“How’s Bob working out?”
“Fine, but you didn’t mention he was your brother.”
“Oh. Well, is that a problem?”
Since the work day was more than half over, she guessed it wasn’t. “Maybe,” she said, thinking of the cash payments.
“Really? Why?”
She explained the tax issue.
“I’m thinking of asking Bob to take a check and disburse the funds to the crew himself, that way I have something for the IRS.”
“Should not be a problem.” As Daniel lifted his hand to sweep his hair from his forehead, his shoulders strained against the material of his white T-shirt. She couldn’t help but surmise that he must do some other form of exercise besides running, because, for a banker, he was quite fit. She bet his arms around her would be strong. They’d make her feel safe.
“You have an accountant, right?”
She brought her wandering mind back to the conversation.
She didn’t have an accountant, but she’d hire one today. Somebody had to figure out how much she’d have to add to Bob’s paycheck in order to cover taxes.
“I already told Bob he could work for cash,” she admitted.
“I’ll straighten it out for you.”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll speak to Bob.” Eva felt her heart speed up and her stomach clench. Was it from attraction or irritation or both? This was her project, not his. She took long calming breaths of lake air as they walked. They stopped together at the rickety steps leading up to her property.
“You have good insurance, right?” he said, eyeing the steps.
“I do.” She’d taken care of that earlier today when she realized she had a crew of men on her property who’d need to be covered in case of injury.
He went over to the steps and pulled lightly at a board. She’d already noted that several had bad spots, splits, a bit of rot, but this one fell completely apart in his hands. She didn’t remember them being in such disrepair when she and her mom had come here last summer to scatter her dad’s ashes.
“I can fix these for you.”
She must quit staring at his muscled arms. She focused on his hair, glinting in the sun. You didn’t see that color of natural blonde on men much downstate. Stop it right now.
“I’m sure someone on the crew can handle it,” she said.“Who’d you bring on?” he asked casually, still inspecting the steps. They were all the names he’d given her, so she didn’t understand why he was shaking his head.
“You don’t have a carpenter. Nobody who really knows wood, except Bob, and he’s going to be busy restoring the wood in the cottages.”
She thought about how her insurance premiums would skyrocket if someone crashed through a rotted beach step. And the way Daniel kept prodding them, they were all likely to collapse in a heap before he was finished.
“Honest to God, it would be a pleasure to help.” Daniel continued poking and prodding the rotted wood.
“You didn’t give me the name of a carpenter. “He didn’t look at her. She wondered if he had omitted that information on purpose. So he could be the carpenter. So he could oversee the renovation.“What about the bank? Don’t you have a real job?”
“I’m easing out of my role at the bank.”
“You’re leaving?”
He nodded and finally turned around, dusting his hands on his jeans. A huge grin split his face as he looked into her eyes. “I’ve been training my replacement for when Bob goes to college in the fall.”
He was still smiling. He had really nice teeth. Was there anything about him that was not perfect? Well, he wore glasses, but then, they suited him.
“Why?” She bit her bottom lip. Had she been too intrusive?
“My family came up to Michigan from Georgia about a hundred years ago.” He went back to pulling and prodding at the rotting steps. More silver wood fell to the sand. “After he became an architect, Bryman went south every winter, to oversee the homes he designed down there. That’s my next move.”
“You’re moving to Georgia?” She had to stop repeating his words, but they made no sense. She collected the discarded the pile of wood, moving it closer to the bluff leading to the house, away from the sandy beach and the running path.
“For the winter months. I’ve already bought a couple of Bryman properties there. In pretty bad shape, too.” It was like she could read his mind by the tone of his voice. He loved a challenge. They had that in common. She tried to pull off a board of her own.
He came over and helped her pull the stubborn step off the foundation board. When their shoulders touched, she could have sworn he leaned into her on purpose. Keep leaning.
“I could use a hammer. And some gloves,” he said, but they stayed where they were, pulling at the loose boards together, letting arms, hands, shoulders touch.
“Ow.” A splinter of wood spiked the pad of her thumb. She pulled it out quickly, blotting the bead of blood on her jeans.
“So is it just you and Bob? You’re like his guardian?”
He nodded, but kept working, kept his eyes on the job, and didn’t explain.
She began to form a mental picture of Daniel as a dad. He was young, but solid. Kind but not a pushover. Good job. Stable life. Perfect dad material. She forced herself to stop the direction her thoughts were heading. Since Marcus shot her down, she’d been licking her wounds, barely even dating. Now all that baby lust came flooding back. Because of Daniel.
“I’ll go up and get some tools and do this right,” Daniel said. He stopped working and, looking down at the sand, said, “After our parents died, we sort of grew up together. My grandparents were still alive then, so they helped.”
Eva’s heart softened, but she kept her face as neutral as possible. Guys hated pity. So did she. She never knew what to say to the people at her dad’s funeral. Some of them cried so hard she had to console them, when it was her mom and her who were the bereaved.
“What happened?” The words escaped before she could take them back.
