Her Man Upstairs

by Dixie Browning

  He nodded slowly. Then he sniffed, using a really nice nose. Not too big, not too straight—just enough character to keep the rest of his features from looking too perfect. “What is that smell?”

  Marty sniffed, too. The air was rank. “Polyurethane and paint thinner, uh, laced with fried cinnamon. Actually, not all my ideas work out the way they’re supposed to. You ever have one of those days when everything goes cronksided?”

  He continued to watch her as if he suspected her of being a mutant life-form. His eyes, she noted, were the exact color of tarnished brass. Sort of greenish blue, with undertones of gold. Looking uneasy, he was backing toward the front hall, and she couldn’t afford to let him get away.

  “I left the burner turned on the lowest setting, thinking sure I’d have time, but…” Despite appearances to the contrary, she tried to sound intelligent, or at least moderately rational.

  Fat chance. She sighed. “Look, I’ve been painting bookcases in the garage and I left the side door open so I could hear the phone, so that’s how the smell got into the house, okay? I was just trying to cover it—while I showered—with cinnamon.”

  “You showered with cinnamon.”

  Was that skepticism or sympathy? Time to take control. “Yes, well—I probably should have used something heavier than one of those aluminum foil pie pans. Pumpkin. Mrs. Smith’s. I hate to throw them away, don’t you? They come in handy for scaring deer away from the pittosporum.”

  Nodding slowly, he backed a few steps closer to the hall door, watching her as if he expected her to hop up on a counter and start flapping her wings. “This is the right address, isn’t it? Corner of Sugar Lane and Bedlam Boulevard?”

  Bedlam Boulevard wasn’t even a boulevard, just a plain old street. She’d almost forgotten the developer’s love of all things British: Chelsea Circle, Parliament Place, London Lane.

  She snickered. And then watched as his lips started to twitch. And then they were both grinning.

  Marty said, “Could we start all over, d’you think?”

  “I guess maybe we’d better. Cole Stevens. I was told you needed some remodeling done?”

  “Martha Owens. I’m mostly called Marty, though. Come on into the living room, the odor shouldn’t be so strong there. I’d open a window, but we’d freeze.” Ignoring her stinging fingers—she’d probably burned off her fingerprints—Marty led the way, pretending she wasn’t barefoot and dripping and utterly devoid of any claim to dignity she might once have possessed.

  Following her, Cole wondered if he wouldn’t be better off leaving now. He’d never worked for a woman before—at least, not directly.

  He wondered if the fact that she was barefoot had anything to do with the way she moved. Hip bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the—

  And then he wondered why he was wondering. Why he’d even noticed the way she walked—or the way she’d scrooched up her mouth when she’d hurled that blackened pan outside. For a crazy woman, she was sort of attractive.

  It wouldn’t hurt to stick around for a few more minutes, seeing as he was here. He hadn’t planned on going back to work this soon, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t change his mind. The one thing he was, was flexible.

  When he’d set out earlier this week, he’d had some vague idea of cruising south until he saw someplace that appealed to him. Less than a day out of his old mooring place on the Chesapeake Bay, he’d had some minor engine trouble and looked for a place to lay over. He’d radioed a friend of his, who had recommended Bob Ed’s place near the neck of Tull Bay on North Landing River. He’d limped along on one engine, located the place, liked its looks and rented a wet slip for a week, with options.

  Yesterday he had exercised his option for another two weeks. One of the things he liked about the place was the fact that, other than a few local commercial fishermen, it was empty. Add to that the fact that, while it was off the beaten track, it was relatively close to a metropolitan area in case he ever needed something that couldn’t be found in the sticks.

  Hell, there was no law that said he had to keep on running. No family, no job to hold him back. Not much of a reputation either, but the lack of a haircut over the past few months should keep anyone from recognizing him as the whistle-blower who’d brought down the third largest developer in southeastern Virginia.

  What he hadn’t counted on when he’d pulled up stakes and headed south was having so much time on his hands. When a guy didn’t have a real life, things got boring real fast.

  He’d been considering moving on when he saw the old guy who ran the place trying to replace a rotten window frame. He’d offered to help, and had been pleased and somewhat surprised to discover that he hadn’t quite lost his old skills. By day’s end they had replaced three windows on the northeast side of the rambling unpainted building that housed Bob Ed’s Ammo, Bait and Tackle, and Guide Service. He’d met Bob Ed’s lady, Faylene, briefly yesterday when she’d come to bring a stack of mail from the post office.

  Now there was one strange lady. It was largely due to her that he was here today, actually considering signing on for a construction job. Too much fried food had evidently affected his brain.

  Either that or too much solitude.

  Cole followed the Owens woman into a comfortable, if slightly cluttered living room, where she turned to confront him. He stood six foot two to her five feet plus a few inches, yet she managed to look down her nose at him.

  Haughty as a maître d’in a five-star restaurant, she said, “May I see your résumé?”

  His résumé. Cole didn’t know whether to laugh or to leave. A few minutes ago leaving had seemed the better option, but sooner or later he was going to have to jump-start his career. Living alone aboard his boat with no real structure in his life wasn’t going to do it. This job, small as it was, sounded like a good first step if he planned to stay in construction, which was all he knew.

