Emmie tried to speak around the lump in her throat. She watched the wind ruffle Graham’s hair, sending puffs of plaster dust into the air to mingle with the fine snowflakes that had begun to fall. Finally she managed to say, “I’m glad you told me.”
He nodded, looking at the ground for a moment, then back into her eyes, his own squinted against the cold. “I don’t tell many people. I view it as our private business, you know? Sophie’s gone through so much . . . We moved here in August, she’s started a new school, we’re renting this crappy little place and . . . I try to make everything good for her, but it’s tough. I think once we settle into a nice home of our own, she’ll be happy.”
“You know what?” Emmie said softly. “Sophie already looks happy to me—and I’ll bet anything it’s because you’re being a great dad.”
“Thanks. But I still want to do this for her.” He looked over at the house. “I wish I had found this place earlier. Looks like we won’t be able to move in till next summer . . . at the earliest . . .”
“You’ve got a lot of people on the job; maybe we can move things along faster.”
“Yeah, now that you’ve already made some progress on the plaster,” he teased with a sly grin. “I’d better get going, get some of the guys started on cleaning up your handiwork in the library before I leave. I’ll be in touch soon, so we can talk about what we’re going to do to get this place in shape.”
“You bet,” Emmie said.
Graham started to say something else, paused, then said simply, “Take care, Emmie,” before he made his way back up the front walk.
“Okay, let’s talk dentil molding.”
Graham shuffled a few papers on his cluttered work area—a piece of plywood stretched across some spare sawhorses—and pulled out one of Emmie’s sketches for the dining room, shifting it so they could both see it at the right angle. Emmie, chin propped on her hand and her elbow in the way, gazed stupidly at his gorgeous profile and didn’t notice that Graham was waiting for Emmie to budge so he could put the sketch down. Graham was looking at the paper, but when she didn’t move, he glanced up. At the sight of his deep blue eyes twinkling at her, Emmie flushed scarlet to the roots of her hair and tucked herself into as compact a size as possible, her hands in her lap.
Graham smiled. “You all right?”
“Sure!” she squeaked, then cleared her throat. “Fine. I’m fine. You were saying? About the . . . the . . .”
“Dentil molding.”
“Right!” Emmie nodded. “Good stuff, dentil molding. Er, what about it?”
Graham ran the tip of his tongue over his lower lip, the corners of which were still upturned in an amused grin, which nearly sent Emmie into fits. He returned his attention to the sketch, but he glanced up at her every few seconds, almost to make sure she was functioning properly, as he asked her how much of the original molding they could salvage, and how much they’d have to replicate and with what type of materials. Emmie put on a studious frown to appear deep in thought, but whenever Graham’s gaze was on the desktop, she went back to mooning at him like a love-struck dope. Which she was. This was their fourth meeting in two weeks, and she hadn’t gotten tired of being with him yet. He was so . . . so . . . yeah. That. Gorgeous, sure. But so smart, too. And gorgeous. Self-assured. Talented. And, you know, gorgeous.
She shook herself. She really should be paying attention to what he was saying instead of staring at his perfect lips and wondering what they tasted like. After all, she wasn’t there to drool over him. She had to make with the interior design.
Graham sighed and leaned back in his wooden folding chair. “Okay, I can see that dentil molding isn’t lighting your fire today.” Oh, my fire is lit, Emmie thought. But definitely not by molding. “So let’s figure something else out.”
It dawned on Emmie that she was going to have a second chance to sound brilliant. Focus.
“The master bath. Obviously it’s too small as it is. But I’d hate to lose a bedroom to expand it.”
“Totally understandable. You’ve only got so many—like, fifty.”
Graham smirked. “Forty-eight, and you know it. Seriously, I think that front bedroom is worth keeping, and I don’t want to cut into it. What do you suggest?”
