I woke up on a pile of my clothes to the persistent sound of banging. I would have sworn it was coming from somewhere else until I heard it directly outside the wall of my bedroom. I flew up from the floor and stomped outside.

On a ladder, pounding in loose nails on the siding, was Ryker.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He climbed down the ladder and stood in front of me. The man towered over me by at least a foot, but I’d never been one to back down. Grams always said I was three parts angel and one part demon. Today I was in touch with my darker self.

“I’m working on your house.”

“I didn’t ask you to work on my house.” I put my hands on my hips and realized I was standing in my yard dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and Hello Kitty underwear. I looked up. Ryker hadn’t missed my lack of clothes. “Stop looking at me.”

He laughed. “It’s hard not to look at you. You’re nearly naked.”

“I’m not naked.” From across the street, I heard Mona laugh.

“Even she can see you’re nearly naked, and she’s almost blind.” He pulled off his flannel shirt and wrapped it around my shoulders, covering the parts that were facing the street but leaving my front exposed to his eyes.

“You need to leave. You’re trespassing.” I pulled his shirt closed in the center. It smelled like dryer sheets and spice and him. “I can call the police.”

“You could, or you could let me work for you. I could use the work, and you could use the help.”

“Yesterday, you told me you killed a girl.” I shivered thinking about it. Ryker didn’t seem like a murderer, but Jeffrey Dahmer probably seemed pleasant before he killed and ate his victims.

“I didn’t murder her, but I feel responsible. It’s not something I want to talk about. But in full disclosure, I spent six years in prison for murdering the asshole that abused my brother, and I’d do it again.” He stepped away from the ladder. “You either want my help or you don’t. I’m not going to beg you for the job.”

There was something different in the way he reacted this time: desperation paired with resignation, which I understood completely. It was the same way I’d felt when I had to come here. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of him working on my house, but he was right; I needed something he was offering.

“You can stay, but I’m paying you half of what I was going to pay the guy at the Handyman Connection. That’s twenty dollars an hour, and you better work fast because I have more work than I have money.”

His firm jaw twitched as he gave me a thin line of a smile. Not the type of smile that said he was happy, but the type that said he would take whatever he could get. “Deal. I’ll finish up out here, and you can tell me where to start inside the house.” I turned around to walk away, but his next words halted my progress. “Nice pussy … cats.”

I pulled his shirt down as far as I could and took off toward the door.

I didn’t dare shower with a strange man around the house—especially one with a temperament that blew in different directions. One minute he was a gentle breeze, the next he was a tempest.

Instead, I pulled a pair of jeans from my makeshift bed and grabbed a T-shirt. I lifted his flannel shirt to my nose one more time and inhaled his scent before I let it slip to the floor. There was something unsettling but oddly comforting about the way he smelled. A chill skirted through my body—a cross between fear and arousal. He was definitely my type physically, even if he was something of a douchebag.

While he fixed the loose nails on the siding, I started painting the living room. By lunchtime I was done with two walls and starting on the third when my stomach grumbled in complaint.

I pulled out the bread and made two sandwiches. I tried to convince myself that it was only polite to offer him lunch since I was paying him less than what his labor was worth.

I found him around the back of the house. Not a place I’d investigated yet, but it was in as bad of shape as everything else. Decades of neglect had killed off the grass, and only weeds remained, but at least the yard wasn’t totally overgrown. Someone had obviously done some yard work in the past.

I stood at a distance and admired him. Every swing of the hammer caused his muscles to bunch and ripple. His broad back tapered to a slim waist, and his jeans hugged his thighs like a hungry lover.

As if feeling my stare, he turned and looked over his shoulder. I stepped forward, hoping I looked like I was in forward motion instead of at a standstill, caught gawking at the hot bad boy on the ladder. “Hey.” I held up a paper plate filled with a bologna sandwich and chips. “I thought you might be hungry.” He shifted his body and looked at me like I was offering him a petri dish filled with Ebola. “It’s just a bologna sandwich.”

He backed down the ladder with speed and efficiency. In seconds he was facing me with a smile. Not a smile that said, cool, a bologna sandwich, but a smile that said I was giving him much more than a free lunch. Too bad everyone didn’t light up like that over two slices of bread and a piece of mystery meat.

I turned to walk away.

“You’re not going to make me eat alone, are you?” he asked.

What the hell was he about? He was like a teeter-totter at the playground—up and down constantly. He confused me. He intrigued me. He caught my attention.

“It’s not like I have a chair to offer you. I’ve only got one. If you want to eat together, we need to sit on the porch.” I made my way to the front porch and took a seat on the top step. Ryker followed and sat on the step below me. Even at that position, he towered over me.

