by Arlene James
Matt might be oblivious to his own sister’s distress, but he picked up on the other man’s verb tense correctly. “Oh, I’m sure sorry for your loss.”
Chey looked up sharply, shocked that she had almost missed the implication herself. To her surprise, naked pain swam the surface of Brodie’s blue eyes. He nodded and murmured, “Thank you. I miss him.” He renewed his smile. “You’re lucky, you Simmonses, having so much family.”
“Yeah, we sure do,” Matt agreed heartily. “Whenever you need somethin’ you got to go no further than family. You take Mary, now, she’s got all the help she needs right at her fingertips. Frank, that’s Francis Delaney, the eldest—me and him, we got the same birthday, May 6, only seven years apart. Well, anyway, Frank, he’s the mason. Anything you do with a brick or a stone or a tile, that’s him. Now, Thomas—that’s Thomas Ducian, not Tommy, his son, or Tom Beltran, the brother-in-law, husband to May, who’s the third oldest—anyway, Thomas, he’s the electrician. We work together a lot, me and Thomas.” Brodie nodded as if he was actually following all this, while Chey grimaced inwardly and tried to distract Matt with a shake of her head.
“Anthony Sherman,” Matt went on heedlessly. “We call him Anthony on account of Thomas, he’s got a boy named Tony, you know, after Anthony, and Anthony, he’s got his own boy. We call him Tony-Tony, on account of him being a Tony junior.”
“Matt,” Chey put in quickly. “I’m sure Mr. Todd has a lot to do and is uninterested in our family peculiarities.”
“No, no,” Brodie interrupted. He looked at Matt. “Go on, please. It’s fascinating.”
Matt stroked his lean, square chin. “Well, let’s see, Anthony, he’s a carpenter, a genius with them tools of his. An artist, that’s what he is. He’n build furniture as fine as anything you can find in any store, old or new.”
“A talented family,” Brodie said, smiling down at Chey, who was tapping her toe impatiently.
“Bay, that’s Bailey Michael,” Matt rattled on, “his thing is floors. You know, carpet and vinyl and them beautiful inlaid woods and all. And Johnny—he’s the baby of us all—Johnny is roofs, any kind of roofs. Clay, shakes, shingles, tin, even gravel, it don’t matter, Johnny does ’em all.” Matt shuddered. “Me, I got no tolerance for heights. Give me a cubbyhole anytime.”
Brodie peered into the crawl space and shook his head. “Too claustrophobic for me.”
Matt just grinned. “Yeah, that’s what Johnny says.” He stroked his chin again and went back to his original subject matter. “I almost forgot the brothers-in-law.” Chey rolled her eyes and huffed an impatient breath, but Matt kept talking, sure of his audience. “Tom Beltran, he’s appliances. Got a shop over in Metairie. And Sylvester Gilroy—he’s husband to Kay, the middle sister—now, he’s foundations and concrete.” He glanced down at Chey, a puzzled look on his face. “Who’m I leavin’ out there, Mary?”
“Carter,” she answered with a resigned sigh.
Matt snapped his finger. “Carter Dupre! That’s Fay’s husband.” He grinned unrepentantly. “They’re expectin’ the nex’ one most anytime now. And Carter, he’s not in any of the building trades, you know. He’s a car mechanic, and not one of them shade-tree boys, neither. Real handy to have around, Carter.”
Brodie laughed. “I can imagine. Sounds like the whole family’s handy.”
Matt nodded proudly. “Yeah, even Mary. She can’t just stay home an’ have babies like the rest of the gals. She’s gotta go crawlin’ in dusty old holes and plannin’ everything down to the millisecond.”
He patted her on the cheek as he spoke, failing to see, apparently, that she was steaming. Stay home and have babies like the rest of the gals, indeed!
“I think you’ve said enough, Matt,” she said through a smile that exposed her clamped teeth.
He just chuckled and dragged her to his side in a hug, saying to Brodie, “She’ll do you a good job. Yessir, you can trust our Mary. Nothing but the best for her.”
Brodie slid his hands into the pockets of his pleated chinos and fastened heated eyes on her. “That’s what I’m counting on,” he said smoothly. “That’s exactly what I’m counting on.”
