Embarrassed, I shook my head. “Of course not.” I swallowed and laid a hand on the windowsill, pointedly ignoring his cupped fingers. “I can do it myself.”

“Oh, you can?” He lifted an incredulous eyebrow. “Excuse me. I thought you might need a little boost.”

“No, no.” I shook my head. “I’ve got this.”

“All righty, then.” He straightened and stepped back, watching as I struggled to lift myself through the window, which turned out to be higher from the ground than I’d thought. After several unsuccessful attempts to push myself over the sill, I finally turned to look at him.

“Perhaps,” I said, blushing, “I might need a little help.”

“Yeah,” he said, pushing himself from the side of the building where he’d been leaning, watching my struggles with some amusement. “I was wondering when you were going to ask. What’s the trouble, exactly? You don’t trust me not to drop you? Or you’re afraid of falling even more deeply and irrevocably in love with me than you already are?”

My blush grew even deeper as I glared at him.

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not in the habit of having to rely on tool jockeys who drink beer for breakfast and are too lazy to think up individual names for their dogs.”

He hooted. “Ouch! Lazy? Is that really how you think of me?”

“It is.” I wasn’t going to mention how precisely he’d nailed it—that I’d already lost control of myself around him and kissed him twice. I didn’t want to go for a third time, much less lose my heart to him, even though I was starting to worry it might be too late. “Look, can we talk about my trust issues later? For now I just need to get in there.”

“No problem.” He cupped his fingers again for me to slip my foot into. “You’ve got other issues, too, just to let you know, but we’ll let those slide for now.”

I hesitated before laying a hand on his shoulder. “What?”

“Well, I’ve just found that people are rarely comfortable admitting their real problems during self-analysis.”

He straightened up so I was face-to-face with him. “Oh, really?”

“Really. So it isn’t only that you don’t trust me. It’s something else.” I found myself staring at his lips. They looked so highly kissable. “Don’t worry, though. We’ll get to it, eventually.”

I shook my head. Because of course he was right. It was myself that I didn’t trust . . . around him.

But I was never going to admit that.

“Could we just—” I pointed at the window behind him.

“Oh, sure,” he said.

That’s when he lifted me high enough for me to catch the edge of the windowsill.

“Got it?” he asked.

“Got it.”

I was preparing to push myself through the small opening, not realizing that he had a similar intention—of helping me through it with a push of his own.

“Ow!”

My landing wasn’t soft. The Petroviches kept a wicker laundry basket under their bathroom window. I pretty much destroyed it.

“You all right?” Drew called from beneath the window, having heard the crunch of wicker and my squeal as the wicker wands stabbed me in the right calf. “What was that?”

“Nothing.” I bent to investigate the wound. No blood had been drawn, but the scrape was going to be tender for a while—my first hurricane-inflicted wound. “Just give me a warning next time, okay?”

“Sorry about that.”

I climbed to my feet. “Go around front, I’ll unlock the front door for you.”

“Got it.”

The apartment was dark and dank thanks to the rest of the windows being boarded up and there not being any power. But I didn’t have to see Sonny’s guinea pigs to know that they were alive. I could hear them squeaking excitedly from the other room, having overheard my not-so-graceful entrance into the apartment.

After unlocking the front door for Drew, I followed the sounds into Sonny’s bedroom, where I found the two little rodents—R2-D2, a black-and-white shorthaired, and C-3P0, a longhaired golden “Teddy”—darting around their cage, covered in shavings. The bedding had obviously become soaked thanks to the flood and was now sticking to the poor animals’ fur.

“Oh, you poor things!” I looked around Sonny’s room for something I could put the guinea pigs in in order to get them out of the mess. Fortunately Sonny had left the animals’ traveling case on his bed, along with a bag of the pellets they were supposed to eat.

“Well, boys,” I said to the guinea pigs as they continued to poke their little toes and noses through the mesh of their cage at me, grunting and squealing, almost as if they were trying to describe to me what they’d been through since Sonny had been gone. “Looks like you’re going home with me.”

“Huh.” Drew was standing in the doorway with a beer in one hand—one that he’d evidently found in Lydia’s refrigerator—looking down on the scene with an expression of mild disbelief on his face. I wasn’t sure which he found most incredible, the fact that I was lifting a trembling, grunting R2-D2 into the traveling case, or that he was in the situation at all.

“What,” he asked, “are you doing with that rat?”

“They’re guinea pigs, not rats.”

“If you say so. What are you doing to them?”

“Water leaked in here and got the bedding of their cage all wet. Now it’s sticking to their fur. They’re going to need a bath, I think.”

“Are you even supposed to bathe guinea pigs?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you supposed to take beers out of the refrigerators of people you don’t even know?”

He glanced down at the beer in his hand. “Hey, if I don’t drink it, it’s just going to get hot and explode in there. I’m doing your friend a favor. You want one?”

“No,” I said. “I’m taking these guinea pigs back to your aunt’s house, and then I’ll see if I can reach Sonny’s mom and find out whether or not you’re supposed to give guinea pigs a bath.”

“Well.” Drew eyed the animal carrier. “Lu’s going to love that.”

“I think she will, actually. She likes animals. She’s already taken in a pair of rabbits, a parrot, and my cat. Two little guinea pigs aren’t going to make a difference.”

He let out a laugh. “Whatever you say.”

“Well, I can’t leave them here,” I said defensively. “There’s no power. It must be ninety degrees in here. It stinks, and it’s filthy.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you, ergo the beer. But . . .”

I glared at him. “Listen, if you don’t like it, you can leave. I’m sure there must be more important things for you to be doing right now. Aren’t you supposed to be a carpenter? Shouldn’t you be out making emergency repairs on someone’s house?”

“Probably,” he said, a slow grin beginning to creep across his handsome face. “Too bad there’s no cell service, so no one can reach me.”

“Fine. Well, if you want I can drop you back at your house first, before I go to your aunt’s, so you won’t have to face her if you’re so afraid of what you think she’s going to say if I show up there with two so-called rats.”