At ten on the precise dot the next morning:

BING BONG CLANK!

Mac appeared at the door with his laptop. He looked so impersonally brisk it was a wonder he hadn’t tucked a pencil behind his ear and clipped a corporate ID and a pen protector to his shirt pocket. Or pump her hand in a handshake and call her “Ma’am.”

She served coffee on the coffee table box and sat at a safe distance while he showed her a breathtakingly organized spreadsheet incorporating her input and his, including time and cost estimates for every element of the project, person power required to accomplish it all, and names of suggested hired help, including Truck Donegal and a few other guys who were unknown to her. He’d even prepared three different bottom-line totals, with variables factored in (new blinds or refurbish old ones?), and a proposed timeline for the work, from floors to walls to fixtures.

She looked at him for a long, silent moment.

He looked back at her. Arched a single eyebrow. “Well?”

She was tempted to say, “I’ve never been more turned on in my life.”

From his expression—the slow, smug smile, all amused, gratified triumph—he knew exactly what she was thinking.

He crossed his arms behind his head contentedly, heaved his feet up onto the box.

Nothing was more erotic than a big, hot, strong guy armed with a spreadsheet whose object was to make her life easier. Even if she had to pay him.

“I’m very impressed,” she settled upon finally. Faint with admiration and, frankly, feeling a little shy, which made her realize that it had been some time since she was in the presence of breathtaking competence unaccompanied by whining.

“Not my first time,” he said easily.

They were in innuendo territory again.

How very, very easy it would be to just . . . crawl into his lap again and bury her face against his brownish neck and breathe in the manly cleanness of him and then maybe stick her tongue in his ear.

She had to look away in case her face became as readable as a billboard.

“Here’s our duty roster,” he said, and pulled up another spreadsheet.

“Who are these guys?” She pointed to the personnel column.

“Some guys I know pretty well. Vets who could use the work. They’ll do a great job. I meet with them once a week downtown, so I trust them pretty implicitly.”

Ah, that was the mysterious meeting.

She knew good jobs were hard to come by in Hellcat Canyon and in a lot of the surrounding cities. You either created your own business, or you drove to a bigger city to work for a larger employer. Or you drew welfare.

“I put these three guys on wallpaper duty upstairs—including a complete wash and prep of the walls—we’ll have it all finished in a couple of days. Unless you’re really dead set on doing that room yourself.”

She thought about her dream and almost shuddered. “No, I’m happy to hand that off.”

He nodded. “I’ll work on replacing and wiring fixtures that need it—I’ll do a thorough test, first—do the new toilet innards, tear up the linoleum and lay tile, check doorknobs and hinges, fix that obnoxious doorbell and the fourth step of the stair, stuff like that. We’ll get a couple of guys to work on the window frames that are warped, because that’s a bitch of a job. For the windows missing blinds we can get good prefab blinds and I can cut them to fit, or you can get fancier, depending upon how much wiggle room you have in the budget. We’ll make sure wireless internet works in every room and we’ll create a system of surreptitious partitions so that the ballroom can become meeting rooms.

“And we’ll arrange all the work so there will always be a room that you and Chick Pea can migrate to and sleep without breathing in a lot of fumes.”

He’d made a little column labeled “Chick Pea.” Her job was to “be fluffy and savagely attack intruders.”

Which made Avalon laugh out loud.

He’d put Avalon on paint duty downstairs.

She noticed that the two of them would be working in different parts of the house for nearly the entire duration of the project. It was a skillful bit of scheduling, and, she was certain, absolutely deliberate.

And they would likely never be alone in the house.

That couldn’t be an accident.

She was touched by his solicitousness.

And, ridiculously, a little disappointed that he’d taken her so very seriously.

“I’ve planned it so we can get all the noise and fumes over with at roughly the same time. I figure, give or take wildcards, we can get it all done inside of a couple of weeks, but let’s give it three weeks on the outside to account for any surprises. I can crack the whip.”

She chose the Column B Budget option: more guys on the job, a little more expensive.

The sooner it was done, the sooner she could sell this place, replenish her savings . . . and maybe bail on GradYouAte, if it came to that.

He clapped his laptop closed. “All right, then. Let’s go paint and tile shopping.”

“Me and you?”

“You’re the lady with the checking account . . . boss.” He stood and gave her another little chummy shoulder punch.

Within a day of Mac making phone calls, the house seemed aswarm with big guys, most of them on the diffident side. There were, in truth, only about a half dozen of them at any given time, but they took up a lot of space and they walked with thunderfeet up the stairs and overhead so that their presence filled the whole house. She kind of liked the energy. They greeted her respectfully, received their assignments from Mac. And like a sergeant, he dispatched them upstairs to get to work after they masked the downstairs rooms for painting.

