Her Man Upstairs

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—

Might have to do what? Open her bookstore in the garage? It wasn’t even insulated, much less heated.

So then what, rob a bank? Get a loan? She hated debt with a vengeance, having been in it for one reason or another most of her adult life.

He’d taken off his leather bomber jacket. Good sign or not?

Who knows. The Sphinx was a chatterbox compared to Cole Stevens. He wore a faded blue oxford-cloth dress shirt with frayed collar, and turned back his cuffs to reveal a pair of bronzed, muscular forearms lightly furred with dark, wiry hair. She couldn’t help but notice his hands, but then, she always noticed a man’s hands. They said almost as much about him as his shoes. Shoes were something she had noticed ever since hearing her friend Daisy, who was a geriatric nurse, talk about this doctor who wore neat three-piece suits and silk ties, but whose nails were dirty and whose shoes were always in need of a polish. It turned out that for years he’d been killing off his elderly patients.

Okay, so his carpenter’s deck shoes weren’t the kind you polished. They were old, but obviously top-of-the-line. He had nice hands with clean nails, and she liked the way he handled her drawing pad, treating it as though the drawings had real value.

How would those hands feel on a woman’s body? It had been so long….

Breathe through your mouth, idiot, your brain’s obviously starved for oxygen!

She waited for him to speak—to say either “This looks doable,” or “No thanks, I’ll pass.” The faded blue of his shirt made his skin look tan, which made his hair look even lighter on top and darker underneath. She was almost positive the tan was real and not the product of a bottle. Sasha, who was a hair person, could tell in a minute, but Marty didn’t want Sasha to get even a glimpse of this guy. Her redheaded friend was a Pied Piper where men were concerned, and Marty intended to keep this one around for as long as it took.

For as long as it took for what?

To finish the job on schedule, fool!

“I didn’t know if you took anything in your coffee,” she said when he finally glanced up.

Despite a lap full of drawings, he’d made an effort to rise when she’d come in. She’d shaken her head, indicating that he should sit. Obediently, he’d sat, knees spread apart so that what Sasha called his “package” was evident.

You are not having a hot flash! You’re nowhere near ready for menopause!

“Black’s fine,” he said, and took a sip of coffee.

“I could open another window. The rain’s let up,” she said. The odor inside was still pretty awful.

“No need,” he said, and went on studying her drawings.

Hopefully he hadn’t noticed her burning cheeks. “The stick figures are silly, I know,” she said in a rush. “I was just doodling. Sort of—you know, illustrating me washing dishes, leaning over to use the under-the-counter fridge. Anything you don’t understand, I can explain.” That is, she could if she could manage to get her brain back online.

“They’re clear enough. Thing is,” he said, “this right here is a weight-bearing wall. I’ll need to leave at least three feet of it, but then I can open your entryway right here and shift this wall down to here.”

She forced her eyes to focus on the area he was indicating instead of his pointer finger. Then, because they needed to share the same vantage point if they were to discuss her drawings, Marty left her platform rocker and settled onto the sofa beside him.

Even without the bomber jacket he smelled sort of leathery with intriguing overtones. Salt water, sunshine and one of those subtle aftershave lotions that were babe magnets.

“Mmm, what was that?”