Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
Piña Colada
Fox
She smelled like damn summer.
And it pissed me off.
Plus, I was tired from a shitty night’s sleep. I’d tossed and turned thinking about Little Miss Home Improvement wearing nothing but a pair of denim short overalls and work boots—no shirt, no socks, definitely no bra or underwear. I probably could’ve put myself out of my misery with a quick jerkoff, but I’d refused to give in and do that while thinking about the annoying damn neighbor. So instead I’d stared at the ceiling, angrily flipping from left to right every five minutes.
Josie hopped down from the last two steps on the ladder. “Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Are you always this grumpy in the morning?”
“I’m not grumpy.”
“No? So this is what? Your idea of a sparkling personality? I asked if your coffee was okay, and you grunted at me.”
“That wasn’t a grunt. That was a yes.”
Josie made a short, deep noise that sounded like a pig.
I arched a brow. “Is that supposed to be me?”
She made the sound again, this time adding some monkeylike arm movements and jumping around. “Gronk.”
“Cute.”
She jumped again. “Gronk. Gronk.”
I tried not to react, but she was just too damn adorable.
Josie pointed at my face. “There it is again. The elusive Mr. Grumpy Pants smile. It’s kind of…dare I say…nice.” She made an exaggerated gasping sound and covered her mouth. “Oh no. I hope it’s not too painful.”
“Alright, wiseass. I get the point. How about you take your oinking ass out front and grab one of the small two by fours I left on the porch? I’ll show you how to make an easy support to hold up the drywall while it gets screwed into the ceiling.”
Josie strutted to the door. The woman was wearing a white tank top and long, pale pink, flowy skirt to do construction. It looked like she was going on a picnic date, rather than hanging sheetrock—though the tank top hugged her in all the right places, and there was something about her collarbone that I couldn’t drag my eyes away from. Porter was damn lucky she didn’t work for me, or I might make her getup our official company uniform. I had a feeling the outfit might make an appearance in my late-night fantasies this evening, rather than the overalls. She bent to pick up the wood out front, and the top of her tank gaped open, giving me a clear view down her shirt. I forced my head in the other direction, though my eyes managed to slant and continue looking.
“Jesus Christ,” I grumbled to myself. “I need to get the fuck out of here.”
She returned with a foot-long block of wood and held it out to me. “Here you go.”
I shook my head. “Not me. You. Grab the screw gun and climb up that ladder.”
“Okay!” She was a little too chipper this early in the morning for my liking. Once she was at the top, she looked down. “What now?”
I pointed. “Now you take that two by four and screw it to that stud. About three quarters of an inch from the bottom of that joist.”
“What’s a joist?”
“It’s the horizontal beam at the top of the wall. You’re going to hang the two by four parallel to that joist so you can rest the sheetrock on it while you screw it into the ceiling.”
“Oh! Smart. Okay.” She did what I instructed then moved the ladder around the room, putting up the other two by fours. When she was done, she jumped down from the ladder and clapped her hands together. “Now what?”
“Now you go make me another cup of coffee and some whole-wheat toast, and I’ll get the sheetrock hung on the ceiling.”
“What? No. I’ll do it.”
“You’re not going to be able to hold a fifty-pound piece of sheetrock over your head with one hand while you screw it in with the other.”
“How do you know?”
I looked her up and down. “Because you’re five foot nothing with a fancy manicure.”
“What do my nails have to do with anything?”
“If you did any kind of physical labor, they wouldn’t look like that. Hell, I bet you don’t even do dishes.”
Josie’s eyes widened. Her hands flew to her curvy little hips. “Excuse me? I’ll have you know I do dishes. I even have a new kitchen faucet—which I installed myself the other day. And I might not be the size of an oak tree like you or do manual labor for a living, but I do Pilates five days a week and I use twelve-pound dumbbells to do the Jennifer Aniston arm workout four days a week.”
“A whole twelve pounds, huh?”
She scowled. “Don’t mock me.”
“Just being realistic.”
“No, you’re being a jerk. I should’ve watched the YouTube videos. At least there the people doing the teaching can’t insult the students. Can you possibly just tell me what to do and I’ll do it?”
I shrugged. “Okay. Go out front and grab one of the boards, then carry it up the ladder. Start in the corner. Lean one side of the sheetrock on the two by four you put up and square the edge to fill the corner as much as you can. Then screw it to the ceiling beams.”
“Fine.”
Josie marched out to the driveway. I watched from the house as she struggled to lift the sheetrock from the pile. It went against everything in me to stand here and not help. After a few seconds, she set the board back down in the pile and returned to the kitchen. I thought she was going to admit defeat, but instead she rustled inside a plastic Lowell’s bag on the table and pulled out a Gorilla Gripper—a tool that latched onto the sheetrock and allowed you to carry it with a handle. It made lugging boards a hell of a lot easier. A lot of my guys used gadgets like that.
