By Design

by Denker, Jayne

He smiled sympathetically. “You’re exhausted. I’m sorry I had to bring this up now. You need to get some rest. And I have to get home to Sophie. Annamaria has probably been checking her watch every thirty seconds for the past hour.” He stood up, and Emmie followed. “I guess I’ll check in with you at work, tomorrow or Tuesday—”

  As if she were watching herself in a movie—or, rather, watching someone completely unlike herself in a movie—Emmie found herself interrupting him with an entirely uncharacteristic, “So . . . you’re . . . telling me that you’re not interested?”

  Now it was Graham’s turn to stammer, “Er . . . what?”

  Even though she was already close to him, she stepped closer. “You’re not interested. In me.”

  “I—I didn’t say that . . .”

  Emmie was pleased to see that he looked a little flustered. She didn’t usually enjoy power trips, but knocking him back on his heels gave her a bit of a thrill. Suddenly she felt more confident than she had ever felt in her life. Maybe it was the fact that she felt so strongly about him, about the two of them together. Maybe she was still in shock from being rendered temporarily homeless. Maybe she was exhausted, like he said. Or maybe she had completely lost her mind. One thing she did know: Suddenly she didn’t care if she tried and failed; what she couldn’t cope with anymore was not trying in the first place. She’d been the meek nice girl all her life, and all it had gotten her was the middle name of “Doormat,” a lousy job with a tyrant of a boss, a self-absorbed father, a selfish boyfriend-turned-ex who wouldn’t go away, and a burned-down house. And that burned-down house was the last straw.

  Emmie took another step toward Graham. He took half a step back. Only half, though. “And you’re telling me that . . . what happened this afternoon . . . you haven’t been thinking about that?” She put a hand on his chest, her fingertips brushing the edge of his collar.

  “Uh . . .” He laughed nervously. “Well, of course . . .”

  “And before today, you didn’t think about me . . . that way . . . at all?” Another step. Graham didn’t move this time.

  “The truth is,” he answered, gazing down at her, “I’ve been thinking about you for . . . quite a while.”

  Emmie caught her breath. Oh really? What Juliet had said to her in the car came rushing back—that Graham had been distracted lately, and she thought he had someone else! Any lingering doubts she may have had about pinning Graham down flew right out the window. She wrapped her arms around his neck, slowly and sensuously, looking him squarely in the eye the entire time. He seemed unable to move. She noticed his Adam’s apple working as he swallowed with difficulty.

  “Well, then,” she murmured, “what exactly are you thinking about . . . right . . . now?”

  But he didn’t answer with words. As tentatively and tenderly as they had kissed earlier that day, the hungrier and more calamitous their collision was at that moment. Emmie thought she was going to launch herself at Graham? No, Graham launched himself at her; suddenly he was kissing her lips, her eyes, her chin—

  Emmie let out an involuntary yip, and Graham immediately pulled back. “What is it? Did I step on your foot?”

  And she laughed softly. “No. You . . . uh . . . that was . . . my . . .”

  He grinned wickedly. “Oh, that’s a good bit of information to have. Where was it, now . . . here?” And he kissed her again at the base of her neck. Emmie’s knees buckled.

  Chapter 14

  “You what!”

  Emmie held the phone away from her ear while Trish screamed.

  “Let’s just say I gave him something to think about.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Trish giggled, then said abruptly, “I want props.”

  “What?”

  “Props. I want props. Credit. Brownie points. After all, the bag of clothes thing? That was me.”

  “Okay, okay,” Emmie relented. “I owe it all to your quick thinking. All praise and props to you, my hero.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  A shadow fell over Emmie’s desk. Wilma, doing his best Nosferatu impression. “No personal calls, Emmaline,” he ordered before stalking away.

  And suddenly the New Emmie, the one that had been born the previous night, took over. “John!” she snapped. “Gimme a break. My house just burned down. I’m emotionally fragile.”

  Wilma’s narrow shoulders stiffened, and he pivoted back around slowly. “What?” he bit out.

