Sway With Me(31)
She held in a laugh and followed. He flipped up the sink’s handle and his eyes narrowed as he observed the low water pressure. After flipping it to cold, he kneeled and stuck his hand underneath the sink. “Could you switch it to hot for me?”
A tingling sensation began in her chest as she decided how to best accomplish his request. With him on his knees, she could stand behind him and lean forward, straddling him with her thighs, or she could stand next to him on her tip toes and reach. It shouldn’t be this difficult. A rational person would stand beside him. So why did she want to play with fire and straddle him?
She shuffled forward, stopping a couple feet behind him. Despite her overwhelming urges, rationality won out and she moved to stand to his right, going to her toes and reaching to turn the handle to cold. She remained next to him, waiting for his next command, amazed she could smell him over all the other scents in the kitchen.
“You can turn off the water,” he informed her as he got to his feet.
She complied and held onto the counter with the tips of her fingers acting as if it were a barre. Her feet couldn’t help themselves from moving into third position. Darn, he was going to wonder what was making her so nervous.
“What’s the verdict, Mr. Vila?” she teased. “Can you save our sink?”
His gaze flew to the floor to watch her feet. “Of course. My guess is the cold water valve is rusted. It’s a common problem with older pipes. They should have used copper, but instead they used galvanized. Not a terrible thing, but my guess is they charged Uncle Alexander copper prices and pocketed the difference. Like my Dad, he wasn’t exactly handy.”
He hadn’t mentioned much about his family and she wondered why he was broke when he came from a family worth billions of dollars, but she didn’t think now was the appropriate time for discussion and filed it away for later. “If the pipes are rusted, how do we fix them?”
“We’ll need to clean the gunk out,” he explained, bending to pull out a couple of tools from the box. He dropped back to his knees and patted his thighs with his hands. “Come on down here and you can help me fix this.”
She really didn’t want to get this close and personal with him, but she couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse to get herself out of it. Resigned, she told her lady parts to behave and knelt beside him.
“The reason I asked you to turn on the cold water was to check which pipe isn’t working right. The hot’s working fine, so we need to de-gunk the cold pipe.”
“De-gunk? Is that the technical term?” she teased, elbowing him playfully in the ribs.
He raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Now see this part here?” She got on all fours and joined him under the sink to see him pointing at a lever. “This is the cold water supply valve. We need to remove the whole valve and see what the problem is, but chances are, it’s rusted.” He grinned and turned his head toward hers, so close she felt his warm breath on her lips. “Impressed yet?”
She wanted to say something witty, but her mind once again went blank in his presence, so she nodded. At least it was darker down there and he wouldn’t notice her blushing.
He gripped the entire valve with his hand and tried to turn it. Mumbling under his breath, he reached behind him to grab something from the tool box. “Here. This should work.” He held a screwdriver in his hand. “We’ll use this to loosen the valve.” He jammed the screwdriver underneath the silver metal flush against the wall and wiggled it. “There, it’s working. See the—”
Cold water shot out of the hole Ryan created, spraying both of their faces. With a yelp, she pushed back on her heels and tried to get out of the way. Unfortunately, he had the same idea and their heads bumped with an audible thump.
“Shit, I forgot to turn off the main water valve,” he said as they got to their feet.
“How do we stop it?” she asked, thinking about the nursery rhyme in which the boy stuck his thumb in the dyke. Somehow she didn’t think it would work.
“Just—I don’t know—hold a towel to it and I’ll run down to the basement and try to find the main valve.” He rushed out, slipping and sliding along the way.
A towel? She grabbed a handful of rags and held them to the hole. The water spurted down rather than straight, creating a huge puddle of water which ran off the sides of the cabinet and onto the beautiful tile floor. In seconds, the rags soaked through rendering them useless. She gave up and dropped them, taking a gush of water to her chest.
She hoped Ryan knew where to look because the basement had to be more than two thousand square feet and they hadn’t even gone down there yet to investigate. Who knew where to find a main water valve? She hadn’t even heard of such a thing until Ryan mentioned it.