Page 3 of Coach (Heartstrings of Honor #4)

Mateo

M ike and I decided to skip the formal dinner plan—which was just a lie we told ourselves so we didn’t feel bad about sprinting toward the smell of deep-fried everything.

The Decatur Arts and Antique Fair sprawled across a huge open-air park, every inch of grass hidden under rows of tents, most of which were a uniformed shade of off-white with a few red and blue ones sprinkled in for patriotic good measure.

Handmade signs flapped in the breeze. Fairy lights dangled in a crisscross pattern overhead.

The air buzzed with the sound of chatter, laughter, and somewhere, very faintly, the tortured wail of a banjo.

But more importantly?

It smelled like heaven. Angels in chef hats smacked my nose with the scents of grilled meats, cinnamon sugar, fresh kettle corn, and fry oil so potent I was pretty sure my cholesterol spiked just breathing it in.

“This,” Mike declared with hands on his hips as he surveyed the landscape like a general about to lead a charge, “is the America I signed up for.”

“God bless it,” I said reverently. “And I’m Italian. I know food.”

Mike grunted but knew better than to argue.

The ghost of my great-grandmother would’ve haunted his dreams if he’d tried to say anyone’s sense of cooking or culinary delight was stronger than a true-born Italian’s.

It simply wasn’t possible, and everyone—including the French, who thought the culinary world revolved around their “Oui, Chef,” needed to just accept it.

We beelined for the food stalls, ignoring wide-eyed families and stroller-wielding suburbanites displaced along the way.

Mike’s first stop: the food truck with corn dogs the size of my forearm.

His second stop: funnel cakes so big they came with their own gravitational field.

He then made a third stop for the most important item of the night: an adults-only lemonade stand run by two octogenarians who poured vodka into plastic cups like seasoned gay bartenders and tried to upcharge us for “organic ice.” Mike paid the ridiculous fee, grinning like a redheaded moron the whole time.

Loaded down with dripping paper plates and enough napkins to make a small mattress, we wandered through the festival, eating and talking with our mouths full like the classy gentlemen we were.

“Look at that guy,” Mike said around a mouthful of corn dog, nodding toward a man in a fedora and full three-piece suit despite the ninety-degree heat. “Who dresses like that to an outdoor festival?”

“Someone who wants you to know he uses words like ‘bespoke,’” I muttered.

Mike snorted lemonade through his nose. “Bespoke is a fine word, thank you very much.”

“I am Italian. I do not know this word. It means you said something terrible, yes?”

Mike stopped walking and turned, his brows knitted together like one long, really pissed off caterpillar.

I shrugged, careful to keep the grin from my lips. “He bespoke terrible things, and she knew him for the cad he was.”

“That’s not what that word means, and you know it.” Mike nearly dropped his powdered dough. “Besides, any man who uses the word ‘cad’ in a sentence is either caught in a time warp from the 1930s or listens to far too much NPR.”

The guy with the fedora turned just in time for us to catch the NPR pin on his lapel.

My jaw dropped.

Mike’s funnel cake hit the ground.

It took a minute for our laughter to subside enough for us to carry on.

Yes, we’d reverted to teenage boys—and it was beautiful.

We wandered past rows of painters hawking landscapes, portrait artists sketching people with wildly inaccurate noses, and booths full of pottery that looked like it had been thrown together by blindfolded toddlers during an earthquake.

Mike pointed at a particularly terrifying ceramic vase shaped like .

. . I didn’t even know. It might’ve been a swan. Or a deformed bagel.

“You should buy that for your living room,” he said, grinning.

“And put it right next to the cardboard box entertainment center? It would tie the room together.”

He cackled and downed half his vodka lemonade of death.

We were halfway through our second lap around the food tents, arguing about whether or not macrame counted as “real art,” when Mike elbowed me in the ribs.

“Hey,” he said, pointing toward the far row of tents, where a massive banner that read, “Antiques,” billowed in the breeze. “That way.”

I followed his finger.

Sure enough, a whole section stretched out under a massive white canopy where tables were crammed between old tools, worn dressers, and weird bronze statues. As we drew closer, I discovered the furniture smelled like a grandma’s attic.

