Page 1 of Made for You
CHAPTERONE
Nikki
If I didn’t know better, I’d say my dearest, prim little Gram was spying on the neighbor.
From my seat on the couch, I craned my neck to see what could have captivated her so but couldn’t tell anything from my acute angle. Her silver hair was twisted low at her neck with a clip, and she was already wearing a smock—must be a painting day. She stood so still, morning pottery mug full of coffee in hand, gazing out as though in a trance.
Evidently, nothing would be happening until after she’d taken in whatever it was that had ensnared her. She used to be into bird-watching, but memory and logic both said a mere bird wouldn’t entrance her quite this much.
“What are you looking at, Gram?”
Her head snapped a sharp ninety degrees to the left like she’d forgotten I sat just eight feet away. “What? Me? Just, uh… Bruce is outside.”
I raised a brow. I’d heard a bit aboutBrucesince he’d moved in next door a year ago or so. Apparently, he was now one of my great-aunt turned grandmother’s good friends and she sometimes helped him out with his daughter. I didn’t have all the details, but I did know the name.
I also knew Gram thought Bruce was atotal babe, as she’d once said. I hadn’t yet caught a glimpse of the dreamboat neighbor since my arrival less than twenty-four hours ago, so I didn’t want to miss a chance to size him up. What kind of man would catch her attention like this?
At first, I’d imagined a silver fox situation. She’d mentioned once, when I told her she should ask him out, that he was too young for her—before she’d told me about helping with his teen daughter. Still, my curiosity had been piqued, and I’d likely meet him eventually. Might as well see what all Gram’s fuss was about.
Hauling myself off the royal blue couch, I tucked my hip-length cardigan around me and padded toward the kitchen in my slippers. September tended to be fairly warm still, but Gram liked to keep it glacially cool with her air conditioning until the weather cooled off more sharply in October. She stood in front of the deep farmer’s sink, still peering out of the picture window framed with carefully painted vines of flowers she’d done decades ago, one hand pressed to her chest and her head shaking back and forth slowly like the beat of a metronome.
“Mercy,” she muttered right as I arrived, dipping her face into her mug without tearing her eyes away from whatever view she enjoyed.
Tucking my lips between my teeth to stifle a laugh, I glanced out and could only see a line of trees, then a ways past it, the side of the neighboring house. A bit more modern than Gram’s but by no means a new build, it’d always been there from what I remembered, though Gram’s house had been here before the neighborhoodwasa neighborhood. Her place stood out from the rest thanks to her eclectic yard, her bright yellow door, and the various artsy sculpture-ish details. Oh, and the hand-tiled sidewalk, which somehow withstood Utah winters.
“I don’t see anything.” A wisp of a worry that maybe she was imagining things spiked into my mind. She’d insisted she needed my help, and though I hadn’t seen any signs of her age catching up with her, maybe this was it.
She whipped toward me, only now realizing I’d joined her. Instead of a little blush or anything like embarrassment brightening her still-high cheekbones, like I might’ve expected to see on her at having been caught red-handed playing peeping Rosie, a gleam entered her eye. “You have to stand right where I’m standing to get the best angle. Hear the ax?”
The mutedthunkreached my ears as her hands on my shoulders guided me into place and her finger pointed over my shoulder to—
My gasp sounded loud and squeaky. Heat hit my cheeks in an instant and burned a path up to the tips of my ears and down into my chest as my heart rate shot straight through the ceiling. Words were zinging in perpendicular lines and crashing at intersections in my brain, and my mouth dropped open with nothing more than stunned silence coming out. I’d never seen anything like it—never in my life had I imagined an actual person could look likethat.
What a sad, sorry little imagination I had, apparently.
A man—Bruce, evidently—was cutting wood with a red-handled ax. Jeans rode low on his hips and he wore dark, outdoorsy boots… and no shirt.That’s right.No. Shirt. And this guy had detailed tattoos splaying across muscular pectorals and drawing the eye down to a six-pack—possibly eight. Maybe he’d imported a ten-pack from a metric-based country? There was something so far superior about the metric system. I’d always thought so—felt it in my gut.And now,ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A.
I’d need a closer look to be sure of the count, but the heat from his magma-hot body would probably melt my corneas if I got any closer—because watching him swing an ax overhead in a perfect, satisfying arc and bring the tool down to split a log in one fluid motion wasn’t ever something I thought would make me feel so inexplicablyawarebut wow. Wow.
The muscles in his torso shifted as he pulled the ax with one hand and set it down, placed a new log on the stump in a move that did glorious things for his well-developed biceps, and then picked the ax up again. The swing overhead stretched him out, displaying every bit of his glorious torso for a flash before his razor-sharp movement used what had to be incredible momentum to slam the bladed edge into the wood, and anotherthunkrang out.
My math-loving brain scrambled for a tether to something familiar and reverted to its base mode as I wondered at the potential energy there in that swing. What actual kinetic energy did he use each time? The ax had to weigh six pounds, maybe eight. What kind of force was he generating to split the log, at what kind of velocity? I had no reference for this—I’d never once thought about it. Yet, my mind launched into calculations of how many newtons of force one might need to get an edge into a log let alone split it, of the kinetic energy expended each iteration. The path of his swing would be a huge factor as well. Clearly, he had superb technique, likely honed from much practice to get just the right impact.
Did people reallydothat—split wood manually? And with no shirt, really? Did they actually look likethatwhen they did it?Or could this be some weird fever dream my brain had manufactured from Gram’s couch, brought on by the incredible series of failures my life had become in the last year and now culminating in fantasizing about the arc of an ax swing and fictional men outside my grandmother’s house?
“Rather impressive, is he not?”
My mouth snapped shut, and I turned to see Gram’s Cheshire cat grin, then blinked back into the reality thatno. Or,yes. Or—whatever. Bruce was a real person, and evidently,thiswas what he looked like.
Mercy, indeed.
“He—Gram!” I’d nearly agreed to just howimpressivehe was, and it only hit me now she’d wanted me to discover this truth from the minute I’d come nosing around—I’d nearly played right into her hands.
“Nikki!”
“You just stand here and watch the man cut wood topless?” I asked, more than a little scandalized but not entirely sure why. Gram and I were honest with each other, and she’d never been shy about appreciating men. Something about subjecting them to the female gaze. Was there harm in her enjoying the view?
Well, probably. If roles were reversed in any way, it certainly wouldn’t seem okay. Would it? No. Probably not.
