by Zoe Chant
Even if you are, Jake thought strongly, as if he could argue half of who he was into submission, even if you are, I'm not rushing into anything. Not with a kid in the picture. Besides...I need some time, too.
A bit of sympathy melted through him and the wolf stopped being pushy, settling down as Sarah staggered back a couple steps, laughing, and scooped the little boy up. "Hey, munchkin. Ready to explore the deep dark woods while your mom gets some work done around here?"
The kid's eyes sparkled and he lowered his voice conspiratorially. "I found a wolf den in the forest."
Sarah, amused, said, "Really? Wolf, huh? Not gruffalo?" as Jake stiffened with caution. The kid obviously couldn't know Jake was a wolf shifter, but that was an unusual thing to hear five seconds after meeting somebody.
His wolf gave a lazy shake, as if casting off a cub's practice attack. It might be, it said, if we hadn't left a den in the orchard when we were young.
A flash of memory hit Jake: the scent of loamy earth, the warmth of sunshine filtering through the trees, the rustle of wind and the thump of falling apples, all experienced from within a well-dug, cozy den. He hadn't thought of that childhood hideaway in years. Decades, even. He would never have imagined it still existed, much less in good enough condition for an intrepid four-year-old explorer to discover. He looked at the kid—Noah—with a degree of admiration that the child utterly failed to notice.
"Gruffalos aren't real," Noah said with obvious derision.
"Noah, be polite," said his mother.
The little boy looked guilty and sparkled his eyes at Sarah. "I'm sorry for being rude. I shouldn't do that because it hurts people's feelings. I won't do it again."
Sarah kissed his hair. "All is forgiven. Wolves may be real and gruffalos pretend, but a gruffalo is about as likely around here as a wolf. I don't think anybody's seen one in these parts in the last fifty years. Sorry, I didn't make introductions. Mabs, this is Jake Rowly. Jake, this is Mary Anne and Noah Brannigan, they inherited the place and Mabs is working on renovating."
"A pleasure." Jake's voice came out two octaves deeper than he meant it to as he offered his hand to Mary Anne. A lovely flush climbed her cheeks as she put her hand in his. She had a strong grip, like she was confident in herself.
"Nice to meet you, Mr. Rowly."
Jake rolled his eyes and a broad grin flashed across Mary Anne's face. "Let me guess: Mr. Rowly is your father?"
"Well, to me, he was 'sir', but...yeah. Please, call me Jake."
"Mary Anne, but please call me Mabs," she said, "and this is Noah. Which Sarah already said, so...I guess we've got that pretty thoroughly covered. Hey, um, Noah, could you go upstairs and get that thing you wanted to show Sarah?"
The child's eyebrows drew down and he looked at his mother in confusion for a few seconds before his expression cleared. He yelled, "Yeah!" and ran from the room with the energy and noise of a steam engine.
Sarah, after watching him go, said, "What did he want to show me?" in a mystified tone.
"I have no idea. I just figured there was probably something, and I needed to get him out of the room." Mabs cast Jake a brief, pained glance, as if to apologize for something in advance, and said, "Did you hear about Chad?"
A misplaced sense of protective outrage rose in Jake's chest. He'd met this woman seventy seconds ago. He had no idea who Chad was. He shouldn't feel the urge to go hunt him down and—
A vivid image of hamstringing prey leaped to his mind, his wolf's presence a low growl at the back of his mind. Jake shook his head, trying to dislodge the general sense of approval he felt at the idea.
As he wrestled with those unexpected impulses, Sarah's expression collapsed into sympathy. "I did. It's all over town. I'm so sorry, Mabs. It sucks."
Mabs sagged against the kitchen chair her son had vacated. "I don't know. I just don't know. He was my contractor," she explained to Jake. "He was supposed to..." She made a helpless gesture at the house. "He took off with my money instead."
"Aw, hell. I'm sorry to hear it." He was more than sorry. He wanted to huff and puff and...blow Chad down, he guessed. The old fairy tale didn't really scan very well in these circumstances.
She gave him a terrible mess of a smile. She wasn't quite crying, but Jake wanted to wipe away her tears anyway, gather her into his arms, and promise it would all be okay.
