Page 152 of Your Place or Mine

And just before his lips brushed mine, he murmured, “Don’t bedazzle the fish.”

I laughed against his mouth. “No promises.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Callum

There’s a very specific kind of humiliation that comes with realizing you’ve turned into a damn puppy dog.

Not the tough kind with bite, either. No, the kind that follows someone around with floppy ears, a dopey grin, and a tail wagging so hard it might fly off.

That’s what I’d become.

And I knew it because there I was, standing on the top rung of a ladder in theReckless River Laundromat,holding a stupid fiberglass ceiling tile over my head while the woman who’d invaded my life one smirk at a time stood below me, making fun of my ass.

“Do you always grunt like that when you lift things?” Lydia asked, chin tilted, amusement dancing in her eyes like she’d been waiting her whole life to ask the question.

“I’m holding a sheet of rock wool above my head while trying not to breathe in 1970s asbestos,” I said flatly. “Pretty sure grunting is in the manual.”

She laughed. That damn laugh that cracked open every guarded part of me like a crowbar to a safe.

“I’m just saying,” she teased, shifting her weight and tossing me a fresh tile. “You’re lucky the new landlord is watching. Otherwise, I’d file a noise complaint.”

“Youarethe landlord.”

She wiggled her eyebrows. “Exactly.”

I rolled my eyes and slid the tile into place. “You keep talkin’, and I might just accidentally drop one of these on your head.”

“Not before I make you hang the new light fixtures next,” she chirped, like this was all part of her devious plan.

God help me, Ilovedit.

The teasing. The banter. The way she filled a space just by existing in it.

She moved like someone who belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once, and Reckless River, my home, my stubborn, sleepy little town, looked different now that she was in it.

Better.

I climbed down the ladder, wiping my hands on the rag hanging from my back pocket, and caught her watching me. Her expression softened as I got closer, like she didn’t mean to let the admiration slip through, but it was too late.

It warmed something in my chest.

“What?” I asked, suddenly needing to touch her.

She shrugged and handed me a bottle of water. “Nothing. Just thinking this might be the best laundromat ceiling in Washington.”

I chuckled and twisted the cap off. “You’re easy to impress.”

She shrugged again. “Or you’re just ridiculously handy, which isveryon-brand for a mountain man.”

“Mountain man, huh?”

She nodded. “Tall. Broody. Beard. Grunts. You hit all the benchmarks.”

“Glad to know I’m a walking cliché.”

“A veryhotone,” she said before sipping from her own water bottle, her eyes twinkling like she knew exactly what she was doing to me.

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