  “I have had a crisis. So I am going to be making personal calls, and I am going to be on the phone with the insurance company, too, till I get this sorted out. Deal with it.”

  Through the handset, she could hear Trish murmur again, “Oh. My. God.” Then, after a moment’s silence, “Emmie? Are you dead now?”

  Although Wilma fired his best death-ray lasers at her, Emmie found that they didn’t frighten her. It seemed like nothing would anymore. “I’m going back to my phone call now,” she announced calmly, turning away from her boss. “Oh, yeah—and here’s your mail.” Instead of scuttling toward him and handing it over, Emmie held the mail out at arm’s length and returned her attention to the phone. She held her breath and waited. After a few seconds, Wilma actually went to her to accept the envelopes and catalogs. She fought back a grin. Oh, yes, it was the dawn of a new era.

  “Meet me for lunch,” Emmie told Trish. “Someplace nice. And fattening. And with a liquor license. I’m going to have a glass of wine.”

  “You. Are going to drink. In the middle of a workday,” her friend said, stunned at Emmie’s new ’tude.

  “Not to excess! Just, you know, one glass. Come on!”

  Trish started to laugh. “All right, all right! Seems like I just can’t say no to you lately.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But hold on just one second, missy—I’m not going to wait till lunchtime for this: What about Juliet? Didn’t you discuss her?”

  Emmie took a breath. “Mm, we did . . . sort of.”

  “What, you were too busy playing tonsil hockey to have an actual conversation?”

  “No . . .” Emmie said. “It . . . came up, of course.”

  “And . . . ?”

  Graham never did bring up Juliet’s name as she had expected, so, riding high on her new wave of confidence, Emmie decided to broach the subject herself. Graham had made a face and reluctantly said, “That’s . . . kind of complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  Graham played with a strand of Emmie’s hair as he said thoughtfully, “Juliet . . . hm. When I met Juliet, I was in a very bad place. I was still mourning my wife. I wanted to be strong, for Sophie’s sake, so I convinced myself that I was fine, that I was back to normal. Of course, I was wrong.” Emmie put her hand on his knee and just listened. “Juliet looked a little like Kat—my wife—and when you’re that devastated over losing someone, it can be enough to make you think that you love the new person. It’s false, but it happens. But she was also very different from Kat. She was . . . well, you know how she is—a force of nature. She bowled me over, and not exactly in a good way. I . . . never should have gotten involved with Juliet. And for more than just the obvious reasons.”

  “Obvious reasons?” Emmie repeated. “Like the fact that she’s married?”

  Graham rubbed his eyes, looking completely wiped out, and it started to dawn on Emmie that perhaps he wasn’t, in fact, anywhere close to comfortable with his relationship with Juliet.

  After a moment, he said wearily, “She lied. She lied to me when we first met, first got together. She said she was divorced. And she wasn’t even separated—not legally. I admit I should have known. I should have figured it out—I’m not usually that dense. And I know some men wouldn’t care—they’d think that was just a technicality, if she was planning on getting divorced anyway, but when I found out . . . I should have known then that it was time to run far away.

  “But I didn’t. The only excuse I have is that I wasn’t thinking straight. Not much of one, I know. But there it is. I convinc
ed myself that she was perfect for me, and we would start a new life together. That’s one of the reasons I bought a big house—I thought we’d fill it with our combined families. I look back on that now, and it seems so crazy. And I should have taken it as a sign when I couldn’t bring myself to introduce her to my daughter. Not as the woman I was dating, that is. Sophie met her once or twice and just knows Juliet as ‘a friend.’

  “I thought we were going to move here together. She was the one who suggested we move in together, and she suggested we move to Jemison. She was talking up her hometown, planning our new life, her new business. But after a while, she started giving me some song and dance about the ‘sensitive nature’ of her situation, that her divorce wasn’t, in fact, going to happen anytime soon, and the next thing I knew, she and her kids moved into the house they’re in now, on their own. That left me and Sophie to scramble to rent a place, because our house was sold by then.”