Arrogant flirt. Chey narrowed her eyes at him, letting him know that she didn’t consider him the best at anything, certainly not what he was implying. He was implying that he was the best at making love, wasn’t he? Or was it just that she couldn’t get the idea out of her mind? She shook her head, the ponytail at the nape of her neck flopping back and forth between her shoulder blades.
“Uh, I need,” she said, to cover her actions, “that written estimate today.”
Matt wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get right on it.” He looked at Brodie and explained, “Have to do this myself. My Gail, she’ll type it up for me and get one of the kids to take it on over, but she can’t do the figures. Got no head for numbers. Not that I mind. You know?” He winked at Brodie and added wryly, “Her figure’s okay without the numbers.”
Brodie laughed in understanding, and Matt thumped Chey on the tip of her chin with his fist before sauntering off, the flashlight stuck in the back pocket of his jeans. Chey sent Brodie a limp smile and started off after Matt, only to be drawn up short by Brodie’s hand on her forearm. She backed up a few steps to break the contact and glared up at him.
“It’s not nepotism,” she hastened to assure him. “Matt really is the best man for the job.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
She frowned at that. “Then what do you want?”
He leaned close, ostensibly to adjust the collar of the simple white camp shirt she had donned for the occasion. He tugged on the points, then brushed his hands lightly across her shoulders. “It’s you, Mary Chey,” he told her softly, leaning close, his head bent near hers. “I just wanted to touch you.” And he did, smoothing his hands down her arms, then lifting them to gently massage her shoulders. She stood rigid, frozen, pretending that her every nerve ending did not suddenly tingle with delight. Finally, she found her voice and her indignation.
“I thought we agreed to keep this strictly business.”
He cocked his head. “Did we? Funny, I don’t remember agreeing to any such thing.”
“Now that’s a blatant lie! I remember clearly….” That bowed head, that blank look and resigned sigh. Outrage and embarrassment suffused her. She didn’t know which one of them she was more upset with, him for letting her think he’d agreed or her for thinking it. The only one she could lash out at, however, happened to be him.
“I ought to smack you,” she huffed.
His gaze dropped blatantly to her mouth. “Oh, baby, please. Right here.” He tapped his pursed lips with a forefinger.
She turned on her heel. Laughter followed her down the hallway as she strode away, but more than once that day she found herself wondering what would have happened if she’d accepted his challenge. One part of her wished she’d slapped him, and yet she couldn’t help thinking of that kiss in his suite. Smack him, indeed. She’d be better off smacking some sense into her own head—if only she could figure out how to do that.
Chapter Five
Crouching, Anthony tapped the thick wooden beam overhead. “No problem here,” he announced. “All the cross beams are sound. I’ll replace the subfloor, then you can get Bay in to do his thing.”
Chey breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good news. Probably save us a solid two weeks.” At five feet and six inches, she could stand upright beneath the old house, but the six-foot-high space felt uncomfortably low, so she invariably caught herself ducking her head.
His investigation done, Anthony turned toward the short, narrow ladder that led up to the ground, his booted feet crunching across the gravel liberally sprinkled with tiny seashells and even some small pieces of animal bone. Chey followed, climbing up the trio of steps behind him. It was the second time in the last few weeks that she’d made this trip, the first time with her brother-in-law Sylvester, who had inspected the foun
dations and pronounced them generally sound. Two corners of the south end of the big old building had been jacked up and reinforced just to make everything level and plumb. For days Kate had been exclaiming how easily all the doors were opening and closing on that end of the house. Next the plumber had come to make his assessment. A full week of pipe replacement had followed, but even that had not been as extensive as Chey had feared it might have been. Now, even though the plumber was still on site and would be periodically for some time to come, it was Anthony’s turn to ascertain the true condition of the floors.
Anthony climbed up out of the opening, then reached down to help her do the same. Once they were both standing on the grass in the sun again, he closed and bolted the small, plank door that gave access to the underside of the house. Together they walked around the corner, climbed a narrow set of concrete steps and entered the kitchen through a storage-room door. Seth was sitting on the butcher-block island next to a metal mixing bowl beneath a rack of gleaming pans suspended from the bead-plank ceiling. His face was dirty, and he popped a chocolatey finger from his mouth and cried loudly, “Hewo, Chey-Chey!”
