“I don’t think he’s going to help us now,” Addy murmured, laughing silently, too.
Being around her had been easy since the first second I’d met her, but this just proved how easy it’d be. There weren’t many women who’d get drenched and splashed with mud on the first date and find it amusing.
How’d I get so lucky? Actually, I wasn’t going to question that. I was just going to be grateful that it’d happened and hope I didn’t lose her or the easiness she felt around me.
Coughing a couple of times, Remy got our attention back onto him to see he’d choked on air. Karma.
“Sorry,” he gasped, thumping his chest as he turned back toward us. “I just thought I’d say hi to our guest before I headed in to get changed into dry clothes.”
“That’s a terrible cough you’ve got there. You should probably go and do that soon,” I muttered.
“I think we need to do the same thing,” Addy agreed, then looked at me. “Oh, no, what about the picnic?”
“I’ll come up with something. Let’s get you inside and showered before you catch a cold.” I’d just taken the bag with the food in it out of the saddlebag and was holding my hand out for hers when Remy decided to fuck with me one last time.
“Actually, you can’t catch a cold from the rain. It’s a virus, so it needs a host to attach to and be passed on from.”
Before I could call him the anal-dwelling amoeba he was, Addy tugged my hand to get me moving. She did, however, add, “But you can catch a chill and hypothermia if you get too cold, which can lead to you being more vulnerable to viruses and pneumonia.”
Remy’s smug smile dropped. “Well, shit.”
“Maybe that, too,” she shrugged. “I’m sure chills, hypothermia, and pneumonia could give you diarrhea. I’ve never really looked into it.”
Now it was my turn to smirk at him as I waved with my middle finger. The thing with Remy was, he may be quiet and serious most of the time, but he didn’t take himself seriously. If someone teased him or did what Addy had just done, instead of getting pissed or his ego taking over, he took it on the chin. I guess, with siblings and my family around him growing up, he was used to it by now, so he never got offended by things like that.
This was proven when he chuckled and said, “Glad to have you around, Adrienne. Have a good picnic, guys.”
Any smugness and relief I was feeling evaporated as my issue hit me all over again. How the hell was I going to do a picnic when we couldn’t go outside?
I was still mulling it over as I opened the door for her to the mudroom. Because there was an overhang over the doorway, Addy was able to stay out of the rain while she toed her boots off before picking them up and dropping them on the dark mat I kept to the side for my shoes to dry off on until they went on the shelves.
“There are towels right there.” I pointed at a stack of them on one of the shelves. “Don’t worry about getting them dirty. Just dry yourself off so you don’t get sick while I take my boots off.”
She looked unsure about it, but given that they were a dark gray, she finally gave in and went and picked one up.
“Did you design this place, or was it like this when you bought it?”
The question surprised me, and I looked up from where I’d just dropped my boot. “The mudroom?”
“No, the house. It looks like one of those old Tudor style ones in photos with the dark wooden beams inside and out.”
The house itself was painted white, but I’d had the wooden beams painted black on the outside and stained a dark brown on the inside, so I guess she wasn’t wrong with her description.
Moving far enough inside the room to close the door behind me, I explained my history with the property and land while I dried off and directed her to the bathroom so she could take a shower.
“This was the original house that came with the land, but I didn’t like how it looked. It was originally painted black with white beams, and it made it look like House On Haunted Hill. There were also way too many walls inside, making the rooms were tiny. One of the first things I did was to change the colors around outside and to knock the walls down inside, while we got the barn near it renovated into a house for Remy.”
“What was the second thing?”
Her question confused me. “What second thing?”
Addy’s head tilted to the side as I leaned around her to turn the light in the bathroom on. “You said that one of the first things you did was get the colors changed around and knock down walls. What was the second thing?”