  “And she lives there with Kevin?”

  “No. He’s still in Williamsport.”

  Emmie was puzzled. “But . . . the night of the cookie party, I saw him there. Juliet introduced him as her husband.”

  “Williamsport is a bit of drive, but Kevin still takes the kids a lot, after school and some weekends.” Graham smirked. “I’m not surprised she called him her husband. They still aren’t divorced, and lately I’ve been thinking they never will be.”

  “So when Juliet said Kevin was with the kids last night, he was babysitting?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she could go to my party with you.” Emmie thought a moment. “She told me Kevin doesn’t know about you . . . ?”

  “She was adamant about that. She said she was worried that it would affect her getting spousal support. But the more I think about it, I get the feeling that she just wanted to have both of us on the hook. If there’s one thing Juliet loves more than life itself, it’s having lots of admirers.” He turned to face her, looking grim. “Emmie, I want you to know that when I found out Juliet was stringing me along—and Kevin, too—well, that was the end of it. I was so humiliated, I nearly packed everything up and moved back to Williamsport, but I had the house to deal with, and Sophie was just getting settled again, and then . . .”

  “Then what?”

  “I kept meeting this beautiful woman—three times, wasn’t it?” Emmie blushed. “And then living in Jemison started to look pretty promising. But as for Juliet . . . I didn’t want to have anything more to do with her. That night of the winter festival? Agony. I tried to tell her that we were done, but she just wouldn’t listen. She’d just talk over me and change the subject, kept acting like we were together. That’s when I started avoiding her.”

  “And then she got desperate and invited herself to my party—so you two could be there as a couple. She told me.”

  “She did?”

  “She got so drunk, Graham.”

  “She does love her gin and tonics.”

  “But—”

  “I know.” He sighed. “It was because we argued about it and I never showed up.” He rubbed his eyes again, then studied her with a tortured expression.

  She knew what was on his mind. “Do not go thinking that if you were there, I wouldn’t have had to drive Juliet home, and Kyle and Caitlynn wouldn’t have lit candles and . . . you know . . . in my bed, and my house wouldn’t have burned down. That’s too much of a stretch.”

  “I can’t help but think just that.”

  “Well, don’t. Come on, crazy Kyle and idiot Caitlynn probably would have figured out another way to bring my house down around my ears, whether or not I was driving Juliet home.”

  Graham cupped her chin tenderly. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For listening. For understanding. For not judging, even though I’ve acted pretty stupid—and crazy—lately.”

  “Oh,” she whispered, “we all have our particular brand of crazy. I don’t think yours is so severe. Not by a long shot.”

  “Hey,” Emmie murmured, hanging back in the doorway of the gutted library, suddenly nervous. It was, after all, her first face-to-face contact with Graham since their . . . extended contact . . . over the weekend. They had exchanged a few texts during the week, and Graham had asked her to come 2 house thurs @ 3? and she had replied with :) , but other than that, all she had been able to do was relive Sunday night in her head. Over . . . and over . . . and over . . .

  “Hey!” A delighted smile brightened his features as he glanced up from his laptop. Oh, phew, she thought. “Come on in, stranger. I’m just—” The rest of his words were drowned out by an incredibly loud brrrrrrrpppp-brp-brp coming from the back of the house, the offending power tool echoing through the empty rooms. When the noise stopped, Graham started over. “I’m just—”

  Brrrrrrrpppp-brp-brp.

  “I—”

  Brp.

  He rolled his eyes and slammed his laptop shut, then walked past her through the doorway, crooking his finger at her to follow. In the kitchen, three of the guys were taking down the god-awful fake-walnut pressboard cupboards. Emmie decided the ear-shredding, conversation-destroying noise was worth it, as long as those hideous wall warts were heading for the Dumpster.

  The power drill started up again as the workers unscrewed the cabinets from one another and from the cleats in the wall. Graham let out a piercing whistle from between his teeth to cut through the noise, and he waved his arms for good measure.