And Emmie’s second chance to sound brilliant died on the vine. She had no clue. As she scrambled to come up with something, her phone chimed, and she jumped. She glanced at the screen; the reminder for her afternoon meeting with Wilma popped up. Ugh. “Sorry,” she said to Graham (boy, was she ever), “I’ve got to get back to the office.” Was she hallucinating, or did Graham look a little disappointed? For the thousandth time since she started spending time with him on this project, her heart started beating triple time. Who needed the gym? Just being around him was giving her enough of a cardio workout. “But, uh, before I go”—she had to salvage this meeting somehow—“I wanted to ask you about the wallpaper in the master bedroom.”
“The answer is no, I don’t want to keep it.”
Emmie grinned. “Yeah, you don’t seem like a forget-me-not kind of guy.”
“Well, under the right circumstances. But surrounded by them every night? Not so much.”
“What I meant was, what do you think of having it recreated, custom, for Sophie’s room? It’d be a nice delicate touch above the chair rail, add some color variety to offset all that yellow.”
“Great idea. She’d like that. Her second-favorite color is purple.”
Ooh, praise from Graham always gave Emmie the wibbles. “I’ll get some for a sample before I go, then.”
She stood, and Graham stood up as well. He wasn’t going anywhere, but instead was doing the old-fashioned stand-when-a-woman-stands thing. More wibbles, which made it difficult for her to cross the room, grab a spare putty knife, and make it upstairs without having to sit on the steps to regroup. She almost—almost—considered it a relief to be alone for a few minutes in the master bedroom.
The workers hadn’t gotten to the room yet; it was still a dusty mess. Before Emmie hunted for a loose corner of wallpaper to pull on, she spent a minute gazing down at the lawn, which was now encrusted with a thin layer of snow. She rested her head against one of the window frames, not caring if some of the peeling paint chips lodged in her hair. Damn, she had it bad. She couldn’t even manage to keep some emotional distance by remembering Graham’s questionable morals. Really, none of it added up. He was so gentle and kind, not to mention funny, polite, and intelligent. She kept trying to find something about him that was objectionable, less than perfect—a telltale sign that his gallant manners were a front for something more sinister, and someday his mask would slip and she’d be able to say, Scooby-like, “Ah-hah!”—that she knew it all along. But so far—nothing.
She tore her gaze away from the window. If she didn’t get back soon, Wilma would have her head (again). She looked around the room and spotted a panel of wallpaper that seemed looser than the others, about three feet above the floor, by the door frame. A narrow air bubble ran down the middle—that’d be a good place to work loose a piece big enough for the wallpaper company to use to replicate the pattern.
Emmie sliced through the bubble with the corner of the putty knife, then slipped the tool under the edge and started to wiggle the paper free. It came away fairly easily, old as it was, the glue completely shot. Emmie frowned and looked closer. She nudged more of the paper loose, this time on the other side of the cut she had made. Then she started pulling at it with her fingernails. Stunned, she sat back on her heels. Then she called Graham.
“You’re kidding me.” Graham crouched down and peered into the open door Emmie had found behind the wallpaper.
A low, narrow hallway ran parallel with the landing on the other side of the wall and ended in a small area only a little wider than the passage. There was a door on that end that would have opened onto the landing, but at some point the opening must have been plastered or drywalled over, because there was no trace of it now.
&nbs
p; He thought a moment, then said, “I know what this is.”
“What, a bedroom for hunchback mice?” Emmie muttered.
“Servant’s quarters. The lady’s maid slept in a cot there at the far end. If the lady of the house—she in the big bedroom here—needed anything, she would ring a bell, and the maid would scoot down this tiny passageway and pop out next to the bed.”
Good grief, there really had been a lady’s maid, Emmie said to herself. “That is completely weird.”
“Yeah? How does your lady’s maid attend to you when you summon her in the middle of the night?”
“I take care of my own chamber pot, thank you very much.” Then she couldn’t resist teasing, “And you didn’t know this was here, Mister Big-time Architect? I mean, the bathroom ends there”—she pointed around the corner—“and then you’ve got ten, twelve feet of nothing till you get to the bedroom?”
He stood up and stretched. “Well, I didn’t think to investigate, Miss Smartypants. With all these additions, sometimes they just left empty spaces behind the wall.”
