I Still Do Read online

  Only with Emily had it ever been like this.

  Special, sweet fire.

  It engulfed him, taking over his common sense, his caution, all those promises about his future he’d made to himself.

  It was so damn hard to think of that future he could start living when the past was so easily preoccupying him.

  Chapter Five

  The local home improvement store had everything Emily needed, she supposed, if she actually knew everything that she needed. There were butcher-aproned helpers here and there, but every time she tried to catch one’s attention, she lost him or her to a more assertive home-improver. Seemed like Sunday afternoon was a popular time for shopping at the place.

  She consulted the do-it-yourself manual she’d checked out of the library and then stood staring at the miles of unfamiliar objects and products stretched before her. There was no need to indulge in self-pity, she told herself. This confusion was probably no more than what the latest HGTV cute carpenter would feel if he suddenly found himself in the aisles of beauty products at a Sephora.

  But at least Sephora smelled nice.

  Emily craned her neck to see if any of the salesclerks were now free, her gaze hop-skipping around the other browsers in her row. There were two dusty, work-booted guys who looked like they were here to pick up a missing item for their current construction job. Three couples—husbands and wives she guessed—perusing the shelves shoulder-to-shoulder. And over there was a handsome young dad, his toddler son riding his shoulders as he shopped.

  It struck her heart with a sudden pang that everybody—even at a place that sold wrenches and windows—seemed to have somebody.

  The sting behind her eyes sent Emily’s gaze back to her borrowed book. She blinked a few times and breathed deep, trying to hold back the unexpected sense of loss. And loneliness.

  Left without family and in a place far from all that was familiar, there wasn’t a soul who cared whether she made it home today—not to mention about any repair job she might want to make to the little cottage house. Pushing the thought away, she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, and focused on the page in front of her.

  Should she get patching compound or spackle? Sheetrock and drywall paper tape?

  “Emily?”

  The masculine voice and its familiar timbre sent her whirling around. “Will?”

  But it wasn’t the man who’d kissed her with such tenderness the other night. Just that one kiss, before he’d cleared his throat, slid back to his side of the seat, and then drove her home. Just that one kiss—and ever since, she’d been telling herself to forget about it and the man who’d given it to her.

  So she should be glad that it wasn’t Will who had called her name, and instead was merely two young men who looked very like him. His brothers. With a smile, she took a stab at their names. “Hi, Max and, um, Alex?”

  “Tom,” the leaner one said. “I’m Tom, but you’re right about Max.”

  “Sorry.” She lifted her book to show them what she’d been reading. “I’m a little preoccupied by the differences between drywall and plaster and the holes in them.”

  Max—she remembered now that he was the second oldest brother in the Dailey clan—glanced over at the page she had open. “You’ve got a hole in a wall?”

  “Ceiling, actually. The fixture was missing from the dining room when I moved in and I have another to replace it, but once I install it there’ll be a gap around the base. I need to fill that in.”

  The young men exchanged a glance. “You’re going to do some electrical work as well?”

  Emily ran her finger over the bookmark she’d inserted farther back in the manual. “I think I just have to twist some wires together or something.”

  “Or something,” Tom murmured. “Are you, uh, experienced with this kind of thing?”

  “No. But I have the book and a set of pink-handled screwdrivers that my friend Izzy gave me one Christmas.”

  “And a ladder?” Max asked.

  “I was going to stand on the dining room table,” Emily admitted. “I’ll put a sheet down or something, and if I’m still not tall enough, I can stack a dictionary and a thesaurus at the center and—”

  “Why don’t you let us help,” Max said hastily. “We can get our hands on an actual ladder.”

  “And we have shiny red toolboxes that are full of tools with manly black handles,” Tom added.

  Emily laughed. “I think my pink screwdrivers work just the same as your manly black ones.”

  “But the idea of you perched on reference books on top of your dining room table is making me queasy,” Max said. “Plus, Will would never forgive us if something happened to you.”

  “Oh, Will doesn’t care what happens to me,” Emily protested, her face flushing. Will was nothing to her nor she to him…except husband and wife. Which they just hadn’t quite gotten around to righting yet. “And I couldn’t ask you two to—”

  “It’s the neighborly thing to do,” Tom said. “You’re new to town. Just consider us like the welcoming committee or something like that.”

  How could she turn down such a friendly offer when she’d just been lamenting her lack of friends? “You’ll have to let me make you dinner afterward.”

  The two younger men exchanged another glance. “Deal,” they said together.

  Then they helped her choose her purchases and followed her home. As she unlocked her front door, a round of second thoughts slowed her movements. On the way over, her inner voice had been presenting reasons it was wrong to take them up on their offer. There’d been the whole feminist argument that she was perfectly capable of attending to the task herself, but she’d squashed that one by remembering the repair she’d accomplished the year before. A woman who had made a major fix to a toilet and then mopped up its overflow didn’t need to prove anything to anyone.

  If she wanted to figure out how to install the fixture and patch the ceiling, then she could install the fixture and patch the ceiling. It just so happened that Max and Tom already had the expertise and the superior tools to do the job. There was nothing shameful in acknowledging that.

