Art snapped on the protective goggles and yanked the cord to kick-start the saw’s reconditioned motor. The blade chugged to life, rotating with blurring speed as the cord snapped back.
Taking a piece of walnut wood out of the pile he’d marked up earlier, he took a deep breath into his nose. The scent of sawdust and turpentine snagged on his tonsils, making him cough.
He needed to calm down. Operating power tools when you wanted to punch something could be hazardous. And letting Ellie Preston mess with his head had nearly cost him his left hand a fortnight ago.
He scrubbed a sweaty palm against his jeans, let go of the breath about to explode in his lungs.
Threading the board against the blade, he shaved off the excess two centimetres. He had forty boards to plane, ready for tomorrow morning, when he was due to get stuck into the second phase of the commission he’d started a month ago.
It was hot, tiresome, and dangerous work, if you didn’t know what you were doing, or weren’t paying attention. And Ellie Preston had distracted him enough already for one night. Make that one fortnight. If she was really planning to stay the whole summer, he needed to find better ways to avoid her – that actually involved avoiding her – because every single second spent in her company was seared on his consciousness.
Letting her handle the project’s admin should have been the perfect solution. Not only did it mean he no longer had to do a job that he wasn’t qualified for and would happily have sacrificed his left nut to be shot of, it also meant he had the perfect excuse to stay locked in his workshop for the daylight hours and well away from the house and her. But the nights had been another matter. Yesterday evening he’d come out of the bathroom and all but tripped over her in the hallway.
Her lips had issued a shocked gasp, her eyes focusing on his naked chest. The long slow glide over wet flesh had burned off the condensation left from his power shower in two seconds flat. Then she’d edged back against the wall as he sent her a mumbled apology and trotted off down the corridor to his room feeling her eyes on his backside every step of the way.
The sibilant buzz of the saw didn’t do much to downgrade his temper.
Ellie’s presentation had been coherent and articulate and, if he had been able to read her printout, he had no doubt she would have made a convincing argument on paper for going ahead with Pam’s scheme. She certainly seemed to have convinced everyone else it was a great idea. But it wasn’t, for the simple reason that Ellie didn’t live here, she didn’t belong here and she wasn’t going to stay.
The door crashed against the frame, making his fingers jerk on the saw. Thrusting up the googles, he squinted through the fog of sawdust at the vision in pyjamas – were those dancing pink elephants? – that stood in the doorway of his workshop. She mouthed something and he flicked the switch on the saw.
The buzzing faded.
What was she doing here? In his place? His sanctuary? He’d made a point of not telling her about the workshop, precisely because she had invaded enough of his territory already.
‘I want to have a word with you,’ she announced.
Her hair hung in damp strands, the drying ends curling around her face in mad corkscrews. Without the sheen of lipstick and the smudge of eyeliner that she usually wore, she looked not much older than the first time he’d laid eyes on her. The top two buttons of her pyjama top were undone, playing peek-a-boo with the worn vest beneath. She crossed her arms under her breasts, making them sway under her top. Her chin lifted in challenge, and he realised two things at once. Ellie was in a major snit. And she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Terrific.
*
‘Sorry, have I struck you dumb? Because you seemed to be talkative enough during tonight’s meeting?’ The righteous indignation that had been pumping through Ellie’s veins while she got ready for bed was like the lava from a long dormant volcano finally ready to blow.
She’d been waiting for Art to come home for two hours while she lay on her bed and relived tonight’s meeting. And he hadn’t shown.
So if the mountain of macho bollocks wouldn’t come to Ellie, Ellie would damn well come to the mountain.
He’d ambushed her in the meeting. Had done his utmost to make her feel useless and insignificant and insecure. And she wasn’t going to let that pass for another second, let alone another night.
She’d spent the whole of her marriage to Dan avoiding difficult conversations, because she’d been scared of what she would discover, and look how that had turned out?
Even so, she’d planned to be calm and dignified with a hint of steel when she’d ventured out to find Art’s ‘workshop’.
But calm and dignified had got lost somewhere while she’d been stumbling around the outbuildings in the dark, getting her best bunny slippers covered in mud.
The workshop wasn’t what she had expected. She’d assumed ‘workshop’ was guy code for man cave. Apparently not, because Art looked as if he was actually working in his workshop. His thick muscular arms and that blasted tattoo were sheened with sweat, his T-shirt speckled with dirt, the dust on his face giving him panda eyes as he tore off his safety goggles.
There wasn’t a single creature comfort in the cavernous barn, just the overpowering smell of tree resin from the freshly cut lumber and the chemical smell of turpentine.
What looked like the chassis of a trailer stood in the middle of the concrete floor with a wooden frame built on to it. A ladder led to a hayloft, which was piled with wood of all different descriptions and thicknesses. And there was the shell of something laid out on the floor, the wood shaped into curves with a series of clamps. She noticed the sketches pinned to the board above the workbench, along with some photographs of what looked like gypsy caravans. Were they previous projects? She envisioned the finished product from the template on the floor, and realised the caravan had to be one of the ‘sundries’ mentioned in the accounts – the sundries that had managed to tip the balance of the co-op’s accounts into credit. Despite all his downsides – and they were legion – Art clearly had some talents, as Dee had insisted.