He set her up with a paint tray and a roller—First Date was ironically the name of the paint for the first room, a pale cream with some warmth in it, with the faintest hint of blush pink when the light hit it. It glowed like the cheeks of a girl on her way to the prom.

“Okay, Avalon. You dip it in like so . . . got it?”

She dipped. As instructed.

“And then you stroke it up and down . . . up and down . . . up and down. Up and down.”

She watched the muscle play beneath his T-shirt as he moved the roller up and down.

He turned, eyebrows up. “Want me to show you how?”

God, yes.

“Got it. I’m going to stroke it. Up and down. Up and down. Faster or slower? Which do you like better?”

He stared at her, thoughtfully.

“Well . . . eventually, it’s always good to go as fast as you can . . . but it’s probably best to start out slow. For everyone. Right? Slow, even, constant strokes.”

She was faint. But not from paint fumes. She stared at him blankly.

“Got it.” Her voice was arid from lust.

“Excellent.” He actually performed one of those brisk little hand swipes people do when they check something off a list. As if his own pupils hadn’t gotten big and black there for a moment.

“I’ll check on things in a little bit. Let me know if you have any questions.”

And then he basically left her alone.

To think about up-and-down strokes as she performed satisfying up-and-down strokes of paint.

There passed about a week of bonhomie and progress that was practically choreography. At the end of each work day Mac called a huddle to review progress or to present things for her to approve or revise. She was seldom alone with him. He didn’t flirt. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t make up excuses to linger around the house.

But the banter was easy. It was, in fact, one of the most effortless weeks she’d ever experienced as an adult. Even shopping for fixtures and picking out tile was an exercise in ease. He had opinions, but deferred to her eye, because it was clear she had a good one; he offered input on durability and that sort of thing. He made sure she colored inside the budget lines. He located deals, called in favors.

She realized that having someone you trusted implicitly, someone to whom you could surrender burdens, was practically synonymous with inner peace.

And that not trusting someone could be like riding a roller coaster in a cart missing a wheel.

Also: trusting someone to get work done was undeniably hot.

Which kind of made it, in some ways, one of the most erotically charged weeks she’d ever had. A veritably tantric week. And as she worked alone in a room, or with some guy he’d assigned to help her, Mac’s non-presence was as potent as his presence.

She wondered if this was his plan all along.

Or if he, too, had seen the wisdom in distance from her.

About four in the afternoon on Friday of that week Mac stopped in to check out the ballroom they’d just finished painting. She’d had some help today from a guy named Doug who didn’t talk but tunelessly whistled between his teeth until she’d wanted to paint his mouth closed with the chosen color, which was called Pismo, and was sort of a rich, pale sand moving toward mocha. She didn’t, though. Together they’d gotten it done.

Mac patrolled the perimeter of the room. She was actually holding her breath as if she was waiting to hear her SAT scores.

He was disheveled and paint-spattered himself. He looked utterly relaxed.

“You have a great eye, Avalon. I’ll hand it to you. The colors you chose are fantastic. This looks like a completely different room from the one my mother used to passive-aggressively sing in.”

She smiled at that. “So . . . I know it’s not on the schedule, Mac, and it’s sort of a divergence from the original plan, but how awesome would it be if we could get the blinds cut for the windows in these two rooms today? I would just love to see how they look in here.”

“So awesome,” he teased her in Valley-girlesque cadence. “But you know, I can get it done. You choose. We can do a mix and match with today’s schedule. I’ll tear up the linoleum in the small upstairs bathroom or I’ll cut the blinds.”

“Wow. I’ll need to consult my eight ba . . .”

She trailed off.

Because she’d suddenly become aware that Mac’s hand was parked lightly, companionably on her butt.

Instantly she could feel him go as tense and motionless as if they were playing Red Light, Green Light. Which was how she knew he’d realized it, too.

There passed a nonplussed moment.

“Mac . . . are you . . . sort of resting your hand on my ass?”

His hand dropped away so fast you would have thought she’d severed it. “God! Ava, I’m sorry. I swear to God, it was a reflex. I wasn’t . . . It was just . . . it seemed . . .”

He stopped.

They didn’t look at each other. Not head-on. But her face was hot and when she slipped him a glance she was pretty sure there was high color in his cheeks.

He had been trying to give her distance. He wasn’t actually making a pass.

Thing was, she knew precisely how he’d meant to end that sentence. Because it was indeed a reflexive, companionable ass-cupping, born of a collegial moment. It had somehow felt perfectly natural, which was why it had taken both of them a moment to realize it was even happening.

Anyone strolling past the doorway would have thought them in thrall to the ugly blinds, because they were determinedly looking at them.

But there were no voices. Because they were, for the first time in a week, utterly alone.