Josie chucked me a feisty grin on her way back out. This time, she managed to lift the sheetrock, but it still wasn’t easy for her to haul into the house, even though it was only twenty steps. There was no way in hell she was going to get that thing up the ladder and screwed into the ceiling on her own. She made it as far as the second rung before the ladder started to tip. If I hadn’t been standing here to grab it, she’d be on the floor wearing a sheetrock blanket.
“Can I do it now?” I said.
“I’m capable. It’s just going to take me a bit.”
I gripped my hips. “How about this… We agree that you’re capable, but we also agree that it will take me a hell of a lot less time to get the ceiling done, and I have shit to do.”
She chewed on her pouty lip. “Alright. But only because you have a time constraint.”
I took the board from her hands. “Right.”
Over the next half hour, I threw four boards of sheetrock up on the ceiling. Josie watched, eager to help whenever possible. At one point, a cell phone rang from atop a box on the other side of the room. Josie ignored it. But a few minutes later, it started to ring again. This time she walked over and checked the screen. “Do you mind if I answer this?”
“Do whatever you need to do.”
Josie stepped from the living room into the kitchen. The house wasn’t that big, so it was impossible to not overhear the conversation. One side at least.
“Hello, Mother.”
Quiet.
“Oh no. Is she okay?”
I held off drilling in the last screw, so I didn’t interrupt her conversation. It sounded important.
“Will they keep her overnight?”
She sighed.
“Alright, well that’s good at least. I’ve been bugging her to go to the doctor. Thank God you were home when she fell.”
There were a few minutes of silence. When Josie spoke again, she raised her voice. “I wasn’t on vacation, Mom. I was in a mental-health facility. And you know that because I left you a message the day I went in.”
Silence.
“No, actually there is a difference. A vacation is very different. You know what, I have to go. Please tell Nilda I’ll call her tonight, when she’s done in the emergency room.” She swiped to hang up without saying goodbye.
After thirty seconds of shaking her head and staring at her phone, she seemed to remember I was there. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Do you need me to hand you anything?”
I shook my head and debated saying something. But she looked pretty upset. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
I waited another minute. “You want to talk about it?”
“Talk? I think you’ve said ten words to me since we met. And most of them were insults.”
“Some people say I’m a better listener than talker…”
“No. It’s okay. But thanks.”
A minute passed, and she still seemed pretty riled up from the call. “God forbid my perfect mother have a child who isn’t perfect. It’s the first time I’ve spoken to the woman since I checked myself into a mental-health facility, and she asks me how vacation was. Vacation! You know, like I was sipping a margarita and lying on the beach instead of having my shoelaces removed from my sneakers as a safety precaution.”
“Some people pretend things aren’t happening because they can’t deal with them.”
Josie huffed. “Not my mother. She’s capable of dealing with anything.”
“Maybe that’s what she wants you to think.”
When she didn’t respond right away, I drilled the last screw in on the board and climbed down from the ladder. Josie was still stewing as I went outside, grabbed another slab of sheetrock, and screwed that one in too. The woman might be a shit driver, in over her head with this dilapidated house, and my dick had too big of an interest in her for my liking, but I wasn’t a total asshole. It sounded like she’d had a rough time lately. So I took out my phone and texted Porter, asking him for something I didn’t ask of many—a favor. Then I went about hanging the last of the ceiling.
Porter’s truck rumbled to the curb just as I finished up. He had one of those obnoxious exhaust systems—the kind you paid extra for to wake up your neighbors when you left early in the morning. He knocked on the screen door while I was still up on the ladder.
I lifted my chin toward the door. “That’s for me, if you could let him in.”
“Oh,” Josie said. “Sure.”
From two rooms away, standing on top of a ladder, I still couldn’t miss the way Porter’s eyes lit up when he got a look at the woman answering the door. Shit. I should’ve seen that coming. Josie was his type—she had a pulse. Porter flashed a smile that made too many women drop their panties, but his dimples only made the muscle in my jaw flex. I hurried to sink the last of the screws, but Porter already had Josie’s hand lifted to his lips by the time I climbed down and got my ass into the kitchen.
“Down, boy. I invited you here to work, not act like you’re in a singles bar.”
Porter’s eyes gleamed. “I was introducing myself to the lovely lady.”
I lifted my chin. “Josie, this is Porter. Porter—Josie. Now get to work.”
Josie’s forehead wrinkled. “Work?”
“Porter’s an idiot who chases anything in a skirt, but he’s a damn good spackler. He can start the ceiling while I get the wall boards up.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I can handle it. The ceiling was more than enough.”
“We got it.”
“But…”
I motioned to my employee. “There’s another ladder in my garage. Should be some wood you can use as a plank, too.”
“On it, boss.”
Porter disappeared. Meanwhile, Josie stared at me like I had two heads.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t get you. You act like I’m a pain in your ass just for breathing, yet you’re going to help me.”
“You are a pain in my ass.”
“So why are you helping me?”
“Fuck if I know. It just feels like the right thing to do.”
Josie contemplated my answer for a minute, then a smile crept onto her face.
“What?” I asked.
“Opal is right. You’re a coconut.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She smiled. “Except I really want a piña colada now.”