Her Man Upstairs

“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.”