And then Ava heard herself say, in a voice so hoarse she inadvertently sounded as sultry as Bacall:

“I didn’t say you had to take it off.”

His head did a rapid 180-degree turn and his gaze collided with hers.

Gasoline, meet match.

He slowly looked away again toward the blinds, and so did she.

And after a suspenseful second’s worth of hesitation, he stretched his hand out behind her and cautiously, gingerly, delicately arranged it right back on her left cheek. As if it were an antique lace doily on a side table.

And yet the moment was at once absolutely ridiculous and deadly earnest.

Her breath was already sawing.

And she could hear his.

But she could hear her own blood ringing in her ears.

He executed the next few seconds like choreography and she now realized this was just one of Mac’s gifts: like Joe Montana had been able to see the pocket on a teeming field of giant humans, Mac saw the field of play and he had a plan. He used the hand on her butt to expertly pivot her toward him, scooped both hands beneath her, pulled her up hard against his body, and urged her forward as if they were tangoing. And just like that, with a soft bam, they were up against the wall. And each other.

It was actually like being sandwiched between two walls: one only freshly painted, the other made of muscle that she wanted to maybe nibble a little. Her hands were already sliding under his shirt as if to test that his abs were indeed that hard, and made of satiny flesh over steel. The heat of his body was intoxicating and the press of his hardening cock against the join of her legs made her grind like a wanton, seeking out a jolt of pleasure.

Her reward was his sucked-in breath and his murmured, “God, yes. More of that.”

Her arms were going around his neck to pull him to her just as his face was lowering and their lips crashed. His mouth was better than molten chocolate and his clever tongue tangled with hers and it was deep, and carnal, and very nearly violent, and somehow she was falling into layer after new layer of pleasure.

His hands burrowed up under her T-shirt and savored a swift glide up her torso, and in a single deft swipe unclicked the center snap on her bra. He muttered a happy, filthy little oath when he filled his hands with her breasts, then dragged his thumbs across her nipples, already so hard they could have used them to trim the blinds.

“Oh, my God. Oh, God. Yes,” she breathed.

“Yeah? Like that?” He did it again and blissful lightning strikes fanned through her body and her head thrashed back and how was it that she was already so close to coming?

She thought the top of her head might just pop right off from the pleasure of it.

She fumbled with lust-clumsy hands for the buttons on his jeans and thank God the worn buttonholes didn’t put up any kind of fight. No grizzly had ever lunged for a trout in a stream more eagerly than she dove into his Calvin Kleins. It was apt, because she felt purely blindly animalistic about getting her needs met. She closed her hand around his cock and stroked him, hard, once. Twice. Again.

“Oh my God, yes. Like that,” he all but hissed. He arched into her strokes and his eyes were bright slits staring right into hers and then he closed them and his head tipped back helplessly and he was all but writhing thanks to her stroking hands, and he was hot and thick and hard and she was lightheaded and desperate with lust.

Thank God for stretchy yoga pants. He peeled hers pretty easily, almost before she knew it, and the underwear went with them. He slid his fingers into the wet heat between her legs and did a few subtle but fancy things down there that shot current after current of almost intolerably delicious sensation through her.

She moaned and ordered, “More.”

He obliged, until she was begging, until pleasure had ramped to hardly bearable levels, until her every cell felt electrified, charged with pleasure.

There was minimal condom fumbling, thank God, he had that down, too: with a yank of the teeth at the package, a flick of plastic, and a deft rolling on. He looped a hand beneath her knee and pulled her up against him like they were about to tango.

He whispered against her mouth: “This is going to be so. Good.”

Then he thrust his tongue inside her mouth on a gasp. And then he moved.

Sensuously, at first. An attempt at pacing. A thrust, a leisurely withdrawal. Another thrust. Teasing her, teasing him. Their breath mingled in short hot bursts. He moved, and she moaned low, officially captive to pleasure. She would be begging in a moment.

And it was almost too intense. Some tacit agreement, almost a dare, kept their eyes locked, so they could watch the power they had over each other, to savor each other’s ramping helplessness to pleasure. She didn’t care if he saw the whole movie of her life in her eyes, every bit of it, the eleven-year-old Ava writing “Avalon Coltrane” in her diary over and over and over, sobbing until her ribs felt sprained that day he’d all but shattered her absurdly naive heart, that moment some years later when she was a little drunk, home from a lame blind date, and had thought about him and masturbated because she figured she might as well put his memory to some use. Right in that moment she’d surrender all of her secrets as long as the tsunami of an orgasm she felt building finally crashed over her.

“Oh God. Please, Mac . . . please . . . I . . . please . . .”

“I got you, sweetheart.”

