Suddenly squinting across the shadowy courtyard he spotted Scott, or at least his image, this time lifelike, heading his way. He could tell it was Scott by the way he walked. And he’d know the guy’s walk anywhere. When Scott’s image finally looked up at Nick, he smiled and lifted a hand in a wave as lifelike and real as if he’d just walked out of the main house. The gesture so familiar, just like Nick had seen him do six dozen times in Iraq. As if real, Scott spread his arms out wide and yelled up, “Took you long enough, you finally got here. Welcome to The Cove, Nick. How do you like it so far?”
Nick considered the fact he might possibly be going insane, slowly, deliberately, off-his-rocker-crazy. What was he supposed to do, answer a ghost, talk to one? How could he have thought coming here to see Scott’s wife would make anything better? He scrubbed a hand over his face. “How’s that working out for you, Harris?”
And now he was talking to himself. In the midst of it all, by coming here, he had a nagging feeling he’d just made the situation a helluva lot worse. What would Scott say if he told him he was attracted to his wife? Ridiculous, he thought. Scott was dead. And had been for ten months.
Nick glanced up at the stars again and tried to make out the brilliant twinkling light of the brightest star. Venus, he decided. The night sky shimmered back at him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken the time to just gaze up and enjoy that view. Insomnia aside, there was nothing like watching the night sky for falling stars. He’d forgotten how to do that in L.A.
As a boy, he’d spent hours looking through his telescope trying to locate everything from the Milky Way to the Little Dipper to Cassiopeia. Funny, he hadn’t thought of that in ages. But for the past three years his life hadn’t exactly been his own. Leaning on the railing, he looked across the courtyard at the main house.
Scott was nowhere in sight.
Shrouded in darkness even he could tell the rambling old Victorian looked as if it needed a complete overhaul. A sudden idea hit him. What kind of fool would be thinking about getting to work right about now? And what would Jordan say?
A couple of hours later, roller in hand, Nick glanced at his watch and yawned. Four-twenty. Standing on the ladder he’d found in the garage, he spread another round of Banana Cream paint on the living room wall. He looked around the room. Once he’d thrown down drop cloths to cover the upright piano, the sofa and loveseat, he had pretty much been good to go. And it didn’t take much thought to slapping on paint.
But the mindless task soon gave way to exhaustion from lack of sleep. When he decided to take a break he simply climbed down off the ladder and sat down on the floor. Stretching out his long legs, he leaned his head up against an unpainted portion of the wall and closed his eyes. It didn’t take long for him to drop off into a deep slumber.
As was often her habit, Jordan walked past the living room on her way outside to enjoy her morning cup of coffee on the front porch. Glancing into the room, she came to an abrupt halt. Startled to see the ladder guarding the front window, along with the butter color now splashed across the white part of the walls, she drew in a breath at the sight of Nick slumped on the floor.
Oh, my God, was the man breathing? Had he fallen off the ladder and broken his neck?
As she got closer, she saw his chest move up and down. The man was sound asleep. Instinctively, she moved toward him. The guy had flecks of pale yellow dotting his black hair. In his right hand he still clutched the paint roller. She leaned down to study his face. The involuntary pull of attraction hit her first before mortification. She hadn’t had feelings like this since Scott. And the UPS man didn’t count.
As if he could feel her intense stare, his eyes flew open. He jerked to attention.
Jordan stood up so fast she sloshed hot coffee all over her hand. Trying to back away, embarrassed at her wayward thoughts, she tripped over the drop cloth, caught her balance just in time to keep from falling.
Self-conscious at the idea of her finding him asleep, Nick immediately started to get to his feet which caused Jordan to stumble again on the drop cloth, putting more space between them. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.” That was a ridiculous statement. The man was sleeping on the floor of her living room. Balancing the mug of coffee in one hand, she nervously pushed back her hair with the hand that held the baby monitor she always took outside with her.
“What are you doing in here?”