He’d been calling her Chey-Chey ever since Georges had tried to explain what they did and had told him the name of her business. She smiled uncertainly and moved closer, asking, “Are you supposed to be up there?”
He nodded just as a frazzled Marcel rose from cleaning the floor, a messy spoon and damp cloth in hand. “We had a little accident,” Marcel explained.
“I dwop a ’poon,” Seth confessed, swiping his finger around the bowl and holding it out to her. “Wanna licked?”
Anthony laughed, and Chey had to smile, too. “No, thank you.”
The boy next offered the finger to Anthony. “Wanna licked?”
Anthony shook his head, long blond hair ruffling, and patted his flat middle. “Better not. We girls have to watch our figures, you know.”
Seth put the finger in his mouth, screwing up his face at the same time. “Woo nod ah gwir,” he exclaimed around his finger.
Anthony looked down in mock surprise. “I’m not a girl? You sure?”
Seth went off into giggles, nodding so violently that Marcel reached out and steadied him. Chey elbowed Anthony in his slender ribs. “Stop teasing him before he falls off there and hurts himself.”
At thirty-six and a father himself, Anthony was still a big kid at heart. He was also vain about his good looks. The only one of her brothers over six feet tall, Anthony was blessed with a fine physique, blue eyes and straight golden hair almost as long as Chey’s. He was also the only member of the family to have married more than once. After his first short, volatile marriage, he seemed genuinely happy now with Mikki, her two kids and their own little Tony-Tony. The divorce had been a major upheaval for the family, though, especially for their deeply religious mother.
“I need you to take a look at the library,” Chey said to him.
Seth immediately tried to wiggle off the edge of the island, exclaiming, “I show woo!”
To keep the boy from falling, Marcel quickly set him off the counter top, saying, “Now, now, Seth. I told Miss Viola you’d be here with me.”
“Marce, I show Chey-Chey,” he insisted, running over to her and slipping his gooey hand into hers.
Chey could tell that Marcel would welcome a reprieve. The man was a marvel in the kitchen, but he only had two hands. It seemed unfair to expect him to baby-sit while beginning lunch preparations. What could it possibly hurt to walk the boy out to his grandmother? Chey asked, “Where is Viola?”
“She went to answer the door,” Marcel answered.
Chey vaguely remembered hearing a bell before they’d crawled up from beneath the house. She looked down at Seth and decided aloud, “We’ll take the boy with us and see if we can find her.” Seth gripped her hand and jumped up and down. Anthony lifted an eyebrow. “It’s on our way,” she told him curtly.
“Whatever,” he replied lightly, but she knew what he was thinking, that it was unusual for her to cater to a child. “Cute little guy,” he murmured as they pushed through the kitchen door into the butler’s pantry. Well aware that he was being discussed, Seth turned up a cherubic face. Chey glared at her mouthy brother and pushed on into the hallway, the boy’s hand held firmly in hers.
They skirted the curving base of the main staircase and found Viola on the other side of it talking animatedly with Georges. Spying Chey, he shifted smoothly into assistant gear, declaring, “There you are! I’ve been trying to call you on your cell phone all morning.”
Chey winced. “It’s in my bag, which I did not take with me to inspect the underside of the house. Sorry. What’s so important that you drove out here?”
“The marble tiles that you wanted for the ballroom floor are not available in sufficient quantity. The supplier says he’s found some used ones in Baton Rouge, though, and that they are an ‘adequate’ match, his word not mine. I didn’t feel comfortable making a decision about them.”
Chey sighed and considered for a moment before answering. “Tell him to go ahead and pick them up but not to send them here until I can get out to his warehouse and take a look at them. If we don’t use them at Fair Havens, I’ll buy them myself. Someone’s bound to want them sometime.”
“Tell him to send them straight here,” countered another voice. Chey turned and looked up. Brodie was standing on the stairs just above them. “No need for you to take a financial risk,” he told her. “I’ll buy them. If the color and pattern don’t meet with your approval, it’ll be my problem.”
