“A place to stay, for the short term,” I finally said. “I need to get my severance pay and insurance payout, but once I have those, I can start on fixing my old life. I also need a job, but before anything else, I need a place to stay, for at least a couple of weeks.”
“What about the motel where you’re at now?” Lisa asked, reaching down to pick up a wooden disc, perhaps intended as a coaster. “Won’t that work?”
I shook my head. “You haven’t seen it, but the place is disgusting. And it’s not nearly as cheap as it looks. It’s not going to work for me.”
“I suppose you could browse through online sites,” Lisa mused, setting down the carving. “I’d offer you the couch in our living room, but it’s not going to be comfortable for more than a couple of nights. Especially since Shay wants to spend her every second of free time plopped on it, staring at the television, her brain totally zoned out.”
“Even finding a place isn’t the whole problem,” I added. “Keep in mind that I don’t really have a lot of good references, since my house burned down and I got escorted out of my last job by security officers.”
“Yeah.” Lisa sighed.
I caught a slight shadow moving out of the corner of my eye. The artist of this stall, the woodcarver, had stepped forward from his seat in the back corner. He was quite tall, I noticed as he rose to his feet, with broad shoulders, sandy blond hair, and a plaid shirt combining to make him look like an almost stereotypical lumberjack.
“Excuse me,” he said, and I started a little at the deepness of his voice. “Did you say that you were looking for a place to rent for a while?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Lisa said at the same time. I tried to shoot her a look without the artist noticing. I didn’t know this man, didn’t need to have some stranger judging me, throwing me out of his stall because he didn’t think I could afford his art!
...which was true, especially with my current finances, but I still didn’t want him thinking it.
The artist hesitated a moment, looking between us, but apparently decided to forge ahead. “I’ve got an extra room,” he said. “I’d be open to renting it out for a couple weeks or so, if you needed it.”
That... that wasn’t what I’d been expecting him to say.
For a moment, I just stared at him, at an unexpected loss for words. For some reason, he looked surprised to have spoken, almost as if he hadn’t planned for those words to come out of his mouth. But that couldn’t be right – I had to be misreading him.
I didn’t know this stranger, couldn’t possibly accept. He could be anyone, a rapist or a serial killer! I opened my mouth to politely decline.
“She’ll take it!” Lisa cut in, beaming as she ruined everything.
Chapter Seven
Rick
* * *
I stared at the two women, my gaze switching back and forth between them, from the curvy Asian to the tall, slender brunette. I felt a bit woozy, like the feeling that came after pounding several shots of cheap alcohol on an empty stomach. An unsteady sensation, not quite drunk, not yet, but knowing that bad fallout was coming soon from my recent choices.
Had I really just spoken to these two strangers? I played back the last thirty seconds of my memory, confirmed that I hadn’t imagined it. Damn it, Niall, for putting the idea into my head of doing something with the second bedroom of my little house besides using it to store extra odds and ends!
The brunette, she’d been the one who spoke about needing a place, and she looked about as reluctant as I felt inside my chest. I’d seen it in her face, the closing down, getting ready to deliver the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech.
But her friend jumped in before she could answer, accepting on her behalf! Now, the brunette didn’t seem to be able to make up her mind whether to talk first to me, or to yell at her friend.
Maybe I’d been distracted, bored out of my mind thanks to the lack of sales so far today, switching instead to admiring some of the ladies wandering by. Sacramento was quintessential California, which meant that for every frumpy mom wandering through the farmers’ market, there were a couple young and active people, showing off their goods in spandex, tights, or obscenely short shorts and skirts. Plenty of eye candy, and more than a few of them smiled back at the sight of my broad shoulders and strong jaw.
These women in front of me now... they weren’t undergrads, that much was certain. The Asian had some appealing curves to her bust and her rolling hips, but my gaze had initially gone to the brunette’s long legs. Even hidden in jeans, I could tell that she was limber and fit, probably hitting the treadmill or elliptical three times a week without fail.
A better look at her reinforced my initial impression of someone tightly wound, who worked out not because she enjoyed it but because it was another thing she had to do. Even the ponytail, pulling her hair back tightly, showed her need for control. I didn’t see a single hair out of place. She’d look comfortable in some expensive boardroom of bloated executives – probably more comfortable than she was here, out among the commoners.
I realized, belatedly, that the silence had stretched on for several beats too long. “Look, I just overheard,” I volunteered hastily, talking more to break the stretching pause. “I’ve got a two bedroom house, and no one’s using the other bedroom. I’m not doing anything with it, and I’m a pretty good roommate. If you need a place, I’d be willing to do a pretty cheap deal. That’s all.”
I forced my mouth to snap shut before I babbled out any more, like that I wouldn’t hit on her, that despite her long legs, I knew she wasn’t my type in the slightest. I had no need to get involved in an uptight, prissy controlling shrew of a woman.
She was still looking at me a bit like I’d sprouted a second head – or, at the minimum, had revealed that my hand was missing a few fingers. I saw her friend, the shorter Asian, nudging her in the ribs with an elbow.
“Sorry about this,” the shorter one spoke up after a beat, when the uptight brunette didn’t appear inclined to say anything. “She’s had a lot happen to her in the last few days.”