  Hands on, though. No more management.

  “My résumé,” he repeated. He cleared his throat. “Short version—the firm where I worked for the past thirteen years recently went bankrupt, so my résumé would be pretty worthless.” He didn’t bother to add that the firm had belonged to his ex-father-in-law, who had pushed him into an area of management he had been unprepared for. Deliberately, he’d later learned. The result being that by calling a spade a spade—or in this case, calling a crook a crook—he’d lost his wife, his job, and any ambition he’d once had to be the best damn builder in the business.

  “Would I have heard of it?” she asked.

  “Were you watching the local news last spring?”

  “Local? You mean Muddy Landing?”

  He shook his head. “Norfolk. Virginia Beach, specifically.” The state line was less than forty-five minutes away. Northeast North Carolina got most of the news from Norfolk feeds.

  The way she was eyeing him, she was probably reconsidering her job offer. With no résumé and no referrals, he couldn’t blame her, but now that he’d come this far, he was determined not to let that happen. Something about big, cloudy gray eyes and soft, pouty lips…

  Oh, hell no. Any decision he made would be based on his own needs and not on the appeal of any woman. He’d gone that route once before, and look where it had landed him.

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you,” he said.

  “For a change?”

  Cole didn’t particularly like being called a liar, especially when he wasn’t, but having been grilled by experts, he let it pass. “I can leave now or we can go on with the interview, your choice,” he said quietly. “I’d intended to head on down the Banks and points south in a few days, anyway.”

  “Then why did you bother to apply?”

  Had he thought gray eyes looked soft? At the moment hers looked about as soft as stainless steel. “I’m beginning to wonder,” he muttered, half to himself. The lady was as flaky as one of the Colonel’s biscuits. “All right, fair question. First, I did a small repair job for a guy who owns
the marina where I’ve been living aboard my boat. Yesterday a friend of his happened to mention that she knew somebody who needed a small remodeling job done in a hurry, and asked if I was interested in earning some maintenance money.”

  Actually, despite appearances, he had a fairly decent investment income considering his simplified lifestyle. But the market tended to be schizophrenic and, as someone once said, a boat was a hole in the water into which the owner poured money.

  “You said that was your first reason. What else? Is there a second reason?”

  A second reason. If he said “instinct,” she was going to think he was as big a nutcase as she was. As to that, the jury was still out, but until he had more to go on he’d just as soon not have to defend himself.

  It had been instinct that had first tipped him off that Weyrich was dirty. Long before that, it had been instinct that told him Paula was bored with their marriage and looking for bigger fish to fry. Frying them, for all he knew. By that time it had no longer been worth the effort to find out.

  “It just struck me as the thing to do,” he said finally. “Small town, small job—good place to get my bearings again.”

  “Again?”

  She might look like soft, but the lady was a piranha—big eyes, tousled hair and all. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, let’s leave my bearings out of this and get on with the business at hand. Do you need a job done, or don’t you?”

  She took a deep breath, hinting at what lay hidden by a baggy turtleneck sweater that showed signs of age. And he wasn’t even a breast man. If anything, he was an eye man, eyes being the window on the soul.

  The window on the soul?

  Clear case of too much fried food and too much time on his hands.

  “It’s a remodeling job,” she explained. “I doubt if it’ll take very long. At least I hope not. I want my downstairs moved upstairs so I can reopen my bookstore downstairs.”

  Cole thought for a minute, then nodded slowly as a couple of things clicked into place. “The bookshelves you were painting in your garage.” The smell still lingered, a combination of burnt cinnamon, fresh urethane and paint thinner—but either his olfactory sense was numbed or the stench was starting to fade.

  She nodded. “I thought I’d better refinish them now so that they’ll be thoroughly dry by the time my upstairs gets finished so I can move my downstairs upstairs and move the shelves into these two rooms and start restocking.”

  Okay. He had the general picture now. “You want to show me what you have in mind?” He hadn’t committed himself to anything.

  Marty rubbed her right thumb and forefinger together as she considered whether to show him her drawings first or take him upstairs. She’d burned off her fingerprints, which might come in handy in case she couldn’t get her bookstore reopened in time and was forced to turn to a life of crime.

  “Come on, I’ll show you upstairs first so you’ll understand my drawings better. You might as well know, you’re not the first builder to apply for the job. The others turned it down.”

  “Any particular reason?” he asked.

  Conscious of him just behind her, she made a serious effort not to move her hips any more than she had to. Too much stress was obviously affecting her brain. Just because she’d noticed practically everything about him, from his tarnished brass eyes to the worn areas of his jeans to the way they hugged his quads and glutes and…well, whatever—that didn’t mean he was aware of her in any physical sense.

  Sasha would have had a field day if she could’ve tuned in on Marty’s thoughts. Her friend was always after her to add a little more vitamin S to her diet. Vitamin sex. “Maybe then,” she was fond of saying, “you’d get a decent night’s sleep and not be a zombie until noon.”

