A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father: A Marriage-Minded Man / From Friend to Father

“Suze,” Tess said, smiling. Heaven knew why Suze had taken Tess under her wing, mentoring Tess into as good an agent as she was. Or at least had been. But the four-times-married blonde’s piranha-esque tactics were legendary. Woman could probably sell property to the dead. So why hadn’t she been able to unload the house up on the hill?

“So I see she dropped the Coyote Trail listing?” Tess said, settling in front of her computer.

“More like the sellers dropped Suze,” Candy said, butt twitching as she returned to her own desk by the front door. “Birdbrains. They wanna dump it but won’t spend a dime on updates. Suze took a stab at selling it as a fixer-upper, but in this market? No way.”

“So there’s no lockbox?”

Candy’s eyes snapped to hers. “You went up there?”

“Just a little bit ago, yeah. I think it has potential.”

“For the Addams family, maybe.”

Tess smiled. “You got the clients’ contact info?”

Now Candy frowned. Carefully. “Well, sure, it’s still in the system, but honey…you can’t be serious.”

“What can I say? I’m up for a challenge.”

Anything to take her mind off Eli, she thought, catching herself moments before she touched the aforementioned “rash” on her neck. But not before the memory of how that rash got there started up the tingling. Again.

“There’s challenges and then there’s banging your head against a wall. Sugar, I hate to break it to you, but business hasn’t exactly picked up while you were gone. In fact…” She sighed. “Suze said if things didn’t improve by the end of the month she’d have to let me go. So I’m thinking this might not be the best time for you to be thinking about getting back in the groove.”

A feeling like hot steam flashed up the back of Tess’s neck. “Nobody’s letting you go, Candy,” she said, even as she wondered how she planned on making good on her promise. A moment later, she had the contact info on the screen in front of her; five minutes after that, she’d arranged to meet Fred and Gillian Harris at the house the following Monday.

She hung up the phone to see Candy wagging her head. “Honey, you are one serious glutton for punishment.”

Yeah. Tell her about it.

Once inside the house on Monday morning, Tess decided it reminded her of a tired housewife who’d given up the good fight. Unfortunately, houses were not capable of dragging their saggy butts to the gym or touching up their own roots.

According to Fred and Gillian-please-call-me-Gilly, the late-middle-aged, well-heeled sibling duo currently dogging Tess’s heels on her preliminary walk-through, their father had succumbed to Alzheimer’s more than a year before, necessitating their putting him in a care facility. Clearly the poor guy hadn’t been able to keep the place up for some years before that. Still, there was a lot of charm left in the old girl, if you knew what to look for.

How to bring her back to life.

But it hadn’t taken Tess five minutes to size up the pair as the “just make it happen” type. These days, though, making it happen took a bit more effort than simply sticking a For Sale sign out by the road and slapping the place up on the Internet.

“It’s already been on the market more’n a year,” Fred said to Tess’s back as she frowned at the worn, fake brick flooring, the dark, depressing cabinets. Big difference between retro and regressive.

“So I heard,” Tess said with a slight smile as she peered inside the good-size pantry, recoiling at the telltale scent of rodent droppings.

“We really need to sell it,” Gilly said. “For Dad.” The neatly coiffed brunette glanced at her brother, then back at Tess. “The place we’ve got him in…it’s good. And, well, pricey.”

As were, Tess surmised, the gal’s diamond earrings and Fred’s watch. So she wasn’t exactly getting an indigent vibe here, even if she didn’t doubt Charley’s new “home” was costing an arm and a leg. Still, she knew she had to tread very carefully if she wanted this listing. Which she did, so badly she could taste it. To feed her sense of self-worth almost more than her bank account. Not to mention help Candy keep her job.

“I suppose…” Fred exchanged another glance with his sister. “We could lower the asking price…”

“Actually, I think you should raise it. A lot.” As expected, four eyes popped wide open. While Tess had them in stunned mode, she moved in for the kill. “Slow market or no, there’s still some demand for these old adobes—”

“Then—”

“—as long as they’re in tip-top condition,” she said, and both faces fell. Gee, big surprise. “For the most part, people are looking for vacation homes,” she continued, “someplace to spend weekends skiing or escape from the summer heat. Soon as they get the keys, they want to walk through the front door, kick off their shoes off and run a hot bath, not start gutting old kitchens. And cleaning up mouse droppings.”

Gilly’s eyes darted around the kitchen. “You think there’s mice?”

“Oh, I’d stake my life on it. Look,” Tess said, gently, but firmly, when they both made a face, “you gave the fixer-upper plan a year and it didn’t work. Be honest—would you want to live here? In the shape it’s in now?”

Another shared glance. Then the woman said, “What…do you suggest?”

Tapping her pen on her clipboard, Tess looked around, pretending to consider. “I’m not talking major remodel, but the kitchen and bathrooms need some serious updating. New cabinets and countertops, tile floors. And the shelves in the den? Really awful.”

“Dad built those himself,” Gilly said, sighing. “He was so proud.” She looked at the seventies-era harvest gold stove. “And the appliances?”

“Wouldn’t hurt to change them out. Don’t have to be top of the line, but they should at least be from this century.”

The siblings looked at each other, then back at Tess. “What kind of money are we talking?” Fred asked.

“Well…you could easily sink forty, fifty grand into the place—”

“Good God!”

“But twenty-five should cover it.”

“Forget it—”

“Oh, come on, Freddy, it’s not as if we don’t have it. And if she can get us—” Gilly turned to Tess. “How much?”

Tess wrote a number on her pad, then turned it around to show them.

“Oh, my,” Gilly said, hand on cheek.

Fred frowned. He seemed to do that a lot. “But there’s no guarantee it’ll sell.”

“No, there’s not,” Tess said easily. “And I understand your concerns, I really do. But you know, we’re so close to Taos and Santa Fe…once the house is fixed up, even if it doesn’t sell it would make a terrific vacation rental. So there’s another option. We could manage the property for you. You wouldn’t have to do a thing.” When the two exchanged another glance, Tess picked her purse up off the chipped Formica counter. “Tell you what…why don’t I give you a few minutes to talk it over between you? I’ll just wait outside.”

Tess crossed to the kitchen patio door, the glass practically opaque from God-knew-how-many years’ worth of grime and dust. French doors, both in here and the living room, would be spectacular…

Five minutes later, if that, she heard the door slide open behind her. “Ms. Montoya?”

Tess turned, trying not to look too eager. “Yes?”

“Tell you what,” Fred said, hiking up his designer jeans as he walked out onto the redwood deck. “If you can bring in the renovations for twenty grand, we’ve got a deal. I’m not real keen on the vacation house idea, but Gilly seems to think it could work. And we like your style.” He extended his hand. “So. You’ve got the listing. Until Christmas.”

Tess’s stomach dropped. “But…that’s less than two months! Six is more customary.”

“If you can’t sell it before the holiday vacation season starts, we might as well rent it out.”

That’ll teach her to come up with brilliant ideas.