  Except she felt just the teensiest bit of shame knowing that she’d mostly accepted their help because she wanted the company. Company that reminded her a little too much of Will.

  “Guys,” she said, glancing at them over her shoulder as they tramped up the walkway behind her. “Really. I’m sure I could handle this and I’m also sure you have more important or at least more interesting ways to spend the last of your Sunday.”

  Max shook his head. “Will…”

  That was the biggest problem of all. If he discovered that his brothers had been over doing her home repairs, he might think she was trying very hard to insert herself into his family. To bind herself tighter to him. Yes, they hadn’t rushed into dissolving the marriage as quickly as they’d rushed into the wedding itself, but she knew Wild Will wasn’t looking for anything the least bit permanent.

  “I wouldn’t want Will to find out about any of this,” she said. “Even that you offered to do something so nice for me.”

  Her gaze caught on a truck that was rumbling down her street. A suspiciously familiar-looking truck. With a familiar-looking piece of equipment in the back, a red rag tied to the few rungs that were hanging out the back end of the bed.

  “That’s Will now,” she said, looking over at the two young men.

  His brothers shared a guilty look, then Tom shrugged. “His was the ladder we could get our hands on. I called him on my cell during the drive here.”

  “Oh, great.” Heat rushed over Emily’s cheeks. How mortifying would it be if Will thought she’d connived to get him close again? She’d been doing a pretty good job putting him out of her mind and now this! “I don’t want him to think it was my idea to drag him over here.”

  “We made sure he understood we had to twist your arm,” Max said. “And we even offered to go and pick up the ladder. It was his idea to come over and help
.”

  Emily bit her bottom lip and couldn’t stop herself from finger combing her hair as she watched him pull up to the curb. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure—though I’ll be honest and say we didn’t exactly try to talk him out of it.”

  Tom shot a quick glance over his shoulder. “And to be really honest, we were glad to have a reason to get him over here. He’s been avoiding the family since June, with only the occasional sighting and we’ve all been racking our brains for excuses to see him.”

  Hmm. So maybe that explained why Betsy needed a ride to the football game the other night. “Why don’t you just call him up and ask him to go out for a beer or get some dinner?”

  “Tried that,” Max said. “He says no.”

  She wasn’t sure quite how to put it, so she just threw out her question. “Is it so bad that he wants to leave a little distance between himself and all of you?”

  Identical astonished expressions overtook the brothers’ faces. “Distance? Why would he want to do that? We’re family.”

  Emily sighed. Will had felt stifled by all the responsibility he’d shouldered, she understood that, but clearly Max and Tom didn’t.

  “So we’ll be owing you, Emily, for this opportunity to hang with our bro.”

  And how sweet was that? Surrendering to the inevitable, she pushed the front door and held it open for the two guys to walk through. Instead of following them in, she stayed where she was and waited as Will came up her short front walk, toting the ladder under his arm.

  “Hi,” she said, as their eyes met. Pretending she had a steel rod for a spine and another couple in her knees, she ignored the memory of his calloused hands around her face and the sweet hot touch of his tongue against hers. She cleared her throat and broke their gazes. “Your brothers are already inside.”

  He paused as he passed her. When she took a breath, she smelled his clean manly scent and stared at the steady beat of his pulse at the notch of his strong neck. “Hi, back,” he said. “I hope my brothers haven’t been any trouble for you.”

  “Of course not.” She smiled. “They’re very nice.”

  Will was lucky to have them. And as she took another breath of his delicious smell and felt the warmth of his body brush hers as he continued inside, she thought that for a woman who was supposed to be forgetting about him and his kiss, she was feeling pretty darn lucky herself.

  It was not that Will couldn’t trust his brothers with his ladder. It was not that Will couldn’t trust his brothers with his wife—they didn’t even know he was married. It was not that Will couldn’t trust his brothers to eat their share of a home-cooked meal by a woman who looked like Emily and then follow it up with some proper appreciation.

  It was all three together: the ladder, his wife, the spaghetti and meatballs that smelled sinfully good.

  “You didn’t know I was cooking spaghetti and meatballs,” Emily pointed out when he tried to explain why he’d broken away from his important appointment with his couch and televised football to come over and help with the project. “You don’t even know whether I can cook or not.”

  “But my instincts were right, weren’t they? It smells great.”

  “Onions and garlic always smell great.” Emily stirred her sauce again. “Nobody can screw up sautéing onions and garlic.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Will answered. “Because I’ve never sautéed in my life.”

  “Yes, you did. KP at camp. Sautéing is when we had to stir cut-up vegetables in hot oil.”

  “Well, I’m certainly out of practice. After that last summer at camp, my veggie prep consisted of ripping open a warehouse store-sized bag of raw baby carrots and tossing it onto the middle of the dining room table. I told the kids we couldn’t afford eyeglasses so they better eat up.” He had to smile a little, remembering their dutiful crunching.

  Emily stood with the wooden spoon in her hand, studying him. “It sounds as if you were a very conscientious provider.”

  He felt his smile die. “I did what I had to do.” It had been a hell of a weight at times, and he thought whole months had gone by when he didn’t sleep. “But that’s all over now.”