“Yeah?” I crossed my arms in front of me, tilted my head slightly to the side to convey interest. “How’s that?”
The pose always convinced drunk girls at the bar to open up, and it worked just as well here. “Ever lost your job and your home within a couple hours of each other?” she asked.
Finally, the brunette found her voice. “Lisa,” she said, somewhere between warning and shocked.
The shorter woman – Lisa – didn’t look perturbed by her friend’s scolding. “Anyway, that’s what happened to Ellie, here,” she continued. “She got fired, and then came home to find that her house was on fire! Doesn’t that just break your heart?” She leaned in, batted her eyes, pretending that the motion didn’t make her blouse’s neckline dip in a very inviting manner.
Knowing that this was a test, I kept her gaze, didn’t let my own drop. After a second, I saw her smile, deciding that I’d passed her test. “That’s horrible,” I agreed. I shifted my attention over to Ellie, the brunette. “Maybe you need a bit of kindness... like a well-meaning stranger offering you a room for rent.”
Finally, the brunette found her voice. “Look, it’s very nice of you,” she said, her tone making it clear she was searching for a way out of this trap, “but I don’t know anything about you. Like you said, stranger. I don’t even know your name.”
“Richard Morgan,” I answered. I held out my hand. “Everyone calls me Rick, though.”
She took the offered handshake, although it seemed mainly by reflex alone. Her handshake matched up with the rest of my impression of her – firm and corporate, the kind of handshake that a woman would need to survive in a man’s world. “Well, I appreciate your offer, Richard,” she began.
“Rick,” I corrected. A little part of me wanted to poke at her, chip away at her stiffness, see how far I could push that stick up her butt. “And please, it’s no trouble to me at a
ll. I could use the extra money, and you’d be getting a deal. I don’t see how you could say no to it.”
“He’s got a point,” chimed in Lisa, inadvertently helping me to torment her friend. “Come on, Ellie, it’s like fate!”
That made Ellie’s eyes roll. “Fate?” she echoed.
“Sure!” Lisa insisted. “You take the first concrete step, figure out the first thing that you need to help get your life back on track, and it’s right there for you to claim as soon as you declare it! Sure seems like fate to me!”
Ellie shot a look at me. That look, in a single second, told me that she saw right through me, had marked me as a degenerate, and wanted nothing to do with me. Still, she hesitated, apparently torn between her morals and her more practical needs.
“What sort of room is this?” she finally asked, looking almost physically pained by the question.
I didn’t bother to keep my smile from growing wider in victory. Not so high and mighty now, was she, even though she wanted to judge me so badly! “It’s very nice,” I said, keeping my tone neutral even as I smirked openly at her. “Quite large, fully furnished – it’s been used occasionally as my guest room. The upstairs bathroom is shared with the master bedroom, but there’s another half bath downstairs if you need it. And the house has a full kitchen and anything else you might need.”
“And how much do you want?” she asked.
Ah, another trap. If I named a number, practically any number, it would give her an excuse to turn me down. Too high, and she’d turn it down because ‘she couldn’t afford that much.’ Too low, and she’d insist that there had to be something wrong with it, that I wasn’t telling her something, and she’d reject it on that basis.
I’d seen it before, in selling art pieces. Some potential customer would express interest in a piece, and then ask for a price. I’d see that same glint in their eye; I’d stumbled into the trap enough times to know how it worked to catch me in an inescapable snare.
Thankfully, after falling for the trap plenty of times as a younger artist, I knew how to escape it. “You know, I’m pretty flexible,” I countered. “What’s a number that would work for you?”
I saw her briefly wince, knew that I’d found the way around her lure. If she had to name the opening number, I could accept it, counter, without her being able to categorically reject me. She frowned for another couple seconds, but with Lisa still listening, she couldn’t just turn on her heel and leave.
Finally, glaring back at me, Ellie named a ridiculously low number. I could see that she could afford more, but she wanted me to say no.
Hell, why wasn’t I letting her say no? I hadn’t intended to get a roommate at all, especially not for that pitiful amount of income. I spent more than that a month in drinks at the bars in the area!
But something about Ellie, the way she categorically rejected me from the moment she laid eyes on me, raised the hackles on my back. Even more than I wanted my privacy, I wanted to verbally smack her down, put her in her place and metaphorically knock some of the uppity bitchiness out of her. She might have suffered some terrible things recently, if she’d really been fired and lost her house in the same day, but that didn’t give her an excuse to come walking through my stall with her nose up in the air, certain that she was so much better than me.
She wouldn’t last long, even if she took the spare bedroom. Every time she saw me, it would remind her of how much she’d fallen – at least in her mind – and she’d want to get out of there all the more.
“That number is per week, right?” I asked, just to further poke the bear.
Her eyes flashed angrily. “Per month.”
I pretended to consider, reaching up to rub the stubble on my jaw with my index finger and thumb. “I suppose I could make that work,” I allowed, laughing inside at how her frown deepened. “I’d need the first month’s rent up front, of course.”
A bit more sand in the wound. “What if I leave before the month’s up?” she demanded.
