A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father: A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father. Karen Templeton
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blazes are you doing here?” the well-past-forty redhead barked from behind her desk by the front door.
“Got a divine message I was supposed to come back today,” Tess said, crossing to her side of the one-room office. Dust of postapocalyptic proportions lay thick on her desk.
“You might’ve given us some warning,” Candy—whose fashion philosophy pretty much began and ended with pushup bras, fringe and Aqua Net—said, following. Today’s ensemble included a snuggly sweater, tight jeans and cowboy boots never meant to come anywhere near a horse. “I haven’t even dusted or anything over here in weeks.”
“So I noticed.” Tess set her coffee and roll on top of her printer, then shrugged out of her jacket, hanging it on the back of her chair. “Where’s Suze?”
Who, knowing her partner, would be less than thrilled by her return. Suze wasn’t real big on sharing. Except for rent and utilities.
“On vacation,” Candy said, madly taking a feather duster to shelves and things, stirring up a lot more dust than she was dispatching. “She’ll be back Monday. Oh, my goodness, honey—you got a rash or something on your neck? You’re all red—”
“It’s nothing!” Tess said, only to be suddenly squished against Candy’s copious bazooms.
“God, I missed you,” the older woman whispered, as though somebody might be eavesdropping. Then she let Tess go. “You know I love Suze to death, but she’s…”
“Suze,” Tess said, smiling. Heaven knew why Suze had taken Tess under her wing, mentoring Tess into as good an agent as she was. Or at least had been. But the four-times-married blonde’s piranha-esque tactics were legendary. Woman could probably sell property to the dead. So why hadn’t she been able to unload the house up on the hill?
“So I see she dropped the Coyote Trail listing?” Tess said, settling in front of her computer.
“More like the sellers dropped Suze,” Candy said, butt twitching as she returned to her own desk by the front door. “Birdbrains. They wanna dump it but won’t spend a dime on updates. Suze took a stab at selling it as a fixer-upper, but in this market? No way.”
“So there’s no lockbox?”
Candy’s eyes snapped to hers. “You went up there?”
“Just a little bit ago, yeah. I think it has potential.”
“For the Addams family, maybe.”
Tess smiled. “You got the clients’ contact info?”
Now Candy frowned. Carefully. “Well, sure, it’s still in the system, but honey…you can’t be serious.”
“What can I say? I’m up for a challenge.”
Anything to take her mind off Eli, she thought, catching herself moments before she touched the aforementioned “rash” on her neck. But not before the memory of how that rash got there started up the tingling. Again.
“There’s challenges and then there’s banging your head against a wall. Sugar, I hate to break it to you, but business hasn’t exactly picked up while you were gone. In fact…” She sighed. “Suze said if things didn’t improve by the end of the month she’d have to let me go. So I’m thinking this might not be the best time for you to be thinking about getting back in the groove.”
A feeling like hot steam flashed up the back of Tess’s neck. “Nobody’s letting you go, Candy,” she said, even as she wondered how she planned on making good on her promise. A moment later, she had the contact info on the screen in front of her; five minutes after that, she’d arranged to meet Fred and Gillian Harris at the house the following Monday.
She hung up the phone to see Candy wagging her head. “Honey, you are one serious glutton for punishment.”
Yeah. Tell her about it.
Once inside the house on Monday morning, Tess decided it reminded her of a tired housewife who’d given up the good fight. Unfortunately, houses were not capable of dragging their saggy butts to the gym or touching up their own roots.
According to Fred and Gillian-please-call-me-Gilly, the late-middle-aged, well-heeled sibling duo currently dogging Tess’s heels on her preliminary walk-through, their father had succumbed to Alzheimer’s more than a year before, necessitating their putting him in a care facility. Clearly the poor guy hadn’t been able to keep the place up for some years before that. Still, there was a lot of charm left in the old girl, if you knew what to look for.
How to bring her back to life.
But it hadn’t taken Tess five minutes to size up the pair as the “just make it happen” type. These days, though, making it happen took a bit more effort than simply sticking a For Sale sign out by the road and slapping the place up on the Internet.
“It’s already been on the market more’n a year,” Fred said to Tess’s back as she frowned at the worn, fake brick flooring, the dark, depressing cabinets. Big difference between retro and regressive.
“So I heard,” Tess said with a slight smile as she peered inside the good-size pantry, recoiling at the telltale scent of rodent droppings.
“We really need to sell it,” Gilly said. “For Dad.” The neatly coiffed brunette glanced at her brother, then back at Tess. “The place we’ve got him in…it’s good. And, well, pricey.”
As were, Tess surmised, the gal’s diamond earrings and Fred’s watch. So she wasn’t exactly getting an indigent vibe here, even if she didn’t doubt Charley’s new “home” was costing an arm and a leg. Still, she knew she had to tread very carefully if she wanted this listing. Which she did, so badly she could taste it. To feed her sense of self-worth almost more than her bank account. Not to mention help Candy keep her job.
“I suppose…” Fred exchanged another glance with his sister. “We could lower the asking price…”
“Actually, I think you should raise it. A lot.” As expected, four eyes popped wide open. While Tess had them in stunned mode, she moved in for the kill. “Slow market or no, there’s still some demand for these old adobes—”
“Then—”
“—as long as they’re in tip-top condition,” she said, and both faces fell. Gee, big surprise. “For the most part, people are looking for vacation homes,” she continued, “someplace to spend weekends skiing or escape from the summer heat. Soon as they get the keys, they want to walk through the front door, kick off their shoes off and run a hot bath, not start gutting old kitchens. And cleaning up mouse droppings.”
Gilly’s eyes darted around the kitchen. “You think there’s mice?”
“Oh, I’d stake my life on it. Look,” Tess said, gently, but firmly, when they both made a face, “you gave the fixer-upper plan a year and it didn’t work. Be honest—would you want to live here? In the shape it’s in now?”
Another shared glance. Then the woman said, “What…do you suggest?”
Tapping her pen on her clipboard, Tess looked around, pretending to consider. “I’m not talking major remodel, but the kitchen and bathrooms need some serious updating. New cabinets and countertops, tile floors. And the shelves in the den? Really awful.”
“Dad built those himself,” Gilly said, sighing. “He was so proud.” She looked at the seventies-era harvest gold stove. “And the appliances?”
“Wouldn’t hurt to change them out. Don’t have to be top of the line, but they should at least be from this century.”
The siblings looked at each other, then back at Tess. “What kind of money are we talking?” Fred asked.
“Well…you could easily sink forty, fifty grand into the place—”
“Good God!”
“But