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“I thought Blake had a list of people to save you from if they bid?”
“He did. It never occurred to me that someone like Dotty would bid, though, so she wasn’t on the list.”
Just the thought of Miss Dotty out on a date with Grant was enough to build a bubble of laughter in her throat. Then Grant said, “She patted my rear end last year at the Fourth of July picnic,” and Pepper lost it. She had to set her mug of coffee down, she was laughing so hard.
Before too long, Grant joined her. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, her newly applied mascara well on its way to running down her cheeks. But it helped. Screaming and worrying hadn’t done a damn thing, but a little hope and a dose of laughter, courtesy of Grant, had done the trick. She felt a lot better about the world in general.
“My original point,” Grant said after they had both calmed down, “was that I know how important working on your house is to you. Coming here and helping you out is the least I can do. I mean it. I’m not trying to just butter you up or get you into bed. Although . . .” he said with a grin, “if it
happens, it happens. But that’s not why I’m coming to your house every day.”
Pepper never expected to wake up to an offer like this, but she was very grateful for it. Labor was expensive. If he could make the most of the materials she could buy, maybe the auction wouldn’t be as big a tragedy as she thought it was.
“Okay,” she said at last. “Thank you. You’re right, this is way better than flowers and dinner.”
Grant smiled wide and finished off his coffee. “So why don’t you show me what I’m in for. I want you to show me everything so we know the most important things to work on. Don’t hide something because you’re embarrassed. I know how you are about people seeing this place.”
“Okay.” Pepper set down her cup and picked up her to-do list. She covered a couple of minor upgrades she wanted to look into in the kitchen, then led him into the back of the house, where no one, not even Pepper, tended to go.
Grant listened attentively, tugging lightly at drooping wallpaper and testing squeaky floors with his heavy boot. They looked over the windows and drywall, then he took a flashlight and bravely crawled under her house to examine the home’s structure and plumbing from the crawl space.
When he crawled out, he dusted his hands off on his khakis and nodded. “I can see where the problem is and I think I can fix that myself. We just need to reinforce the floor joists in that bedroom with some two-by-fours.”
“Really?” Pepper said, feeling hopeful. She’d worried that was going to be an expensive undertaking.
“Yep. I think we can put a pretty serious dent in your to-do list.”
“Great. What do we start with?”
“We start with another cup of coffee and one of those blueberry muffins I saw on the counter in the kitchen. While we eat that, we’ll make a list of everything we need to buy at the hardware store tomorrow and plan out our strategy of attack.”
Chapter 7
Adelia Chamberlain was a bloody genius.
Well, her plan did have some flaws—like Grant spending hours freezing beneath Pepper’s house with God knows what creatures while he reinforced the bedroom floor and checked for other weak areas—but for the most part, it was working.
With every item they ticked off Pepper’s to-do list, he could feel her resistance fading. After they spent a couple hundred dollars at the hardware store and hauled it all inside, she smiled at him. When he fixed the floor of the bedroom, she hugged him. After they painted that bedroom and hung her new ceiling fan, he got a kiss on the cheek and takeout.
This was a reward system he could get behind.
Grant wasn’t sure what part of his new seduction plan was the magic ingredient. Maybe it was because he’d dropped the suave seduction shtick and was trying to be as genuine as he could stand to be. Or it might be because he was doing something nice for her without expecting something in return.
She didn’t need to know it was motivated in part by guilt and in part by those plump, pink lips of hers. But maybe . . . just maybe . . . it was because he had spent a good part of the last few days hot, sweaty, and half-naked.
They were three hours into the second day when he lost his shirt. After he’d reinforced the subfloor, he’d started sanding the wood floors in both bedrooms and the hallway. Even with the big floor sander, it was hot, dusty work, and by the time he’d finished sweeping up, his shirt was plastered to his chest.
He’d whipped it over his head and kept going. That’s when he noticed Pepper watching him. She was sweeping, or she was supposed to be, but out of the corner of his eye, he could tell she was more focused on admiring him. It was only right that he give her something to truly admire. Casually, he yawned and stretched, flexing every hard muscle he had. The motion narrowed his waist, making his jeans slip lower onto his hips and reveal the tantalizing cut of his muscles down into his groin that the women always seemed to go crazy over.
Pepper was stone-still in the hallway, so he decided to push her one step further. Reaching down for the damp rag he’d been using to wipe his face, he poured a little water from his water bottle onto it. Lifting it over his head, he tipped his face up and twisted the towel. The cool shower of water dripped down onto his face and shoulders, dampening his hair and rushing down the channels of his muscles, leaving his chest and abs glistening and damp. It felt wonderful, but the soft gasp in the hallway was his true reward.
When he opened his eyes, Pepper was gone, but he knew it wasn’t an opportunity lost. It was apparently the first volley in a silent war of seduction.
When the floors were clean, he cut in the edges and corners with the polyurethane, then used the roller to put out the first layer. He painted his way out of both bedrooms and down the hall into the living room. There, he found Pepper painting the dining room. The first day, she’d moved all the boxes out of the dining room and into the breakfast nook, and then she had wrestled with removing the ugly wallpaper that had been on the walls since before they were born. Now, she’d finally gotten to painting. She was on a stepladder, applying a second coat of a deep burgundy paint to the walls.
At least, that’s what he thought she was doing. It was hard to be certain with his eyes glued to the short shorts she’d changed into. They were a pair of old denim cutoffs that made her legs look six feet long and displayed just the slightest hint of ass-cheek as she reached with the paint roller. Her hair was up in a messy bun and her gray tank top was yanked up and tied into a Hooters-like knot. Her abdomen and back were virtually bare, and he found himself licking his lips as he watched a bead of sweat travel down her spine.
“Did you need something?” she asked.
