Screwdrivered (Cocktail #3) by Alice Clayton

guy was turning me into an idiot! Like, a simpering girly girl who couldn’t handle herself around a mountain of man flesh, not at all how I normally was around men. But ooooohhhhh. Maybe this was supposed to be how it was? Like, in a good romance novel the heroine was always affected by the hero. Okay, so, reassess. Reevaluate. The cowboy wasn’t going to fall in line. That’s what happened, though, right? It couldn’t be too easy, or romance novels would just be little pamphlets. There’d be some conflict in this story. Challenges. But no more word vomit hopefully.
    I slunk back into the house, avoiding the broken floorboard.
    I also avoided the backyard, although I watched from the windows in one of the guest rooms upstairs. I watched Hank move across the yard, feeding the horses and watering the chickens, which squawked gratefully. As I worried the cameo around my neck, I observed the cowboy in his natural element. He liked to work with no shirt on, which seemed so perfectly right and not at all beefcake. I mean, it was warm this morning, almost seventy degrees . . .
    Once he left in his truck, a great manly beast of a thing, clouds rolling in great waves of lusty dust in his wake, I went to work. I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle all the junk. It was a bit sad, actually.
    Maude had grown up in this house, where she’d lived her entire life. The house had been in the family for more than a hundred years. When the first generation of my family to branch off the Philadelphia trunk had traveled here so many years ago, what would become the town of Mendocino was still a small settlement. It was composed mostly of families from New England, so the style of homes reflected what these pioneers brought with them: Cape Cod, Victorian, picket fences, and cottage rosebushes everywhere.
    She’d lived here when her mother died, and had never left to create her own household. Families had visited over the years; aunts and uncles and cousins and their children had filled this house with laughter and tears, suppers and tea parties. But in her last years, Aunt Maude had withdrawn.
    As I began to sort through the clutter in one of the spare bedrooms, I discovered a trove of Maude’s paintings. Mendocino had once been an artist colony, and she’d signed and dated every one, starting back in the fifties. I knew I’d get lost if I started looking through them with any kind of order at this point, so I tucked them back into the closet until I could spend more time examining them.
    Maude had been an artist. Interesting. My fingers held a phantom brush, noticing the natural light pouring into the room and knowing instantly that this would be a great room to paint in. An inspection of the floor revealed an occasional paint splatter here and there, something I hadn’t noticed anywhere else in the house. So she’d also found the light in here irresistible. Feeling a sudden kinship with her, I smiled.
    I spent the morning cleaning out the bedroom with the best view of the ocean. Wiping a thick layer of sea salt and grime from the windowpanes, I continued to hum the theme to Bad Boys as I worked. Once the blue of the Pacific sparkled through once more, I searched for more clean rags in the linen closet in the hallway and was thrilled to find a fairly new set of sheets. Buoyed by the thought of sleeping in an actual bed tonight, I headed for the basement to see if the washing machine still worked.
    Opening the basement door for the first time, I realized two things. One, the lightbulb was burned out. Two, the motherfucking lightbulb was burned out. Sighing loudly, I threw back my shoulders and bravely tromped down the steps. Into the dark basement of a hundred-plus-year-old house, with nothing but old sheets to protect me.
    So there’s stupid, and then there’s stupid. I’ve had picnics in cemeteries. I went on a tour of the underground catacombs when I lived in Paris. I was always the last one standing when we played Bloody Mary at