I shook my head. “No. Definitely no.”

“No?” He glanced at me.

“No. I can’t let you fix my sink. That’s…just no.”

He smiled over the steering wheel. “You’d rather let a stranger do it? You, who wouldn’t even tell me where you lived until your kitchen was an inch deep in water?” He gave me a comical wide-eyed look and then turned back to the road with a grin.

I narrowed my eyes.

“Also, bonus, if you let me do it, Tucker stays over longer.” He smirked, knowing he had me.

“Fine,” I said, putting my mouth into my palm, not wanting him to see my smile.

“Anything else that needs fixing?” he asked.

“The whole house,” I mumbled.

“It’s not in good shape?”

The house had begun to feel like a sandcastle at high tide. It was crumbling around me.

“No. When Brandon and I bought it, he was going to fix it up. He was good at that stuff…” I said, trailing off, not knowing if I should be talking about my dead fiancé on a date. But Jason’s expression stayed neutral.

“Give me a list. I’ll do it,” he said, turning onto Roscoe Boulevard.

I smiled. “You’re a handyman in addition to being Jaxon Waters?”

“We’re self-sufficient in Ely. I could build you a whole new house if you wanted. So what do you need done?”

“Jason…”

“What? I like fixing things. Besides, my dog likes you. I bet he’d like to come over. Come to think of it, I like you and I’d like to come over too.”

His unrelenting flirting was going to give me a heart attack. But I couldn’t really argue with his reasoning. The pipe did need fixing. Josh did two day shifts at the station, so if he had work tomorrow that would leave me without a kitchen sink until at least Wednesday—that was provided he dropped everything on his day off to come help me, which I hated. And frankly, I couldn’t afford to pay for a professional to do it. I already lived paycheck to paycheck.

Brandon’s fire station had set up a GoFundMe for me after Brandon died. That had helped bridge the gap until I was up to working again. I made okay money doing astronaut cats from the volume alone—I’d always been fast. But the ancient water heater just needed replacing and the month before that, the air-conditioning unit broke. Now my kitchen had flooded, and I wasn’t sure if the floors were going to survive the damage. If I had to pay for a new kitchen floor, I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage this month.

I should have sold the house after Brandon died. I couldn’t afford it on a single income. It was too big for me and too broken. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, the same way I couldn’t bring myself to empty his closet or clean out the garage.

“Okay. But can I pay for your time?” I asked. “And I’ll obviously cover the materials.”

“I don’t want you to pay me. Oh, which reminds me.” He reached across me to open the glove box. His arm brushed my knee, and the sides of his lips twitched. He handed me an envelope. “Here. The money for watching Tucker. I know I don’t have your receipts yet, but I guesstimated. And I added a reward.”

I held the envelope and looked at it. I needed what was in it. But now taking it felt weird. It was one thing to accept it from a stranger whose dog I was watching, a man who was taking Tucker away from me. That was a business arrangement. It was something else entirely to accept money from a guy I was kind of dating and who wanted to help me with repairs on my house.

I handed it back to him. “Why don’t you keep this? You can fix the sink and we’ll call it even.”

He didn’t reach for it. “I insist you take it. It’s nonnegotiable.” Something final in his voice told me the discussion was over. “As for materials, you have a lot of tools and parts in the garage. I doubt I’ll need much else. I can get a lot done with what’s already there.”

I didn’t reply. He parked the truck in the Home Depot lot and put on the brake. “We’re here.”

“You don’t think this is a little weird? You fixing my sink?”

“The weird thing would be me not fixing it knowing that I can. Come on,” he said, opening his door. “I wanna get my hands on your pipes.”

*

Jason went through Home Depot with a surgical accuracy that told me he knew his way around a home improvement project. At the self-checkout stand, he wouldn’t let me pay. “Part of our date.”

“No, it’s not,” I objected, trying to swipe the items from him.

He pivoted and held everything over his head, out of my reach. I crossed my arms and glared at him. His blue eyes twinkled, and I marveled for the hundredth time at how handsome he was. His pictures had been great, but he was so much better set in motion.

“If I’d taken you to a carnival and won you a stuffed animal, that would be part of the date, right? Or if I’d brought flowers or paid for a movie?”

“Yes. But that’s typical date stuff. Buying me parts to fix my sink isn’t.”

“So you want me to be typical?” He grinned.

He had this way of backing me into my own corners. He turned his back on me and continued his purchase, shooting a victorious look over his shoulder as the receipt printed out.