  When he’d gotten the workers’ attention, he said, “I’m going to be meeting with Emmie—show her what we’re doing with Sophie’s room. Pete, you need me for anything?”

  The man wielding the power drill, standing with one steel-toed boot on a ladder and the other on the orange countertop, asked, “You want us to clear out the butler’s pantry, too, when we’re finished with these?”

  “NO!” Emmie yelped. All male eyes settled on her in surprise. “I mean . . . that is . . . don’t change a thing in there. Just . . . just leave it.”

  Graham grinned. “Better listen to her, boys. She knows her stuff.”

  The man called Pete nodded. Emmie let out a relieved puff of breath, thinking how close they had just come to smashing up antique all-wood cabinetry. Yikes.

  As they made their way up the still-rickety stairs, Emmie asked, “What have you been doing with Sophie’s room that you want to show me?”

  In answer, when they reached the landing, Graham grabbed her hand and yanked her into the master bedroom, slammed the door shut behind them, spun her around, and pinned her to it. When she had recovered from a kiss that rearranged her insides, she smiled at him, and said, “Oh, I see.”

  “Hello there,” he murmured.

  “Hello.”

  “I can’t believe I haven’t seen you all week.”

  She closed her eyes as he pushed her hair back to nibble on her ear. “Mm. You smell like sawdust.”

  He chuckled. “Is that a good thing?”

  “The best.”

  “I had no idea that the smell of wood shavings was an aphrodisiac.”

  “Depends on who’s wearing it.”

  “I’m honored.”

  He kissed her again, and the door, ill-fitting in its frame, made little thumping noises as he pressed her against it. She dropped her bag to the floor as she completely gave herself over to his kisses. She tried to tell herself that the interior designer making out with the architect on the job site was entirely unprofessional, especially with a bunch of construction workers swarming all over the house, but her concerns were drowned out by the static that filled her head when Graham reached under her canvas skirt and slid his hand up the outside of her thigh.

  “Oh, dear,” she breathed, feeling the burning heat of his hand through her tights, suddenly unsure that she was going to be able to continue standing.

  Graham sighed and removed his hand. “I agree. Unfortunately.”

  “You are terrible, Mr. Cooper.”

  “But in a good way, right
?”

  “Oh, very good. Very bad. Whatever.”

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

  “Do not apologize.” Emmie smoothed out her hair, straightened her skirt, and said, with fake formality, “Now. Do you or do you not have any progress to show me here on the second floor?”

  “Er . . . not really. But I do have something else I want you to see. Consider it an early Christmas present.”

  “I thought that was my Christmas present.”

  Graham ushered her back downstairs, grabbed his coat, and shouted to the workers that he was going to be off site for a little while. He opened the passenger door of his car for a curious Emmie.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I thought we’d see how our other project is going.”

  On the way to her house, Graham told Emmie that there’d been a great deal of progress already. When they got there, Emmie could see what he meant. A large railcar Dumpster sitting in her driveway was nearly full with the wrecked bits of her house. Pieces of furniture, some slightly scorched and some severely torched, sat in the open garage.

  “I didn’t want to presume that you’d want to throw all your personal items away,” Graham said, “so I had the guys put them there. Just say what’s too far gone, and we’ll throw it out; point out what you want to keep, and I’ll put it in storage.” He added, “The mattress was a goner. That’s in the Dumpster already.”

  She gave him a look. “After the very last thing that, er, happened on it? I would have set fire to it.” She looked around and sighed. “Graham, this is a wonderful early Christmas present. Thank—”

  “Oh, this isn’t your present.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Not quite.” He scanned the yard, put his arm around her shoulders, and pointed. “There. Try that on for size.”

  Emmie’s jaw dropped. Around the back corner of the house came a familiar figure, pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with ragged, water-bloated pieces of drywall, and grumbling and cursing the entire time.

  Kyle.

  Emmie thought she would burst with the giggles that bubbled up inside her. “How did you manage that?”