You should, his wolf said in tones that implied he was an idiot.
And maybe Jake was, but even if the wolf was right, the last thing he was looking for was romance. Not after the way things had gone last time. Last time was why Jake was back in Virtue, a town he'd left after graduating high school, at all. He wrenched his mind away from the thought, and his wolf grumbled.
Before he could take any irrevocably stupid actions, though, a tremendous rattling sounded on the stairs. A heartbeat later, Noah burst back through the door with ten feet worth of plastic car tracks bouncing along behind him. "Lookit this, Auntie Sarah! Watch, the cars go by themselves!" He threw the whole track on the floor, stared around, shouted, "I forgot the cars!" and went tearing back out the door.
For a few seconds all three adults just looked at where he'd been, as if the whirlwind that was Noah would simply reappear, or start up again, without warning. Jake finally said, "Wow," and Mabs made another pained face, this one much fonder than the first.
"Welcome to the life of single motherhood. It's part of why I need a contractor." She pinched her forehead, then slid her hand back through the dark lilac tones of her hair. It fell back around her face in straight lines as she sighed. "I just really can't get any traction on renovations when I'm chasing him around, even if I had the skills, which, honestly, I don't."
Jake opened his mouth to offer sympathies, and instead heard himself say, "But I do."
THREE
Tall, broad-shouldered, ruggedly handsome men did not just wander into Mabs's life and offer to do home reconstruction for her. They just didn't. That was the only thing preventing Mabs from shrieking, "Yes, oh my God, would you please?!" in Jake Rowly's face.
Or in his breastbone, if she was to be brutally honest about it. Mabs knew she had many excellent features, but an excess of height wasn't one of them. Jake Rowly stood a splendid eight inches taller than she did, and had the strong build of a man who'd been doing hard work all his life. He'd obviously gone grey early, because he couldn't be more than a handful of years older than she was, but he had hardly any brown left in its short length.
Not that her own hair wasn't doctored a bit by the fine products of the hair and beauty industry, but Mabs wasn't really trying to hide her handful of grey hairs with the purple she'd favored for years.
Anyway, the grey suited Rowly's summer-brown skin and the electric blue of his eyes, and the piercing in his left ear, and the dark red of his well-fitted button-down shirt, which he'd rolled the long sleeves up on to expose his strong forearms, good God, his forearms, and...Mabs wet her lips and tried to remember what they'd been talking about. Sarah had said she was bringing a friend, not that she was bringing a fabulously attractive single man.
Or at least, Mabs hoped he was single. Not that she needed the complication of a romance with the house and Noah and her job and everything, but... damn. On general principle she needed Jake Rowly to be single, just so there was some hope left in the world.
She could not remember the last time she'd laid eyes on a man so attractive that she'd forgotten what they were talking about. With effort she wrenched her brain back to the topic at hand, which was...Jake Rowly casually saying he had the skills to fix up her house.
Hoping she hadn't been silently gaping like a fish for too long, Mabs released a shaky laugh and shook her head. "That'd be amazing, but I couldn't pay you. I can't pay you. I'm not sure how I'm going to pay for groceries, right now."
The kitchen door burst open again and Noah reappeared, his arms full of battery-operated toy cars. Rattling noises behind him on the stairs and in the hallway suggested that he had been even m
ore toy-laden when he left his bedroom, but had lost a fair number of vehicles on the way. "Now I can show you, Auntie Sarah!"
"Tell you what," Sarah said smoothly, "why don't you bring those out to the porch and start setting up, and I'll be out before you can blink twice."
Noah squeezed his big blue eyes open and shut a couple of times, caroled, "Nuh-uh!", and rushed outdoors to drop the cars with another clatter. He returned at full speed, got the car tracks, and exited again with them banging behind him like a plastic dragon's tail. The door slamming shut behind him was almost anti-climactic.
Silence enveloped the adults again, as if respect had to be paid to the amount of sheer energy they'd just seen expended. Mabs didn't exactly notice it so much when there weren't other people around, but Noah had a real knack for dominating the space he was in.
