“Yes!” she agreed with even more zest. He was definitely not prepared for what came out of her mouth next. “Can we go back there again tomorrow? To Danni’s house?”
“Well, I have to,” he told her, “because I’m working on her house. But you’re going to be staying home with Aunt Virginia.”
He trusted that his sister’s “sudden emergency” meeting with her potential new client was a one-time occurrence and that she would once again be available to stay with Ginny while he worked. All they had to get through was the summer. Once they were past that, Ginny would be in first grade and things would get a little easier.
At least he could hope.
“But what if Aunt Virginia’s busy again?” Ginny asked.
Was that a hopeful note he heard in Ginny’s voice? “She won’t be.”
“But what if she is?” Ginny pressed, obviously determined to get an answer out of him.
Stone sighed. Ginny wasn’t about to let this go. “Then you can come with me again,” he told her. Darting a quick glance into the rearview mirror again before looking back at the road, he saw Ginny elaborately crossing her fingers as she squeezed her eyes shut.
His daughter was making a wish.
This woman had really cast a spell over the little girl. He had never seen her behaving like this. “But if that happens, it’ll be just the two of us at the house.”
Another quick glance showed him that Ginny’s face had fallen. “Why?”
“Because Danni will be at work. She tapes that cooking program on some cable channel,” he reminded Ginny. “I don’t remember the name of the show.”
“Danni’s Desserts to Die For,” Ginny rattled off. “Then can we go there?” Ginny asked. “To watch her make things?”
Her mind was like a steel trap. Even so, he was surprised she remembered the name of the program when he didn’t. This woman had snared his daughter’s heart. Maybe he should have paid a little closer attention to her, he told himself.
In the next moment, he reminded himself that he was currently “seeing” someone, which meant he should be paying closer attention to another woman, not Danni.
“Number one,” he told Ginny, “Danni would have to invite us to come on the set, we can’t just show up. And number two, if we did go there, then I wouldn’t be working on her house, which is what she’s paying me to do, remember?”
“Oh.” It was a very small, sad little sound. His daughter knew how to play him, Stone couldn’t help thinking. “Then I guess you’d better work on her house, huh?”
Stone struggled to suppress a laugh. “Yes, I guess I’d better,” he agreed.
“But you will see her again, right, Daddy? If you work on her house, she’ll want to see what you’re doing, right?”
Stone thought that was rather an odd question to be coming from a four-year-old, even if that four-year-old was going on forty. For now, he set her mind at ease. “I have to,” he told Ginny.
She didn’t leave it at that—not that he thought she would. His assurance just opened the door for yet another question. “Will you be seeing her a lot?”
Glancing to his right, he changed lanes, preparing to turn down the next corner. “Well, she’s the one who has to make the final decisions about each of the rooms I’m remodeling for her, so yes, I’ll probably be touching base with Danni pretty often.” He waited until he turned at the end of the next block before asking, “What’s this all about, Ginny? Why are you so interested in whether or not I’ll be seeing Danni?”
Ginny raised and lowered her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. A movement Stone caught the tail end of as he looked up into the rearview mirror for a split second.
“I dunno,” she told him, suddenly looking every bit the four-year-old. “I think Danni’s fun,” she finally said.
So she’d already said. But this time it began making sense and falling into place for him. This woman had paid real attention to his daughter and she’d played with her. As opposed to Elizabeth, who was polite to Ginny, but for the most part, she didn’t really seem to be able to relate to his daughter at all.
“And you don’t think that Elizabeth’s fun, do you?” he asked, even though he was pretty sure he knew the answer to that.
“Elizabeth’s not fun,” Ginny answered flatly. The simple statement confirmed his suspicions.
“Well, we’ll see if we can change that,” Stone promised. He was going to talk to Elizabeth about their including Ginny the next time the two of them went out together.
When had life gotten to be so complicated and tricky? It used to be something he’d just glide through without any effort, and now, he was constantly facing choices, with forks in the road that necessitated decisions every step he took. He missed the simple times.
He missed Eva.
Elizabeth Wells was the first woman he’d gone out with since Eva had died. One of his friends, Jeremy Banks—they started out in the general contractor business together—had introduced him to Elizabeth. She was the cousin of Jeremy’s wife and, at the time he’d introduced them, Elizabeth had just stopped seeing some politician. Jeremy thought the two of them might hit it off. He and his wife had invited them both to their house for dinner.
Elizabeth, who was a press secretary for the mayor’s office, was certainly attractive enough and interesting enough to warrant his asking her out. Stone knew that he felt like half a person ever since Eva had left his life and, while the work he did as well as raising Ginny certainly kept him busy, there was this empty spot inside of him that nothing seemed to fill.
So he had agreed to give dating a try.
Dating, he thought with a shake of his head. Who would have ever thought that after having what he’d considered a perfect fairytale life with a woman he adored and a baby they were both crazy about, that he would suddenly find himself back trying to navigate the dating pool?
“Okay, Daddy,” Ginny said gamely, agreeing to something he’d said earlier. Stone spent thirty seconds wracking his brain, trying to remember just what it was he’d said. “I’ll try to like Elizabeth.”
