Chapter Three

If He Lets You Wear His Shirt…

In the morning, Lindsay awoke with her head feeling clear and pain-free. The doctor was right, she only had a cut in her eyebrow that was exactly three millimeters long. She went to the bathroom and cleaned the remaining blood from the folds around her eyes. With that done, she suddenly had this impish idea that she should do her makeup before she got dressed. Lindsay was not the type of girl who looked like an entirely different person when she put makeup on, but she knew it improved things and she had made a bad impression on Gavin the night before. She had been covered in blood, been with his drunk brother, and bored him with her conversation about calligraphy.

She got her makeup bag and went about salvaging her pride. With the arrival of morning, she had a second try ahead of her. She wouldn’t make the mistakes she made the night before. The freshly revived zombie look was already washed off. She wouldn’t bore him with her nonsense, even though most men seemed to love her nonsense. Besides, she’d look like a beauty, which always made everyone a little nicer to her when the going was tough.

Lindsay’s most noticeable attribute was her hair. Her hair was too thick and had natural waves usually only worn by homeless people. She had gone unnoticed most of her grade school years, until the year before graduation, she had had an impulse to dye her hair an auburn red, which had gone splendidly. It had given her whole body a new impression and people who never noticed her suddenly took notice. The brown in her hair brought out the brown in her eyes until she made her hair cherry coke red. Then her eyes turned gray.

For her clothing, Lindsay preferred to wear monochrome—especially white. The contrast of the red hair and the black and white clothes made her even more dazzling. She used to wear lots of colors but after the hair color change, all her clothes were white, black, icy blue, and gray.

When she finished her makeup, she returned to the bedroom, went through her bag, and realized that she had left her housecoat at her last digs. She rolled her eyes. That meant it was lost forever. She opened the closet to see if there was anything already in the room that she could slide over her nightgown. To her surprise, the closet was mostly full of men’s clothing.

She chose a white collared shirt with light blue lines and threw it on over her nightgown. She was too hungry to think about the closet and what all those clothes meant. Instead, she padded up the stairs and into the kitchen.

The upper floor was beautiful, all vaulted ceilings and glass overlooking the wood, and through the trees, she spied a lake. Or was it the ocean? She paused to admire the view and looked carefully in every direction, pretending to look for the sasquatch.

Suddenly, a knock sounded at the front door. Lindsay didn’t know where Gavin was, but she thought it was better to answer the door before the knocker knocked again. What if he was still sleeping?

Swinging the door open, she put a finger to her lips and said, “Good morning,” as quietly as possible.

A woman stood on the doorstep. She held a cardboard box in her arms and stared at Lindsay like she was a serpent. Gawking, she said sharply, “This is from Marissa.” She practically threw the box, open-topped, in Lindsay’s unprepared arms. “It’s what she had left of Gavin’s things at her place. Obviously, she doesn’t want to see him again after last night and she asked me to bring them.”

“And your name is?” Lindsay asked, at least wanting to get the name of the person who dropped the box off before she disappeared.

The woman seemed as concerned as Lindsay that she needed to look cool and didn’t leave immediately. She placed her sunglasses on her nose and then pointed that nose in the air. “Tell Gavin Carleen dropped it off.”

“I will. Thank you. I’m Lindsay,” she said, balancing the box on one arm and giving her a friendly little wave.

Carleen’s mouth turned into a snarl as deliberate as her bleach-blonde hair. She ignored the friendliness and said icily, “I’m busy. I’d better be going.” With that, she flipped her blonde hair, pranced down the wooden steps, and got into her compact car.

Lindsay turned around and bumped into a man coming up behind her. With zero lead-up, her cheeks were aflame.

“Hi,” she said, peering up into his amber eyes. “I didn’t know anybody else was here,” she said, gasping for breath a little like a fish. Pausing to examine him, she didn’t know if she’d ever seen a man as attractive as the one standing in front of her. In the next moment, he was taking the box from her and looking over her shoulder to see Carleen’s car as it drove away.

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His hair was brown with so much blond in it, she couldn’t tell if it was sun-bleached or merely dyed. It grew long around his ears with bends in it that made it appear like it had recently been tied in a ponytail. His beard was clipped short and everything about him was beautiful. The cartilage in his nose, the smirk on his lips, the look of interest and intelligence in his eyes, which were framed by gold-rimmed spectacles.