Sarah, though, picked up the thread of conversation as if it hadn't been interrupted, thanks to a lot of practice at the library-daycare. "The thing is, though, Mabs, Jake's just back in town and he doesn't have anywhere to stay, so I was thinking, like, your barn's pretty solid, right? You could snug up a corner of that and Jake could stay there and work on the house."
"He can't stay in my barn. It's a barn! You can't stay in my barn!" Mabs's gaze flickered between Sarah and Jake, finally landing accusingly on Sarah. "Have you been planning this?!"
"I don't see how I could have been," Sarah said in the cheerful tone of someone who had been planning this. "I only found out about Chad this morning and then Jake only dropped by the library about half an hour ago to say he was back in town. Who has time to plan?"
"You!" Both Mabs and Jake spoke, then exchanged little grins that made Mabs want to giggle like a schoolgirl. Jake Rowly had a sly, charming grin that could seduce a woman at five paces. Or maybe seven, since that's about how far away from she was.
"I have not been planning anything," Sarah said loftily. "I do, however, see an opportunity when it presents itself. You two talk it out. I have a date with a car race." She exited with less fanfare than Noah had, leaving Mabs and Jake and a whole lot of uncomfortable space between them.
Jake broke it. "I had no idea she was going to do that. Sorry."
"No, not at all. I didn't either, obviously. And it's not that you can't stay in my barn, it's just—" Mabs gestured broadly, as if it would explain everything she meant. "It's just, who goes around inviting people to stay in barns?"
"Apparently Sarah," Jake said dryly. They both laughed, and suddenly the tension evaporated, leaving Mabs smiling easily at...at the strange man in her house. Maybe she shouldn't dwell on that.
"Sarah's always been a fixer-upper," Jake added. "Even in high school she was always trying to make things work better. She ran our student body single-handedly. I guess I kind of thought she'd be mayor of Virtue by now."
"I don't think she has time, with running the library and the not-officially-a-daycare and helping out with Meals-On-Wheels and overseeing the allotment gardens and..." Mabs trailed off. "I see what you mean." She fell silent a moment, then cleared her throat. "What you said...would you want to?"
"What, fix up this place?" Jake's blue gaze rose to the kitchen ceiling, which Mabs bet he could touch easily. She needed a chair to get to the top shelf of the dang cupboards, and they were only two shelves high. "Yeah," Jake said with a touch of longing that Mabs frankly wished was directed at her. "I could do wonders with this old house. Somebody should, anyway. Do you know anything about its construction?"
His gaze returned to Mabs with the power of a static shock. Her breath caught and she straightened a little, like electricity really had run through her. "Um. No? Not really? I know it's from about the mid-1800s, but that's about it?"
Jake shook his head and actually offered her his hand, like they'd known each other forever. What was even stranger was that she took it like it was natural. His grip was comfortable, his hand strong and calloused from work. Mabs had never liked super soft hands anyway. There were so many places on her body where the roughness of a callous could add a little extra... hrrr.
God, what was she thinking? Well obviously she knew exactly what she was thinking, but it was, as she liked to tell Noah about some of his more outlandish ideas, wildly inappropriate.
Jake smiled and drew her out of her own house, leading her past Noah and Sarah on the porch, and down the steps. Mabs had to look at her feet to make sure they were still on the ground, because somehow, holding Jake Rowly's work-strong hand made her feel like she was floating.
When they got out to the yard, he turned her to face the house, and then, as if he'd suddenly realized what he was doing, let go of her hand. "Sorry, that was..."
"No, it's fine, I could have kicked you instead of taking your hand." It took all of Mabs's attention to not put a hand over her face. She sounded like an eight year old. "What did you want to show me?"
His smile appeared again, no longer sly, but genuine and sweet as he lifted his hands toward the house and began pointing. "So from the door over to the left, basically your kitchen, the room behind it, and the rooms above? That was probably the original house. They called it a double-cell, double-pile."
"Catchy," Mabs muttered, and Jake grinned.
"Isn't it, though? So back then, where your hallway is, that was the front."