He rubbed his face. “Couldn’t sleep. I decided to get a little work done. I didn’t think you’d mind if I started painting in here.” He came more awake—or tried to. The bright sunlight drifting in through the windows hurt his eyes. His mind refused to work. But he did his best to come up with a reasonable explanation as to why he was sleeping on her living room floor. “You said you hadn’t gotten to this room yet, so—I thought—what the heck? But I sat down to take a break for a minute, must have dropped off.”
“I’ll say.” Clutching the cup tighter in her fist, she asked, “Let me get this straight, you couldn’t sleep and got up to paint my living room—in the middle of the night?”
“That about covers it. Back door wasn’t locked. You really need to remedy that. I tried not to wake you. What time is it?”
“Six-fifteen.” When Hutton’s baby babble crackled through the monitor, she immediately turned to leave and then stopped suddenly. She backtracked, held out her cup of coffee to him. “You look like you could use this a lot more than me. Breakfast will be ready in about twenty minutes. Eggs and bacon okay?”
Taking the cup from her in one hand, he scrubbed at his face with the palm of his hand, rubbed his eyes. “Fine. That’s...fine.”
Nick watched Jordan walk out of the room. It might have been through bleary eyes, but all he could think was what a punch he’d just taken. This early in the morning, wearing no make-up, she looked—nothing short of amazing. That thought kicked him into gear. He took a much-needed pull on the caffeine, mentally trying to shake the cobwebs out of his brain.
Jordan was Scott’s wife. Had been, he corrected, as he looked around the room at the mess he’d made.
Thank God the woman wasn’t his type. His type had always been women who liked to party, women who didn’t have a domestic bone in their body. He’d cleverly managed to avoid women like Jordan. After all, the girl next door type could destroy a guy’s player status. Of course, lately he hadn’t exactly been at the top of his game.
He shook his head and stood up. How long had it been since he’d been with a woman anyway? Obviously, it had been too long. He needed to remedy that. Maybe he’d slip into Santa Cruz the first chance he got, find a willing, available female.
Okay, that made him feel better.
Standing there trying to wake up, his mind went back to what Scott had always said about his wife every time he had taken out her picture. And now after being around the woman for less than twenty-four hours, he had to agree...Jordan was a natural beauty, an all-American kind of girl with a sweet-nature.
Definitely the kind of woman he made a point to avoid, the kind you kept at arm’s length.
He worked the kinks out of his neck. Avoided that kind of woman for a reason, he decided, as he got to work cleaning up the caked and dried paint mess he’d created hours earlier when he’d fallen asleep on the job.
As Jordan headed in to get Hutton, she decided as awkward as it was to have Nick working in the house, it also felt like the right thing to do. She couldn’t exactly explain that, except for the fact that for the past two years she had been lonely living out here with only Hutton for company.
While she put a clean diaper on Hutton, she made a mental checklist of things she needed to discuss with him about the work. After all, they had a common deadline to meet. There was a work schedule to organize. When would she have gotten around to painting the living room? She took a deep breath, blew it out. Her lack of organization and direction needed to change. Over the next few weeks, she needed to focus better and stop this habit of not finishing anything. S
he’d have to make sure she kept a tally of all the work he did. She couldn’t deny the prospect of having someone to discuss her plans with felt good though. As she set Hutton down on the floor to walk, as she watched her daughter toddle out the door, she decided she’d made the right decision to let Nick Harris stay.
It took a couple of days for them to settle into a work routine. Jordan would finish painting the guest rooms while
Nick tackled the myriad plumbing problems that always seemed to occur in an old house with five full bathrooms, all of which had ancient fixtures.
For a novice plumber Nick had problems from the beginning. It didn’t take a genius to figure out for the next two months his time would be spent replacing and fixing dripping faucets, wobbly toilets, and broken tile. Sprawled on the bathroom floor, his arms wrapped around an unsteady brand-new porcelain bowl, he did his best to hold it in place while attempting to bolt it to the floor with a wrench. One of Jordan’s many how-to plumbing books lay open next to him. But it wasn’t exactly going textbook perfect. “Son of a bitch.”
