Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“Oh wow. Thanks. Will they still install it for me, though, if you order it?”
“I’ll install it for you.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Still…you’ve done so much already.”
I wiggled my brows. “I plan to do much more. You just wait.”
Josie laughed. “Maybe you can show me how to install the floor and we can do it together?”
“If you want. But I can knock it out in a few hours by myself.”
“I’ve actually discovered that I enjoy learning and doing the work. When I decided to come down here, I thought fixing up the house would keep me busy. But it’s turned into more than that.” She looked out the window for a moment. “When I was little, after I realized I couldn’t dance for crap and ballerina was not likely happening, I wanted to be a painter. Not the artsy kind, but the kind who uses a roller on the walls.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “We had this painter my mom always used. His name was Roland, and he always had a smile on his face. He would paint the living room while humming to the songs playing in his headphones or singing along. He let me help him do the roller whenever my mom wasn’t home.”
My brows dipped together. “Only when your mom wasn’t around?”
“Melanie Preston would never allow me to hang out with someone doing work on the house. She treats people who work for her like they’re hired help, two steps below her. Plus, she wouldn’t want me to get any ideas about career choices. She’d already decided I was going to medical school. It was disappointing enough that I went for my PhD and did research and not real medical school.”
“Why would what you do be disappointing? Aren’t they both doctors who heal people?”
“It’s more about the prestige for my mom than the actual work. She wanted me to be a surgeon like her. Research also doesn’t pay as well as medical doctors, and she measures success by things and awards. That’s probably why she and Noah got along so well.” She paused and grinned. “My mother would probably hate you.”
“Because I do construction?”
“And because you were a hockey player. My father used to have to watch football in the basement because she found contact sports barbaric.”
The thought of her mother disliking me might’ve amused Josie, but it made my jaw tic with tension. It shouldn’t have mattered. Meeting the parents wasn’t on my agenda, yet it hit a nerve for some reason. “Your mother sounds like she should use her surgical skills to get the stick out of her ass. Hope you don’t mind me saying so.”
Josie chuckled. “Not only don’t I mind, but it’s one of the reasons I like you so much.”
Her adding so much at the end of that sentence soothed my bent feelings a bit. I reached over and rested my hand on her thigh, and our eyes met briefly for a silent smile before returning to the road.
“My dad would’ve liked you, though,” she said.
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded. “He liked honest people who didn’t put up pretenses.”
“How did he wind up with your mom, then?”
“I’ve always wondered the same thing. But he loved her. I’d often see him watching her from a distance with a smile on his face. Like, she’d be in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee or whatever, and I’d find him leaning against the doorframe watching her when she wasn’t looking.”
I thought back to the way I’d watched Josie today, enjoying the moment. And how I’d watched her in the yard from the second floor, or stolen a few moments of her toiling in the kitchen through the front bay window on more than one occasion. But that was different, wasn’t it? At least that’s what I told myself.
“Anyway…” Josie shifted in her seat to face me. “I feel like I’m always talking about me. Tell me about you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. What was it like playing professional hockey? Did women wear your jerseys and ask for your autograph?”
“I loved playing, and women did.”
“But did you have groupies? Like women who wanted to be with you because you were a player?”
This was a line of questioning that a man played chess with. One answer could lead us down a path she might not want to go. So I moved a piece that kept my king from being checked. “Feels like a lifetime ago.”
She grinned. “So that’s a yes. Did you have a girlfriend the entire time you were playing?”
I shook my head. “Not until the last year.”
“What about in college?”
“I went out with someone for most of freshman year.”
“What happened with that?”
“She was three years older. She graduated and moved back home, and I got drafted into the league.”
“You went into the pros that early?”