“This could have been where they hid their gold!”
“You think the original owners were leprechauns?”
“That would explain the height of the hideaway.” She peeked out onto the landing again. “Well, that solves your bathroom problem, anyway. Raise the ceiling here, and widen the empty space behind it thataway. Extend the bathroom and put in a proper door, and voilà—an en suite bathroom. They’re all the rage these days, I hear.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Can you raise the ceiling?”
“I dunno. Might have to call an architect. Oh, wait.” Graham winked. Then he made a face and scratched his head. “Yeah, how come I didn’t see this before?”
“Well, you’re looking down at foundations and drainage. But I’m looking up at walls and ceilings.”
“That proves we make a good team, then.”
Emmie’s ever-present butterflies switched from their usual light capering to retro slam dancing in steel-toed Dr. Martens.
He tilted his head and studied her. “You are very good at this,” he said. “And John really has never let you work on other jobs?” She shook her head. “How do you know all this stuff, then? I mean, where do you get your hands-on experience?”
“Oh.” Emmie took a breath. “I have an old Craftsman cottage. I—I did a lot of work on it over the past few years. Refinishing and remodeling and . . . stuff.” Stuff ? she berated herself.
But Graham was saying, “I’d love to see it sometime.”
And Emmie nearly fainted dead away right there.
“One more. Come on, just one more.”
“No!”
“Well, too late, because here it comes—”
With groans and mumbles, everyone leaned forward. Three hands plopped three drinks on the coffee table, and six hands covered six ears.
“Squeeee!”
A pause. Then, “Are you done?”
Emmie took a sip of her wine and thought about it a moment. “Mm, yeah. Okay, I’m done.”
“Thank goodness.”
Six hands came off six ears, and three hands reached for three drinks. Three hands nearly dropped three drinks when another “Squeeee!” rent the air.
“I thought you said you were done!” Trish snarled at Emmie.
Emmie curled up in the corner of Trish’s couch and giggled. “Sorry. That last one just slipped out.”
“And for the record?” Avery added, mopping up the wine that had spilled out of his glass when he was jolted by Emmie’s last squeal. “Nobody actually says ‘squee’—you just text it or post it.”
“Is she always like this?” the third rattled person asked Avery.
This was Adam, he of the cute butt spotted at the town’s winter festival. Emmie learned from Avery that after he had taken her home, he had hurried back to the town center to see if he could locate the owner of the cute butt, and he had found him, said cute butt perched on a stool at the wine bar on Main Street. “Like he was just waiting for me!” Avery had exclaimed excitedly to Emmie when he called to tell her the news.
Now the new couple joined her and Trish to help her celebrate that she and Graham had had at least one “moment,” possibly two.
“Lookee here, newbie,” she said with a goofy grin. “I’ll have you know—”
“Yes, she’s always like this,” Trish interrupted. Emmie made a face, but Trish countered, “Well, you are!”
Emmie contemplated this. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
She didn’t mind getting ganged up on. Nothing could puncture her happy bubble—the one that had settled in her torso under her burgeoning heart, the one that was filled with those madly careening multicolored butterflies that were threatening to stage an all-night rave in her belly.
“What about Juliet?”
It was like somebody had put on a Michael Bolton tune in the middle of the dance party. The butterflies froze in horror and confusion, much the same way Avery and Adam did, which pleased Emmie. They might be new to the Emmie Club, but they were catching on quick. She gave Trish the hairy eyeball but said nothing.
“What?” Trish persisted. “Nothing’s changed. They’re still—”
“Out.”
“What?”
“Out, I say! There will be no sabotaging my good mood today. Not the same day Graham and I had a moment.”
“Maybe two,” Avery reminded her.
“Right. Maybe two. So begone, you who dare to pee in my Cheerios. Out!”
“It’s my house.”
“I don’t care,” Emmie said without missing a beat. “I will hear no mention of Juliet today, of all days.”
“But—”
“Nope!”
“But—”
“Wait,” Avery said. “We’re missing one important factor here.”
Adam nodded. “Yep. A ring.”
“What?”
