Chapter 12
Delilah
“If the timing’s not right, check to see if your watch is still ticking.”
~ Grant Turner
“Right there.”
Sawyer’s baritone command reverberated through me as he held the last upper cabinet in place. I slid beneath his arm and up on the stool that sat at his feet. His body was an inch, if that, behind me and his arms surrounded me.
Heat once again enveloped me, making it difficult to breath. Even with the elevation the footstool provided me, I only came up to his shoulders. At five eight I wasn’t used to feeling so small, so delicate around men. The last guy I dated was six foot, and when I wore my favorite four-inch black heels, we were eye level. I could wear six-inch heels around Sawyer and I’d barely scrape his chin.
His breath was warm against the back of my neck, and the tiny hairs there stood up. It took all of my concentration to focus on the task at hand. I lifted the drill with both arms and secured the last cabinet in place. My mind was distracted by the fact that Sawyer would be leaving after this. My body was distracted by the fact that the past four hours had felt much more like foreplay than work, considering the positions that we’d needed to get into. It’d been like a renovation game of Twister.
“Okay. Done.” I released the trigger from the drill as I stepped down and ducked beneath Sawyer’s bicep.
He inspected the final cabinet, and I watched from beside him. I knew it was silly to call a man, especially a man of his size, beautiful, but that’s what he was. He was magnificently male. The steel contours of his powerful body were like a work of art or a sleek sports car. From the hard line of his square jaw to the curve of his neck, to the smooth expanse of his broad back, to the chiseled muscles of his arms, to the rippling solid slab of his abs, all of the lines worked to create a masterpiece.
Today was the most time I’d ever spent with him, and I found that I kept discovering new things about him that I’d never noticed before, which surprised me considering I’d spent years studying him. Like the small white scar that sat above his lip. The way he moved with a grace that defied his size. The breath he took right before he spoke. He was even more measured and controlled than I’d thought and it made my desire to push him to lose control even stronger than before.
He stepped back, and his eyes took in our work for the day. We’d accomplished everything that I’d wanted to and were on track to finish up tomorrow. After several beats, he walked over to the kitchen table where he’d set his toolbox.
A small bout of hysteria started spiraling through me. I’d been so focused on our sexy Twister game that I’d dropped the ball on my question quota for the day. Just like the renovation schedule, there was a question schedule, and I was falling behind.
I’d have to play some serious catch-up. Knowing it was a long shot I asked. “Did you want to see the plans that I have for the porch?”
Since he was driving I knew that I couldn’t offer him a beer and the one thing that he’d actually asked me about today was about the work I’d done on the house. If I were being honest, my stall tactic wasn’t just about the question quota. I just didn’t want the day to be over. It’d gone by way too fast.
I was under no illusion that he wanted to be here. He’d been all business since coming back from his call after lunch. Since then, he’d been working at a pace that I had to believe was accelerated from his norm. No human, even a super human like Sawyer, could keep up that pace, day after day. Then, the second the last cabinet was in place, he’d wasted no time starting to pack his things to get out of here.
He turned back to me, and I braced myself for rejection.
Like I’d found myself doing several times today, I held my breath as I waited for his answer. If—fingers crossed—anything ever did develop between us, I would need to learn how to breathe through these moments of anticipation, otherwise I was likely to lose a ton of brain cells from oxygen deprivation.
When his chin dipped, I felt my eyes widen as I let out my breath.
I caught myself before I asked if he was sure. I’d gotten the answer that I wanted, no need to push my luck. “They’re out here.”
Sawyer followed behind me. When I grabbed the plans off the small table against the far wall, I unfolded them and turned. “I know that there are a ton of computer programs that I could use, but I like doing them by hand. It feels more…” I searched for the right word, and it wasn’t until I looked up at him that it came to me.
“Honest,” we both said at the same time.
“Yeah, honest,” I repeated as a nervous laugh tumbled from me.
I wasn’t sure if it was an anxious chuckle because I sort of felt like this entire plan of mine was a little dishonest, or if it was a giddy giggle because we’d said the same word so, obviously, we belonged together.
He took the design from my hand. The roughened pads of his fingertips grazed along my knuckles as he did. By now, I should be used to the contact. We had spent the entire day brushing against each other. Our shoulders, our arms, my front to his back, his front to my back. But instead of growing immune to his touch, with each innocent skim I became more sexually charged.
His head lifted from the papers, and he looked around the screened-in space.
Setting the scene for him, I explained, “I picture myself having my coffee here in the morning and dinners out here at night.”
He nodded as he looked down at the paper and began folding it again.
