk in with me at your side. And I’m sure that will drive the sheriff crazy.”
“And you think this can all be achieved in one night?”
“I mentioned the dress, right?” I was really overselling this dress that I didn’t have. “They’ll care.”
I waited for him to mull it over, which felt like an eternity. I didn’t know why I wanted him to say yes so much.
I didn’t know what I was doing.
I really hadn’t been sure since the second I’d walked onto the patio.
But it was the most excited and alive I’d felt in a long time.
His intense gaze met mine. “All right, deal.”
Turned out that life in Ocracoke was going to be anything but dull.
* * *
If there was one thing I had learned about Macon Green in the last twenty-four hours, it was that he was not a sit-around-and-chill kind of guy.