I dragged my feet a little.

Mike noticed.

“Oh, c’mon,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Don’t get scared, city boy. I promise you won’t catch a case of ‘refined taste’ just by walking through.”

“I am Italian. I was born with refined taste, an impeccable fashion sense, and—as you Americans keep reminding me—an accent that could coax the clothing off any woman who hears it,” I said, lifting my chin to new heights.

“But this . . . feels dangerous. Like next thing you know I’m spending four hundred dollars on a distressed end table that smells like my deepest regret. ”

He smirked. “You spent three grand on a flat screen and still prop it up on a moving box. Trust me—you’ll be fine.”

That was fair.

Brutal.

But fair.

I sighed, wiping powdered sugar off my face, not realizing I’d just left a streak of white across my cheek. “Fine. Lead the way, Mr. Antiques Roadshow.”

The antique section stretched like a treasure hunt designed by someone with a hoarding problem and a very loose grip on reality. I felt like we were walking into an IKEA, and the little old man or woman who handed out the maps at the entrance had taken the day off.

Mike and I weaved through the narrow aisles, dodging old spinning wheels, tarnished lamps, and enough old furniture to furnish a haunted house.

What I hadn’t realized when we’d entered the section was that the antique section might’ve been the most popular—and largest—of all the areas of the fair. The ancient pieces weren’t simply housed beneath one large tent, but a series of large tents, each with their own particular theme.

The first tent housed a mountain of chairs, none of which matched each other, or basic human dignity.

The second was filled with pottery, including one table where a man in a glued-on Dudley Do-Right mustache sold “authentic Civil War-era pottery” that looked like it had been microwaved yesterday.

The presence of his Tupperware-contained lunch made our peevish jokes flow .

Mike pointed at a cracked wooden stool with a sticker on it reading, “MAY HAVE BEEN USED BY LINCOLN HIMSELF!”

“Think I could flip it on eBay?” he whispered, dead serious.

“Only if you throw in a lock of your hair and a certificate of delusion,” I muttered.

We shuffled onward, our arms still sticky from funnel cake sugar and powdered with what I was starting to suspect was actual dust from the Great Depression.

“What’s that?” Mike asked, stopping at a table displaying what looked like a cross between a butter churn and an alien torture device.

I squinted. “Conversation starter?”

He flipped the tag. It read, “Nineteenth-century dental equipment.”

We both recoiled as if it had bitten us. Mike yanked his hand back so fast the seller chuckled, his ancient eyes glinting in the dying daylight.

“Nope,” I said, moving on. “Not going in my house. No, sir.”

We passed dressers with missing drawers, tables with legs that looked one stiff breeze away from collapse, and a robust collection of ceramic frogs. I was oddly drawn to the little green things, but Mike threatened to “take away my gay card” if I so much as touched one.

Somewhere to our left, a vendor with a white mustache the size of a small cat was holding court over a battered oak armoire. “Thomas Jefferson himself owned this piece!” he bellowed to a wide-eyed older couple.

Mike leaned close and stage-whispered, “Fun fact: Thomas Jefferson also owned my grandma’s Tupperware set.”

I snorted, covering my mouth lest lemon vodka try to make a run for it.

Finally, we wandered into a section tucked toward the back of the tent—more serious-looking stuff. It was filled with real wood, heavy pieces. There were no googly-eyed ceramic frogs in sight.

Cabinets. Sideboards. Low dressers. Solid, practical furniture.

I slowed without meaning to.

Mike noticed, grinning around a mouthful of what was left of his third corn dog.

“Ooooh,” he said in a low voice. “Do my eyes deceive me, or is Coach Cardboard looking at a real piece of furniture?”

I shoved him with my elbow. “I’m just looking.”

“You’re lingering,” he singsonged. “That’s step one of falling in love. First lingering. Then commitment. ”

I ignored him and drifted closer to a walnut sideboard with clean lines, heavy legs, and a wide, flat surface that looked perfect for a TV.

It was beat up, sure, needed some love, but it was real wood—not likely to collapse under the weight of a mild breeze—or a seventy-inch TV and my poor life choices.

