“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Julia told him as she headed down, what used to be a hallway, into the kitchen.
Someone had taken down all of Grandma’s old wallpaper and the top cabinets were gone. It took him a few seconds to process that it wasn’t his Grandma’s house anymore. Julia had the right to make her home look however she chose and it was his job to build it the way she wanted it. His and now his brothers job, too.
“Here, come in here,” she told him after he set the grocery bag on the counter and followed her into the back bedroom.
It wasn’t a back bedroom anymore, though. It was an office—a really tiny office with boxes stacked on the floor, piles of papers on the desk, and he would swear, not one or two, but three computers on the desk. She rummaged around a few things before finding her building plans and handing them to him. She was leaning over, her finger pointed at the papers in his hands when her phone rang from her sweater pocket.
She checked the readout and answered it, leaving the room without a word.
He perused the plans for the first floor that she given him while pretending not to be eavesdropping as she talked on the phone in the kitchen. The plans were great, adding what looked to be beautiful bay windows in the kitchen where the upper cabinets used to be and columns in what used to be that dining room by the hallway. It was the computer-generated renderings that blew his mind. They were so realistic, it took him a moment to realize that they weren’t real photographs, but graphics. The kitchen would get new cabinetry and countertops, but she wanted to keep the old farmhouse sink and wood floors. It was a great design, something his grandmother probably would have loved, too.
She wanted to turn the old dining room, now a stripped-down mess, into her home office. There would be a lot of open space for the desk she had in her plan and the club chairs that sat in front of it. She’d added more columns and other architectural details that would add some major appeal.
He flipped the page and came to the second-floor blueprints and found himself slightly stumped. What were all those cabinets in the middle bedroom? And there was a new doorway to what was his grandmother’s room. What the hell was she planning to do up there? He kept flipping pages, trying to understand just what she had planned.
“It’s non-negotiable, Jonathan,” he heard her say sternly. “They’re employees and my contracts with them will stand through the buyout. I don’t care if you don’t like him, he stays or the deal is off the table. I know Kelsey brought you multiple copies of the proposed contract this morning. Try reading them.”
She was off the phone and quickly tapping the screen with her thumbs when she entered the room. It took her a few seconds to finish and she put her phone on the desk along with the rest of her things. While she’d been out of the room, she’d taken the head wrap off, revealing what looked like a lot, and he meant a lot, of chocolate-brown hair twisted and piled on top of her head, corkscrew curls escaping all over the place.
“Did you get a chance to take a look at the plans? Is it something you think your company could do?”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” he answered distractedly and went back to trying to decipher the plans. “Want to show me the upstairs?”
Julia hesitated, her eyes skittering away.
“What?” he asked.
“I wasn’t planning on having company,” she told him. Her phone sounded with a new notification and she quickly grabbed it off the desk.
He waited patiently until she finished typing and put the phone down again. “This doesn’t count as entertaining. This is work.”
She seemed to contemplate speculatively for a few seconds before she turned on the heel of those amazing boots and made her way back to the stairs in the foyer without another word. He found it funny that she seemed to have no idea that the faster she climbed the stairs ahead of him, the more level her behind became with his face. After the first few steps, it was just right there, within biting distance.
She crested the landing and stopped to wait for him, her hands fidgeting as his work-boots hit the landing. Nothing structurally had changed in the upstairs. The difference was the bomb of girl stuff that had gone off. His grandmother had kept her home neat as a pin. Miss Hawkins obviously didn’t subscribe to the same method of housekeeping. In fact, he wondered if she knew how to pick up anything at all. There were clothes all over every surface of the master bedroom that he could see from the hallway. He saw clothing strewn across the bed, and he was doing his best to ignore the not one, but three sexy bras hanging from the doorknob.
There were four bedrooms upstairs, he knew. His grandmother’s master bedroom on the left, a bedroom at the end of the hallway, and two small bedrooms with a bathroom in the middle on the right side.
“I’d like to go from four bedrooms to two up here, each with their own bathroom,” Julia began. “The master will become the second bedroom and the rest of the upstairs will be combined to make a new master suite.”
Cole held out the plans and pointed to one piece. “And what is this?” he asked.
“That would be the closet,” she told him as she opened the door to the first bedroom and then moved just a bit farther to open the door to the second bedroom, as well.
Both bedrooms were packed with clothes. Hanging racks, shoeboxes, and cardboard boxes all exploding with clothes and shoes and boots. Hatboxes piled on one side of the second bedroom next to the biggest coat rack he’d ever seen with what had to be a hundred scarves. Racks were hanging with garment bags, dry cleaner bags, and dresses. There were tall racks and short racks, both rooms just mazes of stuff.
Cole walked from one door to the next a few times, not to survey how her plans would work from a construction standpoint, but just to marvel at the sheer amount of clothing. He’d literally never seen so many clothes outside a store in his life. In the front bedroom, there had to be at least sixty shoeboxes—but there was also a seven-foot-tall bookcase that had shoes and boots on each shelf too.
For the first time in his life, Cole Williams found himself speechless.
