Well Matched (Well Met #3)(18)

“That’s awesome. What time’s dinner?” He clapped his hands together, like an invitation was a foregone conclusion.

I snorted. “Long after you leave. Want some coffee?”

He took the rejection with a short laugh and shake of his head, then he followed me into the kitchen, immediately rummaging around in the cabinets for a coffee mug. I leaned in the doorway and sipped from my own mug, amused. Most people would let their host get everything for them, or at least ask where things were. But Mitch had a way of making himself at home wherever he went.

Coffee acquired, he turned back to me. I’d been admiring the way he filled out his jeans, but now I had a great view of his tight T-shirt, and that was just as good. Did the man buy all his T-shirts a size too small or what? “So,” he said. “Carpets?”

I nodded. “Carpets.” I took one more fortifying gulp of coffee before putting the mug down on the dining room table. He followed me down the hallway, and we paused outside the bedrooms. “I figured I’d get the guest room done, and then work out toward the living room and dining room.” Yikes. That sounded like a lot when I said it out loud. Sure, he’d offered to help, but I didn’t want to take advantage. “I’m not saying we have to get it all done today. That’d be too—”

“Nah.” He took an unconcerned sip of coffee. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Are you sure?” I squinted into the guest room. It was still in disarray from Emily’s and my painting party that had started the weekend before. She’d come over a couple evenings during the week to help finish painting the room itself, but the bedroom set was still in the middle of the room under drop cloths, lurking like a monster waiting to eat me in my sleep.

Mitch shrugged. “Sure. I mean, we’ll be doing some work, but we can get them both done today if you want.”

“Oh, I definitely want.” I threw a tsk in his direction as he raised his eyebrows at me over his coffee mug. How could he turn everything into a double entendre? “The carpets,” I said. “I want to get the carpets done.” Come to think of it, that didn’t sound much better.

“Mmm-hmm.” He tilted his head back to finish his coffee and I tried not to be mesmerized by the muscles in his neck as he swallowed. “Anyway . . .” He reached into his back pocket, pulling out two large mat knives. He handed me one, and I took his empty mug in my other hand.

“Easiest way to do this,” he said, “is to slice the carpet into strips. We can move the furniture around while we work, instead of moving everything out and back in again.”

“Well, that sounds ridiculously sensible.” I set his mug down on the dresser in my room and twirled the knife between my fingers. I was glad he’d thought ahead and brought the knives, because all I had was a little box cutter that was about half the size of the one in my hand now.

We fell into an easy rhythm once we got the carpet loosened from the edges of the wall. We pushed the furniture to one side of the room before slicing the carpet into long strips, rolling it up, and getting it out of the room. Then we moved the furniture onto the bare concrete side of the room before doing it all over again.

“You know . . .” I dragged the back of my wrist across my forehead, which did nothing to get rid of the sweat that had started to gather. “All those shows about people remodeling their houses, when they pull up the carpet there’s always this perfect original hardwood underneath. I’m feeling a little ripped off here.”

Mitch snorted as he handed me a roll of duct tape. “Yeah. That’s not going to happen in a house in the suburbs like this. These places were built in the eighties.”

“I know.” I sighed as I picked at the tape, pulling till I got it started. “But a girl can dream, right?”

“Sure.” He held the rolled-up carpet strip together while I wrapped a line of tape around it, then we wrestled it into the contractor’s trash bag, laying it out in the hallway with the others. The neighbors were going to think I was cleaning the bodies out from under my crawl space when we started getting rid of all of this.

“Now, my grandma’s house, that’s a whole different story. That place is something like a hundred and fifty years old.”

I gave a low whistle. “I bet you’d find all kinds of stuff under the carpets.”

“Oh yeah. And secret passages in the closets.”

“Seriously?”

Mitch shrugged. “Someone told me that when I was a kid, and I spent every visit there trying to find them.” He paused. “Now that I think about it, maybe they were trying to get me out of their hair. Huh.”

“Now, why would they do that?”

“I had a lot of energy as a kid.”

“Hmm.” I pulled at the last sliced-up strip of carpet, but it wasn’t giving. I braced everything and tugged harder. Still nothing. “So not a lot has changed, then, huh?”

“Nope.” Suddenly he was down on his knees beside me, grasping the carpet in his much-larger hands, helping me pull. Our hands overlapped each other, and with his shoulder leaned into mine, I tried to ignore the way his breath stirred my ponytailed hair. The carpet came up easily when we were both pulling on it.

“There, see? Easy.” His voice in my ear shouldn’t be doing things to me. That wasn’t what was happening here. But I couldn’t ignore the way things inside of me tightened when he was this close.