Winning His Heart: The Millionaire's Homecoming / The Maverick Millionaire
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He sat out on her deck with his laptop and used her internet, and then, as if it were a fair trade, did some chores around the house. Her screen door didn’t squeak anymore—he’d replaced and reinforced the latch; the kitchen faucet didn’t drip.
Yesterday, when the hardware store had delivered planks to fix her back deck, she had protested.
“David, no. I feel as if I’m taking advantage of you and all your manly skills.”
He had lifted an eyebrow at her to let her know that he had manly skills she had not begun to test yet. The awareness between them was electric. But despite long, lingering gazes, and hands and shoulders and hips “accidentally” touching, they had not kissed again.
But then his gaze had slid to his own house.
She saw how her initial assessment of the situation had been bang on: he needed to be busy right now.
And his initial assessment of her situation had also been correct: her house was a project that was too big for her to undertake.
“I am so grateful for your help,” she admitted.
He smiled and Kayla appreciated the slow unfolding of the new relationship between them. Even if she would have given in to the temptation, Bastigal had an intuitive sense of when the hum of electricity was growing too intense between them, and would become quite aggressive toward David.
His message was clear: I am the man of this house. But in a way it was a blessing that he was chaperoning them.
She had made the mistake of intimacy too quickly once before and the results had been disastrous.
If there was something here to be explored, she wanted to do it slowly, an unfolding of herself and of him.
Now she watched him out on her lawn. David was doing her lawn in sections, mostly because her lawn mower—which he had dubbed HAL Two—had, like the name suggested, a mind of its own.
It would roar to life, work for five or ten minutes and then sputter to a halt. From the first day, she had liked watching David fiddle with her cranky lawn mower.
Every time it broke down he would do the manly things required with such ease: checking the oil, turning it over and cleaning out underneath it. As she looked on he would run his finger along the blade and frown, but then apparently decide it was okay and flip it back up again.
Moments later the air would be filled with the sound of the mower once more. She had always liked that sound and the smell of fresh-mown grass.
Kayla had told herself to keep busy. She could look up the manual for her batch freezer on the internet after all! But there was no reason she could not do that from her perch on the deck.
So she ended up, day after day, taking the computer out on the deck, liking the feeling of being close to him, of covertly watching him work.
Seeing David—willingly working, liking to help out—was such a poignant counterpoint to the life that she had had and the choices she had made.
After watching David struggle through her jungle of a lawn until he was wiping the sweat from his brow, Kayla took pity on him and went in and made lemonade. She had it done by the time the lawn mower shut off, and she called him up from the yard.
He eyed her offering with pretended suspicion.
“This looks suspiciously like pee, too. Is it the Dandelion ice cream reincarnated?”
“No, but what a great idea! Fresh squeezed lemonade at More-moo.”
“You need to let me do some homework before you go any further on the More-moo thing.”
She went still. Oh, it felt so good to have someone offering to do things for her! But it was a weakness to like it so much, a challenge to her vow to be totally independent.
“Duh-veed,” she said, her tone teasing, “I can do my own homework.”
He lifted an eyebrow and put down his lemonade in one manly gulp. He handed her the empty glass. “I have people who do nothing else all day long. You should let them have a look at it.”
To refuse would be churlish, pure stupid pride. “I’d have to pay,” she decided.
“At least that would be a better investment than the batch freezer.”
“The ice cream eruption was just a minor glitch,” she said. “I can fix it. I’ve been on the internet looking at that model. The snap-down lid is missing, that’s all.”
“It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, getting that contraption before you know about the ice cream parlor.”
“It was a good deal!”
He rolled his eyes but took the glass from her. He casually wiped the sweat off his brow. She refilled the glass and he took a long, appreciative swig.
There was something about the scene that was so domestic and so normal that she wanted to just stay here, in this sunny moment, forever.
His phone buzzed and he took it out of his pocket, frowned, read a message and put it back. “Could I tap into your internet for a few minutes? A video is coming through that I’d like to look at on my laptop instead of my phone.”
“Of course.”
He went and retrieved his laptop from where it was now stored on her kitchen counter. He sat outside on one of her deck chairs. He looked uncharacteristically lost.
Kayla refilled his lemonade one more time. “I hope you don’t get a splinter,” she said when he thanked her and settled more deeply into the chair.
He looked like he hadn’t even heard her.
“Because, Duh-veed, it would be very embarrassing for you if I had to pull a sliver out of your derriere.”
“That would be awful,” he agreed, but absently.
Suddenly, she was worried about him. He seemed oddly out of it since he had taken that phone call. Now he was scowling at his computer screen.
“Hey,” she said softly.
When he looked up he could not hide the stricken look on his face.
“David? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie,” she said.
“You’ve got to quit calling me a liar,” he said, but even that was a lie, because while the words were light, his tone sounded as if his heart was breaking.
She had never known a stronger man than him. Not ever. And so it was devastating to watch him turn his computer to her so she could see what he was looking at.
The strongest man she knew put his head in his hands, and she thought he was going to weep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
KAYLA TURNED HER ATTENTION to the screen to give David a moment to compose himself. It took her a minute to figure out what she was looking at. And then she knew. It was some kind of retirement home. Unbelievably posh, and yet...
“Oh, David,” she whispered.
“I have to put her name on a list. If they have an opening,” he said, his voice a croak, “I have to decide right away. I need to go meet with the director and look at the facility in person this afternoon. I’ll come back in the morning.”
