I didn’t know what Zeb Fuller had done to me or to my common sense. All I knew was that he was keeping me up at night and making me resent every single time I turned icy and cold when he flirted with me. I hated that I couldn’t act normal around him because all I wanted to do was rip his clothes off and climb all over him. I wasn’t familiar with any of those emotions, so as a defense I locked them all down.
My awkwardness and ineptitude in the face of Zeb’s overt masculinity meant that I could never find any words beyond polite pleasantries, clichés, and platitudes, which I had no doubt gave him the impression that I was nothing more than a stuck-up bitch. I never intended to treat him like the hired help, but somehow that’s exactly what I had done, and now the job was finished, Zeb was long gone, and I was having phantom orgasms simply thinking about having his hands and mouth on me while I tossed and turned in my very empty and very lonely bed.
So yeah, I missed having him around. I missed watching him, hearing him, and even smelling that unique scent that all men who worked hard for their money seemed to have. Sweat and accomplishment mixed in with something that just screamed hard work and sex appeal.
I pushed my long hair back over my shoulder and raised my eyebrows at Poppy in a questioning expression similar to her own.
“You didn’t seem to mind him roaming around the house while he was here,” I said casually.
Poppy had had a horrible experience with her abusive ex-husband, and in the aftermath the beautiful young woman had shied away from all physical contact with the opposite sex, including my brother, with whom she had grown up. It was crippling, and when I started work on the house I worried how Poppy was going to handle having so many strange men in and out of the place that had been her sanctuary since she started to recover from her abduction.
Initially she handled Zeb and his crew banging around the Victorian by never leaving her room. She spent all day locked in there with a dresser in front of the door until one night when I was supposed to get home early to look at paint samples with Zeb but was running late. When I finally got there, I was stunned to find the bearded giant and the fragile flower with their heads bent together while they looked at paint samples in my torn-apart kitchen. I was so stunned that when Zeb mentioned that Poppy really liked an unusual shade of reddish orange for the walls, I blindly agreed to the choice, even though neutral and serene was much more my personal style.
After the shocking splash of color made it onto the walls I was surprised at how much I loved it. It took me a few days beyond that to realize it was the same shade as a field of poppies, and then I loved it even more. When Zeb left, I tenderly prodded Poppy about how the big man had coaxed her out of her fortress.
It was simple really. He told her he needed a woman’s opinion. He wanted to make sure he was in the right wheelhouse and gave her the choice and the control. If I hadn’t already wanted to kiss him, his simple understanding of how Poppy needed to take back the reins of her life would have made me want to jump him on the spot.
Zeb Fuller was a nice guy. Ugh . . . a nice guy I couldn’t stop thinking about or picturing very naked. He had tattoos on either side of his neck and ones that peeked out of the collar of his shirt. He had ink that decorated the back of each hand and wild swirls and designs that covered every inch of both of his arms. I wanted to see what else marked his skin and then I wanted to drag my tongue across every single inch of it.
Poppy cleared her throat and walked over to get her own bottle of water out of the fridge. She leaned next to me on the island with its fancy marble top and sighed softly. Even the noises she made sounded like a fragile flower fighting to stay upright in the wind.
“I like Zeb. I was surprised that I did, but I really do. He reminds me of Rowdy and he didn’t look at me like I was broken. Not once. Eventually I’m going to have to leave this house, go back to work, and I know that means I have to stop thinking every man out there is going to hurt me. Zeb is huge; I mean, he’s just so BIG, but nothing about him is threatening or scary once you get to know him. I think he was good practice for me, and I love how the kitchen turned out. I would’ve died if it ended up looking terrible considering it was the first decision I’ve made on my own in a really long time.”
Rowdy was my younger brother, who I didn’t know existed until a year ago when my father died leaving his secrets printed in black and white in his will. Rowdy had grown up in entirely different circumstances than my own, with Poppy and her older sister, Salem. After some time and some tragedy, Rowdy and Salem had figured out they were always meant to be together, which meant he cared even more for Poppy and her current state of mind than he normally would. She was family and now that I’d found Rowdy, had dropped every part of my old life, and moved halfway across the country to get to know him, so was I. My father’s final stab in the back, his last cruel act of manipulation, had actually been the best and only gift he had ever given me.
I reached out an arm and wrapped it around her thin shoulders so I could give her a squeeze. Unlike her older sister, Poppy was missing any kind of curve or thickness on her frame. She was a waif and sometimes I thought she was going to disappear right before my eyes. I also wasn’t terribly surprised when she wiggled out of my grip. She wasn’t the biggest fan of touching even if it came from a safe place.
“I can call him back to . . . I don’t know, I’ll ask him to build a deck or a fence or something, if you want more practice.” I was only half kidding. I would love an excuse to have him back within ogling distance.