  Will was getting his easy, breezy bachelorhood back.

  Except here he was, in a kitchen that looked and smelled as cozy and domestic as all get out, with his wife.

  Hell. Without another word, he strode out of the kitchen and then across the hall to the dining room where Max and Tom were putting the finishing touches on the patch job on Emily’s ceiling. The new light fixture was already up—a bright, homey chandelier that lit up the small room with its walls painted a soft golden color.

  He watched with a little spurt of pride and approval as Tom steadied the ladder as Max climbed down. He’d taught them to be cautious like that, just as their father had taught him. They’d done a good repair, too, and cleaned up as they went along, another maxim that Dan Dailey had passed along to his oldest son. Clearing his throat, Will shoved his hands in his pockets. “Looks good. If you’re through with the ladder, I’ll take it back to my truck.”

  Maybe, he thought, maybe he should load the ladder, then load himself and head on home. The delicious smells in the kitchen, the camaraderie he’d felt working with his brothers, not to mention the woman in the kitchen—he didn’t want to get used to any of them, right? A carefree guy like himself could head out to a local watering hole for a beer or two on a Sunday night if he wanted. It wasn’t like the old days when he’d be shoving laundry in the gaping maws of the jumbo washing machine and dryer all night, sweating to get the siblings’ clothes clean in preparation for another school week.

  “Since you guys have taken care of this so quickly, I really don’t need to stick around, do I?” he said. And he didn’t want to stick around, did he?

  Max shot him a grin. “Not on my account. And it wouldn’t make me cry if you took Tom with you.”

  “Tom isn’t getting out of your way, Max, without getting some spaghetti and meatballs first,” Tom said.

  “Getting out of Max’s way?” Will echoed. “Huh?”

  “And you say you’re ready to experience a bachelor’s life,” Max scoffed. “Think, bro. Why would a bachelor be happy to get a beautiful woman alone?”

  “Huh?” Will said again, blinking.

  “I think she has a very kissable mouth,” Max mused, lowering his voice. “Don’t you think she has a very kissable mouth, Tom?”

  “One-hundred percent very kissable,” the youngest Dailey brother acknowledged. “No doubt about it.”

  “Who?” asked Will, knowing as he said it he was taking the bait. But surely his brothers couldn’t mean who he thought they meant. He’d told them he knew Emily from summer camp. But he’d also told them that he and Em were just friends. Still, he didn’t believe…“Who’s so damn kissable?”

  “Very kissable,” Max corrected. “I’m talking about our hostess, of course. Tom, I’ll give you five bucks to get lost. You won’t even have to walk home, because Will here will drive you.”

  “Five bucks?” Tom heaved in a dramatic breath of air. “And leave the smell of that behind? I don’t think so.”

  “Five bucks and when you get back to our place you can have that pizza I’ve been saving in the freezer.”

  “Twenty bucks, the pizza and that tube of cookie dough. You promise that, then I’ll think about it.”

  Will looked from brother to brother. “You’re talking about Emily? My—I mean, that Emily?” He jerked his thumb toward the kitchen as he glared at the younger men. “Nobody in this house is kissing that Emily, not even for forty bucks, two pizzas and half-a-dozen tubes of cookie dough.”

  Max lifted a brow, a glint of amusement in his eyes. “Not even you?”

  Scowling, Will ignored that. “Just finish up so we can get on with this meal and then get out of here. The three of us together.”

  But the meal went forward at a leisurely pace, mostly due to Emily. She’d set the table they moved back under
the new chandelier with two fat cream-colored candles. They didn’t smell at all, Will was happy to note—there was nothing he disliked more than the stench of scented candles. Their flickering light did encourage a man to take a few seconds to chew his food before shoveling in another delicious bite.

  And there was Emily’s attention to his brothers, too. Though Will hoped to God Max didn’t take her polite questions to mean she was returning his interest. He made sure to send his brother meaningful looks that he hoped told the younger man so. Emily was expressing mere curiosity about their lives because she was one of those people who could set a pretty table, serve up good food and also keep dinner conversation going.

  All the while causing him to stare at her kissable mouth.

  The entire time she had Max and Tom talking about their jobs, the apartment they shared, their broom hockey rec league, Will found himself relaxing in his chair and watching her lips move.

  They were a color somewhere between raspberry and cotton candy and while he’d raised sisters and so knew it was likely some lip gloss that helped make them look so tasty, it didn’t detract for an instant from their attraction. Or his desire to do that very thing—taste them.

  He pushed his plate away from the edge of the table and stretched his legs out, avoiding his brothers’ equally long limbs with the ease of long practice. They were laughing about something with Emily now, and the candlelight was shining in her eyes and shining against the very center of her lower lip where she must have just licked it.

  He thought of licking there, too, but at the moment was just content to think about it, basking in the warmth of good, hot food in his belly and in the easy company of his brothers. Emily was teasing them about girlfriends now, and Max was trying put some moves on her, but she was laughing that off as well, taking it as the teasing that Will expected it really was, especially after the way his brother shot him a look to see how he took the mild flirtation.

  He sent his brother a silent Dailey message, just in case: Not for you, my friend.