2
He’d sworn he would call her and he hadn’t.
It had been forty-eight hours since she’d walked Cole Williams to her front door and shown him out. She hadn’t heard one word from him since. Okay, so, he’d looked a little dumbstruck when he’d left after she’d shown him the closet of horrors, but he’d said he’d talk to his brothers and they’d do the job. As much as she was salivating over her dream closet, what she really needed was her office finished. She needed space for her paperwork and a clean desk. As it was, she was bringing laptops from room to room and working wherever she could find a flat space to spread out. At the moment, she was spread out on her bed with two computers, a tablet, and her cell phone by her side.
For the first time in her career, she was in the process of selling an incredibly successful company that she had built from the ground up. As great as that felt, she was still unsure about the buyer of the company and his intentions. She spent a lot of time trying to figure out if she was making the right move and completely second-guessing herself. Jonathan Beyer had agreed to most of her terms of sale, but was being a real prick about her condition of keeping all current employees for a minimum of eighteen months. She’d gone to college with Jonathan at MIT and he’d been a spiteful bully then. Nothing had changed. She still hated being in the same room with him, he still rubbed her the wrong way. She still wasn’t sure if she wanted to sell H-Surf to him or not.
She was expecting a call from her assistant, Kelsey, who was due to drive in from the city in the morning, so when her cell rang, she didn’t even look at the caller ID before she answered.
“I need you to remember to bring the Wexler contracts tomorrow and remind me to call Frank about the cars. If I forget to do it tomorrow, I’ll get billed for another three months for using the garage but I want to be fully moved out of the city by then. Oh, and just make a note that I need to get Sandra from Conquer to the apartment sometime next week
with some movers to take the rest of the clothes.”
“Julia?” a voice that was decidedly not Kelsey asked. “I’m hurt. I thought you’d be waiting for my call.” She could just hear his familiar smile through the phone.
“I have been, but since you hadn’t called, I hired someone else.” Her blank statement was met with silence. She’d been told more than once that her jokes tended to fall flat—her tone not able to convey humor in the same way that other people’s could. “It was a joke, Cole.”
“Not a funny one,” he told her. “And I know you didn’t hire anyone else because the word is out about you, lady.”
That made her sit up a bit straighter. “What do you mean? What word?”
“You’re officially the siren of contractors,” he told her candidly. “You suck in poor unsuspecting laborers with your good looks and then cut them down with scathing criticism and, apparently, that huge stick up your ass. Their words, not mine,” he added the last part before she could get a word in.
“The word should have been out about them. They were lazy and didn’t deliver what they promised.”
“So you said.” Cole laughed again, making her believe that he was enjoying the whole exchange. “Anyway, we’re in. I wanted to swing by in the morning with my brothers to show them where you want to start downstairs. Tucker was blown away by those digital mock-up things you did. He asked me a million questions about how you made them. Maybe you could show him tomorrow.”
There was no real way to show him how she’d made them unless he knew computers the way that she did, which she highly doubted. It was a program she’d made herself, that consisted mostly of codes and sequences, that created the image in the end. It suddenly planted an idea that made her wonder if there were any other programs like it on the market and how she could sell it. Maybe that could be the next project on her list.
“Julia?” Cole asked. “You still there?”
“Yes. I was just thinking,” she said distractedly while still ruminating how to build on the program she’d already started and how to make it user-friendly. Would it be better if it was geared toward consumer or professional? She’d have to research the market on programs available now. “Tomorrow sounds fine,” she told him.
She hung up the phone, without hearing if he responded, and got to work.
Okay, Cole thought, so Elliot was pissed. Turns out his brother had been avoiding Julia’s calls on purpose and didn’t want to step foot in their grandmother’s house while she lived there. He’d even used some very creative curse words to describe her character, which Cole had tried to correct. Elliot wasn’t known for his charming and charismatic demeanor by any means, if anything he was remembered for his surly attitude and general lack of smile. He was big and brawny, worked himself to the bone and always got the job done, but he wasn’t interested in smiling while he did it.
He’d refused to attend the morning meeting at Julia’s until he’d seen her plans for the house. When he’d seen the blueprint for the upstairs he’d uttered, “What the hell is that?” At Cole’s descriptive answer, Elliot had shoved the plans aside and stomped out of the room.
Around nine the next morning Cole, Tucker, and Elliot drove to Julia’s. Outside, the house looked just the same as it always had, but the insides would be forever changed in all of their eyes. It wasn’t necessarily Julia’s fault though, as the house had already been through another owner before her. He and his brothers had shared such a close bond with their grandmother that the thought of her house not being hers anymore was still unfathomable some days.
They walked up the steps to the front porch and Cole knocked on the door. When no one answered, he knocked again, just a little louder.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Elliot muttered as he reached past Cole’s head and banged loudly on the door.
Still no one came to the door.
“Hang on,” Cole said, grabbing his cell and dialing Julia’s. Still, she didn’t answer.
“Can I help you?”
