Clearing his throat to break the silence, he shifted and glanced out the window.
“What do you say we start painting the walls?” he offered.
She glanced back at the room and nodded.
Two hours later, they both stood and looked at the perfectly painted sky-blue room. The new color, mixed with the dark color of the wood, completely changed the room.
“It’s hard to believe that I’m standing in the same room,” Kara said. “I can’t thank you enough for helping out.”
He turned to her and reached up to brush a drop of blue paint from her face. He heard her breath catch when he moved closer. He hadn’t counted on getting caught up in her eyes or the immense sudden desire to kiss her.
Her body swayed to his as her eyes moved down to gaze at his lips. He did the same and held in a groan at the thought of what she would taste like.
They both glanced towards the windows when they heard a car outside.
Seeing the old truck pull into the parking spot out front, he figured now was a perfect time to head out and grab the doors for the cabinets.
“I’ll head on over to my place and grab the cabinet doors.” He started to turn and then stopped. “I can be back after lunch with some other paint and the doors if you want to continue working in there.”
Her smile was quick. “I’d love that.” She followed him out to the front porch where her sister was unloading items from the back of the truck. “Thanks again for your help,” she called after him brightly.
“Sure thing.” He nodded to Robin as he passed her and headed to his truck.
He hadn’t wanted to stick around long when he’d spotted Robin show up. He knew how sisters could be and figured it was better not be around to witness how Kara explained the destruction they’d caused in the place. Then again, with the new paint and the hardwood floors exposed, he knew it was just a matter of cleaning things up and putting it all back together before it would look amazing.
Driving back to the house, he decided to sidestep explaining to his mother why he’d skipped out on helping Jacob and headed directly to the storage barn where he’d stored all the old cupboards and all the other things his mother had made him haul out of the house over the past year.
He knew that at one point his mother had run her family antique shop in town. It could easily explain why his mother was always holding onto old furniture.
Stepping into the dim barn, he was slightly surprised to see his father rummaging through the drawers of an old dresser they’d moved out of the house less than a month ago.
Walking over, he waited until his father noticed him standing off to the side just in the corner view of his eye.
“What are you doing here?” his father used sign language to ask him.
“I’m taking the old cupboard doors to Kara’s and maybe the buckets of French white paint mom decided was too bright for her office.”
His father’s dark eyebrows shot up as a slow smile formed on his lips. “Avoiding helping your brother out?”
Iian Jordan wasn’t a difficult man to read. It probably helped that Conner was pretty much the spitting image of his old man and saw the same expressions in the mirror each day. The main difference was Conner’s curly hair. Jacob had gotten his father’s straight locks while Conner took a little more after his uncle Todd.
Conner rolled his eyes. “Don’t start on me,” he warned. His father’s smile grew as he tilted his head slightly. “Mom has already complained that I’m not up helping Jacob. I think she wants me to be the peacekeeper between him and Rose.”
His father’s laughter echoed in the barn.
“Those two have been dancing around one another for years,” his father signed then sighed heavily. “Help me find something. I don’t know why your mom didn’t clean out all the drawers of this old thing before we hauled it out here.”
“What are you looking for?”
“An old family photo book,” he signed before kneeling and digging into a drawer. Conner took another drawer and scoured through the paperwork until he found a black leather-bound photo book underneath.
He tapped his father on the shoulder. “Is this what you wanted?”
He’d expected his father to look relieved, but he just nodded slightly.
“Go on, take a look.” His nodded to the thing. “It was your grandfather’s.” His father leaned against the hutch and waited as Conner opened the book.
He couldn’t remember seeing the thing before today, but some of the pictures inside were as familiar as his own face.
Larger prints of some of the images hung in the upstairs hallway in the house he’d grown up in. The house his great-grandfather had built when he’d moved to Pride with his young family and opened his restaurant, the Golden Oar.
Seeing several generations of men who shared the same features, the same eyes, as Conner had never really affected him. Until now. There were some images here he’d never seen before, and he couldn’t help thinking about who the men in the pictures really were. What had their hopes and dreams been? Did they have the lives they’d wanted? Were they really in as much love as their smiles showed?
“That’s George, my dad,” his father said out loud, tapping the image Conner had been looking down at. “And Karna, my mother. The picture must have been taken just before I was born.”
His father didn’t speak often, but Conner had grown up knowing his voice well enough. He usually refrained from using it in front of anyone other than family.
Conner stared down at the couple. His grandmother was easily half the age of her husband. He knew that George, his grandfather, had been married once before, to his uncle Todd’s mother, who was still alive and living somewhere in California. He’d heard his uncle complaining several years back how the woman kept coming back to him to try and get money, but as far as he knew, the woman had never wanted to step into the role of mother or grandmother.
He knew the stories of Karna Jordan. How she’d met his grandfather on one of his trips to Norway and had fallen head over heels with the man, leaving everything behind to start a family. She’d taken Todd in and had been the first mother figure he’d ever known. She and his grandfather had several years of blissful marriage before she’d died in childbirth, giving her life for that of his father’s. Just like George Jordan had on Iian’s eighteenth birthday when he’d thrown Iian into a dinghy just as lightning had hit him and his boat.
“You look more like him than I do,” his father said with a low sigh. “You know, I could have sworn I saw him once.”
Conner jerked around and looked into his father’s eyes to see if he was joking. His brother, Jacob, took after their father in that area. There wasn’t a time he couldn’t remember the two of them playing practical jokes on one another, or worse, on him.
But this time, Iian Jordan’s eyes were filled with anything but laughter.
“When? Where?” he asked clearly so his father could read his lips, since he was still holding the photo book.
“In the hallway just outside our bedroom. The night I realized I didn’t want to live without your mother.” His father’s lips twitched, then turned into a smile. “Your uncle found me face down, naked on the floor a few hours later.” He chuckled.