in a dual effort, to keep her mouth under control, and stop her wildly jolting heart from escaping, and landing somewhere, far along the hallway.
The guy from the skip. The guy who had been hammering round her head all afternoon. And now he had teleported, changed his city suit for something way more casual, and re-appeared, behind the front door of the pink house. And he was looking disgusting. Better than anything Luce could have expressed. Completely disgusting. Completely disgustingly, amazingly awesome. Drop. Dead. Gorgeous.
‘Did you know you’ve got paint on your face?’
He was laid back, cool, laconic even, and giving nothing away through that steady, narrow eyed gaze of his. And shit, shit, shit to the way his impossibly low dusky voice sent shivers scattering down her neck. Her hand had risen in slow motion, and now she was rubbing her cheek, trying desperately to locate the offending paint, but without a mirror there was no chance. And somehow this caveman didn’t look at all surprised that the girl who’d been rooting through his skip had rocked up at his very own front door.
‘And you’ve got paint on your vest…’
Another useless observation from him, and definitely no need to look that pleased with himself about it. Great. Whatever… She resisted the urge to say the words out loud. Uncomfortable under his scrutiny, she shuffled her shoulders, fiddled with her vest strap, and shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her dungarees.
If he was trying to pull off a snarky smile, he’d just failed. Epically.
‘So…Vintage at the Cinema?’ He sounded vaguely bad tempered. ‘Does this mean I’ve just bought back what you took from me yesterday?’
From somewhere she found the fire to reply to his taunt.
‘Well you’d only have yourself to blame if you had bought everything back – given that you threw it out in the first place.’ Shit, she was jutting her chin out, and that meant she was careering towards out-of-line, at a hundred miles an hour. Future business. Right. Keeping that thought firmly in her head, she sweetened her tone. ‘But, I’m equally happy to assure you, nothing here was pre-owned by you.’ She was cringing at the saccharine here, but the fact it was starting to sound like she was taking the piss, made it easier to carry on. ‘And incidentally, I also apologise profusely for any paint in the wrong places, but this is an out of hours delivery, and some of us have actually been working elsewhere before coming here.’
Izzy was wincing at the grammar of the thing, but she hoped this speech would lick the requisite number of boots. Given the teensy size of the items, and the fact that this glowering man had his Range Rover languishing in the drive, she was questioning why she’d had to make this delivery at all. She suppressed her exasperation, and reverted to detached, ultra-professional mode.
‘Okay.’ Time to bring on the no nonsense approach. ‘I’ll bring the items from the van, and you can tell me where you’d like me to put them.’ If he couldn’t have been bothered to stick these few things in the back of his car when he was at the cinema earlier, he was hardly likely to want to carry them in for himself, was he.
She marched across to the van, flung the back doors open, grasped a cupboard, and arrived back at the house. The door was open, but the guy had disappeared, so she dumped the cupboard on the doorstep, and returned to the van for the second one. She was on her way to the house with the rocking horse by the time he re-appeared.
‘Just went to get some shoes…’
‘Sure.’ Damn she shouldn’t have said that, even though that might have been the hint of a shamefaced grimace on his face. ‘Too late now, this is everything.’
Shit, his feet looked sexy in those flip flops he’d put on. She gave a shudder. Feet, sexy? He grabbed a cupboard, and headed off inside. ‘Come in, follow me.’ He’d already set off down the hall.
She stepped, tentatively, into a light echoing space, kicking off her converse as she hit the floorboards. Lugging the rocking horse past an elegant staircase, she wrinkled her nose at the sharp smell of paint and newness. If the house had looked impressive from the outside, now she was inside, she could see it was to die for. Not that she would have personally. But she knew high quality when it smacked her in the face. Even though she’d only seen the hall, she could already tell from the impeccable finish, from the plasterwork to the perfect wide oak floorboards to the brushed stainless electrical switches, that this was a stylish, luxurious, money no object renovation.
Izzy knew from working with her mum, that for a finish like this, you were talking serious dosh. As for the man of the house, if his jeans were slipping down over his bum as he made his way into the next hallway, she, for one, was not going to notice.
‘It’s all newly done.’ He offered an unexpected burst of conversation over his shoulder as he went. ‘All that’s left to do now is the furnishing.’
Stating the obvious here, obviously.
Izzy always found it strange plunging into the heart of people’s homes as she carried furniture in. One lucky family, moving into this place, although she suspected that houses like this had a lot less to do with luck, and more to do with hard work on someone’s part.
The guy thumped down his cupboard on the hallway floor, opposite a doorway.
‘Dobbin’s going to live here.’ He pushed open a wide panelled door, and stepped back, and gestured for Izzy to walk through first with the rocking horse.
She hesitated slightly, trying to take a line through the doorway, to ensure she made it into the room, without knocking into either the paintwork or the customer. Her heart lurched as she arrived in the huge space, and saw toys scattered across the floor.
‘A playroom…’ Of course, why wouldn’t it be a playroom? Her mouth went dry, and her gut dropped. Why the hell did she feel as if she’d been thumped hard in the stomach?
‘Are there children?’ It came out as a croak, but she had to say something to fill the space until she started breathing again.
She kicked herself for being ridiculous. Of course he’d have children. Why wouldn’t he? Hunky, virile, thirty-something men like him did. He was hardly going to live in this big family house on his own was he? She’d had no expectations at all in his direction, so why the hell should it matter to her if he had children or not.
‘Two, actually.’
His gravelly confirmation echoed around the room, stamping on the hopes she hadn’t even know she’d had. Not just one child then, but two. That was doubly resounding. She took a deep breath, and asked herself why she even cared that he was spoken for. Of course he’d have lovely children, and a beautiful wife. A life and a family to go with the perfect surroundings.
She needed to remind herself. She was making a delivery to a resoundingly unfriendly, arrogant customer, who was too idle to take his own purchases home, who she happened to have encountered the day before. Who was completely and utterly unavailable. It was nothing more, or less, than that.
‘I hope Dobbin will be very happy here with them.’ She lowered the rocking horse to the floor, gave the horse a pat on his dappled grey velvet rump, tugged his woolly mane for the last time, and turned to leave.
Izzy had to get the hell out of here and fast, before she made any more of a fool of herself. She arrived at the door, expecting the guy to have already melted away down the hall, but instead she came to an abrupt halt, faced with the faded grey of his t-shirt.
‘Excuse me.’ She looked up at him, close enough to see the stubble on his jaw, the creases on his lips. He smelled just the same as yesterday. She shuddered, then reminded herself to get a grip.
He hesitated, staring straight at her, with those eyes full of darkness, his head inclined, for what seemed like an age, as the blood rushed through her ears, and her heart clattered against her chest wall.
Then he cleared his throat loudly.
‘S-sorry. I was miles away’ He shook his head, stepped back,