Well, that sounded hopeful, he thought, taking her words at face value. “That’s my girl.”
He noticed that this time, she didn’t smile the way she usually did when he called her that.
He definitely needed to have a talk with Elizabeth about opening up more to his daughter.
* * *
Virginia was home by the time he and Ginny arrived. Parking the car, he undid his daughter’s car-seat straps and placed her on the driveway, then went to take out the leftovers his newest client had all but forced on him.
Ginny was already at the door, standing on tiptoes and ringing the doorbell. “It’s us, Aunt Virginia,” she declared at the top of her lungs.
The door swung open less than half a minute later. “How did it go?” she asked her brother as he crossed the threshold after Ginny. “And what is that wonderful aroma?” she asked.
“Not badly and leftovers,” Stone said, heading straight for the kitchen.
It took Virginia a moment to unscramble his answers and assign them to the right questions. By then, Stone had put the leftovers down on the table. “How did it go for you?” he asked.
“For me?” Virginia asked, momentarily bewildered at his question.
“Yes, you told me that you had an interview. With a new client. That’s why you said you couldn’t watch Ginny, remember?” For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps Virginia hadn’t had an interview to see to. But if she didn’t, why had she said that she had? Things just weren’t adding up.
“Of course I remember,” she said almost indignantly. “And it went just the way I expected it to,” she told him, mentally crossing her fingers and hoping, if this all went the way it should, that her brother would find it in his heart to forgive her for bending the truth this way.
What “bending?” You’re lying and you know it. But it was for a good cause, she told herself.
“You landed t
he client?” he asked her, taking down three dessert plates out of the cupboard.
“Like he was a salmon and I got between him and upstream,” Virginia said with a pleased laugh. She was rather proud of herself for the image she’d just verbally drawn.
“So you can watch Ginny for me tonight?” he asked Virginia.
“Sure.” Following her brother’s lead, she took out forks and placed them next to the plates. “Are you going out?” she asked hopefully.
“Going out,” he confirmed.
There was no need for either Virginia or Ginny to know that he was going to call Elizabeth first and see if perhaps he could either coax her to come over so that they, meaning she, could spend more time with Ginny. Or to at least broach the idea to her and perhaps make arrangements to bring Ginny along with them this weekend. Maybe they could take in a movie or go to an amusement park.
“That was fast work,” Virginia couldn’t help commenting.
Stone looked at her, confused. “I worked at my usual pace,” he told her.
Trust Stone to be too literal. “Wait,” Virginia said, putting her hand up. Something didn’t feel right. “You’re going out with—”
“Elizabeth,” he answered, wondering why she had to ask. “Who else?”
“Who else indeed,” Virginia said under her breath as she watched her brother go up the stairs to change into fresh clothing.
So far, this wasn’t exactly going according to plan, she couldn’t help thinking.
But then, as the cliché went, tomorrow was another day.
And she prayed it would go better tomorrow.
* * *
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” Elizabeth asked with a touch of impatience a few minutes later as they spoke on the phone.
He was getting a bad feeling about this. No part of his conversation so far had suggested that this was going to be the comedy portion of their verbal exchange. “No, I’m being serious.”
“You want to include your four-year-old on our next date,” Elizabeth repeated incredulously. And then, after a rather audible sigh, she seemed to regroup. “Stone, honey, if you feel you’re not seeing enough of your daughter, I understand. Really,” she emphasized, making him doubt that she understood anything at all. “Spend some time with her. Take her to one of those God-awful animated movies you just mentioned. We can go out some other night,” Elizabeth told him.
He couldn’t help feeling that the leash about his neck was being temporarily loosened. All he could focus on, though, was that there was a leash.
When had that happened?
One of his most cherished memories was the last time he, Eva and Ginny had gone out as a family. Ginny was two and a half at the time. They had gone to a matinee at the neighborhood movie theater to see a rerelease of a famous cartoon classic. He could have sworn that Eva enjoyed it just as much as Ginny had.
It was Ginny’s first experience going to the movies and her eyes had been as big as saucers for the entire movie. She’d also insisted on standing up rather than sitting down, afraid that if she was sitting, she’d somehow miss something that was on the screen. She’d been incredibly excited about what they were watching.
They’d each sat on one side of Ginny, he and Eva, and he remembered thinking that this was the way life was supposed to be, enjoying these tiny, sparkling pockets of time that were absolutely perfect.
Less than two weeks later, Eva was gone. Just like that. And he’d felt as if someone had gutted him using a jagged spoon.
He’d started seeing Elizabeth in hopes of getting rid of that feeling. But maybe, he now thought, this wasn’t the way to go.
“I take it you don’t like animated movies,” he said to Elizabeth, exhibiting a great deal of restraint as far as he was concerned. The fact that she didn’t somehow insulted the memory of Eva for him.
Stone could almost envision Elizabeth’s expression, half amazement that he should even ask such a question and half pity that he had entertained the thought that she might like watching cartoon characters cavorting across a movie screen.
