Page 44 of Comeback
His lips quirk with another smile. “I meant the place. It’s not as bad as I remember.”
“Oh. Right.” I turn from him to look at it with fresh eyes. The vacuuming has helped, but there’s a lot of wall and floor space left to go.
“I can sort of see it now.” He steps up next to me. “I have to admit, last night while you were talking about your plans for this place, I was seriously doubting that you could turn it into anything but a landfill, but it’s got good bones.”
His words fill me with a weird sense of pride and hope.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, you have to lookreallyhard.” He squints and holds his hands up in front of him, thumb and pointer finger up like he’s framing a picture on the wall.
I shove at his arm playfully, leaving a dirt mark on his white shirt. “Oops.”
“Guess I was asking for that by wearing white in here.”
“Pretty much.”
We stare at each other a beat. He’s unshaven and the scruff along his jaw is seriously sexy and distracting. He looks happier, lighter than last night too.
“Where do you want me?”
I’m not too proud to admit several delicious, dirty—and I don’t mean in the way this place is dirty—thoughts race through my mind before I realize he’s offering himself up to help me.
“You really want to clean this place on your afternoon off?”
“Yeah. The day after a game I can’t sit around, or I just end up running through every play, every mistake until I drive myself crazy. Plus, Brogan and London are cooped up in their room. You don’t want to be at the apartment right now. Even without my hearing aids, I can feel the vibration of the headboard banging against the wall.”
A small laugh slips from my lips.
“So I’m a last resort?” I ask, not offended in the least even if that were true. I know he could be doing a dozen different things – a dozen different women too. He might not have been in the mood to socialize last night, but I saw the looks he was getting from women all around the bar.
He smiles back freely.
“I’m not sure if I should feel honored or insulted.”
“Best not to examine it too hard.”
He’s here. Whatever the reason, I’m glad.
“You really want to clean?” I ask one more time to make sure because this place needs a lot of work and I’m not about to turn him away if he’s really offering.
“Put me to work, boss,” he says with a wink that I feel down to my toes.
After some minor swooning and gawking at his arm muscles, I get Archer set up with the vacuum. His height allows him to reach a lot higher than I could, and I follow behind him scrubbing with a mop.
He’s a lot faster than I was, too, which means I’m struggling to keep up with him. He stops a few minutes in and pulls out his phone.
“Is it okay if I play some music?” he asks.
“Yeah, of course,” I say, but with the respirator on it’s muffled, so I pull it back up and repeat myself.
A few seconds later, familiar rock music fills the space.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Poison.”
“Should I know who that is?”
