I’m about to pick up my hammer when I notice movement at my back. I turn to find June standing a few feet away, staring up at the half-finished gazebo.

This time, she’s got the thick gray blanket wrapped around her chest. The good news is that only her toned legs and her shoulders are exposed. The bad news is that those tiny regions of bare skin are as distracting as the rest of her.

“Did you build this yourself?” she asks as I force my eyes back to the work at hand.

I grunt a yes without looking at her.

Her eyes flicker to my bare, sweaty chest before she moves them pointedly back to the structure. “It’s really good.”

“I know.”

I can practically hear the sound of her rolling her eyes. Sighing, she circles the gazebo slowly, eyeing each detail with scrutiny. She stops at the lattice walls that rise up from the wooden base I built on my last trip here.

“You did all this yourself?” she asks. “Without any help?”

“Don’t sound so shocked. I used to do a lot of carpentry work around some of the motels my father used to own.”

“The mighty Kolya Uvarov, getting his own two hands dirty? I never thought I’d see the day.”

“You’re seeing it.”

She chuckles, but it fades into a quiet, contemplative look after a moment. I line up a nail and drive it home. The thwack of it is satisfying in a way few other things in this life ever are.

“What kinds of things did you build?”

“Anything that needed building.”

“Gee, thanks,” she scoffs. “You really paint a vivid picture. As good with your words as you are with your hands, anyone ever tell you that?”

“No.” I sigh and lay my hammer down on my lap. Fixing her with a stern gaze, I start rattling things off. “Busted door frames, nightstands, that kind of thing at first. I got better. Started building from scratch after a while. Anything that would distract me worked.”

She knows exactly what I’m talking about, but she asks anyway. “Distract you from what?”

“From everything going on in the rooms above,” I tell her. “Adrian shut it out with his piano. I preferred to whack things with a hammer.”

“You played the piano, too, didn’t you?” June points out.

“It’s a hard instrument to share. Adrian needed it more than I did.”

She shuffles awkwardly on her feet, her eyes never leaving my face for too long. She seems distracted by the fact that I’m still shirtless. Which is exactly why I stay that way.

Two of us can play that game.

Slowly, she mounts the two steps up to the center of the gazebo and cranes her neck back to admire the smoothly fitted mahogany planks that form the underside of the roof. “These are beautiful.”

I nod. “I’ll have some ivy placed around the structure, so that it can weave in and out of the latticework.”