“Tell me why you’re here.” His voice wasn’t angry like it had been yesterday, but confused. And why wouldn’t he be baffled? I’d showed up out of nowhere with nothing.

“My grams died and left me this house. I was struggling to make ends meet in Denver, and my options were limited. It was come here or sleep on my friend’s couch.” I shrugged and looked down at my meager lunch offering. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. It was sad that the sum of my worth was limited to the contents of my refrigerator and the clothes that lay scattered in the bedroom of my run-down house.

“At least at your friend’s, you had something to sleep on.”

He popped a chip into his mouth, and I watched his lips move as he chewed. Red ruby lips that looked soft and kissable. What the hell am I doing? The man has a girlfriend. And he’s a psycho. Those were passing thoughts, though; I gripped onto the fact that he was so yummy to look at. This girl needed to glom onto any positive moment, and having Mr. Dark and Dangerous sitting on my porch was about the nicest thing to happen to me in a long time. How sad is that?

“One thing at a time. First is making sure the house isn’t going to come down around me. I’ll worry about comfort later.” I took a bite of my sandwich and enjoyed the silent companionship for a moment.

We both sat looking across the street toward Mona’s empty porch.

“Have you met Mona?” He set his empty paper plate on the step above him and wiped his mouth with the bottom of his T-shirt. When he pulled it up, I caught a glimpse of his stomach. Ropes of well-defined muscles bulged and rippled with the movement. When he dropped his shirt, he gave me an I-caught-you-looking smile.

Heat rushed to my face. I looked away and toward Mona’s bungalow. “Yes, she’s a hoot. I’m not sure what to make of her yet. Yesterday, she wanted to talk about lemonade and oral sex.” I slapped my hand over my mouth the minute the last two words were out. “Shit.”

Ryker lifted his eyes with interest. “That sounds like Mona. Did you?”

“Did I what?” I crumpled my empty plate and set it on top of his.

“Talk about oral sex?”

I leaned away from him as if being close to him was like taking a lie detector test. I didn’t know why I’d told him that, or why I wanted to tell him anything he wanted to know. Was it because I was lonely, or was it because for some strange reason he seemed familiar?

“No, I didn’t talk to Mona about oral sex.” He watched my mouth as I said the words, and I swear there was heat in his eyes. “We talked about the shitty condition of my home, and how it had been abandoned for twenty years.”

Ryker’s expression hardened. Gone was the warmth, and in its place was a thick dark heaviness. It cloaked him anytime the house was mentioned. He had gone from approachable to shut down.

It probably wasn’t smart, but I needed to know more about him. If he was going to be working for me, I needed to feel safe, and Ryker didn’t make me feel safe. It wasn’t that I was afraid of what he could do to me. He was a fortress of a man, but it was his silence and anger that sliced at the raw edges of my nerves.

“Hey, can you handle coming here every day, it clearly made you insane the other day.”

His eyes were large glittering ovals of sadness. His shoulders rounded enough to cast a gloomy shadow on the sidewalk. “I knew the people who used to live in this house, and things didn’t end well for them.” He scrubbed his hands over his face as if the action would erase the memory. “Sorry about my behavior.”

I could tell by his tone that he didn’t want to continue, so I backed off and replaced the thousands of questions racing through my head with a declaration.

“Let’s turn this place around. Help me take it from a place of despair to a place of delight. Deal?” I seemed to be making a lot of deals with Ryker lately.

He didn’t say a word, only nodded his head and left me sitting alone on the porch while he returned to work.

Ryker left shortly after lunch and returned with Nate and a bed.

“Where did you get this?” I stood against the wall while they put the frame together.

“I had an extra at my house.” They lifted the box spring and mattress into place, and I almost cried. I had a bed. A real bed. I hadn’t had one since I left Grams’s house. “I brought sheets too.” He tossed the flowered fabric onto the bed and walked out of my room.

Nate stared at me for a moment. “Thanks for hiring him. He really needed the job.”

“What’s his story?”

Nate shook his head and walked toward the door. “It’s not mine to tell.”

I heard the door close behind them, and the engine of Nate’s truck rumbled to life. I stood and stared at the bed. I’d just won the damn lottery.

Once the sheets were on it, I fell back onto the soft mattress and thought about Grace. She’d be appalled that I’d accepted a used mattress from a stranger. I curled on my side and thought about the quiet, stoic man who gave me this wonderful gift. Did his body ever lie on these sheets? Did the frame ever squeak under his weight? I buried my nose into the linen and inhaled. It smelled like fabric softener and him.