~Chris~
I’m not checking out her body.
I’m not staring at her face. I’m focused on the task at
hand. Thank God I have one, because otherwise, I’d be staring at those eyes.
They’re blue with gold flecks, making them look almost hazel at times. She has
all sorts of colors working in her irises, and the net effect is totally
captivating.
So is her lush mouth.
She’s running it while I carefully screw the case back
together. It’s painstaking work since it’s tiny and the screwdrivers are the
size of nails.
“I tried to fix my shower once,” McKenna says, wrapping her
slender hands around a cup of coffee. Yes, even her hands are hot. Lord help
me.
“Yeah?” I glance at her hands then back at the hard drive.
“How’d it go?”
“Well, if you consider scars a good thing, it went well.”
I look up. “Scars can be cool. I trust it ween exceedingly
well?”
She lifts her chin and shows me a thin white scar on the
right side of her jaw. “Then I did a fabulous job of ‘fixing’ the shower.” She
sketches air quotes.
“Looks like it to me. But how exactly did the shower hit you
in the face?”
“When the door fell.” She says it so matter-of-factly.
I blink, trying to process the enormity of everything that
could have gone wrong. “I don’t know if I should be impressed you tried to fix
a shower door without any fix-it skills, or impressed with your good luck in
surviving the incident. Because those things are heavy.”
“Hey! How do you know I don’t have any fix-it skills?”
I grin. “Lucky guess?”
“Fine. You’re right. But what else was I to do?” She shrugs,
her tone light and breezy. “It wouldn’t close all the way. And that was getting
me down because I like to take really hot showers. We’re talking sauna
temperature. You know the type? Imagine you walk into the bathroom, and steam
is everywhere, and you can barely even see the other person in the shower. Just
the silhouette? Can you picture that?”
Can I picture it? Hell, I can feel that. In my pants. “Yep,”
I answer, and it comes out a little dry, a little gravelly. Because painting
crazy-hot images is playing below the belt, and I bet she doesn’t even realize
it. Hot women shouldn’t use the word “shower” in casual conversation. It’s
wholly unnecessary, along with “yoga pants” and “strawberries.”
“So you tried to fix it?” I ask, forcing myself to focus on
the project in front of me, rather than on images of steam rising, which lead
to other things rising.
“Yup. And then that shower door showed me who was boss.” She
holds up her forearm vertically then lets it fall as she makes a kaboom sound.
I can’t help but laugh. “And whacked you on its way down?”
“Completely whacked. It’s kind of a miracle I’m alive, come
to think of it.”
“I’m glad you survived the shower whacking. What happened
with the door thought?”
“I called my friend Andy. He fixed it for me. It works like
a steamy, dreamy charm now.” She takes a sip of her coffee, smiling happily.
I stop and take a drink of espresso.
“Andy? So he’s Handy Andy?” I kind of hate him already.
Wait. That’s dumb. I don’t feel a thing for Handy Andy who was in McKenna’s
shower, that lucky bastard.
“That’s a good one. Can you rhyme my name?”
“Henna McKenna?” I toss out.
“And you’ll be Chris who brings me bliss by fixing the hard
drive,” she says, and I just smile at her.
“You’re a bundle of energy,” I say as I return to my
project, moving to the right side of the case.
“And you’re a bundle of skills. What do you do when you’re
not rescuing hard drives from evil cats?”
“Admittedly, that does occupy a large portion of my day. But
in the few hours I can eke out, I host a show.”
“Like radio show or a podcast?”
I twist the screwdriver a notch. “It’s a TV show. On
WebFlix. It’s called Geeking Out.”
She narrows her eyes and points at me, circling her finger.
“You’re a geek?”
“You say that like it doesn’t compute, and yet here I am,
fixing your tech in a coffee shop. I’d say that makes me a geek.”
“You definitely don’t look like a geek.”
I meet her eyes. They’re sparking with a glint of
playfulness. “And what does a geek look like?”
“Not like a surfer. You look like you’re going to go hang
ten.”
“I do that too. For fun.”
She pumps a fist. “Nailed it. You totally have that vibe
about you. Not that I’m pigeonholing you based on your looks. But with the Nor
Cal T-shirt, it wasn’t the hardest round of Jeopardy! to play.” She imitates
Alex Trebek. “What is the most likely profession of a guy with floppy hair, a
not-from-the-salon tan, and casual charm?”
I quirk up the corner of my lips. “You think I’m charming?”
She blushes, but it disappears quickly. “You charmed my hard
drive out of my hands.”
I screw the final piece of the case back together, set down
the tiny tool, drag a hand through my hair, and gesture to the repaired device.
“Good as new.”
“Wow,” she says appreciatively, picking up the drive and
gazing at it in admiration. “Thank you so much. You are Mr. Fix It.”
I puff out my chest playfully. “Why, thank you very much.
I’m having T-shirts made with that saying. Want one?”
“I do. I want one to sleep in at night.”
And there she goes again.
