Right where we belong, p.3
Right Where We Belong, page 3
Then Beth muttered, “Finn has got some explaining to do.”
“So has Chase,” Izzy added, frowning. “He didn’t tell me anything about it.”
“Well, no, he wouldn’t.” Shirley examined the quilt square she was sewing. “Levi doesn’t like people to know.”
“Really?” Indigo didn’t bother to hide her skepticism, because Levi not wanting people to know he owned a chunk of Brightwater Valley seemed…unlike him.
Shirley glanced up from her sewing and gave Indigo a look over the top of her glasses. She was in her late sixties, with a soft, grandmotherly face and dark eyes sharper than a pair of knitting needles. Her hair was pure white, very curly, and worn down to her shoulders. She reminded Indigo of an encouraging art teacher who could turn very stern at the drop of a hat.
“Yes.” Shirley’s voice held a slight edge of warning that any criticism of Levi would not be tolerated. “He’s uncomfortable about it.”
“Why?” Beth sounded intrigued. “That man clearly has hidden depths.”
“People here don’t like outsiders owning things,” Jim said, not looking up from his granny square. “So, we keep it quiet.”
It was clear he meant that it should stay quiet too.
Interested despite herself and not wanting to show it, Indigo leaned back in her chair and glanced down, unseeing, at the shawl she was knitting.
How weird that Levi should end up owning the building that housed the general store. It made her uncomfortable, especially because the business she and the others had started was based in that same building.
She didn’t know what she thought about that. She didn’t know what she thought about Levi having money either. He’d mentioned it the night before, when he’d made his offer, but she’d been so shocked and not a little incensed by the thought of him giving her a house and land that she hadn’t realized he must be loaded if he could afford to just hand them over.
And now that she thought about it, it wasn’t the money that bothered her. It was that she hadn’t known about it. Because he never talked about it.
People hid things. They told you how special you were to them while at the same time planning on abandoning you. And when they told you how much they loved you, they were just straight out lying.
Levi didn’t lie—or at least she’d never caught him in one—but it was obvious he’d kept things hidden, which was not a point in his favor.
That made her wonder where he’d gotten his money, because he certainly couldn’t have gotten it doing guiding or being in the army. And he didn’t seem to spend it on anything but wild nights in Queenstown bars.
Beth had mentioned to her that he had a house in Queenstown, and that it was a pretty fancy one, but since he never seemed to live there, Indigo hadn’t thought about it again.
But she was thinking about it now and she wished she wasn’t. She wished she wasn’t thinking about Levi King at all.
At that moment, there came the sound of footsteps on the porch, and then a deep, smooth voice said, “Is this a private party? Or can anyone join?”
Everything in Indigo went tight, the way it always did whenever Levi was around.
She looked up from her shawl.
Sure enough, leaning against one of the wooden posts that supported the awning was Levi’s tall muscular form.
The late morning sun was doing its usual glorious thing with his hair, making her want to run her fingers through it to see all those beautiful golden threads, like a miner panning for gold in a stream. His hazel eyes gleamed, and she found herself mesmerized by the golden flecks in them too.
He wore a black Pure Adventure NZ T-shirt, the way all the guys did, with worn, dusty jeans, and standing there leaning casually against the post, he was the most ridiculously handsome man she’d ever seen.
“Speak of the devil,” Shirley said, smiling at him, her soft spot for Levi clearly on display. Not that having a soft spot for Levi was unusual. In fact, everyone in the entire town seemed to have a soft spot for Levi, which made it very difficult when all Indigo wanted to do was complain about him.
Even more difficult that her dislike was complicated by her own inexplicable and intense physical reaction to him.
She had zero experience with men, but Indigo wasn’t stupid. She knew that for some reason she was very attracted to Levi. She also knew that she hated it.
Grandma had been very specific: never let a man’s good looks turn your head, because the good-looking ones were always the ones who couldn’t be trusted. And Grandma hadn’t been wrong about that. Indigo’s father had been extremely good-looking, and he’d used it to his advantage shamelessly, having had more than one affair while married to Claire. She’d found out soon after she’d gotten pregnant with Indigo and, heartbroken, had left him.
And that would have been that if he hadn’t reappeared not long after Indigo turned seven, wanting Claire to take him back, and of course she had. She’d never been able to resist a handsome man, or so Grandma had said. Indigo had loved her father back then. He’d brought her gifts, told her stories, taken her for ice cream. She’d thought he’d hung the very moon in the sky.
Until he’d left with her mother and never returned, and she’d understood that the moon had only been a flashlight that had blinded her.
He’d kept making promises over the years—he and her mother both—that eventually they’d come back for her. But they never had. Frank just hadn’t loved her enough, while Claire had loved a handsome face more than her own daughter.
Reason enough not to want to have anything to do with men, most especially the good-looking ones. She’d never believe in a man’s promises again like she had with her father, and she’d certainly never be her mother, letting her head be turned by a pretty face.
She was smarter than that these days.
“It’s a knitting circle,” Indigo said pointedly, staring hard at her shawl and not at him. “So, if you can’t knit, you can’t join.”