The circular saw Art had been using to shave a plank of wood gleamed in the light from the single bulb hanging from the vaulted ceiling twenty feet above their heads. A shudder rippled down Ellie’s spine – was that the blade he’d cut himself on? He was lucky he hadn’t lost a limb.
‘What words do you want to have? I’m busy here.’
The surly statement zapped Ellie’s attention back to the man.
Electrical energy and pissed-off vibes zinged in the air around him. She tightened her arms under her breasts, and felt them sway under her pyjama top. Why had she decided to come out here in her nightclothes?
‘I’d love to know if that stick up your backside is a permanent fixture,’ she said, relocating her temper. ‘Or whether you just shove it up there for my benefit?’
He tugged the goggles the rest of the way off his head, making his sweaty hair stick up in indignant tuffs, and dumped them on the worktable. ‘You need to go, I’m not in the mood for an argument.’
The words were laced with enough restraint of the gritted-teeth variety to send a prickle of warning through the short hairs of her scalp. But the lava bubbling below her solar plexus was having none of it.
‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to behave like such a prick and play “who’s got the biggest penis” with me in tonight’s meeting.’
‘I was not being a prick. I was voicing genuine concerns.’
‘You were rude and obnoxious and unnecessarily confrontational. That makes you the definition of a prick in my book.’
Fury flared, turning his hazelnut eyes to a hot vibrant chocolate. His mouth drew into a tight line, the plaintive hoot of an owl the only sound puncturing the silence.
So they were going to play it that way? were they? The way he’d played it nineteen years ago, not speaking, just glowering, expecting her to figure out what the hell was going on in his head using what? A Jedi mind meld? Or some other kind of freaky psychic ability no woman actually possessed.
Fine. She would speak and he could bloody well listen.
‘I’ve spent the last four days working my butt off on that business plan. If you’ve got genuine concerns and are prepared to be constructive, I’m more than willing to listen to them. But instead you attacked and belittled me in front of everyone. Why?’
‘Because you overstepped the mark. You were supposed to be sorting out some paperwork, not coming up with ideas that could run us all into the ground.’
The derogatory comment, ground out through a jaw locked harder than granite, froze the lava in her chest. Emotions careered through her, scouring her insides.
‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she said, struggling to regain her composure, her certainty, ‘it won’t run us into the ground.’
‘There is no “us”. Not for you.’
And there it was, out in the open. The hostility that had been riding just beneath the surface ever since she’d arrived. It shouldn’t feel like a blow, another cut below the knees, she didn’t need his approval. But somehow it did.
‘I’m as invested in this project as anyone,’ she said.
‘And yet you’ll leave at the end of the summer without a backward glance.’ The scorched earth gaze he levelled at her probably wasn’t a good idea with all the dry lumber around.
‘This isn’t about the shop, is it? It’s about me.’ At least he was finally admitting it. ‘What did I ever do to make you dislike me so much?’ she asked, finally through tiptoeing around the twenty-ton pachyderm doing backflips in the centre of the room. ‘When I came here nineteen years ago with my mother, I got the same reception. And I never understood why. Why you bullied me and made fun of me and went out of your way to exclude me.’ That the memories still hurt only humiliated her more.
He blinked, his face rigid. ‘I was a bastard. I admit it. But you took it too hard,’ he said, as if that excused the hurt he’d caused.
And it had got so much worse the day before she’d left, the day before her father had arrived. She had no intention of rehashing that scene again, and she certainly didn’t expect the apology she wasn’t going to get. But she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to rail against the injustice of his accusations.
‘Maybe I was oversensitive,’ she said. ‘I was fourteen years old, trying to process stuff I didn’t understand. But let’s be clear about the real reason I left with my dad that day. It was you Art, you were the reason, because you went out of your way to make me feel like shit that whole summer.’
‘You made a choice to break Dee’s heart,’ he said. ‘How the hell is that my fault?’
The low blow knocked her back on her heels, tapping right into the emotions she’d been determined to ignore.
‘My relationship with my mother is none of your business.’ She pushed back. She’d already let one man trample her self-esteem and her self-confidence into the mud.
But she didn’t feel particularly strong when instead of backing down, he stepped forward. ‘That would be the relationship you’ve ignored for the last nineteen years, would it?’
His gaze drifted up to her hair, as she breathed in a lungful of salty sweat and fresh sawdust, and the electrical attraction arced between them like a lightning strike.
‘Back off.’ She slapped a palm against his chest, feeling cornered.
Solid strength strained against the soft cotton, prickly with wood splinters. But then he swore softly and stepped away, his breathing almost as ragged as hers.
She looked away, the shot of adrenaline, the heady feeling of déjà vu unmistakeable. And all the more disturbing for it.
When was the last time she’d felt that basic, elemental connection? The sharp, insistent tug of desire? So long ago, she almost hadn’t recognised it.
She rubbed her stinging palm on her pyjama bottoms, feeling more exposed than she had nineteen years ago.
