his big body blocking the wind whipping at her hair. “Where’s your son?”
“At school. He only has tomorrow and next week before winter break, so we’re commuting.”
“To Seattle?”
Conscious of him frowning at the top of her head, she tried to remember if the key she’d just selected was for the store’s front door, its emergency exit, the door to the house or the side door to the garage.
“I don’t want him to miss working on the holiday projects with the other kids. He already missed the first of the week because of the move and he really wants to help decorate the school’s big tree.” He wanted a big tree, too, he’d told her. A huge one. How she’d make huge happen currently fell in the mystery category, too. “Since he won’t be going back there after Christmas, it’s about the only thing keeping his mind off the need to change schools right now.”
“How long does that take you?”
“An hour and a half, if you include queuing up for the ferry.”
“You’re spending three hours over and back in the morning, and another three hours every—”
“That’s just today,” she hurried to assure him. “I’ll usually only make the round-trip once. Kindergarten is only four hours, so I’ll run errands while he’s there.” And maybe see if she could slip into her friend Emmy’s yoga class, since seeking calm seemed more imperative by the moment. “A friend is picking him up with her son this afternoon. He’ll play at their house until I get there.”
His tone went flat. “So you came all the way back just to keep this appointment.”
“You said it was the only time you had this week.”
“You could have told me you’d be in Seattle,” he insisted. “I never would have expected you to come back here for this.”
“You said we had to go over the inventory. We have to do that here, so there was no point in mentioning it.”
The key didn’t work. Her head still down, his disapproval doing nothing for her agitation, she picked out another.
Before she could try that one in the lock, Erik reached over and snagged the wad of keys by the purple rhinestone-encrusted miniflashlight dangling below them.
“That’s to the garage.” He paused at the practical bit of bling, chose one beside it. “You want this one.”
He held a duller brass key by its blade.
“Next time something like this comes up,” he continued, biting back what sounded a lot like frustration, “mention it.”
All her rushing had left her jumpier than she’d realized. Or maybe it was the edginess in him that fed the tension she did not want to feel with this man. Taking the key, conscious of how careful he’d been not to touch her, she forced the hurry from her tone.
“My schedule is my problem, not yours. I’ll make sure it doesn’t interfere with what you need to show me here. Not any more than it has already,” she concluded, since last time he’d wound up hauling in her furniture.
Trying not to give him time to dwell on that little failure, she slid the key into the lock.
As the lock clicked, he moved behind her. Reaching past her head, he flattened his broad hand on the heavy wood door.
His heat inches from her back, the nerves in her stomach had just formed a neat little knot when he muttered, “Then let’s get to it,” and pushed the door open.
Intent on ignoring the knot, disconcerted by their less-than-auspicious start, she hurried into the store to the warning beeps of the alarm system.
With the front display windows shuttered for the winter, the only light came from what spilled in behind them. Relying on that pale shaft of daylight, she headed straight for the checkout counter and the inner door behind it, mental gears shifting on the way.
Feeling his scowl following her, she deliberately sought to shift his focus, too.
“I’m going to start the coffee. While I do that, would you look over the floor plan I came up with? It’s right here on the counter.” Fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered as she snapped switches on. Punching the security code into the pad by the inner door, the beeping stopped. “I’ll be right back.”
In less than a minute, she piled her purse, coat and scarf onto the dining table, flipped on the coffeemaker she’d already filled and grabbed the tape measure she’d left on the island.
She’d barely turned back into the store when the hard line of Erik’s profile had her freezing in the doorway.
He’d tossed his jacket over the far end of the U-shaped counter’s now-bare surface. Without it, she could see Merrick & Sullivan Yachting discreetly embroidered in sky-blue on the navy Henley hugging his broad shoulders. Ownership, she thought. He had a definite sense of it. He had it stitched on his shirt. His initials, she’d noticed before, were on the latch of his briefcase.
On the scarred beige countertop lay the file she’d left open. His frown was directed to the new floor plan she’d come up with.
“You did this?” he asked.
With a vague sinking feeling she walked around to him. She might not know anything about the little doodads in the bins and on the Peg-Boards hanging in her new store, but she was a consumer with her fair share of shopping hours under her belt. If the interior didn’t have some appeal, people might run in to buy what they needed, but they wouldn’t stick around to browse and buy more.
“The store needs updating,” she said simply, certain he could see that himself. “I thought it might make the space more interesting to have three shorter horizontal shelving units in back than that one long one down the middle. The floor space along here,” she said, pointing to the front and back walls on the drawing, “would be a little narrower, but the endcaps would allow for ninety-six more inches of display space. I could use part of the longer piece—”
“I’m not asking you to defend this,” he interrupted mildly. “I’m just asking if you drew it.”
Erik’s only interest when he’d first arrived had been in tackling the task they hadn’t even started the other day. As far as he was concerned, they were already behind schedule if she was to open in April. Not wanting to fall further behind and risk her not making a success of the business, he’d just wanted to get in, get out and get back to work until the next time he had to meet with her. It had been that ambivalent sort of annoyance eating at him when he’d realized what she’d done to accommodate him.
The trip by air between the store and Seattle was nothing for him. Minutes from takeoff to touchdown, depending on head-or tailwinds and whether he left from his houseboat on Lake Union or the boatworks in Ballard. The drive and a ferry ride for her was infinitely less convenient. People commuted from the inner islands every day. But she had actually come back from Seattle just to meet with him, and would have to return later that day to pick up her son.
Even the time it would normally take her on other days seemed an enormous waste of time to him. She was right, though. How she did what she needed to do was her problem. Just as it was his problem, not hers, that he
