Page 29 of Restored By You

“That’s not what I asked,” she deadpans.

“I know it’s not.” I smirk and drink my wine. She waits. Callie has always been able to out-wait me; it’s her single most annoying quality. I cave far too fast. “Fine. Fine.” I set the glass down harder than necessary. For the plot, of course. “He’s…not what I expected. Any of it. I thought he’d be this gruff, grunting mountain man who’d nod at my plans and tell me what things cost, and instead he listens. He redrew a whole kitchen island because I said the light mattered more than the counter space. He taught Tyler to use a shop vac and tear up old flooring. He shows up at six in the morning and still works a full day, then comes back and does more, and he never once makes me feel like I’m crazy for buying a hundred-year-old house, he just—” My voice does something embarrassing and I stop to breathe. “He makes it all feel possible. Like my dreams are possible.”

Callie doesn’t say anything. She just reaches over and refills my glass, which is somehow worse than if she’d gloated with a typical, “Called it!”

“But it doesn’t matter,” I say, faster now, gathering the loose ends of my emotional spiral off the floor. “Because I have too much going on, Cals. I don’t have room for romance or love or even a fling right now. I’ve got a show to pitch and a house to beautify and a teenager to keep alive and a father who will find a way to make all of it my fault if it falls apart. So, no, it doesn’t matter that he’s—” I gesture vaguely at the air. “—you know.”

Capable. Sexy. Steady. Handsome. Patient. Has arms of steel.

“Shea.” Callie sets her glass down, setting her hand on my knee. “It’s okay to want something for yourself, you know. Even if that something is a person.”

And there it is. The thing I’ve been outrunning since that slow song on Saturday night.

Because the truth, the one I won’t say even to her, even now, three glasses deep with the mountains gone dark outside, is that it isn’t the wanting that scares me.

It’s that Rhett sees me.

Not the designer, not the resort mogul’s daughter, not the girl who shows up and handles wardrobe malfunctions so nobody has to worry about their biggest day. Just me. Wild ideas and big dreams and a heart three sizes too big for its own good.

Nobody has ever just stopped and seen me before. And I have no idea how to feel and not fall completely apart.

“Okay.” Callie claps her hands together, and just like that, the air lightens. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

I eye her warily.

“We are going to finish this bottle.” She refills both our glasses to the rim to prove it. “We are going to eat these chips for dinner like the grown, functional adults we are. And we are not going to make any romantic, potential rendezvous decisions about tall, competent contractors tonight, because your judgment is legally compromised.”

“My judgment is fine.”

She stares me dead in the face. “You bought a house on the internet, Shea.”

I roll my eyes. “That was one time.”

“It was three weeks ago!” she cackles.

I throw a chip at her. Hulk, who has been a model of professional restraint this entire time, tracks its arc across the room with his whole soul, looks at Callie for permission, and lets out a snoot-huff.

“See, he gets it,” Callie says, scratching his ears. “Nobody in this room is thinking clearly.”

We laugh, and it’s easy, and she launches into the reshoot drama—some actor who won’t stop improvising, a director on his last nerve—and I let her voice wash over me, warm and familiar, the mountains dark and my best friend finally, finally on the same couch as me.

For a little while, it’s enough.

“One last thing,” she starts, holding a wagging finger between us as her phone rings, indicating her fiancée is here to pick her and Hulk up.

I giggle as she downs the last drop of her glass. “Oh, boy. What is it now?” I follow her to the door, Hulk trailing our every move.

She spins on me, her hands planting firmly on my shoulders. I place my hands over hers, smiling wide at whatever drunken wisdom my best friend is about to deliver. “For whatever it’s worth, Shea-babe, he is a good one.”

My smile falters slightly, but she doesn’t notice. “I know,” I say softly, and the hardest part is, it’s true. He really is.

I don’t remember falling asleep.

One minute I’m on the couch with Fixer Upper playing on the TV to critique, mentally redrawing their hideous open-concept everything. And the next, I’m surfacing through a post-wine fog to my phone buzzing itself off the coffee table.

I grope for it. The screen a smear of too-bright light. I squint to read the screen: Father. My gaze flicks to the clock in the corner saying 2:14 AM and I groan, jolting upright before my brain fully catches up. Something’s wrong, why else would he be calling at this hour? I swipe to answer with my heartrate climbing.

“Dad? Is everything okay?”