“At the risk of sounding way too gay for my own good by paraphrasing old club tunes,” Adam said, “if there’s no ring on it . . .”
“You’re right,” Emmie said. “Juliet’s married to Kevin. Juliet hasn’t left Kevin for Graham—”
“Yet,” Trish muttered.
“Quit it,” Emmie growled.
“Right,” Avery agreed, refilling Emmie’s glass and gesturing to Trish to hand hers over as well. “All’s fair in the mad scramble for a decent man, and all that.”
Trish shook her head. “I don’t know. Juliet could invoke prior claim.”
“Bah.” Emmie took a healthy swallow of wine. “She has no prior claim when she’s stepping out on her husband.”
“Oh, yeah?” Trish asked, eyeing her best friend shrewdly. “You think you could intentionally break them up so you could steal him?”
Emmie smirked and let out a tipsy “pssshhht” that was meant to be a confident dismissal. “Hell yeah!”
“Really?”
“Yes!” Now Emmie was irked. “I am completely capable of playing hardball. This is Graham we’re talking about here! I just need to get him in some . . . social setting. Not work, you know?”
The side door to the garage slammed and Rick entered the kitchen, dropping his car keys onto the counter with a clatter. As he came through the doorway to the living room, Trish said, “You forget the little monsters at the hockey rink?”
“Justin’s learning responsibility—he’s putting away his own equipment this time. Logan’s, uh, ‘helping.’”
Sure enough, strident kid voices came from the garage as the boys wrestled with Justin’s hockey gear.
“It’ll be in a pile on the garage steps, blocking their way into the house,” Trish corrected. “That means they’ll have to sleep in the garage tonight. And, you know, I’m okay with that.”
Rick nodded to Avery. “Hey,” he said, enthusiastically friendly. “Good to see you. And you, Emmie,” he added pointedly. Emmie snickered. Neither she nor Trish had told him about Avery. Now was probably a
good time, though, as Rick looked curiously at Adam and extended his hand. “Rick Campo.”
Adam rose halfway from the sofa. “Adam Lowery.”
“Nice to meet you.” He shook Adam’s hand, then gave Emmie the eye. “So! Picking ’em up two at a time now?”
Emmie snickered again. “Not quite, Rick. But Graham and I had a moment!”
“Maybe two,” Avery added again.
Rick was now completely befuddled. “Er . . .”
Trish decided to rescue him. She stood up, grabbed her husband’s arm, and steered him toward the kitchen. “Let’s open another bottle and get you a glass.”
“I’d rather have a beer,” Rick said, glancing back at the threesome on the sofa, trying to figure it all out.
“Fine,” Trish answered, still propelling him out of the room. “Now, there’s just one other thing . . .”
Chapter 11
“Kill me.”
“And end up alone with . . . this? No way. Remember, Emmie darling, this was your idea. I’m just the saintly friend helping out. Now get this saint another glass of holy wine.”
Emmie and Trish were leaning in the doorway of Emmie’s kitchen. They, like the people who had arrived before them in the combined living room and dining room, were dressed in their best festive gear, backlit by strings of fairy lights and dozens of candles. What with the decorations, trays of hors d’oeuvres, and a side table groaning under the weight of every kind of alcohol Emmie could fling in her shopping cart à la Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, her impromptu holiday party should have been a raging success.
As it was, however, the scene was more like a forced march. Emmie had invited every happy couple in her circle of friends, in a grand scheme to get Graham to her house and among stable relationships. Kind of as a hint that he belonged with her, in a normal setting, instead of slinking around dark alleys with Juliet.
It had started off promisingly, with Avery and Adam agreeing to attend as readily as Trish and Rick. In a paroxysm of holiday spirit, Emmie had even invited Wilma and Travis. Wilma had turned her down flat without so much as a moment to reflect, of course, but she had anticipated his Scrooge-like response and had sent an Evite to Travis as well. He had phoned her promptly, rumbling to her in his deep, honeyed voice that he would make sure they were there. And, true to his word, somehow he had managed to drag Wilma to the party.
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