“I can’t knit, and I joined,” Beth said, then cursed under her breath. “I give up.” She flung her bootie down on the porch floor beside her yarn. “I need a break from that damn bootie. You sit here, Levi.” She pushed herself out of her chair. “I need a word with that man of mine.”
Indigo opened her mouth to protest, but Levi said, “Oh, don’t mind if I do,” and sat down in Beth’s vacated chair. Then he grinned at everyone. “That okay with you guys?”
Shirley, predictably, beamed at him. “Of course. And you don’t have to be able to knit to join. I’m sewing and Jim’s crocheting.”
Levi beamed back. “I can’t sew or crochet either.”
“Perhaps Indigo can teach you,” Izzy murmured, giving Indigo a knowing look that she pretended not to see.
She didn’t understand why Izzy and Beth kept encouraging her to be nice to Levi. And they weren’t subtle about it either. Beth had told her that she liked seeing the “fireworks,” and Izzy said that it was in the town’s best interests that everyone get along.
Indigo understood and she tried to be nice, she really did. But he was just so…provoking.
He was sitting next to her now, that wicked smile of his playing along his beautiful mouth, making her feel hot and restless, and his long legs were outstretched in front of him. She couldn’t take her eyes off the way the denim stretched across his powerful thighs.
This was the worst. Why was she hypnotized by a man’s thighs? Especially this man’s thighs?
“Well?” Levi gave her a look beneath dark, gold-tipped lashes. “Teach me the way of the needles, O holy one.”
Jim snorted.
Levi ignored him.
Well, great. She didn’t want to teach him because he didn’t really want to learn. He was only here to be a dick.
She looked up from her shawl and met his gaze head-on. “Do you really want to learn? Or are you here because I told you I didn’t want you building me a house last night?”
He grinned, the way his mouth curved doing stupid things to her insides. “What would you say if I told you it’s a combination of both?” Then, before she could get another word in, he added, “Actually don’t tell me what you would say. I feel I know the answer to that already.”
Izzy leaned forward unexpectedly, packing her knitting away in the little project bag Indigo had made for her before pushing herself to her feet. “I have to see Chase about…something,” she said vaguely. “I’ll see you later.”
Indigo sent her a “really?” look that Izzy pretended not to see.
Shirley cleared her throat. “You know, I think I’ve forgotten that errand I was going to run. You were going to help me, Jim.” She pulled on his arm.
He jolted slightly. “Eh?”
A minute later, Indigo found herself sitting by herself on the porch of the Rose with a grinning Levi and a sense of betrayal sitting in her gut.
They’d left her alone on purpose, which did not improve her temper one bit. She wasn’t sure if it was a bad attempt at matchmaking or because they all wanted her to be friends with him, but whatever it was, it was annoying.
Knowing that her own annoyance at herself and her fascination with him were making her so bad-tempered did nothing at all for her mood.
Levi sighed. “Put the prickles away, hedgehog. I’m not going to wind you up today.”
Indigo bit her lip. “You could start by not calling me ‘hedgehog.’”
“Why not? You’ve got a lot of needles.” He gestured to her knitting needles. “Both real and figurative.”
That was not…untrue.
Being grumpy with him is not going to help. And he was offering you an olive branch last night. He’s not that bad. And he’s not like your dad.
It was true; he wasn’t. He’d stopped flirting outrageously with her when she’d asked, though that hadn’t stopped him from teasing her.
You like him doing that; don’t lie.
Indigo stared hard at the tumble of blue-and-purple-speckled yarn sitting in her lap, trying to wrestle her intense annoyance into submission. Being grumpy with him because he reminded her of someone who’d left years ago was stupid and petty.
Also, it wasn’t his fault she was wildly attracted to him. It wasn’t his fault he was handsome either, or that she had good reasons for not trusting handsome men as far as she could throw them.
It wasn’t just handsome men she didn’t trust. That extended to people, period, and she’d found that prickliness and grumpiness were excellent deterrents when anyone tried to get too close.
She didn’t like it when people got too close.
Living in a literal cabin in the woods and being brought up by her hermit grandmother, who barely let Indigo out of her sight let alone out of the house, would do that to a person. In fact, from the age of eight on, the only human Indigo ever saw was grandmother.
Still, that was her deal, not Levi’s, which meant she couldn’t in good conscience keep being crappy to him. Since she’d come to Brightwater Valley, she was trying to be more open, less mistrustful.
She let out a silent breath, deciding to leave the matter of “hedgehog” out of it for the time being, and looked at him. “You really want to learn how to knit?”
“Yes, absolutely.” He glanced at the shawl in her lap. “Looks hard though.”
“You don’t need to flatter me,” she said shortly. “It’s not hard.”
“I’m not flattering you. That genuinely looks hard.”
She gave him a stare, examining his handsome face for signs that he was, as Kiwis termed it, taking the piss, AKA making fun. But no, it seemed he was genuine.
“You fix engines,” she said, relenting slightly. “Engines are hard. Knitting is easy. It’s basically two stitches, knit and purl. That’s it.”
“Engines are not hard. An engine is—”
“Do you want to learn or not?” Indigo interrupted, not really in the mood for an explanation of what engines were.
