Her Man Upstairs. Dixie Browning
despite appearances, he had a fairly decent investment income considering his simplified lifestyle. But the market tended to be schizophrenic and, as someone once said, a boat was a hole in the water into which the owner poured money.
“You said that was your first reason. What else? Is there a second reason?”
A second reason. If he said “instinct,” she was going to think he was as big a nutcase as she was. As to that, the jury was still out, but until he had more to go on he’d just as soon not have to defend himself.
It had been instinct that had first tipped him off that Weyrich was dirty. Long before that, it had been instinct that told him Paula was bored with their marriage and looking for bigger fish to fry. Frying them, for all he knew. By that time it had no longer been worth the effort to find out.
“It just struck me as the thing to do,” he said finally. “Small town, small job—good place to get my bearings again.”
“Again?”
She might look like soft, but the lady was a piranha—big eyes, tousled hair and all. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, let’s leave my bearings out of this and get on with the business at hand. Do you need a job done, or don’t you?”
She took a deep breath, hinting at what lay hidden by a baggy turtleneck sweater that showed signs of age. And he wasn’t even a breast man. If anything, he was an eye man, eyes being the window on the soul.
The window on the soul?
Clear case of too much fried food and too much time on his hands.
“It’s a remodeling job,” she explained. “I doubt if it’ll take very long. At least I hope not. I want my downstairs moved upstairs so I can reopen my bookstore downstairs.”
Cole thought for a minute, then nodded slowly as a couple of things clicked into place. “The bookshelves you were painting in your garage.” The smell still lingered, a combination of burnt cinnamon, fresh urethane and paint thinner—but either his olfactory sense was numbed or the stench was starting to fade.
She nodded. “I thought I’d better refinish them now so that they’ll be thoroughly dry by the time my upstairs gets finished so I can move my downstairs upstairs and move the shelves into these two rooms and start restocking.”
Okay. He had the general picture now. “You want to show me what you have in mind?” He hadn’t committed himself to anything.
Marty rubbed her right thumb and forefinger together as she considered whether to show him her drawings first or take him upstairs. She’d burned off her fingerprints, which might come in handy in case she couldn’t get her bookstore reopened in time and was forced to turn to a life of crime.
“Come on, I’ll show you upstairs first so you’ll understand my drawings better. You might as well know, you’re not the first builder to apply for the job. The others turned it down.”
“Any particular reason?” he asked.
Conscious of him just behind her, she made a serious effort not to move her hips any more than she had to. Too much stress was obviously affecting her brain. Just because she’d noticed practically everything about him, from his tarnished brass eyes to the worn areas of his jeans to the way they hugged his quads and glutes and…well, whatever—that didn’t mean he was aware of her in any physical sense.
Sasha would have had a field day if she could’ve tuned in on Marty’s thoughts. Her friend was always after her to add a little more vitamin S to her diet. Vitamin sex. “Maybe then,” she was fond of saying, “you’d get a decent night’s sleep and not be a zombie until noon.”
She wasn’t that bad. Just because she wasn’t a morning person—
He’d asked her a question. He was waiting for an answer. Kick in, brain—it’s four-thirty in the afternoon! “Reason why they didn’t work out? Well, one never showed up, and the next two, once they found out what I wanted done, told me I was wasting their time. Oh, and one of them said he could only work on weekends because the rest of the time he worked with a building crew at Nags Head.” She hadn’t yet mentioned the time constraints, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t a major job, after all. Not like starting from scratch and building a house.
“So—here it is.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the upstairs hall and the spare bedroom, which she planned to move into so that the larger bedroom could become her living room.
She had painted up here less than two years ago. She’d chosen yellow with white trim on the theory that sunshine colors would help kick-start her brain when she stumbled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom early in the morning.
While he looked around, tapping on walls, studying the ceiling, Marty told herself that it would get done. It was going to work. Her life was not in free fall—it only felt that way because time was wasting. She kept racing her engines but not getting anywhere.
Following him around, she tried not to get her hopes up—tried not to be distracted by the fact that he smelled like leather and something spicy and resinous, and that he looked like—
Well, never mind what he looked like. That had nothing to do with anything except that her social life had been seriously neglected for too long.
They were standing beside the closet she wanted taken out and turned into part of a new kitchen when he said, “You want to show me your drawings now?”
There was plenty of room. It was only her imagination that made it feel as if the walls were shrinking, pushing them closer together. Breathlessly, she said, “Come on, then, but remember, I’m not an architect. You can get the general idea, though.” Turning away from her yellow walls, she was aware again of how early it grew dark in late January—especially on cloudy days. “I’ll make us some coffee,” she said. Heck, she’d cook him a five-course dinner if that was what it took to get him to agree.
Marty saw him glance into the spare bedroom where she’d stored dozens of boxes of paperback books, plus the bulletin boards where she used to tack up cover flats, bookmarks and autographed photos. She hated clutter, always had, and now she was wallowing in the stuff. As Faylene, the housekeeper she could no longer afford, would have said, “You buttered your bread, now lie in it.”
Hmm…alone, or with company?
Two
“They’re there on the coffee table,” Marty said, leaving Cole to look over her plans while she started a pot of coffee. Too late to wish she’d taken time while they were upstairs to pull her hair back with a scrunchy and put on some shoes—and maybe add a dab of her new tinted, coconut-flavored lip balm. Not that she was vain, but darn it, her feet were cold.
Okay, so he was attractive. He wasn’t all that attractive. Not that she had a type, but if she did, he wasn’t it. She’d been married at eighteen to Alan, whose mother had left him this house. Whatever she’d seen in him hadn’t lasted much beyond the honeymoon, but as she’d desperately wanted a family, she’d stayed with him. After he’d been diagnosed with MS, leaving was out of the question.
A few years after Alan died she had gotten married again, this time to Beau Conrad, a smooth talker from a wealthy Virginia family—F.F.V., U.D.C. and D.A.R.—all the proper initials. Only, as it turned out, Beau was the black sheep of the family.
Looking back, she could truthfully say that both her husbands had been far handsomer than Cole Stevens. So what was so intriguing about shabby clothes, shaggy hair, and features that could best be described as rugged? Was she all that starved for masculine attention?
Evidently she was. When she’d first mentioned her building plans, Sasha had offered to buy her a stud-finder. Four-times-divorced Sasha, ever the optimist. It had taken Marty several minutes to realize that her friend wasn’t talking about one of those gadgets you used to find a safe place to hammer a nail into a wall.
“You see what I mean, don’t you?”