Page 4 of Stirring Up Love
“But still, walking up on a chef without announcing yourself? You’re lucky it wasn’t a pot of boiling water.”
Darius shook sauce off his hand, splattering the white cabinets in red drops. “Lucky, Finn? You’re lucky I don’t ban you from my properties for life.”
“This won’t even be your house for long.”
“It will be if you ruin all my suits so I can’t look my best for showings.”
“Oh, there’s an idea.” Finn grinned. “Kidding, obviously. And don’t worry, I’ll pay for dry cleaning.” Cutting off Darius’s rebuttal, he said,“You’d don’t even let me pay rent. Least I can do is clean up my own mess.”
“Okay, have it your way, Cinderella.” Darius leaned onto his elbow and pulled a can of Lysol and a roll of paper towels from under the sink. He tore off a piece and dabbed at his loafers.
Finn spritzed the floor with disinfectant and resisted the temptation to spray Darius’s shoes. To distract himself from the childish urge, he said, “So are you going to tell me why you’re prowling around in a suit at midnight?” A thought hit him. “Wait, you’re not meeting a girl here, are you?”
Darius made a face of supreme disgust. “Do you honestly think I use these flip houses as sex dens?”
He didn’t, but he grinned anyway, just to get under his friend’s skin.
“C’mon, man, no.” Shaking his head, he went back to cleaning off his shoes. “You do realize I have my own place, right? I don’t need to be bringing dates back to my flips.”
Right. Darius was too classy to pull a douchebag stunt like that. Plus, no doubt the thread count on his sheets at home far outclassed whatever the room stagers had put on the beds in here. And he was officially done thinking about the state of Darius’s bedsheets. “Which brings us back to what you’re doing here. In a suit. At midnight.”
Darius wiped his fingers on a paper towel, curling his lip at the damage left behind. “Why can’t you get past the suit thing? I met up with some friends for drinks after work and didn’t get a chance to change.”
“And then you decided to come here and check up on me? Make sure I wasn’t throwing a kegger?”
“Cut it out. You know I trust you. I came because I heard about an opportunity for you.”
“And it couldn’t wait until tomorrow?” Stupid to ask. With Darius, everything had a timetable.
“Tomorrow would be too late,” Darius said, confirming his assumption. “There’s a farmers’ market about an hour away. Little town called Hawksburg, but apparently it draws a huge crowd, and this year it’s expected to be even bigger.”
“And you know this how?” Probably from hours of research on Finn’s behalf. He claimed to believe in Finn’s end goal to start a nonprofit, but if he decided to go all in with the sauce venture, he knew his best friend would be ecstatic. A barbecue sauce business made sense on paper. His cooking-school dream? Not so much. Then again, he’d never been big on coloring inside the lines.
“Kendall—you know, from Hammerstein and Blythe?” Finn didn’t, but he nodded anyway because he didn’t need a who’s-who rundown of Springfield real estate agents at going on one a.m., especially when he’d been on his feet for nearly twenty hours. “Well, she’s got an uncle whose mother fell—”
“Dare, get to the point.” His tiredness had crept up on him, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to crash face first onto the air mattress waiting upstairs.
“The point is”—Darius loosened his sauce-covered tie—“there’s an open slot at the Hawksburg farmers’ market tomorrow.”
“You keep saying the name Hawksburg like it should mean something to me.”
“It should. It’s the town where they found the dinosaur last year.”
Finn stood up and looked around for a trash can. He ended up tossing the dirty towels into one of the empty grocery bags. “You do realize I am not a four-year-old child, right? Dinosaur news isn’t exactly on my radar.”
“Shut up. To be honest, I hadn’t heard about it, either, but the way Kendall hyped it up, I thought maybe you might’ve. Anyway, I googled it and apparently it was a big thing last year, a dinosaur turning up in a swimming pool or something.” Darius gingerly removed his jacket and laid it on the counter, which seemed like overkill since the damage wasdone. “They’re planning to build a museum to capitalize on the interest. Smart, if you ask me.”
Capitalizing on interest was basically Darius’s motto. But since giving back was the other half of his personal mission statement, Finn couldn’t fault him. Except when his friend’s overzealous ambition morphed into meddling in his life.
“And all of this matters to me because ...” His exhausted brain couldn’t keep up, but he sensed meddling on the horizon.
“Because it’s a great opportunity for your business.”
Finn groaned, exhausted just thinking about trying to fit something else into his schedule. “Dare, no.”
“Kendall already texted her uncle and got you the spot. It would be rude to not show up.”
Trust Darius to use his people-pleasing personality fault against him. Luckily, charity trumped manners. “I have a shift at the meal-distribution center tomorrow.”
