“Oh,” she said with an adorable frown as she looked back up. “What about the heat?”
Once their grandparents passed away, Jackson stopped staying at the old house and started crashing with him or with whatever bar bunny he’d picked up for the night. Reed couldn’t even remember the last time that Jackson checked on the old place. Between the taxes and the insurance, the old house just wasn’t worth keeping, but every time Reed suggested that he sell it, Jackson would just shrug it off and tell him that he would think about it.
“Broken,” he said, wondering why she really came back here.
Nodding absently, she mumbled, “I see,” as she reached up and pushed her mud-caked hair back before releasing a heavy sigh. “I guess I’ll stay at a hotel until I get it fixed. Is there still a Marriot on Chase Street?”
“You can stay with me,” he found himself saying because he couldn’t send Jackson’s little sister to a hotel.
“Oh,” she said, worrying her bottom lip as she turned to take another look around and somehow managed to trip over her own two feet in the process. She would have fallen on her ass if he hadn’t caught her.
“That must be some insurance,” he said as he dragged her back up to her feet.
“The best.”
Chapter 5
“My mother left some clothes in the closet, take a shower, stay out of trouble, and try not to burn the place down. I’ll be in my office upstairs if you need anything,” and with that, the man that she never thought that she would see again was gone and she found herself standing in the middle of the admittedly beautiful bathroom, dripping mud all over the floor.
“All right then,” she mumbled to herself as she continued to stand there, trying to figure out where she went wrong.
Since there were just too many possibilities to choose from, she reluctantly closed the bathroom door. For a moment, she considered trying to sneak back out the front door and heading next door, but since she was covered in mud, freezing, and wasn’t really a big fan of “roughing” it, she decided that she would take Reed up on his generous offer and stay the night. Decision made, she struggled for the next ten minutes to tear her water-logged clothes off and once she was free, she climbed into the large shower, turned the water on, closed her eyes, and let everything go, the stress, the worries, everything that she couldn’t do anything about at the moment. It was something that she’d been doing since she was a kid and the only thing that had allowed her to survive this long without developing an ulcer.
Twenty minutes later when she started to feel human again, she reluctantly turned the water off, grabbed a towel and walked over to the large closet where she found his mother’s clothes on a shelf next to the dryer. When she spotted the size small on the label, she put them back on the shelf, because this just wouldn’t do. After a slight hesitation, she turned her attention to the dryer and helped herself to some of Reed’s clothes. After grabbing one of his tee shirts and a pair of his boxers, she threw her clothes in the washer along with the clothes she’d found in the hamper, started a load, and cleaned the floor. Once that was done, she decided to kill some time by exploring the old house that she’d been banned from since she was three.
Not that her grandparents had specifically told her that she was banned, but that’s how she’d taken their requests that she never get within fifty feet of this house, mostly for Jackson’s sake. Ever since the day she was born, Jackson had been stuck with her and it only got worse when their mom died and their father dropped them off on their grandparents’ front step. With her grandparents already in their late seventies, it had been left up to her brother to watch over her and make sure that she didn’t do anything that would cause irreparable damage. Things only got worse when she started skipping grades left and right until one day she was sitting next to him in Algebra class, asking him to sharpen her Scooby-Doo pencil for her. So, she’d understood that he’d needed some time to himself and she’d been more than happy to give it to him, especially when it meant that she didn’t have to deal with Reed.
Now that she’d made it into the inner sanctum, she couldn’t help but give in to her curiosity and have a look around since it appeared that her self-imposed babysitter was still busy upstairs. Knowing that she would probably never get another opportunity like this again, she pulled up her boxers when they threatened to fall off, opened the bathroom door and carefully stuck her head out, deciding that it was better to be safe than sorry. Once she was assured that he was really gone, because she wasn’t stupid after all, she walked down the beautifully maintained nineteenth century hallway, peeking into rooms along the way, exploring a few of them, helping herself to what appeared to be the Bradford family library, selecting a few books that caught her attention, carried them toward the door at the end of the hallway, and—
Found herself staring at one of those old-fashioned stoves, the one with multiple warmers, bread drawers, six burners, and what appeared to be four ovens. She’d heard stories about this stove from her grandmother over the years, but she’d never truly believed that it would be this beautiful. For years, her grandmother had adored this stove from afar, dreaming of the day that she could take it for a spin, but unfortunately for her grandmother, she’d always been too polite to ask.
Thankfully, Joey didn’t have that problem.
Chapter 6
Little Joey Lawson, he thought with a rueful shake of his head as he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes with a long-drawn-out sigh, wondering what the hell he was going to do with her.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true, because he knew exactly what he wanted to do with her. He wanted to go downstairs and pull her back over his legs so that he could finally give her the spanking that he should have given her years ago, but since that wasn’t an option…
He was going to have to figure out how to keep her out of trouble without losing his fucking mind. Then again, maybe he was worrying over nothing. For all he knew, she was just in town to take a look at the old place to see if it was worth keeping and as soon as she realized that it wasn’t, she’d tell Jackson to put it on the market, and this would probably be the last time that he saw her. Hell, if that’s all it took maybe he should put an offer on the old house and finally be rid of the little pain in the ass once and for all.
It was actually an idea that he’d been toying with for a while now. When he was a kid, he’d learned the family business like the rest of the men in his family. He used to sit on his father’s workbench and watch his father work, amazed at all the things that he could make out of a pile of wood. He’d learned how to handle a hammer before he could ride a bike and by the time that he was ten he could make just about anything that his father showed him. By the time he was fourteen, he was spending half his summers with his Uncle Jared, learning how to build houses. He’d loved working with his hands, creating something out of nothing, and fixing up old houses. He’d been able to keep working for his family when he went to college.
But then he got his first teaching job…