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“If you say so,” he said with a disinterested shrug. “Follow me.”
He led the way through the hallway back toward the kitchen. It was interesting to see the house in the gloomy light of a rainy day. Last night everything had been dark and a little terrifying but today she found herself astonished by how lovely this house was. The colors were bright and fresh—cream, sage, and the palest of pinks as an accent hue. It was unexpected and not at all what she would have pictured for Trystan Abbott’s home.
They hastened past a wall of framed photos and Iris’s steps slowed as she tried to take in the images. Clearly annoyed with her lingering, he backtracked a few steps and grabbed her hand to drag her along behind him.
The contact—like before—startled her. What the hell was up with these caveman tactics?
“Hey, mister, it’s not okay to just grab a woman like that,” she gasped, fighting to keep up, and simultaneously trying to pull her arm from his unrelenting grip.
“And it’s not okay to snoop around people’s private shit.”
“They’re photos. On display. They’re there to be looked at. Why else go to the trouble of printing, framing and hanging them?”
“They’re to be looked at by invited guests, which you are not.” He didn’t even bother to glance back at her as he said that, instead hauling her to the kitchen door leading outside.
She hesitated just inside the door, staring up at the gunmetal gray sky and the constant torrent of water streaming down from it. The man in front of her stopped as well and turned back to glower at her for a long moment before his shoulders lifted and fell in what looked like a heavy sigh.
Before she knew what his intention was he had dragged his raincoat off and draped it over her shoulders like a cape, fastening only the top two buttons at her throat and tugging the hood up over her head.
“It’s hopeless trying to put your arms in the sleeves,” he muttered, half to himself. “It’s miles too big. And it’ll be impossible to roll up, so this’ll have to do until we get to the shed.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she protested half-heartedly, but he ignored her and continued forward.
Iris followed him. The jacket helped, but the front of her hoodie and her jeans were still getting soaked. At least her shoulders and head remained dry, as long as she kept the hood from blowing back.
At that point—regretting every decision that had led to this miserable moment in her life—Iris was helpless to do anything other than keep her eyes trained on Trystan Abbott’s broad shoulders and follow meekly.
Alarmingly, there was water flowing pretty rapidly over the toes of her boots, and the fast-running streams seemed to get deeper as they progressed further downhill into the garden.
He led her to the large-ish shed and she waited, shivering, while he unlocked the padlock on the doors. He turned to face her after swinging the doors open. Even though it was quieter inside the—blessedly dry—shed, the wind and rain were still a constant roar, and it was hard to hear him, but Iris kept her eyes glued to his face, afraid of missing some important instruction.
“There are two wheelbarrows,” he all but shouted down at her. “We’ll fill the first one together. I’ll wheel it down to the garage where I’ll offload and stack the bags. Meanwhile, you fill the empty wheelbarrow, and when I bring the other one back, I’ll take the filled on back down. We can get an efficient production line type of system going like that.”
Iris dubiously eyed the very many bright orange sandbags heaped against the back wall of the shed. They weren’t very big, but they looked heavy as hell. Iris was of medium height and weight, and not particularly strong, and she wasn’t sure she’d get the wheelbarrow loaded by the time he was done stacking the sandbags.
Still, since she’d managed to lug her twenty-five-kilogram suitcase around for short distances at a time, she could probably heave sandbags into a wheelbarrow if she had to. She just wouldn’t be very fast at it.
“How heavy are those bags?” she asked, pushing the hood off her head when it kept slipping down over her eyes. In the meantime, she tried very hard not to notice how his flannel shirt was plastered to his muscular chest and shoulders, leaving not much to the imagination.
He gave her another once-over—again appearing unimpressed with what he saw—and lifted his shoulders.
“About fifteen kilograms. You look weak and soft as hell, but you’ll probably be able to manage that.”
“I’m not weak and soft,” she retorted sharply.
“No?” Now it was his turn to look dubious.
“No, I can do this,” she told him through chattering teeth. God, she was freezing. It felt like cold and wet had been pretty much her constant state of being since arriving in this godawful place. She turned toward the bags and fumbled with one, her frigid, numb fingers struggling to get a grip around the edges of the bag.
He made an impatient sound behind her and brushed by her to pick up two bags at once and load them into one of the empty wheelbarrows.
Show-off.
Iris was finally able to wedge her fingers beneath the bag and managed—with an embarrassing groan and a great deal of effort—to lift it. She couldn’t quite straighten her back and did a humiliating crouched little crab walk to the wheelbarrow, where—with gargantuan effort—she heaved it a bit higher to dump it on top of the six bags he’d already put in there.
He didn’t acknowledge her paltry contribution. Instead, he continued to steadily fill the wheelbarrow, six bags for every one of hers. She managed to double her pace after a couple of warm-up bags, but she was still much slower than he was.
She shrugged out of the raincoat, hoping she would move faster without having its cumbersome heaviness hamper her movements, but that didn’t help.