“Car accident,” Daniel said. He kicked at the neat pile of wood they’d been building, avoiding her eyes. “My dad died instantly, but our mother hung on, in a coma, for weeks.” He tried to keep his voice neutral; she tried not to hug him. He looked like he needed one. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on her part. No wonder he always tried to fix everything. No wonder he tried to keep whatever pieces of his family were left intact and exactly the same.
He held his large hands to frame the partially dismantled steps like a camera lens. “I’d make them wider,” he said. She noticed his hands were banged up for a banker, his fingers a little thick. Better hands for a hammer than a keyboard. His thumb nail on the right hand was smashed, a little deformed. So, another flaw. But, like the glasses, an endearing one. “And build a handrail on both sides. That might even lower your insurance premiums.”
“Sounds expensive,” she said, but in a soft tone. It had been so much easier to treat him in a business-like manner when he was dressed in a suit and tie. When she had not known his history.
“This—” He still kept his hands in a frame of the stairway in his head. “—leads to a Bryman property. I’d do it for free.”
This guy was either way generous or…what? What did he stand to gain? She covered her doubts by teasing him. “Don’t you mind changing the integrity of the beach steps?”
“Oh, these old things have been rebuilt plenty of times,” he said. “Weather. Water. People. Tears ’em up every decade or so.”
He climbed up what was left of the steps, stopping and turning to hold out a hand to help her up the ones they’d pulled loose.
She took his hand just in case, but focused on balancing on her own. When he would have continued walking toward the bungalow, she pulled him back. Which is when she realized they were still holding hands. And it felt nice. Warm and tingly, not a sexy shock like the first time they’d touched. She reluctantly released her grip on his hand.
“Look at
this with me for a minute,” she said.
They stood side by side, staring at the house. Flaking paint made it look like a wrinkled old lady. The cement stoop begged to be turned into a big front porch. The squat roof wanted to be a room full of people. She could feel it.
“Can’t you just picture a second floor? The overhang could be the roof of a big porch? And upstairs there’d be windows to show off the lake view, with comfy furniture, and a fireplace and books and tables for eating and playing board games on rainy days?”
He seemed to consider what she said and finally, reluctantly, agreed. “Yes, I can see how this might be turned into an airplane-style bungalow.” He was quiet for a beat, while she basked in the sweetness of winning him over. “But that’s not what Bryman built.”
Okay, so she hadn’t won. Still, he’d seen what she’d seen. Their inner visions had agreed.
“Maybe he meant to,” she said. “Maybe he ran out of money. It was the Depression, after all.”
“We’ll never know. Unless you’ve got the blueprints stashed somewhere.” Daniel stood with his arms folded across his slim waist, still looking at her house.
She laughed. “Nope.” Then she sighed. “It’s just…that’s the part about coming up here that was so special. My aunts and cousins and us, we’d all have our own cottages, but every meal, we’d gather in the bungalow. And at night, we’d all be there together.”
“I heard your aunts insisted your dad buy them out.”
“They wanted him to sell his share too. That way they’d get the money faster.” All the anger and sorrow her dad’s decision to keep Blue Heaven had caused—one day she had a big, happy extended family, and the next nobody but Mom and Dad. Then just Mom—made her yearn to create a family of her own.
Chapter Four
Daniel had never been inside the bungalow. He wished she’d ask him in. If he fixed her beach stairs and her accounting problem with Bob, maybe she would. There was something in her that pulled him toward her. And it wasn’t just Blue Heaven.
While Eva went to the truck of her car to unload a box of what she called “treasures” he spoke briefly to Bob.
“Let me get that,” he said, taking the awkward box from Eva. Her arms were so delicate, pale and soft, but she wanted to do everything. He admired the way she’d pitched in with the beach steps, showing she wasn’t afraid of hard work.
“Careful,” she said when the box he held clinked. Glass, he figured.
She went back to her car and pulled out another, smaller box, affording him a perfect view of her sweet rounded backside. Then she slammed her trunk and he thought, Just my luck. When I’m finally leaving town, someone comes along who makes me want to stay.
Eva, carrying her box of fragile cargo, was beautiful in the way some women are, the ones who don’t know it. It was a quiet sort of beauty. Well, until she got excited about her project. Then her face came alive. Hold on, he cautioned himself. She might be pretty but she isn’t practical. Then he thought about why that would matter. He had enough common sense for both of them. If only she’d let him use it. If only she’d let him help.
He carefully adjusted his box, and opened the door for her.
“Would you like a tour?” she asked.
He walked in, finally right where he wanted to be.
“Just set these down over here,” she said, indicating a worn and scarred registration counter, a huge slab of old wood that spanned the walls end to end. It had an old-fashioned flip hinge, and, made from the same wood, an ancient set of pigeon holes were anchored to the wall on the other side of the counter.
He ran his hand over the wood.
“It’s awful. I’ll need to replace it.” Eva settled her box next to his.
“I think this is an old oak, right from the river.” Daniel carefully ran his hand over the thick slab of wood.
“Really?” She didn’t seem impressed. So he worked a little harder. He wanted to impress her.