Mike sidled up beside me, his arms crossed, considering it like we were buying stock instead of furniture.

“This would hold that monstrosity you call a television,” he said, nodding. “And bonus—it won’t fold under pressure like your last relationship.”

I jabbed him in the ribs.

He grunted but grinned wider.

“It looks expensive,” I said, eyeing the worn price tag. “And it needs work.”

I reached out and ran my hand along the top of the sideboard, feeling the nicks and scratches in the wood. It had . . . character. Stories. Probably ghosts, but the good kind.

Maybe.

“At least if you buy this,” Mike added, “you can pretend you’re a real adult instead of some weird bachelor-cryptid hybrid.”

“Say bachelor-cryptid one more time and I’m telling Jessica you’re single and emotionally vulnerable. ”

Mike paled and took a huge bite of his corn dog just to shut himself up.

I smirked and turned back to the sideboard . . .

Then forgot how to breathe.

Because crouched behind the sideboard—hidden until that moment—was a man.

And not just any man.

Him .

And I didn’t even know who he . . . him . . . who the guy was.

He rose, pushing up from where he’d been working, and the movement—God help me—the movement was pure sin.

First came his hands, rough and broad, calloused palms dusted with sawdust, flexing as he gripped the edge of the cabinet.

Then his arms, tanned and muscular, the sleeves of a worn flannel shirt shoved up past strong, work-hardened forearms. His shoulders unfolded next, wide and solid, like he was built for carrying heavy things and not complaining about it.

Flannel strained across his chest in a way that probably violated a few local ordinances.

He moved with a lazy power, like a man who knew what his body could do and didn’t feel the need to show it off.

And then—then—he lifted his head.

Sandy brown hair appeared, just messy enough to make me wonder how often he ran his hands through it.

His jaw was granite, dusted with the kind of stubble you only got from either deliberate rebellion or stubborn genetics.

Above were high cheekbones and a crooked nose that made him look like he might have fought a bear once and only lost slightly.

Then I saw his eyes.

Gray-blue . . . or gunmetal . . . or steel .

. . I couldn’t find the word. His gaze was sharp and cutting beneath dirty-blond brows.

They were the kind of eyes that looked straight through you and made you wonder if you should apologize for existing .

. . or offer to buy whatever he was selling and let him wreck your life.

He didn’t say anything at first, just braced one hand against the sideboard, easy and steady, like he had all the time in the world, like he was the solid thing, not the furniture.

Sunlight from the open side of the tent caught him just right, highlighting the dust motes swirling lazily around him, the curve of his throat, the broad line of his shoulders.

He looked like something out of a dream.

Or a magazine cover.

Or maybe both, if the magazine featured “Hot Guys Who Can Build You a House With Their Bare Hands and Then Sling You Over Their Shoulder and Haul You Over the Threshold.”

“See anything?” he asked, voice low and gravelly enough to leave burn marks across my skin.

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

Not a damn thing.

Speech? Gone.

Brain? Offline.

Functioning as a human being? Absolutely not.

From the corner of my eye, I caught Mike slowly, deliberately, turning his head toward me. I didn’t even have to look at him to know the face he was making, that smug, slow-spreading grin that said, “Oh, you’re screwed. You’re so, so screwed.”

I fought to get my mouth working again, scraping together the shreds of my dignity like confetti after a parade.

“Uh—yeah,” I stammered, because clearly I was a master of seduction. “I mean, the piece. The furniture piece. This thing. The, uh . . . sideboard.”

Mike made a sound next to me that might have been a snort or a dying wheeze.

“Let me know if you have questions. I’m Shane,” the Home Reno God rumbled.

Shane—because his name had to be something solid like that, not, like, a Brad or a Tanner—raised one eyebrow, his mouth twitching like he was used to making people lose basic motor function, then disappeared behind the damn furniture again to fix whatever the fuck might need fixing.

I stood there holding a half-eaten funnel cake and an empty cup of vodka lemon death looking like I needed emergency CPR.

Great.

Fantastic.

This was exactly how I planned this evening.