  She wasn’t that bad. Just because she wasn’t a morning person—

  He’d asked her a question. He was waiting for an answer. Kick in, brain—it’s four-thirty in the afternoon! “Reason why they didn’t work out? Well, one never showed up, and the next two, once they found out what I wanted done, told me I was wasting their time. Oh, and one of them said he could only work on weekends because the rest of the time he worked with a building crew at Nags Head.” She hadn’t yet mentioned the time constraints, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t a major job, after all. Not like starting from scratch and building a house.

  “So—here it is.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the upstairs hall and the spare bedroom, which she planned to move into so that the larger bedroom could become her living room.

  She had painted up here less than two years ago. She’d chosen yellow with white trim on the theory that sunshine colors would help kick-start her brain when she stumbled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom early in the morning.

  While he looked around, tapping on walls, studying the ceiling, Marty told herself that it would get done. It was going to work. Her life was not in free fall—it only felt that way because time was wasting. She kept racing her engines but not getting anywhere.

  Following him around, she tried not to get her hopes up—tried not to be distracted by the fact that he smelled like leather and something spicy and resinous, and that he looked like—

  Well, never mind what he looked like. That had nothing to do with anything except that her social life had been seriously neglected for too long.

  They were standing beside the closet she wanted taken out and turned into part of a new kitchen when he said, “You want to show me your drawings now?”

  There was plenty of room. It was only her imagination that made it feel as if the walls were shrinking, pushing them closer together. Breathlessly, she said, “Come on, then, but remember, I’m not an architect. You can get the general idea, though.” Turning away from her yellow walls, she was aware again of how early it grew dark in late January—especially on cloudy days. “I’ll make us some coffee,” she said. Heck, she’d cook him a five-course dinner if that was what it took to get him to agree.

  Marty saw him glance into the spare bedroom where she’d stored dozens of boxes of paperback books, plus the bulletin boards where she used to tack up cover flats, bookmarks and autographed photos. She hated clutter, always had, and now she was wallowing in the stuff. As Faylene, the housekeeper she could no longer afford, would have said, “You buttered your bread, now lie in it.”

  Hmm…alone, or with company?

  Two

  “They’re there on the coffee table,” Marty said, leaving Cole to look over her plans while she started a pot of coffee. Too late to wish she’d taken time while they were upstairs to pull her hair back with a scrunchy and put on some shoes—and maybe add a dab of her new tinted, coconut-flavored lip balm. Not that she was vain, but darn it, her feet were cold.

  Okay, so he was attractive. He wasn’t all that attractive. Not that she had a type, but if she did, he wasn’t it. She’d been married at eighteen to Alan, whose mother had left him this house. Whatever she’d seen in him hadn’t lasted much beyond the honeymoon, but as she’d desperately wanted a family, she’d stayed with him. After he’d been diagnosed with MS, leaving was out of the question.

  A few years after Alan died she had gotten married again, this time to Beau Conrad, a smooth talker from a wealthy Virginia family—F.F.V., U.D.C. and D.A.R.—all the proper initials. Only, as it turned out, Beau was the black sheep of the family.

  Looking back, she could truthfully say that both her husbands had been far handsomer than Cole Stevens. So what was so intriguing about shabby clothes, shaggy hair, and features that could best be described as rugged? Was she all that starved for masculine attention?

  Evidently she was. When she’d first mentioned her building plans, Sasha had offered to buy her a stud-finder. Four-times-divorced Sasha, ever the optimist. It had taken Marty several minutes to realize that her friend wasn’t talking about one of those gadgets you used to find a safe place to hammer a nail into a wall.

  “You see what I mean, don’t you?” she called
now from the kitchen. There’d been no sounds from the living room for the past several minutes. “Where I want the closet taken out and added to the back wall to make room for a couple of counters and whatever else I need for a small kitchen.” She could mention the plumbing and wiring later. She didn’t want to scare him off until she had him on the hook. She was rapidly running out of time. If it didn’t happen with this one, she might not make the deadline, in which case she might as well have a humongous yard sale, sell off her remaining stock and then look for a job in an area where there weren’t any. Either that or pull up stakes and move, which wasn’t an option. The closest thing to roots she had was this house. Beau had tried to force her to sell it, but she’d held out. God knows, it was about the only thing of hers he hadn’t forced her to sell. The paintings and antiques he’d inherited from his own family had been sold off soon after they’d married, along with the few nice things she’d been able to accumulate.

  Damn his lying, thieving hide. She hoped wherever he was now, he was married to some bimbo who would take him for every cent he had.

  Marty laid a Tole tray with two mugs, sugar, half-and-half and a plate of biscotti. As a bribe, it wasn’t much, but at the moment it was the best she could do.

  “Of course, I guess I could always get a camp stove and a dorm refrigerator,” she said as she joined him in the living room. “It’s not like I did a lot of entertaining.”

  No comment. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? At least he hadn’t walked out after seeing her drawings. The stick figures might have been overkill. Occasionally in moments of desperation she got carried away.

  “I guess we need to discuss money,” she said, searching his face for a clue. If knocking out a wall or two and putting in a kitchen on the second floor was going to cost too much, she might have to—