“Huh.” He shook his head. “All right.”
“All right,” Jeff echoed. Wait, what? “All right?”
Honestly, one day Jeff would earn this kind of devotion and forgiveness. “All right,” Carter repeated. “Come on. I want a tour. And then, when that’s done, I think you and… I’m assuming that’s Max and Joe and Trix down on the dock?”
“I dropped them off here before I came to see you.”
“Right. So give me the tour, and then you and me and Max and Trix and Joe are going to sit down and figure out a plan B.”
As if it were that simple. “Carter—”
“Tour,” Carter said firmly. “Come on.”
So they did. Jeff led him through the cottage, which featured a gray water reclamation system and repurposed wooden flooring along with its creature comforts—a natural gas range in the kitchen, the soaker tub, a shower big enough for two, with dual rain-shower heads. Balconies in two bedrooms. From the one in the master, he pointed down to the boathouse. Unlike the main cottage, its roof wasn’t shaded, and the previous owners had installed solar panels.
“It’s not enough to live off the grid or anything,” he said, embarrassed that these were the things he’d hoped Carter would appreciate. “But—”
“Jeff.” Jeff shut up and looked at Carter, who was smiling more with his eyes than his mouth. “I think I’ve finally realized grand gestures are your love language. You can stop downplaying them now.”
Jeff had never successfully downplayed anything in his life, but he decided it was better to kiss Carter than argue about it.
Finally they walked hand in hand down to the dock, where Trix sat under a huge umbrella reading her latest cozy mystery series, a bag of snacks open on the table next to her. Joe and Max were sunning themselves on the raft; Jeff hoped Max had remembered sunscreen.
Trix pulled her sunglasses off and tilted her head to say hi. “Hey. I thought this whole operation was on the DL? Uh, no offense, Carter.”
Carter shrugged. “None taken.”
Jeff grabbed the deck chair next to hers. “It was, but that kinda got blown out of the water. Hey, Max, Joe, you want to bring it in for a minute?”
The four of them told Carter the original plan for recording the album. Then Jeff sucked it up and explained the problem with the house. “So it turns out they don’t just need to put in another breaker panel to up the service to the recommended 200. They need to rewire the whole house.”
“Shit. Any idea how long that’ll take?”
“At least a week, probably two. And the power will be off for a lot of it, not to mention the noise and disruption.” Translation—they weren’t going to be able to finish writing an album here, never mind start recording anytime soon.
Max cracked open a bottle of water from the cooler under the table. “Okay. Easy problems first. We could just rent another cottage and stay there.”
“In Willow Sound in peak tourist season?” Carter said wryly. “Good luck.”
“A motel, then.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be fancy.”
“The boathouse has a bathroom and kitchenette on the upper level,” Joe said. “We checked it out earlier ’cause Trix has to pee all the time and she didn’t want to walk all the way back up to the house—”
Trix tossed a handful of Cheezies at him.
“Anyway. The point is, we could just move some mattresses in and slum it.”
“Yeah,” Max said dryly. “We’re really going to be suffering.”
“Iwillbe suffering,” Trix said, “because you both snore like chainsaws, but I’m willing to put up with it. Problem solved.”
“We could write there too, probably,” Joe said, thoughtful. “No recording, because the water would be too loud, but there’s probably space.”
“Only if you picked the mattresses up every morning,” Jeff said, shaking his head.
“What about the garage?”
He grimaced. “Almost definitely not.” That place was crawling with spiders. Jeff wasn’t going in there until it’d been visited by the pest-control man. Which he’d have to keep secret from Carter. But in this case, what Carter didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “There’s barely any lighting, and it’s full of junk.”
