Love's Nine Lives

This house was extremely well kept, the shingle siding painted sunshine-yellow, the trim, stairs and window boxes white. Cheerful red geraniums were already planted in those boxes. A front window was open and a lace curtain danced on the light spring breeze.

“Thanks, Fred,” Justin muttered.

Justin owned West’s Construction, a construction company specializing in framing new houses. The north side of town was building up phenomenally as more and more people left the cities looking for exactly what Hunter’s Corner, population fifteen thousand, had to offer—a small-town feel and flavor.

There was no Wal-Mart, no Starbucks, no multiplex theaters. The town was tidy, safe and neighborly. For amenities, it boasted a town square with a park that children still played in. There was a library, a swimming pool that was open in the summer, two grocery stores, one ice cream parlor and close proximity to the great outdoors and all its attractions. People here sat on their front porches, grew gardens, threw out a fishing pole in their spare time. Kids rode their bikes down the tree-lined streets and walked unescorted to school.

Justin West had more work than he knew what to do with.

He didn’t need the kind of job a tidy house in Honeysuckle implied—a little old lady who wanted a new washstand for the backyard. He’d be plied with cookies and tea—and get phone calls long after the job was done about imaginary popped nails or squeaks. When he arrived to investigate, there would be more cookies and tea and pictures of the new grandchild.

On the other hand, Fred had asked him to come and at least look at the job. And how could he say no to Fred?

In his seventies, Fred was still the town maintenance man, refusing to reveal his actual age or to consider retirement. He had also been Justin’s father’s best friend since the days when Hunter’s Corner had been little more than an autumn retreat for city boys who wanted to bag a deer or two. Fred had been there through all those lonely, hard years when the Alzheimer’s took hold, wrapped its tentacles around Justin’s father’s mind, changing him from a powerful man into a baffled, helpless child. Fred had never once said, “I’m too busy,” when Justin called in panic because he had to be at work and his dad was having one of “those” days.

His dad had gone finally, a bittersweet blessing. And now Fred was asking a favor of him, of Justin, for a lady friend.

Justin wasn’t going to return the friendship and loyalty that Fred had shown his father with I’m too busy, even though he was.

Justin took the front steps two at a time, knocked on the door—loudly, in case Fred’s lady friend was deaf. He thought it was nice that Fred had a lady friend. Fred’s wife had been gone for nearly fifteen years. And his best friend for just over a year. It was about time—

The door opened, and Justin reeled back, nearly stumbling off the step. He grabbed the handrail and steadied himself.

The woman smiling tentatively at him was shockingly beautiful, maybe particularly in contrast to his expectation that the door was going to be opened by someone old and wrinkled and deaf.

Justin gauged her to be in her mid to late twenties. She had hair the exact color of shiny new copper, pulled back quite severely off her face. But the severity of the hairstyle only emphasized the loveliness of her features: high cheekbones, a pert nose, a small tilted chin, a gloriously generous mouth. There was the slightest smattering of freckles over milky-white skin, and eyes that were huge and green as Smoky’s Pond on a summer afternoon. She was slender as a reed and petite, the kind of woman that gave a man the dangerous feeling that he was big and strong and that he had been put on this earth for the sole purpose of protecting those more fragile than himself.

She had an enormous orange cat in her arms that was comically bandaged around its head. Justin had a feeling it might be a mistake to laugh at the cat, which was glaring at him with baleful dislike. She juggled its bulk to offer a slender hand.

“Justin West?” she asked.

He took a steadying breath and accepted her hand. It was cool and soft and small—and packed a jolt like a shock from a circular saw with a bad connection in a rainstorm. He held her grip a fraction longer than might have been necessary. The cat shifted its weight, forcing her to withdraw her hand or let the cat slide down her front.

“I’m Bridget Daisy. Thank you for coming.”

So he did have the right address. She was Fred’s friend, though obviously not his lady friend in the way Justin had imagined. He glanced at her ring finger. Bare. Lord have mercy!

“Come in.”

He stepped by her, aware of a lovely fragrance, light and sweet, as he moved directly into her living room. The room increased his sense of being big and male, clumsy and uncouth. There were trinkets, potted plants, a vase of fresh flowers on the floor at the edge of the couch. If he breathed, he was going to break something.