“Should I?” she asked with a touch of disdain. “They’re made for children.”
Stone thought of letting that pass uncontested, but then he heard himself saying, “To appeal to the child in all of us.”
Elizabeth laughed in response. “Now you sound like a production marketing executive. I like movies that are intended for adults, Stone. The ‘child’ in me grew up a long time ago. But, like I said, if you feel you need to connect with your daughter, then by all means, do it so that you can stop feeling so guilty. We’ll just go out some other time.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to inform her that this had nothing to do with guilt and that part of him actually resented the off-handed assessment. He’d spent the better part of the day, in one form or another, with Ginny, so it wasn’t a matter of needing to connect. He wasn’t the one who needed to connect with his daughter.
Better luck next time, Stone thought philosophically.
“I’ll be over by eight,” he told her.
“I take it that eight is past her bedtime?”
“Yes.” He told himself he shouldn’t be feeling this sudden resentment toward the woman. She’d never had children of her own and this was a learning process for her.
But Danni didn’t have any kids, either, a voice in his head said. And she related to Ginny just fine.
He shut the voice out.
“Wonderful,” Elizabeth was saying with a note of triumph—as if she’d just thrown the dice and come up a winner. “I’ll be here, waiting.”
For some reason, Stone felt as if he’d just been put on notice.
Chapter Nine
“I have no kitchen,” Danni cried as she walked into what had been, up until just now, the center of her home. She’d arrived from the studio early and had walked through the house, looking for Stone and curious as to his progress. The noise of groaning plasterboard under attack had led her to the back of the house.
Once on the scene, it took Danni a couple of moments to recover.
They were three weeks into renovating the forty-plus-year-old house and so far, she had dealt with looking at stripped walls and exposed, ugly pipes in all three of her bathrooms and had put up with a family room that looked as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of it.
But seeing her kitchen devoid of everything that made it a kitchen in the first place—the stove, the refrigerator, both sinks, everything, included the overhead light panels and the walls—well, it made her feel as if her very identity had been diced, sautéed and then thrown down the garbage disposal to be ripped into tiny bits.
Danni had deliberately come home early—having moved up her program’s taping schedule for the day—so that she could touch base with her general contractor and discuss mundane things like where to shop for rugs and stone flooring. These areas, she was clueless about. Her life had always been filled with far too many details for her to take note of the best places that catered to home rejuvenation.
She hadn’t expected to be jarred by the sight of a war-zone kitchen.
Surprised—she hadn’t said anything about arriving home while he was still here, working—Stone dropped the crowbar he’d been using to pry away the discolored, cracked tile from the counter beside the gaping hole that had once been the double sink.
Recovering, Stone laughed at her exclamation. “For my sister, that would be a reason to rejoice and an excuse to go nuts, ordering takeout,” he told her. For the first time, he took in Danni’s shell-shocked expression. “But I guess not for you,” he speculated.
What she was looking at took her breath away—and not in a good way. Even the floor—he’d removed the dark brown vinyl with its embossed, cracked octagon design—felt uneven beneath her feet. Splotches of dried glue yet to be pried off added to the unevenness.
Doing anything in this shell of a room before Stone got around to remodeling it would be immensely challenging, Danni thought, already tryin
g to deal with the challenge. She couldn’t conceive of not having some sort of a kitchen to work in.
“I guess I could put up a card table and have a hot plate on it.” And then a thought hit her and she looked around at what was left of the walls—or where the walls had been this morning when she’d left for the studio. “I do still have sockets so I can plug in a hot plate and a coffeemaker, right?”
“One,” he told her, pointing to the opposite wall. He hadn’t gotten around to removing it yet so that he could check the wiring, making certain that it was sound.
Danni smiled as she nodded. “One’s all I need to plug in the coffee in the morning and a hot plate to cook on at night.”
The woman had to be one of the most exceedingly flexible people he’d ever met. He liked the way she was able to adjust to any circumstances. He’d certainly dealt with enough home owners to be impressed with Danni’s low-key attitude. She hadn’t gone off the deep end when she saw that her creative center had been demolished. That spoke well of her resilience.
“Like your morning coffee, eh?” he asked, amused. That gave them something in common. He couldn’t fully function without his.
“My eyes don’t officially open until the second cup,” Danni willingly admitted.
Stone laughed, nodding his head. “Me, too,” he told her. “I’m dead asleep until I’ve consumed my second cup of what I’m told passes as a giant cup of double espresso. My sister threatens to run a coffee IV through my arm so I sound human first thing in the morning instead of like—her word,” he quoted, “Bigfoot.”
As Danni listened to him, she looked around again, thinking she might have acclimated to what she saw. But the view was as abysmal the second time around as it had been the first. Maybe even a touch more, since there were gaping holes, which she now noticed.
She didn’t want him to think she was trying to rush him in any way, but she needed something to hold on to and schedule around.
“Just how long does it have to stay like this?” she asked, doing her best to sound as if she were just curious and fighting off a full-blown panic attack. She didn’t want him to think she was a flake, but she did need her kitchen.
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