Page 10 of Something Like Shelter

“He came right over?”

“Yeah. He was here in half an hour. And, funnily enough, you hear that?”

“Hear what?” she asked.

“Exactly. Adelaide loves the fans he brought in to dry out the bathroom. She’s been quiet ever since. I haven’t had this much peace in almost a month.”

“You look a little better,” she agreed. “Like you got some sleep.”

“I did. I passed out on Owen when he went to get the samples. I guess he just headed out when he noticed. After running the dishwasher.”

“He ran the dishwasher?” she asked, giving me that look again.

“Don’t read into it. He probably felt bad for me. I’m pretty sure I came off borderline deranged when he was here.” I’d certainly felt that way. It was amazing what a few consecutive hours of sleep could do for your mental health. I still felt like I was in a fog, but my emotions didn’t feel quite so raw anymore.

“Still. A lot of men would have just left. And likely trekked mud through your house in the process.”

“He offered to wear booties when he saw Adelaide.”

“Aww.”

“Gracie…” My voice held warning.

“Oh, let me be a romantic.”

“Just because he’s hot?”

He was.

He was knock-you-upside-the-head hot. And I wouldn’t lie that when he showed up at the door the first time, I’d had some very vivid fantasies of him grabbing me and the two of us doing all sorts of steamy things for a few hours.

He wasn’t my typical type. My cousins would likely accuse me of only falling for ‘suits.’ There was some truth to that. I’d mostly dated men who I met in my circle. And my circle was business.

Owen was not a suit.

He was work boots and jeans worn soft from too many washings, stained permanently in different shades of paint. He was shaggy dirty blond hair, a scruffy face, and that kind of lax, easy carriage that you found in blue-collar men.

It was appealing.

Just not what I saw for my future.

Which was why I’d seen a torrid, short-lived affair in my mind and not wedding rings.

“Well, there’s that,” Gracie agreed. “But it’s also a man seeing something that needed to be done… and just doing it. Better than that, he did it without expecting any kind of praise for it. He just did it and left. And locked the door, by the way. I had to plug in my code.”

“He’s a good man,” I agreed.

I stared at the dishwasher for a moment.

It was such a small thing. Ridiculously small, really. Loading the dishwasher wasn’t exactly an act of heroism. It wasn’t changing a tire on the side of the road during a storm or rushing into a burning building, or any of the other ways the men in stories did to somehow prove they were worthy of the heroine.

Still, the act made my chest ache.

Because he hadn’t done it for me to see.

He hadn’t mentioned it. Hadn’t waited around for me to wake up and see it and hear my appreciation. He hadn’t made some joke about the state I let the house get into.

He’d just noticed the dishes and done them.