“Have a seat,” she suggested.

Where? Everything in the room was small and frail-looking, not man-size at all. The tiny sofa was set on curvy legs and was covered in a fabric that looked suspiciously like ivory silk that would be destroyed by his just-finished-work-for-the-day jeans and T-shirt.

His gaze caught on an old leather wingback that looked slightly sturdier than her other furniture. The chair was rump-sprung, as if it was the favored spot of someone with a little more meat on their bones than her. Justin beelined for it, but her delicate cough stopped him just short of sitting down. He glanced back at her.

She smiled apologetically. “That’s Conan’s chair.”

Conan? He felt a wave of relieved disappointment. Ring fingers didn’t really tell the story these days. But he should have known a girl like her came with a guy named Conan. Muscle-bound. Big. Territorial. Couldn’t the roommate build her washstand or whatever she wanted?

She moved by him and set the cat in the chair. “Isn’t that right, Conan?”

Conan was the cat? The cat inspected the spot carefully, turned two full circles, then plopped himself down. The chair groaned, and the cat gave Justin a look of naked dislike, as if it was somehow his fault the chair was making noises. Then Conan dismissed their visitor by delicately lifting his tail and beginning his bath.

“I didn’t want you to get hair on your clothes,” Miss Bridget Daisy told him.

He looked down at his clothes. Like a little cat hair would hurt? But she gestured to the sofa, and he reluctantly perched on the corner, trying to make as little contact with the highly soilable silk as possible.

She took the far end of the same sofa, and now that she wasn’t hiding behind the cat, he could see she was wearing a businesslike suit in an unflattering color that flattered her nonetheless. Despite her slenderness, she had curves in all the right places. When she sat down, the tight skirt edged up, revealing the most adorable little kneecap.

“Sorry?” he said, realizing she was saying something.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice. Fred said you were very busy. How do you know him?”

“He’s my godfather. He and my dad were best friends since they were kids.”

She folded her hands primly over that delicate little knee and regarded him solemnly. “How long have you been building, Mr. West?”

“Justin,” he corrected her. “Uh, ever since I can remember. It’s a family business. Between my grandad, my dad and me, we’ve built just about every building in town.”

“Oh.” She looked very pleased by that. She slid a little clipboard out from behind one of the cushions and made a mark on it. “So is your work guaranteed, then?”

He realized, stunned, that he had somehow become an involuntary participant in a job interview. He ordered himself to wake up and quit looking at her kneecap, to take charge of this situation by letting her know in no uncertain terms he wasn’t going to be insulted with an interview. That’s not how it worked.

He came in, looked at the job, gave her a price. Take it or leave it. Unfortunately her eyes were every bit as distracting as her kneecap.

“I stand behind my work,” he said shortly.

“Of course you’d sign something saying that?”

Devastating kneecaps and eyes aside, he could feel himself starting to get annoyed. “What kind of job do you have?” he asked. He hadn’t even said he’d do the job, and she was talking about signing something? He had houses to build. He was doing her a favor by being here!

Almost shyly she reached behind her pillow again and came out with a thick manila folder, which she passed to him. The shyness—her dropping her thick lashes over the amazing green of her eyes rather than holding his gaze—made him bite back his annoyance and take the folder.

“This is my project prospectus,” she told him happily, meeting his eyes briefly before looking away. Was she blushing?

He tore his eyes away from the heightened color in her cheeks and felt the weight of what had been passed into his hands. It was thicker than the Hunter’s Corner telephone directory. What the hell was her project? A new shopping mall? The Taj Mahal comes to Ohio?

He opened the cover of the folder. A full-color eight-by-ten glossy of the cat was clipped to the first page. In the photo the cat was wearing a knitted purple sweater and he looked none too happy about it either.

Justin shot Bridget Daisy a wary look. Was she nuts? What a shame that would be, but of course that would explain why a woman this gorgeous but single had gone undetected on the Hunter’s Corner bachelor radar. Not that, God forbid, he was on the lookout for single women. After having had responsibility for his ailing father since high school, Justin West was enjoying freedom.

Getting tied down would not be his idea of a good time.

An evening with those kneecaps, though, no strings attached…

He looked hurriedly down at her “prospectus.”