Page 14 of His Hot Mess

I ran back into the bedroom, triumphant.

But Chris wasn’t there.

“Chris?” I called.

“Over here,” he said, his voice coming from the bathroom now.

I found him kneeling before the sink, bottles of shampoo and curling irons and loose makeup rolling around on the floor beside him.

“How long have you lived here again?” he asked.

I clapped the flashlight down on the counter. “I know where everything is.”

He looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. This must be his favorite look. TheIs that right?look. At least he was still down on his knees.

“Well, there doesn’t appear to be any leaking in any of the pipes,” he said, shifting the items on the floor back into the cupboard. “But you might want to keep your cupboards and closet a little more… accessible, so a plumber can get into the floor quickly if it happens again.”

Heat rolled in my stomach, and not the good kind. “You know, you have a lot of nerve coming into someone’s home and telling them they’re… disorganized.”

Chris shut the cupboard doors and stood up. When he reached his full height, a full head over me, my snappy insult died on my lips.

Seeing him fill up my tiny bathroom was enough to make me lose my words, but the fact that he was standing inches from my shower, a place I had been naked only a few hours ago, made my mouth go dry.

While I tried to give my head a shake without actually moving, Chris shifted to fold his arms—presumably to tell me that yes, I needed to get my shit together. But a flash of bright pink on the side of his dark t-shirt made me do a double take. There was something stuck there.

I was about to reach for it when he pulled out his phone and began typing on it, his elbows blocking the thing from my reach.

His thumbs danced across the screen as he spoke under his breath.

“Old leak to remedy… wall replaced downstairs… exposed beams… concrete floor”

“What are you doing?”

“Hang on.”

I waited for a moment, deeply impatient. Then something pink flashed in the mirror as Chris shifted.

I leaned forward to try to get a better view, then sideways. I couldn’t crane my neck too much without being overly obvious. I’d draw his attention, and with my luck, he’d think I was checking him out. Which I definitely wasn’t doing—just looking around his sculpted body to try to identify whatever that thing was.

Chris held his phone out, startling me.

Thankfully he didn’t seem to notice. As he lifted his arms, the pink thing came back into view, but I still couldn’t make out what it was.

“So the good news is, there are no major structural issues that I could see downstairs or up,” Chris said. “I’ve got a list of all the stuff that needs doing downstairs. That is, if you want to make it look like—” he scrolled down on the screen, then turned it towards me. “This.”

I tore my eyes from the pink thing in the mirror and stepped forward to get a better view of his screen. Then I lost my breath.

On his phone was an image I instantly recognized: a photo I’d been fawning over for years, long before I knew I wanted to open up a store. It was an outrageously stylish vintage clothing store in London, and it was everything I wanted in my shop: polished concrete floors, salon walls covered in stylishly arranged wall hangings, little tapestries, and vintage photos and paintings. Exposed wood beams overhead. And at the end of the room, a beautiful rounded cashier desk with glass windows for the vintage jewelry displayed underneath.

“Where did you get that photo?” I asked. I hadn’t shown it to him, had I?

“Pinterest.”

The man was onPinterest?I snorted.“You mean the site I find dinner recipes on?”

That wasn’t a lie. I’d used to really be into finding photos of places and things I liked on Pinterest until it got too depressing to look at images of a life I’d never have. These days I basically only used it to search boards with names like ‘Dining Solo’ or ‘Recipes for One’.

“Aren’t youSexySadie911?”

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