AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I lost myself to the movie, and even though I had seen it a thousand times, I still gasped and ooohed and ahhed. When the movie came to an end, I picked up the bottle of wine and pressed it back to my lips, taking another deep swig. I’d made a definite dent in it now, and I was feeling a little floaty as a result.
I selected another movie, romance, obviously, and settled in to watch it when there was a knock on the door before I had the chance to press play. I wrapped my blanket more snuggly around me, shuffled my way over, peered through the peephole, and groaned.
Blake stood on the other side of the door. And even as distorted as he was through the fish-eyed glass, he still looked unfairly hot.
I stepped back, heart hammering, and pulled open the door. He had a toolbox held in his hand, and his stormy eyes lit with amusement as they roved over me.
“Juniper,” he said with a grin, dipping his head in greeting. “I’m here about the radiator.”
“It’s Nell,” I corrected with a snap, not budging from my place at the door. “And why the hell are you here to take care of it? Don’t you have boatloads of money so someone can do stuff like this for you?”
“Well, I have plenty of money,” he laughed. “But I like handling some of the small stuff. Especially when I first buy a property. Helps me get the lay of the land and get to know the tenants.”
“You already know me,” I argued. “There’s no reason for you to be here.”
He huffed a sigh. “Listen, Nell. You can either let me in to look at the radiator now, or I can call someone to do it. But if I call, it’ll likely take until at least Monday before someone can get here to look at it. Which means the entire weekend without the radiator at the very least. You’ll freeze. Do you wanna freeze?”
I glared at him, weighing my options before finally realizing that he had a point. The temperature had already dropped a lot, and the weather forecast said it was only going to continue to go down as the days passed.
Finally, I stepped back to give him room to walk past me, pointing toward the still-silent radiator and walking back to the sofa.
“Radiator is that way.”
“Glad you saw reason,” he said with a smirk, his large frame stepping through the door and into my tiny apartment.
“It still doesn’t make sense to me why you would like doing this, though,” I said, grabbing the wine bottle and pressing it to my lips again.
I took a bigger drink than I likely should have, the stress of Blake being in my apartment making it hard for me to focus on anything else. When I set the bottle back on the small coffee table, it was feeling considerably lighter than when I had first taken it down.
“I worked as a handyman through college before I dropped out to pursue being a general contractor. I still like getting my hands dirty from time to time.” He threw me a wink before sinking down to his knees before the silver monstrosity.
Maybe it was the wine, or the sight of him down on his knees, or maybe even the fact that I still had Mr. Darcy fresh on the brain, but something about that wink and the way his ass looked in those jeans had me feeling suddenly incredibly flushed and more than a little uncomfortable.
“It’s freezing in here,” Blake said, not turning around to glance at me as he selected tools from the toolbox at his feet.
“No shit Sherlock,” I grumbled, taking another swig of my wine and pressing play on the movie I had selected before he showed up.
It wasn’t one I had seen before, but the summary made it look cute. Little did I know that it was a cold open straight to a wild, passionate sex scene. The woman on the screen let out a loud, guttural moan as she was pressed against a wall, and Blake’s head snapped around.
I fumbled with the remote, trying to press the back button, but it was too late; he had already seen it.
“Didn’t take you as the type to watch porn when someone was in your apartment, but by all means, don’t let me interrupt.”
His deep voice was laced with amusement, and his blue-grey eyes flicked from the TV back to me. My cheeks heated with embarrassment as I finally made it back to the Netflix home screen.
“It was a romance movie,” I fired back. “I just didn’t know that it opened like that.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself,” he joked, chuckling as he turned back to face the radiator.
I flipped through a few more options and decided on another movie. One that I had seen a million times and that I knew had no raucous sex scenes that could embarrass me while Blake was still here.
As the opening credits began and Kate Hudson’s face filled my screen, I tried everything I could to avert my attention to the movie. But no matter what I did, my gaze kept flickering back to Blake.
I watched him as he worked. He still had his coat on, so I couldn’t see his bulging biceps underneath all the layers of fabric.
And with how I was feeling at that moment, how the heat rushing to my cheeks had nothing to do with the cold or the wine, maybe that was for the best.
“You know, if you stare long enough, you might burn a hole straight through me.” He purred, never once turning back to glance at me.
