Read Flipped! (Spinning Hills Romance 1) Online

Authors: Inés Saint

Tags: #Romantic Comedy, #Contemporary, #Romance, #Fiction, #Forever Love, #Adult, #Bachelor, #Single Woman, #Spinning Hills, #Ohio, #Town History, #Small Town, #Amador Brothers, #Community, #Hammer & Nails, #Renovating Houses, #Perfumer, #Military Brat, #Ramshackle House, #Craftsman Style, #Young Daughter, #Single Mother, #Real Estate Flipper, #Outbid, #Auction, #Family Tradition, #Neighbors, #Optimism, #Fairy Tale Ending, #Dream House, #Quirky, #Line Streets, #Old-Fashion Town, #Settling Down, #Houseful Of Love, #Flipped!

Flipped! (Spinning Hills Romance 1) (11 page)

BOOK: Flipped! (Spinning Hills Romance 1)
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Sam and Dan were looking over some blueprints when Johnny walked in. “Hey,” he called.
“Hey,” both brothers replied without looking up. Dan coughed. Damn. It was starting up again and he’d already downed a bottle of cough syrup.
“Guess what I’m holding?” Johnny asked. They looked up. Johnny had one hand behind his back.
“Cavaliers tickets for tomorrow night’s game,” he revealed. “And I booked us a room just a few blocks away. It’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive, so we should leave before noon.”
Sam swore under his breath. “I’m leaving for Chicago tomorrow morning. Dan was going to handle a few things for me so I wouldn’t get too far behind, but it should be fine. We’re on track. You should go,” he said to Dan.
“You going to see Heather’s parents?” Johnny asked, looking confused.
“Yeah. They’re worried. Heather wants to show them we’re good at this co-parenting stuff.”
Johnny looked at Dan. “I’m sure we can get Marty or Leo to go. Be ready by noon.”
“Sorry, bro.” Talking threw him into a coughing fit. “I’m just not feeling up to it,” Dan said. In truth, he was running behind on legal work and didn’t have the time, but he didn’t want to say so in front of Sam, so he wouldn’t feel bad about throwing more work his way.
“Dude, forget about the permits. I’ll do it on Monday. Go get some rest. You look and sound like crap,” Sam told him.
“We’ll see,” Dan said.
“Well, let me go see who I can round up. Shouldn’t be too hard.” Johnny walked to the door, but turned to look at Dan just before he twisted the knob. “By the way, I heard Holly embarrassed you a little while ago. Just wanted to let you know it wasn’t her fault. She really didn’t know.”
“Did Holly say she embarrassed me?” Dan demanded. “Because she didn’t.” He’d handled the situation well.
Johnny looked like he was sorry he’d opened his mouth. “No—Mom did. She felt bad that you were embarrassed, and I just didn’t want you to get mad at Holly over it.”
“Why would I get mad at Holly over that?” They’d barely spoken, yet Marianne had found a way to say something bad had happened. What a surprise. Dan coughed a few times. It didn’t matter. She’d never get him to say anything back. He had no trouble biting his tongue. He’d been doing it for years.
Johnny shifted from one foot to the other. “Yeah, you’re right. Forget I said anything.”
“So, you never told Holly that Marianne’s not my mom?” Dan asked, curious about that. How close could they be if Holly didn’t know that?
“Why would he? It’s no big deal,” Sam was quick to say.
Dan bit back a smile. The subject always made his brothers uncomfortable. “I know that. You guys can quit acting weird. I was just wondering why it had never come up when you guys seem to be so close. It’s all good.” What they’d never understand was that it really was no big deal to him, either. It didn’t matter to him, but he’d never be able to tell them the things that did.
“You’re the only who’s acting weird. Lay off the cough syrup, will ya?” Johnny tossed back, eying the empty bottle on the desk before turning to leave.
“Wait,” Dan called after him. Johnny looked back. “Holly brought Sam something in a little paper bag and he won’t tell me what it is.”
Sam shot Johnny a warning glance, which Johnny ignored. “Why, it’s Sam’s very own signature scent.” Johnny faked a Southern drawl and female voice, while pretending to fan himself.
“Yeah, well, Johnny has one, too,” Sam was quick to point out.
“But I’m man enough to own it.” Johnny left before Sam could say anything else.
Dan would’ve laughed, except he was confused. He thought she owned a perfume shop. “She makes colognes?”
Sam shuffled some papers. “Yeah, remember how you said we smelled good the other night at the wine bar? Well, now you know why.”
Dan coughed again.
 