Mabs said, "But this is the front," and winced. Now she sounded like an idiot. She was a waitress, for heaven's sake. She was good at talking to people, even about things she didn't care about, and she did care about the house.
But Jake was still grinning like she wasn't an idiot, so maybe it was okay. "Right, this is the front now. But when it started, back probably around 1790—you could look it up in the local records—it was the side."
"Oh. Wow. I never thought of looking it up in the records. I've never lived anywhere old enough to have local records, I don't think."
"Most of us haven't, but this place, everybody knows it."
"'The Old Brannigan Place,' yeah. People in Virtue are always excited to hear there's someone living here again." Mabs smiled at the truth of that. It was one of the reasons she simply didn't want to give the place up. "Okay, so this was the side?"
"Right, and you know how the roof is a different height over the kitchen side of the house?" At Mabs's nod, Jake went on. "That's because this part of the house, from about here over..." He jogged over to the farthest wall to the right of the kitchen—which was quite a ways to the right, maybe 25 feet—and spread his arms like he'd pick up a piece of the house. His jeans fit really well. Really, really, really well. Like... really well.
Mabs yanked her attention away from Jake's backside, caught Sarah's gaze, and tried not to blush as Sarah winked before going back to playing with Noah. Mabs grimaced, but looked back at Jake, who was talking over his shoulder to her.
"This was probably a second house, built free-standing but with the intention to expand toward the original house. So they both faced each other, see?" He sounded so excited that Mabs started to smile. "Then as the Brannigan income and family size grew, they expanded the newer house toward the older one until it became one."
Mabs blinked back and forth at the whole front of the house, trying to wrap her brain around it. "So all of this used to be the sides of the house...es? Until they connected it? I wondered why the roof was higher over the right side of the house, but...I had no idea!"
"Yep, these were the sides, but once the buildings were connected, it became the front, and they put the porch on. And then sometime later they added the buttery on the other side of the kitchen, and probably even later than that they rearranged everything inside that wasn't a load-bearing wall." He suddenly looked abashed and came back from gesturing at the house's walls. "Sorry if I went on about it. It's an exciting bit of old architecture."
"No, it's amazing." Mabs came forward to stand beside him, looking up at the different heights of the roofs. The attic was over the newer part, the one Jake had described as the second original house. "So we've really been li
ving in the very oldest part of the house. I couldn't tell."
"Yeah, the whole idea of the exterior renovations, back in the day, was to make it look like it had always been a single unit. That's where we get these long slats running horizontally across the front. They moved all the doors around, put in new windows, made it symmetrical, and boarded it so it looked like it had been built this way on purpose."
"Life hack," Mabs said, almost under her breath, but Jacob Rowly grinned down at her.
"That's what I think of it as, too. Then there's an extension behind the buttery, right?"
"Yeah, so the whole house is a kind of wonky L-shape and you can't get from the parlor to the rooms behind the buttery without going on a half-mile walk. And the butter extension is only single-story so the roofs are all over the place, like..." Mabs drew it in the air: two and a half stories for the parlor side of the house, two for the kitchen side, then one for the buttery and rooms behind it. "It's a mess."
"What do you want to do with it?" Jake turned his attention from the house to Mabs, regarding her with the same intensity he'd examined the walls with.
Heat started burning along her collarbones and crept upward to the line of her jaw. She knew the look was for her planned renovations, not her, but... dang. The impulse to look at her feet and mumble like a shy teenager was high. Very, very high.
Mabs swallowed instead, tried not to look too hard at Jake's lips—he had very nice lips—and said, "Well, Chad was supposed to get the kitchen up to some kind of modern specs, for one. Right now it's kind of the main heating source for the house, and the roof needs work, and there are just a lot of corners and spaces where I'm afraid Noah will fall through the floor or something, and—?"
Jake held up his hands. "A lot of that's not under my skill set, but the roof and floors are."
"What is your skill set?"
"I'm a carpenter." Jake folded his hands down again, smiling, and Mabs watched them go into his jeans pockets.
Good hands. Long fingers. Nice nails. She already knew they were strong, from holding one briefly. There were a lot of things long, strong hands could do....