I could feel the clock ticking on him leaving. My window of opportunity was shutting, and I knew I needed to squeeze one more question in. It was a doozy so I did my five-second countdown, opened my mouth, and blurted out, “If you could change anything about your childhood, what would it be?”
Slowly, he lifted his eyes to mine. For a brief moment, I thought he was going to just turn around and leave or tell me to mind my own business. Sawyer was fiercely protective of his family, and I wasn’t sure if he’d take the question as an insult.
“What about you?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “If you could change anything about how you were raised, what would it be?”
“Oh, um…well…”
It took me off guard since it was the first time he’d turned the tables on me. I knew the answer, but I was scared that it would reveal too much. I worried that if I let him behind the curtain, he would run screaming, or more likely walk silently, out of my life, never to be heard from again.
I thought about coming up with a different answer. Something less revealing. Something safer, like I wish we would’ve had more family game nights. But I quickly dismissed going that route. If I wanted him to trust me, to let me in, then I needed to trust him and let him in.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I walked to the edge of the confession cliff and jumped off. “I wish that my parents would’ve seen me. I know they loved me, but I wish that they had seen me. I always felt invisible. Everything we did, everything in our lives revolved around the shop and the triplets. I was just kind of along for the ride.”
He didn’t respond and my mind filled in the blanks of what he was thinking.
He thinks I’m a spoiled brat. That I am a self-centered, attention-starved girl with serious emotional issues.
I tried to fix the damage I’d done and show him that wasn’t who I was. I wanted to show him that I was a woman that took responsibility for her own life. “It was my fault. I never spoke up. I never asked for what I wanted. I just went along with everything because I wanted to be the good daughter. I thought that if I did, they…”
My words trailed off because before I finished my sentence. I’d inadvertently come full circle from taking responsibility back to being the attention-starved girl. At least I knew the man of few words standing in front of me wouldn’t point it out.
“They would notice you.” He finished.
Whelp, I guess I was wrong. Now that we’d established that I was self-centered, I figured that he would take it as his cue to exit. But again, I was wrong.
His expression turned pensive. “My mom stopped by the other day and apologized for the amount of responsibility that I’d had with my brothers and sister. She thought that it was her fault that I’m still single. But, I didn’t mind helping out. I guess the only thing I would’ve changed was I wish I could have had my own room and didn’t have to share a bathroom with Wyatt, Jackson, Beau, and JJ.”
Gravity was pulling my jaw down from the shock and disbelief that what had just happened had actually happened. Sawyer had answered all of my questions today, but never with more than one word or sentence. For Sawyer that’d practically been an essay.
As excited as I was about that development, I couldn’t help but want to ask why he was single, but I knew that I should consider his answer a win and move on. I should stick to the plan. The intimacy experiment was apparently working, and there was nothing in the study about follow-up questions. Though I wasn’t sure when I’d get another opening like this.
I was still battling with whether or not to satisfy my curiosity when he grinned, handed me back my paper, and said, “Better get going.”
“Oh, right.”
After grabbing his tools, I walked him to the door and said goodbye. As he walked past me, his arm slid against mine, and something wonderfully unexpected happened. It was no surprise that my body responded as it always did, with tingly fireworks exploding like it was the Fourth of July, but, it appeared that I wasn’t alone in my reaction.
When Sawyer’s forearm connected with mine, he paused halfway out of my door. He remained in place, not moving his arm forward or pulling it back, we were skin to skin. There was a seismic shift in energy. An intimacy that hadn’t been there a moment before now settled between us. When I felt it, my brain told me that it was just in my head, that I imagined it. Facing that possibility, I tilted my head up to see if that was the case.
What I saw stole my breath away. Sawyer was staring down where our bodies touched. His eyes were locked on our innocent contact. I watched raw emotions play across his face as I felt the back of his hand, his knuckles brush back and forth and up and down slowly in a whisper-soft caress along my arm. The delicate motion was such a stark contrast to his dominating presence that it increased the erotic magnitude of the moment to almost unbearable levels.
I couldn’t breathe as a hurricane of arousal lashed through me. My knees weakened from the tornado force of need that whipped around me. Dizziness assaulted me as tsunami waves of lust crashed over me.
Then, as fast as the storm rolled in, it cleared. One second Sawyer was beside me, the next he was gone. I blinked, and he was climbing in his truck and driving away.
For a moment I entertained the possibility that the entire thing had been in my head. I wondered if I’d imagined it. Was it just a visualization that I’d inadvertently had?
The one thing that I knew for certain was that I could still feel the trail of embers that the heat of his touch had left on my arm. The sensation was proof that something had happened, I just had no idea what. But I was hoping to find out…