Brewer snorted. “Can you imagine?”
“Actually, yes,” I said seriously. “I can’t tell you how many things I ‘couldn’t imagine’ that have actually happened to me in the last few months. It’s this place, man. Weird shit happens in Copper County. Anything is possible. Just talk to him. About everything.”
He frowned, and I wondered if I’d overstepped. How much did I really know about his relationship with Hayes? About any part of his life before we met?
“No risk, no reward?” I asked softly, pushing up to press a kiss to that hard jaw I loved—liked—so much.
Brewer’s lips found mine in a kiss that was achingly tender. When he finally pulled away, his eyes were dark with promise, and I’d forgotten how breathing worked. “See you tonight? Might be late.”
“Come to my bed,” I whispered. “I’ll be the one with the kraken warlord.”
The way his eyes crinkled made me forget everything else. “Then maybe I should leave you to his watery depths,” he teased.
I shrugged. “Warlords are overrated. I’d rather be ravished by a man with a tool belt riding nice and low. Pretty sure ‘Sledgehammer My Heart’ is next month’s selection, now that I think of it. Contractor romance is an underserved niche.”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment as I realized that I’d inadvertently used the words “heart” and “romance” as if… well, as if I had expectations of him.
I held my breath in fear I’d made things awkward again, but he snorted with laughter.
“You could do serious damage to someone’s heart with that thing, Monroe,” he said, snickering through a final kiss to my forehead.
I watched him walk away with a strange mix of emotions—relief, longing, hope… but also a growing sense that Brewer and I needed to have a talk. To get on the same page about our… whatever we were doing here.
After the door closed behind him, I headed to my office to tackle the emails from Marjorie’s assistant. I needed to find something to break this Empire Ridge story… or decide it wasn’t breakable and set it aside once and for all.
But when I opened my inbox for the first time all day, I found it overflowing with messages.
I sighed. Amber had dug up building permits, tax records, and zoning applications for days, sending me a separate email about every single detail, no matter how unimportant.
After scanning through some zoning applications that seemed to make no sense, I clicked into one labeled Property Sale. The first and only attachment was a deed of transfer, dated eight years ago last June.
“Between Anthony Harmon,” I read aloud. “As trustee of the Belles Pivoines Trust, in regards to a property at 19 Halifax Street in Southbourne, New York. And Empire Ridge Development Corporation…huh.”
Anthony hadn’t mentioned that the land he’d sold to Empire Ridge had been in a trust, rather than outright owned by him or Harmon Construction. This wasn’t a big deal, necessarily—it was most likely a family trust—but something about it niggled at me.
I scrolled to the next page of the document. “Being a parcel of land with residential dwelling and improvements thereon,” I murmured. “Containing 4.75 acres, more or less.”
I was surprised to discover it was a residence. Anthony had made it sound like unimproved land, not a house. Had he inherited it from his father the same way he’d inherited Harmon Construction? Was it a family home or investment property? None of that mattered, necessarily… except somehow itdid, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
That same gut instinct kept me from picking up the phone to call or email Anthony to get easy answers to those questions. I needed more information first, at the very least a reason for caring one way or the other. It seemed to me selling a home someone might have lived in was an even more egregious result of Empire’s strong-arm tactics.
Googling the property yielded no further results, and a street view map gave me none of the information I wanted. I emailed Amber and asked her to get me whatever information she could find on the background of the property.
My phone vibrated on my desk, startling me, but warmth spread through me when I saw the message on the screen.
Brewer
Hayes says hi. Might crash here tonight. FYI, we’re watching Wicked and he loves it. Who knew?
Teeny will be fine until tomorrow after all that playing. Will you be okay on your own?
I was glad Brewer wasn’t there to see the goofy grin on my face because I was pretty sure if he saw it, he’d know…
I blew out a breath. He’d know I had feelings for him. Strong feelings. Feelings I couldn’t hold back. Feelings I hoped like hell he reciprocated.
I really needed to talk to my jam cupboard, as Tam had said.
I typed out a message.Hey, when you get home?—
