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

“Yo, Eli…where’d you go, guy?”

Took him a second for his brother’s face to come into focus.

“Just thinking about the bid I need to be working on,” Eli said, swallowing the last of his beer and getting to his feet.

“Bid? What bid?”

“Charley’s house is back on the market. Needs some updating. Dad’s busy, so I signed on.”

“No kidding? Fred and Gilly sellin’ the place on their own?”

“No. Tess Montoya’s the agent.”

Noah frowned. “Didn’t you used to—?”

“Shut up,” Eli grunted, his brother’s evil laugh following him as he wormed his way through the noisy crowd to get the hell out of there.

Chapter Six

Kisses duly dispensed—how long, Tess wondered, before Miguel called a halt to that?—she sat in the drop-off zone in front of the elementary school, leaning farther and farther over to watch her little boy run off to join his classmates on the playground, until some doofus behind her leaned on his horn.

Okay, so maybe I’m just a smidgen overprotective, she thought as she pulled away, Julia singing one of her tuneless creations behind her. Tess suddenly had a vision of her baby with a nose ring and pink hair up on a stage somewhere surrounded by drugged-out rockers and nearly had a heart attack.

“Birdies, Mama! Look!” the little girl cried as they passed a naked ash tree studded with big, black, scary-looking crows. One of them cawed; Julia cawed right back, then giggled, and Tess relaxed, deciding she probably had a few years yet to worry about her daughter’s induction into the dark side. Right now, her major concern was getting the kid to her babysitter’s so Tess and Eli could trek to Home Depot to choose cabinets and paint and such.

Yeah, she was so looking forward to that. Sitting next to him in the confined space of somebody’s vehicle. For a half hour. Each way. Smelling him. Hearing him—

Please, God, just don’t let him chuckle, ’kay? Thanks.

It’d been a week since the Harrises approved Eli’s bid, bless their miserly souls, wrenching from Tess a promise she’d do an open house the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Never mind that open houses right before Christmas were pretty much nonstarters. Because people were, you know, doing Christmas shopping and putting up trees and wrapping presents and who the hell went house shopping in December?

Not that she used those exact words.

And anyway, these days grasping at straws was better than grasping at nothing. Maybe.

At least the demolition phase was moving along nicely. And quickly. Eli had found worker bees from God knew where—cousins and brothers and uncles of the guys who worked in the shop, she gathered—and lo and behold, the ’60s were vanishing right before her eyes. Now all the gutted kitchen needed was new cabinets and counters to make it all purdy—not to mention inhabitable—and they’d be good to go. But since the Harrises had entrusted Tess with all the design decisions—as in, as long as the project came in on time and under budget, they didn’t give a rat’s booty what it looked like—Eli insisted Tess go with him to help choose.

Hence her rumbly tummy.

She pulled up in front of the tidy little ranch-style house where Carmen Alvarado, Evangelista’s niece and Tess’s part-time babysitter, lived. One of her own toddlers straddling her hip, the smiling, slightly pudgy young woman opened her door, calling to Julia in Spanish before Tess had fully untangled her from her car seat. It wasn’t that the area locals couldn’t speak English—most of them did, as well or better than their gringo counterparts. But if English was a pair of dress shoes worn only in company, Spanish was that favorite pair of slippers you put on as soon as you got home.

Except for Tess, whose mother had refused to let her speak Spanish growing up, or even to take it in school, a quirk—the nicest word Tess could think of—that had always made Tess feel like part of her was missing.

Julia wriggled free as soon as the car door slammed shut, running up to her sitter, babbling about birds. “Vi parajos, Carmen! Muchos parajos! En arbol!”

“Usted hizo? Cool! Ahora dé a su mama un beso, sweetie!”

And wouldn’t that frost Julia’s grandmother? Tess thought as she and her daughter exchanged a dozen kisses before the little girl gleefully stomped up the few steps into the uber-babyproofed house filled with toys and dolls and books and healthy snacks…and no TV.

Yeah, maybe she shouldn’t think too hard about Carmen’s extraordinary child-care skills. “I should be back no later than two,” she said, and the young woman smiled.

“No problem. Since she takes her nap from one to three, take your time.”

As she was saying.

Twenty minutes later, some radio talk show—en espanol, natch—spilled through the half-open front door when Tess arrived at the house. Devoid of the rotting blue window trim, the house now looked like that old woman without any makeup at all, mouth and eyes agape in shock. Inside, the noise was as thick as the dust—bursts of laughter, the pow! pow! pow! of a nail gun, that radio show.

“Hello!” she yelled over the din, even as she took in the remarkable progress Eli and his elves had already made. Sure, it looked like a bomb had gone off, but you can’t re-do until you un-do. Not only that, but the pow-pow-powing was due to the brand-new shelving going into the living room, replacing the sorry, warped built-ins.

One of the workers noticed her and nodded, grinning. “Buscando Mr. Eli?”

“Yeah. Is he here?”

“In the back. He’ll be out in a minute.” He loaded another nail into the gun, then gestured with it toward the new shelves. “You like?”

“Very much,” Tess said. “They look terrific.”

“Gracias, senora.”

“De nada. I’m sorry…what’s your name?”

“Teo,” Eli answered, coming into the room. Smiling. Making Tess’s lungs seize up. “Teo Martinez.” He nodded toward both the gray-haired man and the younger one on the other side of the shelves. “And his son, Luis. I was damn lucky they were both available. Couldn’t ask for a better crew.”

“No, it’s us who are grateful, Mr. Garrett. With the economy the way it is?” He did the in-the-tank gesture with his thumb. “Not so easy, finding construction work these days.” Turning back to the shelves, he lined up the nail gun and let ’er rip. Pow. He glanced over his shoulder at Tess while reloading. “Las’ month was the firs’ time in twenty-five years I have to go on unemployment. Luis, he’s been laid off, what? Three, four times in the last year. With a wife and son to support, he’s thinking, maybe he should join the army or the marines—”

“It’s just an option, Pop,” the younger man said as Tess’s lungs seized again, for an entirely different reason.

“An’ I tell you—” pow “—wait a little while, see if things pick up. An’ see?” He tossed a grin in Eli’s direction. “They did.”

Tess’s gaze slid to Eli, exchanging an apologetic glance with the younger Martinez, and Tess guessed that this job was at best only a reprieve. The younger man shrugged—It’s okay, man, I’m cool—then bestowed a beautiful smile on Tess that broke her heart.

At that moment, Eli wasn’t sure what was tearing him up more—Luis’s bravado or the obvious turmoil that bravado provoked in Tess. Because even though she was smiling and commending Luis for wanting to serve his country, Eli could tell the conversation was bringing a whole lot of junk to the surface…even if he couldn’t immediately identify what that junk was.

“Looks great, guys,” Eli said to the two workers, then steered Tess into the gutted kitchen. “You okay?”

Caution flashed in her eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, I don’t know…maybe because the minute Luis brought up the military you looked like a brick had fallen on your head?”

“That obvious, huh?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Watching the young man, she breathed out a sigh. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Same age as Ricky when he first went in,” she said, more to herself than Eli. “Teo said there’s a kid?”