Winning His Heart

* * *

Two days later, on her back deck, Kayla snuck another look at the man in her yard. Terrible as it was to admit—like a weakness, really—it was nice to have a man around. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it was a man like David.

They had fallen into a routine of sorts. He came over in the morning, and she made coffee and toast.

He sat out on her deck with his laptop and used her internet, and then, as if it were a fair trade, did some chores around the house. Her screen door didn’t squeak anymore—he’d replaced and reinforced the latch; the kitchen faucet didn’t drip.

Yesterday, when the hardware store had delivered planks to fix her back deck, she had protested.

“David, no. I feel as if I’m taking advantage of you and all your manly skills.”

He had lifted an eyebrow at her to let her know that he had manly skills she had not begun to test yet. The awareness between them was electric. But despite long, lingering gazes, and hands and shoulders and hips “accidentally” touching, they had not kissed again.

But then his gaze had slid to his own house.

She saw how her initial assessment of the situation had been bang on: he needed to be busy right now.

And his initial assessment of her situation had also been correct: her house was a project that was too big for her to undertake.

“I am so grateful for your help,” she admitted.

He smiled and Kayla appreciated the slow unfolding of the new relationship between them. Even if she would have given in to the temptation, Bastigal had an intuitive sense of when the hum of electricity was growing too intense between them, and would become quite aggressive toward David.

His message was clear: I am the man of this house. But in a way it was a blessing that he was chaperoning them.

She had made the mistake of intimacy too quickly once before and the results had been disastrous.

If there was something here to be explored, she wanted to do it slowly, an unfolding of herself and of him.

Now she watched him out on her lawn. David was doing her lawn in sections, mostly because her lawn mower—which he had dubbed HAL Two—had, like the name suggested, a mind of its own.

It would roar to life, work for five or ten minutes and then sputter to a halt. From the first day, she had liked watching David fiddle with her cranky lawn mower.

Every time it broke down he would do the manly things required with such ease: checking the oil, turning it over and cleaning out underneath it. As she looked on he would run his finger along the blade and frown, but then apparently decide it was okay and flip it back up again.

Moments later the air would be filled with the sound of the mower once more. She had always liked that sound and the smell of fresh-mown grass.

Kayla had told herself to keep busy. She could look up the manual for her batch freezer on the internet after all! But there was no reason she could not do that from her perch on the deck.

So she ended up, day after day, taking the computer out on the deck, liking the feeling of being close to him, of covertly watching him work.

Seeing David—willingly working, liking to help out—was such a poignant counterpoint to the life that she had had and the choices she had made.

After watching David struggle through her jungle of a lawn until he was wiping the sweat from his brow, Kayla took pity on him and went in and made lemonade. She had it done by the time the lawn mower shut off, and she called him up from the yard.

He eyed her offering with pretended suspicion.

“This looks suspiciously like pee, too. Is it the Dandelion ice cream reincarnated?”

“No, but what a great idea! Fresh squeezed lemonade at More-moo.”

“You need to let me do some homework before you go any further on the More-moo thing.”

She went still. Oh, it felt so good to have someone offering to do things for her! But it was a weakness to like it so much, a challenge to her vow to be totally independent.

“Duh-veed,” she said, her tone teasing, “I can do my own homework.”

He lifted an eyebrow and put down his lemonade in one manly gulp. He handed her the empty glass. “I have people who do nothing else all day long. You should let them have a look at it.”

To refuse would be churlish, pure stupid pride. “I’d have to pay,” she decided.

“At least that would be a better investment than the batch freezer.”

“The ice cream eruption was just a minor glitch,” she said. “I can fix it. I’ve been on the internet looking at that model. The snap-down lid is missing, that’s all.”

“It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, getting that contraption before you know about the ice cream parlor.”

“It was a good deal!”

He rolled his eyes but took the glass from her. He casually wiped the sweat off his brow. She refilled the glass and he took a long, appreciative swig.

There was something about the scene that was so domestic and so normal that she wanted to just stay here, in this sunny moment, forever.

His phone buzzed and he took it out of his pocket, frowned, read a message and put it back. “Could I tap into your internet for a few minutes? A video is coming through that I’d like to look at on my laptop instead of my phone.”

“Of course.”

He went and retrieved his laptop from where it was now stored on her kitchen counter. He sat outside on one of her deck chairs. He looked uncharacteristically lost.

Kayla refilled his lemonade one more time. “I hope you don’t get a splinter,” she said when he thanked her and settled more deeply into the chair.

He looked like he hadn’t even heard her.

“Because, Duh-veed, it would be very embarrassing for you if I had to pull a sliver out of your derriere.”

“That would be awful,” he agreed, but absently.

Suddenly, she was worried about him. He seemed oddly out of it since he had taken that phone call. Now he was scowling at his computer screen.

“Hey,” she said softly.

When he looked up he could not hide the stricken look on his face.

“David? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie,” she said.

“You’ve got to quit calling me a liar,” he said, but even that was a lie, because while the words were light, his tone sounded as if his heart was breaking.

She had never known a stronger man than him. Not ever. And so it was devastating to watch him turn his computer to her so she could see what he was looking at.

The strongest man she knew put his head in his hands, and she thought he was going to weep.

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