Jordan suddenly appeared in the doorway with an amused look on her face. “Problem?”
“The damn bolt is stripped. And it’s the only one left.” He’d gone through three already. “Is there a hardware store in town? I’ll need another bolt, probably several.” More like several boxes.
“Ferguson’s on Main. You drove past it to get here. Can’t miss it. If you’re making a trip to town, would you mind picking up the flooring while you’re there. It’s been on back order for four weeks, should be there now for sure. I haven’t had a chance to pick it up. Would you mind bringing it back?”
Nick stood up, his large frame filling the rather small space. Instinctively, Jordan backed up into the hallway. “Sure, but I can’t bring flooring back on the bike.”
“Why do you ride it, the bike I mean?”
“It’s open.” Eyeing the puzzled look on her face, he added, “I don’t like closed-up spaces, being confined inside a vehicle for too long.”
“That might rule out the SUV then. No problem. I can pick up the flooring when Hutton wakes up from her nap.”
As he dried his hands on a rag, he calmly told her, “Jordan, I think I can handle a ride into town and back.” At least he hoped he could.
“Then take the SUV. The keys are on the peg by the back door.”
Fifteen minutes later on the ride into town, he rolled all the windows down on the Explorer and fought off a panic attack by gulping in deep breath after deep breath. When the trapped feeling began to abate, he started to worry over Jordan’s situation. He remembered in detail his talks with Scott who had given him the impression that the house was pretty much good to go, even ready for guests. Ever the eternal optimist, that assessment was so like Scott. Nick shook his head. He could almost hear Scott’s voice.
“Yeah, now that I think about it, I might have been a little too optimistic in that regard.”
Nick almost drove off the road when he glanced over to look at the passenger seat. There sat Scott with a big goofy grin on his face. “Sorry buddy, but you weren’t ready for the truth.”
“Shit.” Nick forced himself to focus on the two-lane roadway. “You aren’t here.”
“Of course, I’m here. Why wouldn’t I be here, the place where I was the happiest? I’m all around here, everywhere here actually, especially The Cove, to help you adjust, Nick. Jordan needs help. And whether you want to accept it or not, you’re it.”
“I’m not a contractor or a carpenter. She needs both. The house is nowhere near ready for paying guests. Even if both of us worked twelve hours a day for the next ten weeks, it’s gonna be cutting it close.”
“Just do your best. That’s all I ask, Nick. You promised me.”
As Nick hit the city limits, he pointed out, “You’ve sure gotten a lot of miles out of that, too. Look, installing plumbing fixtures isn’t my forte. I could offer to hire help, bring in a professional, but how would I explain that to Jordan.”
“You’ll figure it out, Nick.”
Nick spotted Ferguson’s on the same side of the street and pulled into a slotted space. He cut the engine and looked over at the passenger seat. Scott was gone. Nick puffed out a shaky breath. Maybe sleep deprivation caused hallucinations. Maybe he needed to look that up on the Internet. He continued to sit there and rack his brain for inspiration. Maybe he should simply head back to L.A. It was, after all, the easy way out and would make more sense than this crazy idea ever had. But if he did that, he knew he probably wouldn’t be able to sleep again in this lifetime. And if he walked away now knowing what Jordan was going through alone, he was sure Scott might never stop harassing him.
No doubt about it, he felt trapped between a promise that hadn’t meant anything and his guilty conscience. He crawled from behind the wheel of the SUV, muttering something that sounded like, “Thanks Scott. I’m stuck here and something tells me you’re loving every minute of it.”
Feeling pissed off at the whole situation, he walked through the double doors of Ferguson’s with an attitude. Looking around the store he spotted the hardware section and dug through the shelves until he found several boxes of nuts and bolts he thought he could use.
