Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 94106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
“You’re back.”
“Just got in a few minutes ago. How’s Bella?”
“She’s good. Just left for work. The house is still standing, so I guess things went okay.”
I smiled. I’d planned to sit on the back deck and enjoy the late-afternoon sun, but it felt weird now since we were both alone. Our houses stood so close together that we could probably jump from one deck to the other if we had to.
“Glad it worked out. You look busy. I’ll let you get back to work.” I waved and turned to go back into the house.
Ford’s voice stopped me as my hand hit the handle to the sliding glass door. “Wait,” he called. “What are you up to now?”
“Umm. I…uh…I was going to go for a walk,” I lied. “It took me almost four hours to get here with all the traffic. Figured my legs could use a good stretch.”
“Mind if I join you? I need to stop staring at this computer.”
“Uh. sure. That’d be great. I’m going to go change. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Changing turned into fixing my hair, brushing my teeth, and touching up my makeup. I was really disappointed in myself for putting in so much extra effort.
When I walked back out to the deck, I found Ford waiting at the bottom of my stairs with two glasses of wine. I had two beers in my hand. “Guess we both had the same idea.”
“Great minds. Do you want to leave one here or double-fist it for our walk?”
“Why don’t we sit for a few minutes before we start walking? I’m not sure I’m capable of maneuvering through the sand without spilling both.”
“Good idea.” We sat side by side on the third stair from the sand. I chose to drink the wine first, while Ford picked up the beer.
“Did you bring beer because you know I like it?” he asked.
I smiled. “Did you bring the wine because it’s what I drink?”
He smiled back. “Only because we don’t have any olive juice in the house. I’ll have to remedy that.”
Our legs brushed against each other, and arousal shot through me. Seriously, it was just a leg. What the hell was wrong with me? My libido had been dead for so long, and it had to pick a totally inopportune time to wake up? Nothing like a smidge of alcohol to put it back to sleep. I swallowed half my glass of wine and tried to be myself.
“You looked like you were stressed sitting in front of your laptop. Everything okay at work?”
“Nah, it wasn’t work. I was weeding through the mountains of women on Match.com who messaged me.”
The burn of jealousy crept through my body, making me feel warm.
“Oh. That’s nice.”
Ford bumped my shoulder with his. “Kidding. I haven’t been on Match since we started talking. You?”
I shook my head. Not wanting to analyze why either of us hadn’t gone back to the dating site, I moved our conversation along. “I must’ve misread concentration for stress.”
He shook his head. “You actually didn’t. I have some big decisions to make at work that are weighing on my mind.”
“You said you work in real estate, right?”
“Yeah. My family owned a commercial storage business, and my dad and I had started to move into temporary office space, too. The commercial storage side of things doesn’t do as well anymore, so we’d begun transitioning the buildings we own into something new. The storage facilities convert into pretty nice temporary office suites—high ceilings, exposed ductwork, and brick. We converted one before the accident, and it’s done really well. People love the idea of having a place to go work with everything available to them—receptionist, printers, Wi-Fi, furniture—but without the long-term lease commitment and expense. Most people only work from an office a few days a week, so sharing the cost and space with others works out.”
“Wow. That’s amazing. Were you a business major in college?”
He shook his head. “Architecture.”
“Well, I guess converting the space goes with that, then, right?”
“Yeah. My dad was the business side of things. I just saw the potential in the old buildings. It was something we were doing together.” He pushed around the sand with his foot and grew quiet.
“It must’ve been a lot to step into everything after your parents…”
He nodded. “My parents were smart about contingency planning, though. They had a trust in place so if anything happened to them, the stock in their corporation went to me and my sister, but their CFO became the president until I graduated college and turned twenty-one. Once I did those things, I had the option of becoming co-president, which I did. Then at twenty-five, I became the sole president.”
“So you’ve had help the last few years, but now you’re on your own?”
“Technically, yeah. But Devin, the CFO, is still there for me whenever I need him. We have a few more commercial storage buildings with leases coming due, so I’m struggling to decide whether to convert them into more temporary office space. Now would be the time. That’s the stress you read on my face while I was on my laptop.”