“Yeah, I think Bryman took the tree trunk and sanded it down. Look at the grain of the wood.”
“Isn’t it weird to be an architect and a builder? Not just one or the other?” She came over to where he stood and ran a slow hand along the wood. He tried not to think about her slow hands on his body. He forced himself to think about practical things. Like, at least now she knew to watch for splinters. That was something. She also had courage. To start a project like this in the current economy. There was for sure more to Eva Delacroix than just a pretty face.
“I don’t know,” he answered her question honestly. He hated that he’d never gotten a formal education, but he’d learned to just admit when he didn’t know something. “Maybe it was the times. Maybe he thought only he could get certain things right. From the few letters we have, I know he loved working with wood as much as he did drawing blueprints.”
“And you do, too.” He nodded even though she wasn’t looking at him, but still staring down at the wooden registration counter as if it would eventually give up its secrets.
“All I see are a bunch of gouges and water marks,” she admitted. That was fine. He’d teach her to see beneath the surface. If she’d let him. An idea had been growing since he’d seen her on the beach, but he wasn’t exactly sure how to bring it up. She was so territorial, and rightly so, when it came to Blue Heaven. He’d wanted this property for a very long time. It had pained him to see the slow deterioration after the family stopped coming. When he’d heard Eva’s dad had died, he’d hoped her mother would put it on the market. She didn’t, but he could work with what he had. Right now, that was a little piece of Eva’s attention. He intended to make that attention grow. He needed to oversee this project. He had to. Nobody else would do it better. Nobody else would keep her from destroying historically accurate floor plans.
“Here’s where the staircase would go,” she said, indicating a perfect spot next to the entry door. He hated that he could see it. That her passion made him compromise everything he believed in.
“And through here is the kitchen.”
Early 1950s re-do, but the knotty pine cabinets were original. She led him through the room before he could take a closer look.
“And this is the living room…”
Except for a ladder, the living room was empty. She’d pulled up the carpet to reveal original wood flooring. She’d washed the windows, which were mostly original glass. She’d even shined the crystals hanging from what looked like an original light fixture in the center of the room.
Daniel pulled the ladder over and climbed the rung to inspect the fixture.
“Original,” he said. “This particular globe hasn’t been made since 1943.”
“But the chain’s a little rusty. I was thinking of getting a new one. Or spray painting it so it matched the rest of the brass.”
Daniel came down off the ladder.
“It can be cleaned. Try not to replace anything. Please.”
She needed him, she just didn’t know it yet.
“This room’s empty because I’m going to strip the floor and refinish it.”
“Perfect,” he said. “And it’s in good shape. No termites.”
“You can tell that from just touching a window sash?”
He’d come down off the ladder to inspect the windows. The sashes were bad, but not the worst he’d seen.
“I was thinking I’d need to replace those?”
“They can be repaired,” he said.
“Next you’re going to put yourself on my payroll,” she said.
“Oh, that reminds me. I spoke to Bob about your tax situation. Tell your accountant to cut one check to him every week and he’ll take care of the rest.”
“I told you I’d speak to Bob.”
“Really? I don’t remember that.”
“Because you were too busy plotting how to take charge of my renovation.”
“Restoration. And I don’t want to ‘take charge,’ but I do want to help.”
She looked miffed at the correct
ion to her terminology.
“I’m sorry.” Those two words usually went a long way with women.
Her sweet face softened. He’d bet a Benjamin she was remembering his family history. He wished she wouldn’t. He’d rather be admired for his expertise than pitied for his situation.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, but he could tell by her tone that what she really meant was “No way.”
He took a deep breath, still wondering where to start.
“Want a coffee while we talk?”
Relieved and grateful she didn’t kick him to the curb, he vowed to be more sensitive to the fact that this was her Bryman house, her project, not his. And that she didn’t seem all that interested in taking the advice or the help he’d offered so far.
He followed her back into the small kitchen and took a seat at the chrome-rimmed table, topped with shiny yellow Formica meant to mimic marble. He wasn’t great with décor, but this table looked earlier than 1950s. Maybe 30s or 40s. It sort of blended with the avocado green appliances. More or less.
“So, you’re bringing Blue Heaven back to its original intended purpose,” he said, looking out the little window the table sat up against, probably for its view of the lake.
“I’m not sure this place was ever really used as a business.”
“Yep. When the Depression settled in, your great-grandfather, Louis Delacroix, lost his job and decided to move his whole family up here.”
“How the heck do you know that?”
“Family legend. Not a lot of proof, other than county records. But I’ve found postcards. A few letters. Stuff like that. Anecdotal evidence.”
“So, what’s the rest? I mean, I know he had six kids, including my grandfather, but how long was he in business? And how did he pick this place?”
“The main house was built, and my great-grandfather, Vance Bryman, added the cottages as an afterthought, with the idea that Louis could rent them out and make his living that way. One story says he turned your side room, which was supposed to be a big family gathering room, into an office.”
Blue Heaven (Blue Lake) Page 3