Holly dropped Ella off at Grandma Ruby’s for an evening of movies and cookie baking and drove home with mixed feelings about her Friday evening appointment with Dan. She was looking forward to seeing any progress he’d made on the house, but she felt strange about everything she’d learned about him.
She parked in her driveway. The house next door was dark, but Dan’s car was parked on the grass on the side of the house farthest away from her. Was he avoiding her?
She walked over and knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing.
Strange feelings were set aside. They had a deal and he could at least answer the door. She banged just as Dan opened the door. Holly gasped. His clothes were wrinkled, his face was ruddy, his nose nearly purple, and his eyelids drooped over his eyes. She stepped inside. The house was cold. It was early November, but temperatures had dropped to the mid-thirties the last few nights. The house had questionable insulation. “You’re sick! What are you doing in a house with no heat?”
“Your precious Sam and Johnny”—
cough
—“accidentally locked me out”—
sneeze
.
“But do they know you’re staying here?”
Dan sat on a step, pulling the grimy blanket around him. “One’s in Chicago and the other’s in Cleveland. I don’t want to bother them.” He sniffled.
Holly walked past him and into the kitchen, where she noticed two empty bottles of multi-symptom syrup and a bottle of allergy medicine on a makeshift table. “You’re taking allergy meds?”
“I ran out of the other two and it helps with my stuffy nose.”
“No wonder you look out of it.” There was a tiny and inefficient-looking electric heater in one corner. “Why didn’t you just stay at Leo’s or Marty’s? They’d be happy to take you in.”
“Leo and Marty are with Johnny.”
“Then you’re coming with me,” she commanded.
“No!” Dan tried to stand and nearly keeled over.
Holly tried to help him stand, but she could barely support his weight. She touched his forehead.
Hot
. “You’re coming next door with me so I can take your temperature. If it’s over one hundred and two, I’m calling your brothers and taking you to the hospital.”
“You shouldn’t risk your daughter by having me come over,” Dan said, before doubling down in a coughing fit.
“I wouldn’t put my daughter at risk!” He was weak. One little shove would knock him down, but she resisted the temptation. “Ella is spending the night with my grandmother, the way she does every Friday night because, apparently, kids need a break from neurotic parents. But I’m pretty sure she’d be immune to you, it’s likely you have the same flu she had last week. She looked exactly the way you do now, just shorter and cute.”
Holly gathered his jacket and some clothes he’d heaped in a corner and helped him next door. No easy task for a five-foot-three woman.
Dan leaned against a wall, shivering, while Holly opened the sofa bed in front of the TV.
By the time she found a thermometer, he was asleep on the sofa bed and snoring. Both his blanket and her decorative throw were covering him. One hand dangled from the bed, and Stanley was licking his fingers. Dan remained oblivious. “Yuck, Stanley. Do you want to catch the flu, too?” She took his temperature. It was one hundred and one.
Rummaging around her cabinets, all she could find for adults was aspirin. It had been ages since she’d gotten sick, but aspirin would do for the fever, and she’d whip up something natural for his cough. His body was already too full of meds. Kneeling over him, she slipped her arm under his neck, placed the capsule in his mouth, and put a glass of water to his lips.
She made a tiny bit of chamomile tea, thickened it by adding honey and ground ginger, got a spoon, grabbed some vapor rub, and headed back to Dan.
“No, I saw you mixing some stuff ”—
cough
—“and I won’t drink it if”—
cough
—“I don’t know what it is”—
cough, cough
.
“Don’t worry. It’s just one of Grandma Ruby’s old gypsy recipes. It has frog urine, pummeled fish eye, and honey. It’ll make you feel better in no time.”
His lips twitched, and he opened his mouth to say something else. Holly stuck the spoon into his mouth.
“Sneaky,” he muttered in a nasally voice as his eyes fluttered closed again.
Swallowing hard, she unbuttoned the first few buttons of his shirt. She scooped some vapor rub and massaged it onto his hard, warm chest, irritated at how much she enjoyed doing so. The more she massaged, the slower he breathed. Soon he was sound asleep. It was a good thing, because she’d applied vapor rub to areas of his chest that did not need it.
With her initial round of nursing done, she tried to get ahold of Sam and Johnny, but she couldn’t reach either of them. Every twenty minutes, she took Dan’s temperature. An hour later, it was up to one hundred and two, so she called her own physician, who told her to give him another aspirin and wait another hour before taking him to the emergency room.
At least he was no longer coughing, and he was sleeping, but she still hadn’t been able to reach Sam or Johnny.