Fabulous, this was just what she needed, her libido to come out of hiding and start behaving like a lunatic. And not with any man, but with Art. A man she could barely have a civil conversation with. A man with whom she had a history. A man who had made it fairly clear he despised her.
‘I have nothing more to say to you,’ she murmured, suddenly desperate to escape that searing gaze which seemed able to locate every one of her insecurities and expose them.
‘Wait.’ He seized her arm. ‘We’re not finished here.’
His thumb touched the pulse on the inside of her elbow, and that heady shot of adrenaline careered round her system again. Panic soon followed.
‘Yes, we are.’ She shook off his hold. ‘This conversation is over.’
He held up his hands, but the dilated pupils suggested he’d felt that brutal shot of desire too. Which was so not good. ‘I’ve got something to say to you, and I want you to listen.’
She rubbed the inside of her elbow, where his touch had branded the skin. ‘Why should I?’
She could see the struggle cross his face.
‘Because I was here and you weren’t,’ he said. ‘You weren’t here to see what it did to her when you left. I don’t want to see her hurt that way again.’
‘I don’t plan to hurt her.’ Despite the denial, guilt coalesced in the pit of her stomach, heavy and indigestible, like a wodge of unleavened dough.
His Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘Maybe you don’t plan to,’ he said. ‘But you will.’
What could she say to that? She wasn’t even sure what he was accusing her of? It had been her mother’s choice to abandon her, not the other way around. Hadn’t it?
‘Losing Pam nearly destroyed her,’ he said, the sincerity in his voice cutting through all Ellie’s defences. ‘She had to watch the woman she loved, the only person who stuck by her no matter what, die a slow and painful death.’ He waved his arm to encompass the workshop and the farm beyond. ‘This place means everything to Dee, because it’s all she’s got left of Pam.’
‘Which is all the more reason to try everything to save it.’ Why couldn’t he see that? Was this all simply because he had no faith in her? Why couldn’t he at least give her a chance? ‘I know the idea has come out of left field, but it really is a good…’
‘I knew about the damn planning application, Pam and I worked on it together,’ he said, the revelation shocking her into silence.
‘But if you knew about it, why didn’t you say something sooner?’
‘Because Pam told me not to. She was going to surprise Dee, on the anniversary of their civil partnership. But then she got diagnosed with stage four breast cancer and she wanted me to bury the idea. She didn’t want to risk Dee losing the farm as well as her.’
‘I… I didn’t know that. But if you went along with it then, why are you so against the idea now?’
‘Because it’s too big of a risk. What if the shop doesn’t work? It’ll be like losing Pam all over again for Dee. It’s easy for you, it’s just some project to keep you occupied before you go home again, but for Dee it could mean losing every damn thing that matters to her.’
If she’d wanted evidence that Art did feelings, other than stubbornness or temper, she had it now. But she also had evidence that every damn thing that mattered to Dee didn’t include her.
‘She’s not going to lose anything,’ she said, suddenly weary. She couldn’t fight this battle all over again. ‘It’s a good idea. And I promise you, even though I’m going back to the US at the end of the summer, I am totally invested in making this work.’ And she was even more invested now because it turned out she had something to prove to Art as well as Dee. ‘Perhaps you should try trusting me on that?’
The suggestion hung in the air between them, the blank look on his face all the answer she needed.
What had she been thinking? Persuading Art to trust anyone, especially her, was about as likely as persuading him to join a Spice Girls tribute band.
She braced herself for the inevitable slap down. But instead of telling her where she could shove her trust, he simply said, ‘It’s not like I have much of a choice now, is it?’
She didn’t reply, as he walked back to the workbench. Not sure what to say, the grudging acceptance about as far from a vote of confidence as it was possible to get.
The saw roared to life.
She stood and watched him for a moment, her emotions in turmoil, as he snapped the goggles back on and worked the wood.
He handled the plank with easy competence, his large callused hands stroking the grain. The hairs on his forearms misted with sawdust, more flecks standing out against the sweat pooling at his clavicle.
The inappropriate heat flooded in her abdomen to go with the rising feeling of inadequacy. She shot out of the workshop into the night.
She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling despite the warm evening, and spotted the lantern her mother had left burning in the farmhouse window so Art could find his way home in the darkness. The ball of anxiety knotted in her abdomen.
Art knew her mother now better than she ever could. And whose fault was that, really? His, for being such a bastard to her that whole summer, or hers, for letting the way he treated her mean more than it should?
However much she might want to dismiss his criticisms of her and the shop project as envy, resentment, his fear of change or simply his trademark Art bullheadedness, she had to accept that underlying all that were some genuine concerns. And if he ever found out how badly she’d stuffed up her own business, not to mention her marriage, he’d think he was even more justified in believing she had no way of pulling this off.
What Art refused to believe, though, because the man clearly had serious trust issues, was that she was prepared to do everything in her power to make sure the shop was a success. And all she had to do to prove that, to him and her mum and everyone else at the co-op, not to mention herself, was make absolutely sure this was one thing she did not stuff up.
She trudged back to the farmhouse in her ruined bunny slippers.
No pressure at all then.