Shit. She looked like she was trying too hard. She leaned into the mirror and wiped the makeup, but it was sticking to its promise of staying put.
Okay. Okay. Haley would be here in… twenty minutes.Merd. She was ready way too early.
Puckering her lips and posing, she risked another look at herself. Ugh. Add a coffee cup in one hand and snap a selfie and she’d look like she was posing for her nonexistent social media followers.
Plastic crashed against table and scissors and needles and containers all clanged together, capped by the distinct crash of a toolbox exploding in the craft room. The subsequent string of expletives was slightly more controlled than the crash.
Trace drew open her bedroom door and walked over to the craft room. She absolutely did not laugh out loud at the sight in front of her. Not funny. Not at all.
Maybe a little.
Cole was in his bare feet, wearing nothing but jeans, his weight on his uninjured leg and the opposite foot helplessly bare and suspended in the air. Surrounding him like a miniature nightmarish gauntlet of terror were dozens of sewing needles, pins, scissors, seam rippers… pretty much the entire contents of her father’s sewing kit.
Not her mother’s. Ellen’s was the pink one. The black camo one was Jeremy’s. It had begun on a bet between them a few years back, but now the pair quilted, mended, and created like it was a full contact sport. Doubly amusing, as neither was competitive, but they had found their edge through such a tame hobby.
As she stopped in the doorway to appreciate the mess, Cole looked up, a helpless laugh rising with his breath. “Hey,” he said, smiling adorably sheepishly as he met her look across the hellfire of a comedic prison.
Unable to resist, she folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the doorjamb. “Well, hi. Looks like you’ve gotten yourself into quite a pickle.”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” he teased, glaring at the ground, at the fallen crutch that he only used when he refused to wear the walking boot.
“Taking up sewing while you recover?”
Chest lifting with an easy laugh, he shook his head. “Not today, anyway. I’ve uh…” He gestured to the sutured wound that stretched from the base of his ribs to his hip. “Stitches need to come out. I was looking for scissors.”
Baiting him, she stalled before coming to the rescue.
He didn’t seem to mind, biting his bottom lip and lifting one side of his mouth into a grin. “Hot date tonight?”
Wow, she wasn’t going there. Hot didn’t tend to describe her dates. “Something like that,” she said, shrugging as she finished messing with him. Grateful for the chunky soles on her boots, Trace crossed the room and adjusted the dress to squat down and execute the rescue op.
Cole didn’t budge—no place to go in his bare feet—and hissed as she knelt down in front of him to clear around his feet first. “You know, this is getting a little weird,” he said, smiling wickedly as she looked up at him in an awkward, dangerously precarious position.
“Agreed,” she said, flipping her hair out of her face and smiling up at him, her face again inches from his groin. “Next time I get myself into a situation, you’re the first person I’m calling.” Each pin was embedded astonishingly well in the carpet. As she gathered more and deposited them into the toolbox, she laughed under her breath.
“What?” he asked, still frozen in place while she worked.
“At least you have your pants on this time,” she said, her imagination neatly stripping those jeans back off and knowing exactly what she would find. Down to the simple cedar-branch tattoo on his inner thigh.
He huffed a laugh and shook his head. “You have no idea how grateful I am.”
“That I’m rescuing you, or that you have your pants on?” Damn, he was still such an easy mark. Draven would have been stammering and blushing and making this awkward. Her last serious boyfriend—before the failed second attempt with Finn, as she wasn’t counting that for so many reasons—would have missed her goofy joke. Or, worse, his predecessor would have been too busy crying at his perilous predicament.
“Um, both.”
As soon as she’d cleared enough that he had a margin of safety around his toes, he crouched down, still keeping all his weight on the one foot, and joined her in the cleanup effort.
“I can get it,” she said, looking over to catch his eye.
He pushed his hair back and tucked it behind his ear, half of it slipping right back out as he met her look. In the shadowy room, his eyes were completely gray, but it might have been the yellowing of his bruises that washed out the color today. “It’s my mess,” he murmured.
“I guarantee that when I call you to bail me out, it’s going to be worse than pins on the floor.”
He continued picking up pins, dropping them into the shared container that was rapidly filling. “Who bailed you out of harrowing situations like this while I was gone?”
She shifted her feet to gather more, her knees starting to argue at being crouched down for so long, but she didn’t dare put a knee down and risk getting stabbed.
Damn, he smelled good. Of course, he had been using her soap, but he made the lavender smell earthy and rugged. Lavender was a highly underrated flower, and so much more appealing than the sweet overbearingness of roses or honeysuckle.
