Page 31 of His Build

Then he looked at her over a globe gilded in gold. “Do you live each day with joy?”

When she glanced up at him he was looking intently at her, his slate eyes locked on hers. Her stomach jolted, her mouth going dry. “I try to.”

“Do you have everything you want?”

She considered this for a minute, looking down at the globe. She rolled it gently on its axis. “I thought I did, but now… I don’t know.”

I don’t have you.

The thought came so hard and fast her stomach lurched. She was sure her face had lit up like a Christmas tree.

Was this how it happened? Was this how one launched into a fling? She should have thought this out more. Journaled, mapped out a schedule in her calendar… then she gave herself a mental facepalm.

Maybe this was one thing she couldn’t plan to a T.

Lucy picked up a lamp with the base shaped like a woman in a toga. “I don’t have this,” she said, feeling the desperate need to change the subject. “Yay or nay?”

“Yay.” He said, decisively. “Looks like…” His eyes went downward so briefly she might have missed it if she weren’t staring at him. He turned back to the lamp, a little too quick.

Lucy took in the figurine’s wavy hair; her curved arms and the slight roundness of her belly. Her breasts pointing out to neat peaks…

Me. He was going to say she looks like me.

This time, when her eyes met his, something electric snapped between them. Lucy’s stomach flipped hard.

Graydon reached for the lamp. When his hands touched hers the electricity practically crackled, running from the place their skin met down her fingers, all the way to her toes. He cradled the woman’s figure in his palm. “She’s beautiful.”

Lucy’s throat seemed to close.

“For Alfred’s place?” she said, so out of it she was a little confused.

Graydon jerked his eyes down to the figure, clapping his other hand on top of the lamp as if suddenly trying to preserve the figure’s modesty. “Hell no, for mine!”

She laughed, big and loud, the tension breaking like shattering glass. “It doesn’t fit with the mid-century look I’m going for, anyway.”

11

They made it to seven antique shops before Lucy’s eyes were too bleary to look anymore. She was also starving. She had wanted to hit as many stores as possible and hadn’t let them stop for lunch. Instead, they’d grabbed a slice of pizza and soda after store three. But that was several hours ago.

“Who knew furniture shopping was so stimulating to the appetite?” Lucy said as she tipped back the seat in Graydon’s truck. She hoped he didn’t notice her inhaling the scent from his flannel shirt hanging over the seat. It smelled of him; the woodsy, clean-soap scent of this born-and-bred in the lake country man. This strong, simple, yet complex man.

Was he really all those things?

And more.

On the way home, Graydon regaled Lucy with stories about growing up in Jewel Lakes County. How many good memories he had early on.

“How come you never left Jewel Lakes County?” Lucy asked. “After… your parents?”

Graydon shrugged. “I guess I felt like someone should stay here. At first it was to make sure someone was here for my Grandma—we moved onto her hobby farm for a couple years after the accident. As she got older she needed help with the handful of animals there. My sister took off right after high school, so it was just me. But by the time Grandma passed, I realized there wasn’t anywhere else I’d rather be.”

Lucy wondered what that was like—to feel so at home somewhere you knew you were in the right place. Knew it down deep. She loved her apartment in New York; she’d made it her own. But did she feel like it was home in her bones?

“Where’s your sister now?” Lucy asked, to shift herself away from the uncomfortable feeling thinking about that gave her.

“Oh she came back too, with a kid in tow. Leaving didn’t end up working out too well for her. She’s running Grandma’s hobby farm. Not that that’s working out either.”

“What do you mean?”

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