“Holly,” Dan’s raspy voice called from the sofa. She knelt by his side and placed a cool, wet hand towel to his forehead again. “I know Johnny or Ruby must’ve told you about my mother leaving.” Holly didn’t say anything. His eyes were glazed over. The fever and antihistamines were doing the talking. “I don’t need your pity,” he said.
“I don’t pity you.” She understood why he could be such a jackass at times a bit better, though.
“Why are you taking care of me then?” He looked up at her, half-delirious. “And why are your eyes so bright and so green?”
“Because I’m a lunatic, remember?” She smiled. “We loons all have exceptionally bright eyes.”
Dan sighed. “You’re not a loon. You’re odd, but you’re not a loon.” It seemed like he’d fallen asleep again, but he opened his eyes the moment Holly moved. “And I don’t think Johnny’s in love with you, but I’m not sure.”
Holly laughed. “It’s good to see you’re finally using that sense you so pride yourself on. Of course he’s not in love with me. Johnny needs
guerilleros
to keep the girls away. Why would he be interested in someone who treats him like a pesky little brother?”
Dan’s eyes fluttered and closed. “Because you’re pretty and interesting in a head-scratching sort of way.”
Holly stared down at him. He’d said she was pretty. Her beaten heart stirred at the words. It had been years since anyone had called her pretty. She firmly forgot about the rest of his sentence, because she wasn’t sure what it meant. “You think I’m pretty?”
“So pretty,” he said. So that’s what a sincere compliment felt like. It was too bad a man had to be almost unconscious to flatter her.
He reached out to curl a lock of her hair around his forefinger. It made her feel funny inside. She told herself it was because it was the first time a man who wasn’t her friend had touched her in any way in years. “Soft. I knew it.”
She swallowed hard. “Johnny and I are just friends. Great friends. Johnny’s a feeler, like me.”
“I’m a thinker,” Dan whispered.
“I know.” She checked his forehead again.
“Why don’t you hate me?” he asked.
“Who says I don’t?”
“I can tell you don’t.”
Holly sighed. “I’m not built for hate, and I have a hard time staying angry.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“No, it’s not. It makes you believe things are forgiven, when in reality, they’ve only been forgiven on the surface. Sometimes you need to stay angry enough to set a different course.”
“That makes sense,” said the delirious man.
“Who—who took care of you when you were little and got sick?” she asked before she lost her nerve.
That got a reaction. “All I had to do was stick a spoonful of cough syrup in my mouth and swallow a pill, Holly. No one had to take care of me.”
But who checked your fever’s progress, kissed your forehead, and snuggled beside you? Your father? Marianne?
“I’ve had a good life. I had a great relationship with my dad, and my brothers have always been my best buddies.” He coughed, looked up, and offered her a devilish grin. “Plus I excelled at sports, music, school, and girls. Nothing for you to feel sorry about.” His eyes fluttered closed, the grin still on his face.
He looked ridiculous, bragging and acting all cocky with that nasally, sniffly voice and his eyes glazed over. “Yeah, I can see you’re quite the stud. Now get some sleep.” She patted his hand and tried to get up, but his finger was still wrapped in her hair. The moment she tried to move, he entwined his fingers into a few more locks. Not wanting to disturb him, she climbed into the bed, making sure the only contact between them was his fingers in her hair. She felt like an idiot.
He pulled her close and the funny feeling spread throughout her body. He was right, no reason to feel sorry for him. Except she couldn’t help feeling for the little boy he’d once been, any more than she could help being attracted to the man he was now, even though she didn’t particularly like him. Stanley hopped up, lay down, and curled his little body between them.
 
Nearly two hours later, Dan’s temperature had gone down to ninety-nine. Holly tried his brothers once more and got ahold of Sam. He was five hours away, visiting Heather’s parents in Chicago, and Johnny was at a Cavaliers game in Cleveland. Damn it, what was she supposed to do? Have Dan stay for the night? Ella would be back tomorrow. What would she think? Holly covered her face with her hands.
“I feel better.” Dan sniffled. “I can go back next door.”
She peered at him through her fingers. He was sitting up and looking miserable, but he seemed lucid. “You know you don’t really want to go next door. Admit you don’t want to freeze to death. Ask for my advice on the Craftsman’s kitchen design, and you can stay here.”
“I don’t want to freeze to death.”
“And?”
“And I can’t believe you’re still harping on about the house—” Dan tried to stand up, but it was obvious with every movement that his muscles were in pain. It had to be the flu. He fell back down onto the sofa bed. “What did you have in mind for the kitchen?”
BOOK: Flipped! (Spinning Hills Romance 1)
2.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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