Her Man Upstairs. Dixie Browning
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you’ve had time to make an impression on him yourself.”
“Will you stop it? It’s nothing like that! He’s supposed to come by to give me an estimate early this morning, and I’ve got to walk Mutt first and get back here—so if you don’t mind, you need to leave now and so do I. Five minutes ago, in fact.”
Sasha grinned, her eyes sparkling like faceted gemstones. Today they were aquamarine. Tomorrow, they might be topaz or sapphire. The woman had never met an artifice she didn’t adore, regardless of the time of day.
Marty, on the other hand, was barely able to find her mouth with a toothbrush, even after she’d stood under the shower for five minutes. A morning person she was not. The time had long since come and gone when she could stay up half the night reading and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the crack of dawn.
“Look, just let me get him on the hook and then you and Faye can have your way with him. All I want is his skills.”
“What else is there?” the redhead murmured.
“His carpentry skills!” Marty all but shouted.
“Shh, calm down, honey—no need to get all excited. You can have him during working hours, but Faylene and I want whatever’s left over for Lily. She needs a little R ’n’ R before the tax rush starts. We tried Egbert on her, but it didn’t work out.”
In the middle of a jaw-cracking yawn, Marty had to laugh. She edged her best friend toward the front door. “No kidding. I wonder why?”
“Hey, when you’re wired for one-ten, you don’t go fooling around with two-twenty. I learned that from husband number two, the electrical engineer.”
“I thought number two was the con man.”
“Aren’t they all?” Sasha called cheerfully over her shoulder.
Marty watched her friend sashay down the flagstone walk hitting about every third flagstone, not even bothering to look where she was going. That was Sasha—stiletto heels, red leggings and faux fur at a quarter of eight on a cold, gray Monday morning, leaving in her wake a trail of Nettie Rosenstein’s Odalisque. She might look purely ornamental, but when she was on a job, she worked harder than any woman Marty knew—including Faylene, Muddy Landing’s unchallenged queen of housecleaning.
As soon as the red Lexus convertible disappeared around the corner, Marty grabbed a coat and a pair of gloves. Cole had said he’d be here between eight-thirty and nine, which barely gave her enough time for Mutt’s half-hour gallop.
“You’ll make it, easy,” she assured herself as she waited for her cold engine to turn over. “Think positive,” that was her motto. It had to be, because any negative thinking might send her into a serious decline.
There were several doughnuts left in the box. Still breathless from the dog walk—or in Mutt’s case, dog gallop—Marty left them on the table as she hurriedly washed the mugs and turned them down in the dish drainer. A moment later she heard the truck pull into the driveway behind her minivan, which meant she’d run out of time. Her hair was a wild, windblown tangle, her nose and cheeks red from the cold, and there was no time to dash upstairs for a quick fix.
Probably just as well. No point in giving him the wrong impression. Inhaling deeply of the air that now smelled only faintly of varnish and burnt spice, she braced herself for bad news. It was called hedging her bets. Deliberately not getting her hopes up. If so-and-so happens, she always reasoned, I can always do such-and-such, and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll just fall back on my contingency plan.
What contingency plan? This was her contingency plan.
She opened the front door before he could knock. “Good morning, have you had breakfast?”
He raised his eyebrows. They were almost, but not quite black. Thick, but not unkempt. “Did I misunderstand? I thought—”
Oh, shoot. She’d told him to come by for breakfast. “The bacon’s ready to pop in the frying pan, the eggs ready to scramble and there’s doughnuts to start with. Toss your coat on the bench or hang it on the rack and come on into the kitchen.”
Oh, my mercy, he looked even better than she remembered! She was no expert, but after two husbands and several near misses, she’d learned a few things about men. For instance, she knew the really handsome ones were about as deep as your average oil slick, having spent a lifetime getting by on their looks. Cole Stevens wasn’t that handsome. Whatever it was that made him stand out from all the men she’d ever met, it was far more potent than a pleasant arrangement of features.
“Do you have a phone where I can reach you if I need to?” she asked.
He gave her his cell phone number and she hastily scratched it down on the bottom of a grocery list. Then he followed her into the kitchen.
“Warming up out there,” he said. It wasn’t.
“Spring’s on the way,” she replied. It wasn’t. “Where are you staying, in case something comes up and I need to reach you?”
“At this place down by the river. Bob Ed’s. I thought I mentioned it yesterday—I’m living aboard my boat at the moment.”
Right. Bob Ed and Faylene had sent him, after all. There’d been a few distractions yesterday, including the man himself.
“Isn’t it cold?”
“Yep.”
And that was the end of that…unless she wanted to invite him to move into her warm, insulated house, which wasn’t even a distant possibility.
Back to business. “How long do you think it will take to tear out what needs tearing out and turn my upstairs hall into a kitchen?” She placed three strips of bacon in a frying pan and turned on the burner. At the first whiff of smoke she remembered to turn on the fan. The cover and batteries for her smoke detector were still on the counter where she’d left them.
Spotting them, Cole replaced the batteries and clicked the cover in place.
Marty smiled her thanks. “I was just getting ready to do that,” she lied.
“As to the tear-down, it shouldn’t take more than a day or two.”
Was that a yes, he’d do it, or an answer to a rhetorical question? Forcing herself not to sound too eager, she said, “That sounds great.”
He stood beside the table staring out the window, his hands tucked halfway into the hip pockets of his jeans as the tantalizing aroma of frying bacon filled the room.
“Forecast is calling for more rain,” he said.
Marty glanced over her shoulder. Oh my, honey, I hate to tell you this, but those jeans are a little overcrowded. “It’ll be February in a few more days, and after that, March—that’s when spring starts for real. Of course, we get those Hatteras Lows that can hang around for days, beating the devil out of any blossom that dares show its face.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he murmured.
Mr. Enigma. The fact that Marty tried not to look at him again didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of him with every cell in her undernourished body.
She took up the bacon and placed the strips on a folded paper towel. Whipping a dab of salsa con queso into the eggs, she tried to focus her mind on the estimate and not on the man. The fact that he’d showed up meant he was ready to talk business. Whether or not she could afford him without taking out a loan remained to be seen.
“Have a seat. D’you need to wash up first? The bathroom’s upstairs—but you know that, of course. Or you can use the sink down here if you’d rather. The hand towel’s clean—or there’s paper.”
Excuse me and my big, blathering mouth, I always talk like this when I’m on the verge of losing my mind.
A few minutes later, Marty popped two slices of bread in the toaster and filled two plates. Cole had excused himself