Page 10 of Guarding My Love

“Daddy’s getting married,” Penelope said, his sister’s boyfriend’s daughter.

“What?” he asked and looked at Laken sitting next to her boyfriend, Jamie Wilde. Laken held her hand up showing off her ring.

“How come no one told me?” he asked.

He was closest to West, Braylon and Laken in terms of location and who he spoke with more than anyone. At least from a work end.

“If you showed up for breakfast yesterday,” his mother said, “you would have known.”

He looked at Elias and wondered why his brother didn’t text him. But his brother just shrugged with a grin. Then he turned to Talia. “How come you didn’t say anything to me outside?”

“I was too busy soaking up the fact my big brother was comforting me,” Talia said and put her head on his shoulder.

His mother’s eyes softened immediately. “Foster is good at being there when you need him.”

Damn, his sister knew how to have his back. “Thanks,” he whispered.

“No,” Talia said. “Thank you.”

He managed to get through Easter dinner and wasn’t even the first person to leave. He actually left at the same time everyone else did, but many were going to the airport or getting the helicopter. He was just as happy to walk to his vehicle to drive the short distance home.

The fact he got out of the day without having his skin peeled off his ass by his mother was more than he could have hoped for and even put him in a fairly good mood.

That mood changed when he turned down his driveway and saw the new neighbor carrying a ladder way too big and clunky for her and watched her lose her grip on it, only to have it fall to the ground, her going down with it.

4

START TO BELIEVE IT

The skidding of the tires had Charlotte turning her head and groaning more over having a witness to her klutziness than the fact she dropped the ladder on her foot, then tripped and stumbled to the ground.

“Are you okay?” the man asked as he got out of his SUV.

“I’m fine,” she said, standing up and brushing the dirt off of her jeans. “Just tripped over my own two feet.”

“Let me get that for you,” he said. “Unless you’ve got someone else that could do it.”

She laughed. “If I had someone else that could do it, I wouldn’t have just broken a nail.”

He looked at her hands. “They look fine to me.”

“Just a figure of speech,” she said and went to reach for the ladder again.

He got it before her and lifted it easily enough. Considering he was a lot bigger than her and had more muscle than she could have imagined when she’d seen him in his vehicle, she wasn’t complaining in the least.

“Where do you want this?” he asked.

“If you can put it on my deck, that is fine,” she said. “I’ll get it in the house.”

She was thrilled the previous owners had left the ladder in the shed along with an old lawn mower and snowblower.

Two things she’d never used a day in her life and would have to figure out when the time came.

Maybe.

It was one thing to be independent and another to be stupid and hurt herself when she could pay someone else to do it.

“I can bring it in if you want,” he said. “You’re liable to just put a hole in the wall if you drop it in that tiny place.”

---