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~ Excerpt ~

He confused her. His presence was too strong. He was fierce, yet in an odd way somehow...kind.
And she had to pass him to depart. She should tell him she was leaving, but maybe she'd just slam the back door and let him find out that way.

Then she got mad that she allowed him to unnerve her. Jaw tight, she closed the shop door and locked up. As she crossed the concrete floor, the glow from his workspace caught her eye.

She turned toward it—and something deep inside her shivered.

He was engrossed in what he was doing. His long fingers caressed the wood, trailing down the grain with exquisite tenderness, yet his other hand gripped a sharp chisel, and the muscles in his arm stood out in relief.

A study in contrasts. Cast in golden light, he was anything but a handyman; he seemed a creature of another time, a different world. For a moment, the creative spirit inside her had to stop. To simply...look.

He walked around the piece slowly. His gaze scanned the wood—

Then caught on hers. Went still.

"Are you showing your work anywhere?"

His eyebrows rose, then snapped together. "No."

"Why on earth not?"

"My reasons are my own."

"But you can't seriously want to spend your time doing plumbing and painting walls when you are capable of beauty like this."

"All work is honorable." His voice was stiff with wounded pride.

Off on the wrong foot again. "I'm sorry. I only meant—" She threw her hands wide. "I give up. I'm out of here." She turned to go.

"It is not practical, this carving. My efforts are directed toward building a business now."

She blinked. Glanced back. "Beauty doesn't have to be practical. That's not why people buy it."

"So you think it is beautiful?"

"Of course I do."

For a heart's beat, she spotted a hunger in him and understood that even he had vulnerabilities.

Just as quickly, he erased any trace of them. "I do not trust luxury."

Ria cocked her head. "What do you mean?"

"Your life has been pampered. You cannot understand what it is to see those you care for lack medicine or the simplest necessities."

She couldn't help the laughter that clawed from her throat. She clapped a hand over her mouth but couldn't stem it.

He glared at her. "Starvation and want are not cause for humor."

Ria perched on the fine edge of hysteria, until tears streamed down her face. Nothing was funny, yet all of it, both of them, were ridiculous.  Of the myriad sins she was guilty of, he had indicted her with possibly the only one that was patently untrue.

She paused with her hand on the knob. "You're right to despise me for many reasons, but you're dead wrong about one."

"And what might that be?"

"I understand exactly what it's like to go hungry. How much worse it is to be impotent to provide for someone you love.

“There is no other force on earth that would have brought me back. I'm only here for the sake of my son."