It was a generous offer, but she suspected that his motives went beyond mere thoughtfulness and she disliked having her decisions countermanded. “That’s not necessary.”
“I think it is,” he said, coming down the stairs. She opened her mouth to argue, but he turned his attention to Seth. “Someone needs his face washed.”
Knowing perfectly well who that someone was, Seth yanked free and scuttled behind Chey, crying, “I show Chey-Chey!”
Glancing up at her, Brodie reached around and tugged Seth forward. “What is it you want to show Ms. Chey?”
“I show Chey-Chey,” Seth whined, trying to pull away again.
“He heard me tell Anthony that I wanted him to take a look at the woodwork in the library,” Chey explained. “That must be what he wants to show me.”
“Ah.” Brodie nodded in comprehension, then bent over to bring his face to the level of the boy’s. “You know perfectly well, young man, that you’ve been forbidden to go anywhere near the library or the game room. Don’t you?”
Seth nodded even as he whined around his finger, “I show Chey-Chey.”
“You go straight upstairs to your room and stay there until lunch,” Brodie said firmly, “and if I catch you anywhere near the library or the game room, you’re going to be in big trouble. Understand?”
Seth nodded mutely and ran to Viola, who whisked him off up the stairs.
“I didn’t know he’d been forbidden to go to the library,” Chey apologized.
“No reason you should,” Brodie replied, “as you weren’t told. He was.”
“I should have realized that those rooms would be dangerous for a little boy, though,” Chey admitted. “The shelves and chimneys are coming off the walls, and the floorboards are weak. Not that I intended to take him there, actually. I was planning to drop him off with his great-grandmother.”
“Well, then, mission accomplished. No cause for concern. Now about those tiles….”
“I ought to get back to the shop,” Georges announced abruptly.
They had a perfectly capable young woman who came in part-time to help out when Chey was away from the shop on one of these big projects. She was incapable of making design decisions, as Georges well knew, but she could handle customers off the street, and the matter of the tiles had yet to be settled. “Wait just a minute,” she said to Georges, then turned back to Brodie. “There is no reason for you to buy tiles that you may not be able
to use.”
“But I can use them,” he said. “If not in the house, then outside. Grandmama wants to lay pathways beneath the trees on the back of the property. If the tiles don’t work for the ballroom floor, we’ll use them out there.”
“You want to use expensive marble tiles to make pathways beneath the trees?” she asked skeptically.
“Anything wrong with that?” he countered.
She wanted to argue that if he was doing this just to get on her good side it wasn’t working, but with Georges and Anthony standing there, she dared not open that can of worms. Nodding at Georges, she murmured that she’d see him back at the shop. His immediate departure brought Brodie’s attention to Anthony.
“About those weak floors and falling shelves,” her brother said. “I’ll take care of those first thing.”
“That must mean,” Brodie mused, pointing a finger at him, “that you’re the carpenter.”
“Right. Anthony Sherman.”
“Not to be confused with Tony,” Brodie said, “who would be your nephew or Tony-Tony, who would be your son.”
Anthony grinned, obviously impressed. “He’s just starting to walk, my boy.”
“Walk today, run tomorrow, scheme the next,” Brodie commented wryly, offering his hand. “I’m Brodie Todd, by the way.”
“I figured as much,” Anthony said, giving that hand a firm grip and shake. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“Grand old place you’ve got here. You’ll be glad to know that the underpinning is sound.”
“Indeed, I am,” Brodie told him. Then he glanced at Chey, leaned in close to Anthony and said, “Tell me something. What’s the deal with this Georges guy? He strike you as a little odd?”
“Odd?” Anthony hooted. “The man’s a bona fide mystery. Did you know he’s been married four times?”
“You’re kidding!”
“Don’t ask me to explain it.”
“All right, I’ll explain it,” Chey snapped indignantly, honor-bound to defend her friend and aide. Unfortunately she had to think a moment before she could come up with a good explanation for Georges’s mysterious appeal. “Women like a sensitive man,” she finally said.