Page 26 of Lovewell Lane

“Is today good for baking?” I asked.

He nodded. “We’re free all day.”

“Great. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” I waved to them both and grabbed my mug and opened the driver’s side door to sit in my car. Then stood back up unexpectedly with one foot still on solid ground and the other inside the car.

“Should I knock? Or call?”

“What?”

“When I’m ready to bake with Tessa for her bake sale. Do you want me to text you?”

Derek full-out smiled at that. The crow’s feet next to his eyes crinkled as he smiled down at me. My God, he was handsome. Even more handsome than usual when he was smiling. I felt my brain start to turn to mush.

Someone woke up on the right side of the bed this morning. My heart skipped a beat at the sight. He was totally warming up to me, and I found myself thinking that I’d do a lot more than bake cookies to see that smile again.

“You’re allowed to knock on my door, Margo. Yes,” he patronized.

Suddenly feeling like an idiot, I sat back in my Kia and fumbled with my seatbelt until it clicked into place. The entire time I felt him watching me. The warmth in my face spread throughout the rest of my body when I realized he wasn’t looking away. Tessa ran over to the side of the yard to wave with a duck still trapped in her arms. I waved through my windshield at them both before pulling off to put some distance between me and my suspiciously smiley new landlord.

-

I knocked on Derek’s door and waited. He swung it wide open without even looking at me and said, “Come in.”

Ordinarily, that was a friendly phrase, but coming from him it sounded like an order.

“How did you know it was me?” They didn’t have a peephole, and again, he hadn’t looked at me once.

Derek changed what he was wearing this morning. Now, he wore an all-black Henley, and I couldn’t stop myself from doing a once over of him while he looked pointedly at the kitchen. He always filled out every shirt he wore, but he filled out this one even better than usual. His shoulders looked like they were stretching the fabric as far as it could go. He wore a backward baseball cap that made him look more boyish than usual. His smile from earlier was gone, leaving me with his clenched jaw to stare at. I must be ovulating.

“Only you would knock like that.”

“What the—” I stopped when I saw Tessa looking at me. “Hey, Tessa. Your dad told me you might be interested in baking. Wanna help me out?”

She nodded from where she sat at their giant dining table with a fancy marker in hand. Derek grabbed the majority of the grocery bags I held and carried them to the kitchen island while I followed.

I took a detour to walk over to Tessa. “Whatcha makin’?”

“I’m coloring a fish tank,” she said. I took that as an invitation to lean over her shoulder to see it.

“Wow. You’ve got so many colors in there,” I said. I’d never been so impressed by a coloring book before. Usually, staying in the lines was excellent in my book. Tessa had somehow made it into an art piece by adding her own textures and shading to the outlines the book gave her.

She didn’t respond, so I took that as a cue to move on. “I’m just going to set everything up. Why don’t you keep working on this, and you can join me when you’re ready?”

“Okay,” she said. Her nose was already back in the coloring book.

I returned to Derek over at the kitchen island. Making a point to not forget, I pulled my purse off of my shoulder and handed him a wad of cash. I purposefully got it all in tens. Five hundred dollars in ones felt cruel, but tens were just enough to be inconvenient.

“It’s five hundred,” I explained. He gave me a look after he saw what the bills were. “If it costs more than that, please let me know, but this is for the leak and the car.”

He split the bills in half and shoved one of the stacks at me. “You overpaid.”

“It’s for the lift home, too. I tip my Uber drivers well.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners again and he breathed out a heavy gust of air. Was this his version of a laugh? It was quiet and short-lived, but so adorable. I needed to see the full-fledged version.

“I’ll put the extra toward your counters,” he said gruffly.

“We’ll see. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I despise having financial talks in the kitchen, it’s sacrilege.”

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