He then followed the signs for customer pickup to the back counter, only to find he had to wait his turn behind five other people. There was one lone man behind the counter trying to take care of everyone—and at a snail’s pace no less. But he got in line behind a little old lady with blue hair, who as it turned out, wasn’t picking up anything at all, but rather wanted spring planting tips on what kinds of perennials thrived best in this zone. After standing behind her for ten minutes, Nick suspected she wanted nothing more than to have someone listen while she berated her lazy, good-for-nothing excuse for a son-in-law.
By the time a balding, overweight man in his late forties finally greeted him from behind the register, Nick was looking for a fight.
“I need to pick up flooring for Jordan Phillips.”
The man shook his head and didn’t even bother to stutter when he said, “Sorry, mister, but that flooring’s not going anywhere until I get some money on the account. It’s way past due. I’ve been patient up to now, but I’ve got to have payment on her account before I let her have the flooring. I’m not in business to give away my inventory.”
“How about if I speak to the owner, Mr. Ferguson?” Through Scott’s descriptions of the town, Nick felt as if he knew the townspeople well enough to ask for him by name.
“You’re looking at him.”
Nick raised an eyebrow in disbelief. So much for Scott’s misguided assessment of the citizens of Pelican Pointe. “She needs that tile.”
But Ferguson was steadfast. “Sorry.”
Just as obstinate, Nick pointed out, “You know her husband died in Iraq, right?”
Ferguson shook his head defiantly. “For his country and all that. Look, I’ve carried the account for well over six months. That’s more than most would do. I can only be charitable for so long, I’ve got a business to run, bills of my own to pay.”
“How much will it take to bring her account current?”
“I’ll need at least twenty percent of the balance.”
Nick reached for his wallet, pulled out his credit card. So much for being a returning war vet and getting help from the good people of Pelican Pointe. He had to fight the urge to tell off the balding gasbag. As he handed off the credit card something occurred to him though. He lowered his voice when he demanded, “I don’t want you hassling Jordan about paying on her account every time she walks into the store. From now on, you talk to me about it. Got that?”
When the man looked even more sheepish, it only made Nick more determined. “If I find out you’ve bugged her, I’ll come back in here and ream your miserable ass. Are we clear?” While the man stood there with his mouth open, Nick leaned over the counter and made another point. “And I want help loading the damn flooring.”
Later Nick st
ood on the loading dock and watched as two Ferguson employees carried heavy square boxes of tile flooring and pushed them into the back of the SUV. With a satisfied smirk on his face, Nick didn’t see Murphy amble over.
Noting the men were loading Jordan’s Ford Explorer, Murphy asked, “How’s it going? I see you found Jordan’s place.”
“Seems like I’m working for her.”
Murphy sent him a dubious look. “Now how did that happen?” But suddenly Murphy understood. “You didn’t tell her who you were, did you? Something tells me Scott’s name didn’t even come up. Am I right?”
Nick let out an audible sigh, ran his hands nervously through his hair. “When I got there, she was having a crisis of sorts, a meltdown. It wasn’t a good time to start throwing Scott’s name around in the mix.”
“You have to tell her. Jordan’s had a rough time.”
“I know that. She’s under the impression you sent me out there to find work.” He let that register for a couple of minutes before adding, “Look, I know you don’t know me, but when I told her my name, it didn’t register, didn’t mean a thing to her. She was upset, the baby started crying, and I didn’t want to add to that. I haven’t found the right time to tell her yet.”
“Trust me. There is no right time. You wait and it’ll get tougher to find the right words, not easier. I don’t want to see Jordan hurt.”
“You think I do? That’s the last thing I want. So, could we ride with this for a while, Murphy, just until I find the right time?” Knowing small towns, a thought occurred to Nick. “And just so you know, she fixed up that studio apartment over the garage. I’m sleeping there. ”
Murphy shrugged. “What do I care?”
“Yeah. Right. Gossip is the small town way of life. I don’t want people getting the wrong idea about Jordan and giving her a hard time.”
Promise Cove (A Pelican Pointe Novel Book 1) Page 5