It was the best word in the world the way he said it, it was rescue and surcease and utter confidence. She didn’t think much beyond that, because his hips were drumming hard now. And then she all but detonated from the banked pleasure. She heard her own tattered scream from somewhere on another planet, as her body dissolved into what felt like a whole galaxy of stars. She was all but whipped right out of her body. And somewhere from out in space she heard his hoarse cry of release.

She slid down the wall to the floor, liquified, sated, stunned, her body humming like the last note struck by a gong.

He slid down next to her with a soft bump.

She wasn’t going to say, or think, or do another thing until she’d savored every last sensation thrumming through her limbs and her nether parts and her kiss-stung lips.

She closed her eyes to be alone with it, her lungs still heaving like a bellows.

She heard Mac’s breathing, too. She knew a surge of very primal and feminine satisfaction. She’d worn him out.

When her thoughts reassembled, she spared one for the paint job on the wall. Because otherwise she’d have Pismo all over the back of her and they’d have to do it again.

And when their breathing had settled they still didn’t speak.

She opened her eyes. The afternoon light had gone amber, and the refinished floors were glowing serenely golden under it.

“So . . . are you going to give another little speech about how you shouldn’t do this?” He said this wryly, though. And still a little breathlessly.

“Nope.” She’d fully realized the futility of this.

And so they sat in silent contemplation. Perhaps awe.

This. This was sex. The frantic surge of lust, the sweat and roaring breath, the grappling, the apparently infinite variety of ways her nerve endings could be strummed to produce umpteen degrees of pleasure. Nothing else in her life to date compared. Certainly not her polite and pleasant couplings with Corbin. All orgasms were good, of course. But . . . it was the difference between that long, flat, torturously dull drive on I-5 from San Francisco and then—ta da! You were in beautiful Hellcat Canyon, and taking the windy, spectacular scenic coastal road to Big Sur, a road that offered something new and splendid around every turn.

“You know . . . this doesn’t need to be a big . . . thing.”

He made it sound like an idle remark, but she was pretty sure it was studied. A foray. A man perhaps carefully negotiating for more hot sex in the future. Perhaps creating a safe space for her to agree to something she clearly wanted but thought she shouldn’t.

“It can be just a thing we do, like trimming the blinds or rewiring the light in the upstairs bathroom? When the mood takes us?” she mused.

“Yeah. Like a morale-boosting team-building exercise. Like . . . trust falls. Only a lot better.”

She gave a short laugh. And then sighed and folded her head onto her arms and propped them on her knees. The peace of the moment was replaced with a tension. Between the idea of more of what had just happened, which made her even now feel weak with anticipation, and the fear that there was no way she wouldn’t emerge from this freshly scathed in some horrible new way.

Even if Mac could partake in the whole thing the way he would a good meal or, say, volleyball.

Even if it was bound to end.

She ran through a swift bullet-point list of reasons why this was madness in her head: They didn’t want the same things, unless you counted this house. Corbin remained quite the loose end. Her life was still in San Francisco, as was her company.

She kind of had a sense that Mac’s breath was held.

“We are really good at it,” she allowed. Cautiously.

“Yeah. I liked the way we kept affirming each other. ‘Yes, oh yes!’” he mimicked.

She gave a quick shout of laughter.

Her heartbeat was ratcheting up again when she looked at him.

She wasn’t a masochist. She might be a little impulsive, but the object had never been to court pain.

But maybe this was part of their battle, too: this was something she needed to prove to herself and to him. That her heart was a little more muscular now, thanks to the workout she’d put it through over the years. That she was strong enough to take what she wanted without giving up anything critical.

“Nothing much has changed about what I said before . . .”

He turned to her. Clearly aware that her sentence had ended with an ellipsis, not a full stop.

“Let’s say . . . we won’t exactly add it to the schedule. But it’s not off the table.”

He studied her a moment. Then the corner of his mouth tipped ever so slightly. “Understood. Wanna shake on it?”

She hesitated, then gave her hand to him with a bit of an ironic flourish.

He took it.

But once he had it, it was almost as though he’d forgotten why she’d given it to him. He held it a moment; his face clouded slightly. He almost whimsically laced his fingers through hers, and he looked down at where their fingers joined and dragged his thumb lightly over the back of her hand, frowning faintly.

And then he dropped her hand abruptly and pushed himself to his feet.

“Guess I should go get started on the blinds, eh?” He headed for the doorway.

He turned around and walked backward a few feet and added, wickedly, “And go hydrate.”

She stared after him. Then back at her hand.

She curled her fingers closed.

Troubled and elated.

Because she could have sworn his expression, that fleeting glimpse of his eyes before he stood, was an awful lot like the one she’d seen when she’d opened her eyes, flat on her back, that day in Whiskey Creek.