He and his brothers turned to see a tall blonde come around the side of the house. She had an armful of stuff—papers and a box—but she moved like they weighed nothing. Hell, maybe they did.
“Yeah, we were supposed to meet Julia Hawkins here this morning about doing some work in the house,” Cole told her.
She laughed as she came onto the porch with them. She was a beautiful woman with blond hair, brown eyes, and a wide smile as she took them all in.
“Did she know you were coming this early?” she asked as she unlocked the door and let them in.
“It’s nine in the morning.” The tone in Elliot’s voice implied that the entire world should be awake at such a time.
The blonde didn’t like his response and seemed to take offense on Julia’s behalf. Her eyes narrowed as she inspected him. “Julia doesn’t always work regular business hours. I’m her assistant, Kelsey.” She angled her head around the staircase. “Julia, the contractors are here!”
Cole wiggled his pinky in his ear, trying to find relief from the ringing.
She turned and smiled at him and Tucker, ignoring Elliot. “I’m the youngest of nine. I’ve learned how to use my outside voice.”
She was tall, maybe five ten, and slender. Her jeans looked worn, but he suspected that she bought them looking that way instead of breaking them in herself.
“Julia, the contractors are here for you!” she screamed again. “Why don’t you get started looking around and I’ll get her down here?”
He and Tucker both watched as she went up the stairs. He would have kept watching had he not gotten a smack on the back of his head. Cole turned to asked his brother why he’d done that.
“Dibs,” Tucker said quietly.
“Can we get to work here?” Elliot hissed from the hallway. “This place is a dump. What the hell has she been doing in here?”
They were conferring over Julia’s plans in what would be her office and making a few notes when Kelsey came back down and headed for the kitchen.
“You guys want coffee?” she yelled. Cole wondered if she had another volume other than really loud.
“Sure.” Tucker smiled in her direction. “We’d love some, thanks, Kelsey.” Then he followed her to the kitchen, Cole trailing slightly behind him.
His brothers were idiots that were happy to be led around by their dicks. Elliot looked around what used to be his grandmother’s dining room and sighed.
An office? Who wanted their front room to be their office? Why did she have to change everything?
When she decided she wasn’t cut out for small town life and headed back to the city, what the hell was he going to do with an office instead of a dining room? Because he knew that’s what was going to happen. She’d get bored and leave, and then he’d finally be able to buy his grandmother’s house from Little Miss Moneybags Julia Hawkins and her last-minute offer. He’d put in a good offer on the house. His realtor had assured him the deal was in the bag. The next thing he knew, someone outbid his offer by tens of thousands of dollars. He couldn’t compete with that and had bowed out, annoyed and angry.
His brother Cole had done nothing but talk about how hot Julia Hawkins was, while Tucker blathered on about her amazing digital constructions. Elliot didn’t care. He didn’t want to be in the house while it was hers. He didn’t want to do the job for her because he didn’t want to change the house. He liked it just the way it was.
He couldn’t even think about the upstairs plan. What he knew as his bedroom was going to become the sitting area of her master closet. She was going to change her clothes smack dab in the middle of his childhood. The good part of his childhood, anyway. He’d been adopted at the age of twelve by the Williams family, and he was loath to let anything from that part of his life go. Anything before that time was worth nothing to him, but his memories with Mary King? They were worth more than some arbitrary amount of money.
Elliot turned when he heard a small scuffle, followed by a thump, and then a femi
nine murmur. She was at the bottom of the stairs, one hand hanging onto the railing while the other scratched her head. Her brown hair was a wild mass of curls and tangles down to her ass making her look kind of like Slash from Guns N Roses, only way hotter. She was in nothing but a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of hot-pink boy-short underwear.
She swayed a little and sat down on the steps, then leaned her head against the newel post and promptly fell back to sleep. He wanted to take a moment to study her face, which was striking even in repose, but Kelsey and his brothers came back into the room, drawn by the sound of her coming down the stairs.
“Oh, good.” Kelsey smiled as she walked toward her with a cup of coffee. “She’s up.”
He, Tucker, and Cole stepped farther back into the dining room—he refused to call it an office—while Kelsey approached Julia.
“Okay, Jules. I’ve got coffee.” She squatted down and shook Julia’s knee. “Jules, come on. Contractors, office, work, ya know. Come on.”
Glazed green eyes opened, sightless and lost. “I thought the zoo was here yesterday,” she told Kelsey, her sleepy voice sending a strange shiver down Elliot’s spine.
He and his brothers looked at each other in confusion at her comment.
“That’s great,” Kelsey told her, placating her as she pushed the coffee into Julia’s hand. “Drink that.”
Julia weakly took the cup and gulped a few sips down before resting the mug on her knee. “The cotton candy was yellow.”
“That sounds gross.” Kelsey grimaced before she raised her voice again. “Julia! Wake up.”
Elliot, Tucker, and Cole watched as she blinked a few times, the haze in her bright green eyes clearing a little.
“Ah, there you are,” Kelsey crooned. “The contractors are here to go over your plans with you.”
Elliot: The Williams Brothers Page 2