“I’m going with you,” she said.
She could not leave him alone with the torment she saw in his face.
He looked at her as if he was going to protest. But then he didn’t.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“I’ll go pack an overnight bag. And make arrangements for Bastigal to go to the kennel.”
And it wasn’t until she was in her room packing that bag that Kayla considered the implications of it. She sank down on the bed.
Life seemed, suddenly, to have been wrested from her grasp, to have all these totally unexpected twists and turns in it.
But there was something about making this decision to go with David that felt as if she had been lost in a forest and suddenly saw the way out.
She needed to be there for him. His need and his pain were so intense, and she needed to be there, to absorb some of that, to ease his burden.
Kayla realized there was the potential for pain here, tangling herself deeper in his world. And yet, she had to do it.
The word love whispered through her mind, but she chased it away. Now was not the time to study this complication.
Wasn’t it enough to know that something amazing was happening, and that it was happening to both of them?
She didn’t have to—or want to—put a label on it. She just wanted to sink into the sensation that they weren’t, either of them, as alone as they had been just a short time ago.
And she wanted to sink into the feeling of gratitude, that all the events of her life, even her difficult marriage—or maybe especially that—had prepared her for this, made her exactly the person she needed to be to rise to this challenge and more: embrace it.
* * *
David was so grateful that Kayla was there with him. It took his mind off what he was about to do. As they drove to Toronto she was the most pleasant of diversions—the way the wind caught in her hair with the top down, how childish she was in her wonder about the car, her lemony scent—what kind of ice cream stain was she trying to get rid of now?—tickling his nostrils.
He wanted to take her for lunch at a place he favored downtown, which was coincidentally close to the “retirement” home, but she took one look at his face and knew he was not up to even the rudiments of ordering a meal.
Instead she had him stop by a food truck, got out and ordered for both of them, and they sat in his car and ate.
“I’ll try not to spill, Duh-veed,” she said, but quickly saw he was not even up to teasing. She put out her hand and he took it, and it seemed after that he would never let go.
He left the car—she insisted he put the roof up, otherwise he was so distracted he might have left it down—and they walked to Graystone Manor. David knew from the video that it was a converted sandstone house that had belonged to a lumber baron at the turn of the century. It had a specialized wing for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.
The director, Mark Smithson, met them at the door. He was kind and soft-spoken, but nonetheless it reminded David of consulting with a funeral director over his father’s ceremony many years ago.
It was a beautiful facility. The rooms were like good hotel suites, the colors were warm and muted, the quality of the furniture and art was exquisite.
As Mr. Smithson talked about their programs for patients with all forms of dementia—people first, illness second, life maps and memory boxes, gardening and crafts—David knew he had come to the right place. He wondered if he should have made this decision long ago.
Still, it was with great sadness that he made the deposit and filled out the forms for his mother.
“We could have a vacancy very quickly,” Mr. Smithson warned him, kindly. “You will only have forty-eight hours to make up your mind.”
A vacancy. David realized his mother could come here when someone else died. He could not trust himself to speak.
Again he was aware of his hand in Kayla’s, and that that alone was giving him the strength to do the unthinkable and unspeakable.
When they left, she remained silent. She did not try to reassure him, or comment on the visit.
Fifteen minutes later, Kayla led him past the uniformed doorman into the lobby of his building. David felt as if he were the Alzheimer’s patient, dazed and disoriented.
His condo was Yorkton—arguably Toronto’s most affluent neighborhood—at its finest. His company had bought an aging hotel and completely gutted and refurbished it into condos. The lobby, with its Swarovski crystal chandelier, artfully distressed leather furniture and authentic Turkish rugs, could easily compete with the best five-star hotels in the world.
Each condo took up an entire floor of the building; their size was part of the reason they had commanded the highest prices ever paid in Yorkton for real estate.
The elevator, using the latest technology, was programmed to accept his fingerprint. He touched the panel and it began to glide upward to his penthouse.
“But what about company?” Kayla asked, her voice hushed as if she was in a church.
“I can give them a code.”
“Oh.” She seemed subdued. As the elevator doors whispered open, Kayla looked like a deer frozen in headlights. Her eyes went very wide and David saw his living space through her perspective.
“This is like a movie set,” Kayla said.
“Feel free to look around,” he invited.
Kayla glanced at him and then moved into his space, her mouth a little round O of astonishment and awe.
The space the elevator opened onto was large and open. The original plank flooring had been restored to distressed glory, stained dark, and it ran throughout.
Low-backed and sleek, two ten-foot white leather sofas, centered on a hand-knotted carpet from Tajikistan, faced each other over a custom-made coffee table, the glass top engineered around a base of a gnarled chunk of California Redwood.
Floor-to-ceiling windows—the window coverings could darken the room by remote control if needed—showed the skyline of Toronto, lights beginning to wink on as dusk fell.
Outside the windows was a generous deck with invisible glass rails. There was a good-sized pool—for a private pool in a condo, anyway—the infinity edge making it seem like the water cascaded off into the city lights. The pool lights on sensors were just beginning to come on, turning the water into a huge turquoise jewel.
The kitchen, open to the living room but separated from it by an island with a massive gray-veined granite countertop, was as sleek and modern as his living room furniture.
“Copper?” she said of the double ovens mounted into the cabinetry. “I’ve never even heard of that.”
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