I shrugged. “Hey, I’m giving you a hell of a deal, here. If you leave early, we’ll drop the whole problem of you giving me thirty days’ notice, and just call it even.” I stuck my hand out again. “Deal?”
I could practically hear her teeth grinding together from here. “I need a moment,” she hissed, and spun away from me, grabbing her friend’s elbow to yank her a few steps out of my stall.
While she stepped away, an older woman with hair well on its way from gray to white stepped forward, holding a few of my coasters. I rang her up, keeping one eye on Ellie and Lisa. Ellie was letting off some of that anger, gesturing curtly, but her friend wasn’t backing down. Ellie turned and snuck another look back at me, and I made sure to let my gaze run up and down her figure before returning to her eyes.
She stomped back over to me a minute later, as I handed the older customer her purchases, wrapped in a layer of tissue paper and tucked into a small bag with the receipt. “Fine,” she snarled. “But if there’s any sort of funny business, I want a full refund. Understand?”
I blinked back at her, giving her my most innocent expression. “Funny business? What do you mean?”
She didn’t answer, instead whipping out her phone, gripping it so tightly that her knuckles were white. Slim fingers, I noted. The kind of fingers that didn’t do much besides type on a keyboard, that hadn’t built up calluses from any sort of real labor. Not like my own, hard and toughened from working with wood and tools.
No ring, either. Figured. I’d guessed as much from her situation, but an uptight bitch like this wouldn’t be likely to keep a man around for long, not unless she could completely beat him down, turn him into a spineless lump.
“What’s the address?” she asked.
I gave it to her, watched her fingers fly over the touchscreen keyboard on the smartphone. “I’ll be done here in a few more hours,” I said. “You can meet me at the house then, and I’ll get you a key and show you the room.”
“Great.” She sounded like I’d just helped her schedule a prostate exam. Hell, with how uptight she was, I doubted that she’d get anything up there. After all, no room for a camera to come in, since she already had a stick shoved up that hole, keeping her spine stiff and her attitude so frustratingly formal.
Ellie spun away, although her friend, Lisa, lingered. “Thanks, Rick!” Lisa chirped, smiling at me, showing off a dimple in her round cheek. “I’m so glad we stopped in here! And your art is very nice!”
“Thank you so much!” I replied, all smiles and charm. “And you’re a great friend, looking out for Ellie like that. I hope she appreciates you.”
Lisa’s smile grew a little wider as she left, even as Ellie’s face turned even more thunderous. There was no way that brunette would soften up to me now – but it was worth it to knock her down a couple of pegs.
Of course, I wasn’t blind; I’d seen the glittering diamond on Lisa’s finger. And despite checking out those long, slender legs, Ellie wasn’t my type at all. Too old, too sharp, too cynical, too... corporate. I’d made a conscious choice to never enter the corporate world, and I certainly didn’t want to get involved with a woman who clearly ate, slept, and breathed corporate memos and best practices.
I turned my attention back to smiling at other potential customers, keeping my eyes from following after the two women as they walked away... but I had a hard time shaking off what I’d just done.
Niall owed me for this. The bastard would probably half piss himself laughing when he heard what happened.
Chapter Eight
Eileen
* * *
“Oh, stop glaring at me,” Lisa said, not turning to look back at me as she walked in front of me down the rows of stalls of the farmer’s market. “I can feel your eyes burning into my back, and it makes me itchy.”
I almost didn’t have the words to explain how I felt – almost. “Are you crazy?” I burst out, the words exploding out of me a little louder than I’d intended. A couple other shoppers turne
d to look at me, but I was too incensed to care. “What were you doing back there?”
Lisa turned to look back at me, keeping annoyingly calm. “I was helping you find a new place – wasn’t that what you needed?” she pointed out.
“Yes – but not like that! Not from some stranger!”
“He seemed pretty nice to me,” she offered, smiling. “In fact, if I didn’t have a wedding ring on, I might have flirted back with him a bit – although he passed my test for being a dirtbag.”
‘What test is that?”
“I leaned forward, and he didn’t look down my shirt,” she answered.
“Well, he might not have been checking you out, but he certainly was looking at me.” I grimaced. “I feel like I need a shower, after his sliminess – and I definitely don’t want to take one at his place, knowing that he’s probably just outside the bathroom, jerking it and thinking about me.”
“Now who’s the one being ridiculous?” Lisa raised an eyebrow at me, making me even more annoyed that, somehow, she’d managed to be the one in this argument keeping her cool, while I was losing control.
“I’m not being ridiculous! I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s an artist, and also apparently a pervert who keeps staring at my ass!”
“You also know that he has a bedroom that you can rent for a stupidly cheap amount per month,” Lisa pointed out. “And isn’t that what you need? I know that you named a really low number because you wanted him to say no, but he threw you a bone. Now, you can focus on getting back on your feet.”
I gritted my teeth, in part because I knew that Lisa was right, and she was definitely going to win this argument. “How are you so calm about this?” I exploded, finally.
She smiled. “After some of the crazy arguments that I’ve had with a five-year-old daughter, trying to get her to go to bed on time or eat her vegetables? This is nothing.”
The Woodworker Page 5