He gave a long-suffering sigh. “Why does no one want to listen when I talk about engines? Okay, fine. Yes, I do.” A spark of amusement glimmered in his eyes, making her heart flutter in her chest for absolutely no reason at all. “And while you teach me, I’ll tell you about my further thoughts on your tiny house.”
* * *
It was immediately obvious to Levi that Indigo did not want to hear his further thoughts on her tiny house, but hey, that was too bad.
He was obsessed with it now.
He’d spent all night turning the problem over in his head, trying to figure out why she was so opposed to it and what he could do to make her change her mind. He understood her reluctance about him paying for everything. Money was a whole thing. He’d learned early on that if you had something other people wanted and they were stronger than you, they’d take it from you whether you wanted them to or not. As a kid, his solution to that problem had been to have nothing. That way, no one bothered him.
He would have been fine with that as an adult too, because he didn’t need a lot of things. But he’d learned he had a talent for making money, and because he enjoyed it, he exercised that talent often, much to the continued happiness of his bank managers.
He didn’t like to talk about it though. The secretive habits of his childhood were too ingrained, and flaunting the fact that he was loaded in a place like Brightwater, where no one had a lot, was too much even for him.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his wealth for the good of the people here when he so choose. For the good of Indigo, for example.
Except she clearly saw it as charity she didn’t need and didn’t want.
Who knew that such a small prickly woman would have such a streak of pride? He would have found it endearing if it hadn’t been so damn annoying.
Still, that was the way she felt, and he didn’t want to ride roughshod over her feelings. Which meant if he wanted to help her out, he was going to have to find a way that would allow her to keep that pride of hers intact and not make her even madder at him than she was already.
Except he had the impression that she kind of liked being mad at him as much as he kind of liked teasing her.
More than “kind of.”
That was true. He liked it very much. It was just the kind of challenge he liked, and that was wrong of him. Very wrong.
She was glaring at him as if he’d said something offensive, all her sweet little prickles on show despite his urging her to put them away. Today, she was in a long-sleeved, many-tiered dress of soft-looking light blue linen almost the same shade as her pretty eyes. Her brown hair was in a ponytail down her back, exposing small ears and the silver hoop earrings in them.
There was something a little bit fey about her, something slightly magical to do with her sharp nose, determined chin, and the feline tilt of her dark eyebrows.
She wasn’t anything like the women he usually went for. There was nothing fey about them, though they were in their own way magical. They were usually curvy and cheerful, flirty and fun, and they were generally up for anything. A woman who took pleasure out of life was a woman he wanted to get to know.
Indigo wasn’t cheerful or flirty, and she certainly didn’t like the things he thought were fun. But that made her all the more fascinating to him. It got him thinking about what would make her smile. What would make her laugh. What would make her flush with pleasure…
Yeah, perhaps stop there.
Yes. Absolutely he should stop there.
He was here to try to talk to her about this house plan, not anything else. Well, nothing bar knitting.
“What?” He lifted a brow. “Are you going to show me this knitting thing or what?”
She let out a huff of irritation, then put her own knitting down before reaching into the big patchwork style bag that sat near her chair. After a bit of rummaging, she brought out some big pink plastic knitting needles that looked very unlike the small metal ones she used.
The plastic ones looked very much like kind of needles you gave to kids—big because they were easy to use and blunt so someone wouldn’t hurt themselves.
He didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved.
“You can start with these,” she said. “This is how you hold them.” She demonstrated, then handed them over to him. Then she rummaged more in her bag and brought out some thick red yarn. “We’ll start by learning the knit stitch. Can you tie a slipknot?”
That was a good start. Of course, he could. He could tie any knot she cared to name. Knots were his thing.
He demonstrated with the yarn she’d given him, feeling smug about it.
She sniffed, unimpressed. “Now we need to cast on. We’ll start with a knitted cast-on.”
She did something complicated with the yarn and the needles that Levi missed. Then she did it slower so he could see.
Okay, that didn’t look too hard. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d told her that her shawl looked difficult. He’d never been artistic, and the thought of creating something from scratch with nothing but a pair of needles and some yarn seemed like magic to him.
“I didn’t know Jim crocheted,” Indigo said after she’d demonstrated casting on to him a few times.
“Oh yeah.” Levi frowned at the five stitches he’d managed to create. They seemed good, though holding the needles felt weird. “He’s been crocheting for years. He made beer cozies for everyone for Christmas once. I’ve still got mine somewhere.”
“Right.” She watched him laboriously cast on another stitch, though he was finding it faster than the first couple. “I didn’t know you owned the gallery and the general store either.”
A flicker of annoyance arrowed through him, though he immediately locked it down. He’d told Jim when he’d bought the land off him that he’d prefer if the rest of the town didn’t know. He hadn’t wanted to create any feelings of suspicion about outsiders coming in and taking over, not when at the time he’d been such a newcomer himself.
Over the years, people had slowly found out but it had never been a problem, not even with Bill, who was notoriously skeptical about outsiders. It helped that Levi had given responsibility for rent of the building and other details over to a real estate company and had never done anything with the land the building sat on or that stretched up into the bush behind it.
