Page 7 of Restored By You

But it’s already too late.

Three.

Shea

I don’t know what I expected when Callie said she was sending help. A plumber, maybe. Someone older, rounder, with a belt full of tools and zero interest in my spiral. Not… him.

The man filling my narrow bathroom doorway has to be at least six-foot-two, with the kind of build that makes a simple grey T-shirt work entirely too hard. My gaze snags, briefly and against my will, on his forearms when he reaches under the vanity—the flex of muscle, the map of veins shifting under his skin when he wrestles with the wrench.

I look away. Focus, Shea.

I have a house that’s actively trying to drown me, a contractor who ghosted me on day one, and a walking responsibility downstairs who’s offered approximately zero help. The last thing I need is to be cataloguing a stranger’s arms in my flooded bathroom at nearly eleven o’clock at night.

But then he laughs—this low, unexpected sound that rumbles out of him—and something about it settles warm in my chest before I can stop it.

“I’ve got a shop vac in my truck,” he says, already moving past me into the hallway, all calm efficiency. He glances at the water damage with those eyes. Hazel, I notice, warm and light like the first pour of cream into a fresh cup of coffee…

I really need to focus.

“I’ll run home for a mop,” he continues, then pauses at the top of the stairs and raises his voice. “Hey, Tyler, right?”

A beat of silence from below. “Yeah?”

“Shop vac is in the bed of my truck. Black handle, grey tank. Can you grab it?”

Another pause, longer this time, and I brace myself for the flat refusal—accompanied by a blank stare, usually—I’ve come to expect in the last twelve hours since I became his reluctant guardian for the next six weeks.

“Fine.”

I blink.

This…guy just accomplished in four seconds what took me forty-five minutes of negotiating earlier today. I don’t know whether to be impressed or humbled.

Both, I settle on.

He turns back to me then, and I get the full effect of those latte eyes finding mine in the dim hallway light. “I won’t be long,” he tells me, turning away and taking his pretty eyes and arm porn with him.

My mouth opens to respond, but he’s already heading down the stairs, the old wood groaning under his boots.

I stand in my flooded hallway, wet curls dripping onto my shoulders, surrounded by the remnants of my spectacularly disastrous first day in Montana. I almost smile.

The house is a disaster, my contractor is a ghost, I’ve learned my pet teenager responds better to strangers than to me, and the man who just fixed my sink in under two minutes has eyes the color of my favorite thing in the world.

I groan, my head falling back. “God, I could go for a caramel latte right now.”

“Do they even have a Starbucks in this shithole?” Tyler grunts, pounding up the stairs with the shop vac in hand.

“Hey! Language, dude,” I scold as he rolls his eyes. He sets the barrel-like vacuum between us with a thud and a light splash. “Do you know how to use this thing?”

He gives me a dead stare, one that says, Obviously not, I’m fifteen and from Malibu.

“Me neither,” I say, biting my lower lip.

The sound of boots on the porch saves us both from figuring it out. The front door opens and closes, up the stairs in quick stride, and then he’s back—mop in one hand, bucket in the other. He looks at me, Tyler, then finally at the shop vac sitting untouched between us.

“Neither of you know how to use it, do you,” he says. Not a question, sadly.

“We were…waiting for supervision,” I tell him.