To Lindsay, it felt like she had never known how to describe the man of her dreams. She had to be shown what she wanted, and it was right in front of her.

“Close the door,” he said to her as he led the way back into the kitchen.

“Hi,” she said again, following him. “I’m sorry we didn’t meet last night. I’m Lindsay.”

“We did meet last night,” he said, looking amused.

She stared at him. Black toque gone. Bushy beard? Mostly gone. He smiled and the smile was something like a reincarnation of Oliver’s smile. It was Gavin and he looked astonishingly less like a sasquatch than she remembered.

“Sorry, Gavin. You look so different. You cut off your beard?” What she wanted to say was, ‘You chopped down the forest that was growing on your face,’ but she wisely refrained. A tightly clipped beard was one thing, but when it hid a man’s Adam’s apple, things had gotten out of hand in Lindsay’s opinion. Now, Gavin’s beard wasn’t even a tight-clipped one. He was down to stubble. “Looks really good,” she said out loud.

He merely nodded and placed the box on the kitchen floor.

“What is all this stuff?” she asked, trying to direct her focus to the box if only to stop herself from staring at him.

“It’s everything that’s left from my broken relationship.”

“Everything? Small box.”

He groaned slightly. “At least, I hope it’s everything.”

“Did things end badly?”

“For me, things ended well, because they ended. She is unhappy, which is what always happens when people don’t get what they want. Hopefully, she will feel better soon.”

“Marissa? That was your girlfriend’s name? Ex-girlfriend now?”

“Yes,” he said bluntly before kicking the box out of the way with his toe. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“I love breakfast.”

“What should we have?”

Lindsay looked around a little frantically. “Something easy? Toast? Cereal?”

He looked at her. “I’m not an infant. I can cook. Do you like pancakes?”

“I love pancakes!” she gushed. She had never had a man make her pancakes in her life.

He busied himself in the kitchen preparing his batter. “I got a call from Oliver this morning.”

“Thank heaven it wasn’t the doctor,” Lindsay breathed.

Gavin nodded in agreement. “He’s fine except for the breaks in his arm. The head injury wasn’t as bad as the doctor feared. I thought we’d pick him up after breakfast. He’s getting a hospital breakfast, but that’s all part of his punishment for crashing his car.”

“Can I help you?” she asked, coming around the island to stand beside him.

He looked at her like he’d never seen her before. “No. Get out.”

She slithered back to the other side of the island and sat on a stool facing the rest of the kitchen.

“Pancakes are easy,” he elaborated. “And you don’t know your way around my kitchen.”

Lindsay remembered her vow to avoid being chatty and closed her mouth with a determination not to open it again until she was asked a question.

“Do you eat dairy?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“And you aren’t allergic to anything?”

“No.”

“And there’s nothing you hate and you only love breakfast?” he asked, that touch of amusement entering his voice again as he stood in front of his grill.

“I don’t just love breakfast. I love food.” Then suddenly, she forgot her resolution to keep quiet as a terrifying thought entered her mind. “You know, if that girl who just came by, Carleen, is your ex-girlfriend’s friend, she might have misunderstood what was going on when I answered the door. She might have thought that you’d already replaced Marissa with me. I didn’t get a chance to explain anything to her.”

“That’s all right. It’s not your problem,” he said coolly, noticing what Lindsay was wearing over her nightgown. “I don’t think I ever let Marissa wear one of my shirts.”

“Sorry. Should I not have borrowed it?” She tugged on the collar, revealing the lace neckline of her floor-length nightgown.

He glanced at her. “It’s fine. You can wear it.”

If there was one thing Lindsay was confident about, it was her physical appearance. That had been a lot of the reason she thought she could be an actress in the first place. Looking at Gavin across the island, she was perplexed. Did she make such a bad impression on him the night before that she couldn’t salvage it in the morning?

His back was to her while he cooked. His shoulder blades jutted slightly out of the back of his black t-shirt. He wore blue and gray plaid pants, like that was what he had worn to bed. She was suddenly interested in what his bedroom was like. The master bedroom! The idea took complete control of her mind and she wondered if she could see the doorway to his room if she swiveled around. Around she went, and what she saw was a couch with blankets and bedding spilling onto the floor. She saw with dismay that aside from a bathroom tucked beside the fireplace, the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room took up all the available floor space on the top floor.

Without another second ticking on the clock, she realized he had put her to bed in his own room and he had slept on the couch.

She had been pink before. She was red now!