“When do you get to have any fun?”
He laughed humorlessly. “Let’s put it this way, I don’t have a list. I don’t have time for a list.”
“Fine, but what would be on it if you did?”
He shrugged.
She stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know.”
“How could you not know?” she asked, stunned. “You don’t have any hopes and dreams?”
“I already have my dream job,” he said, which she couldn’t help noticing didn’t really answer her question.
“You have to have a list,” she said.
A whisper of a smile curved his lips. “Who says?”
“Me.” She pulled her little notepad from her saddlebag and thrust it at him. “Here, you can write it down as it occurs to you. It’s small enough to fit into one of your cargo pockets.”
He just kept looking at her, like maybe she was a species he’d never come across before.
She shook the notepad a little, and with a wry twist of his mouth he took the thing and stuck it into one of his myriad of pockets.
When his phone rang again, he looked at the screen and took the call with a terse “Kincaid.”
She could hear a male voice, low and pissed off, barking something about a delivery of… obnoxious undies?
Hud listened for a few beats and then disconnected, all without a word.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Aidan.”
She stared at him. “And?”
“Nosy much?” he asked.
“It was the mention of obnoxious undies,” she admitted. “And yes, I’m nosy as hell.”
His mouth twitched. “My brothers and I have an ongoing… thing. One of us sends another one of us a package. And whatever’s in it has to be worn on the next day. Proof is required or there will be a dare. And trust me, no one wants to face a Kincaid dare.”
“Package,” she repeated. “As in the aforementioned obnoxious undies?”
“The more obnoxious the better.” He smiled. “Aidan just got his delivery. Tomorrow he’ll be wearing butterfly lace bikini panties with cutouts in some pretty strategic areas, and he’s pissed because it’s some kind of anniversary between him and Lily and he wants a pass.”
“Which of course you’re going to give him,” she said. “Right?”
“Oh, so wrong.” Hud grinned and it nearly melted the bones right out of her knees. He stepped closer. “Guess what?”
“What?” she asked, annoyingly breathless.
“It’s my turn for a question now.”
Oh boy. “Aren’t you afraid that might express personal interest?”
His smile was a little naughty. “I’ve had my tongue down your throat. I’m pretty sure I’ve already expressed personal interest.”
Good point. “So what do you want to know about me?”
“I want to know about your list.” When their gazes met, her heart skipped a beat. Damn. She could stare at him staring at her all day long. He never looked at her all sad or worried, and he certainly never looked at her like he felt bad for her and all she’d been through.
It was so incredibly, amazingly attractive.
So she answered his question honestly. “I spent over a decade with an expiration date,” she said.
“Cancer?”
“Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Got it just before I turned fifteen. I was handed a death sentence but somehow managed to wrestle the beast against all the odds.” She shrugged. “I get that most people make a bucket list when something bad happens, but I never did. Ten years is a really long time and for most of it I wasn’t normal. My life wasn’t anything close to normal. I was really sick, way too sick to do much of anything.” She shrugged. “Even so, my doctor always gave me options and she said one of those options needed to be a good spirit. So I secretly dreamed big. And when I got rid of the cancer and I started to feel… normal, I guess, I wrote down the list I’d been secretly dreaming of. A what-I-get-to-do-now-that-I-get-to-stay-alive list. Probably silly but there it is.”
She waited for the usual platitudes, empty and meaningless and rather annoying, but again they didn’t come.
What did come stunned her. “Not silly, not even close. I think you’re incredibly brave,” he said quietly.
She automatically started to shake her head no because she’d never thought of herself as brave before—the opposite actually. There’d been plenty of times when she hadn’t been able to see the end of the line, hadn’t been able to imagine herself getting to this point, had in fact wanted it just to be over.
So “brave”? Nope, but she sure could get used to seeing him look at her like she was and maybe she’d get brave by osmosis. “Thank you,” she said just as quietly. It’d only been a week but she’d half convinced herself that she’d imagined the chemistry between them. She hadn’t, and she was glad.
“So you’re good,” he said.
She nodded.
“Stay that way,” he said, and took the hammer from her hand.
“Am I keeping you from anything important?” she asked as he tossed the hammer aside and began to pull out long pieces of steel and planks of wood.
“Depends on your definition of ‘important,’” he said, easily moving the long pieces of steel, the muscles of his shoulders and back moving enticingly beneath his shirt. “Been up since three a.m. on avalanche control and was about to grab breakfast.”
Good Lord. He’d been working for six hours already. And now she had him loading steel and wood, carrying it around the side of the building, and putting it together so she could access the entire wall. “Listen, I can get someone else to help me—”
“Bailey?”
“Yeah?”
“Shh.” Once he had all the material stacked near the wall they began to put it all together, and she had to admit she could never have managed on her own.
Not to mention that working in such close proximity as they were, there was a lot of accidental touching. A brushing of hands, bumping of shoulders… And every time he pulled back.
“What is that?” she finally asked when they stood on the second level of the scaffolding. She was hot, insulted, and dammit, also annoyingly turned on.
“What’s what?” he asked.
“You know what. You’re acting like you’re afraid to touch me.”
“We both know that’s not true,” he said, eyes hot, making her remember when he’d pushed her back against her car and touched her plenty. In fact, if he’d touched her for another minute or two, she’d have had an orgasm right there in the parking lot.
“I’m not afraid to touch you,” he said.
“Then you feel sorry for me because I was sick,” she said, hating that idea.
He winced with guilt but not pity, which was good. Pity would have brought out her homicidal tendencies.
“I told you I’m not sick now,” she said.
Hudson looked her right in the eyes. “And I heard you.”
Her heart skipped a little beat. “So if you’re not afraid of me and you don’t feel sorry for me, what’s the problem?”