Remodeling The Bachelor

He expected Kelli’s mother to step in and admonish the little girl for talking so freely to a stranger. But there was nothing forthcoming from J.D. and Kelli was apparently waiting for him to give her an answer.

“Yes,” he finally said. “Two.”

“Do they live here, too?” Kelli asked. She seemed ready to go off in search of them.

He shifted his eyes toward the so-called handy-person. “Don’t you think you should teach her not to be so friendly with strangers?”

Janice had never liked being told what to do. She struggled now to keep her annoyance out of her voice. The man probably meant well and he was, after all, a potential client.

But who the hell did he think he was, telling her how to raise her daughter?

She took a breath before answering, trying her best to sound calm. She was dealing with residual anxiety, as always when Gordon went out on a date. He had a very bad tendency to overdo things and shower his companions with gifts he couldn’t afford.

When she finally spoke, it was in a low voice, the same voice he’d heard on the answering machine. “I don’t see the need to make her paranoid if I’m around to watch her. Kelli knows enough not to talk to someone she doesn’t know if she’s alone—which she never is,” Janice added firmly. “Besides,” she continued, “Kelli’s a very good judge of character.”

Now that he found hard to believe. “And she’s how old?”

He was mocking her, Janice thought. Probably thought she was one of those doting mothers who thought their kid walked on water. But Kelli seemed to have a radar when it came to nice people. She turned very shy around the other type.

“Age doesn’t always matter,” she told Zabelle. Gordon, for instance, had the impaired judgment of a two-month-old Labrador puppy. Everyone was his friend—until proven otherwise. The later happened far too often. He had a V on his forehead for victim and self-serving women could hone in on it from a fifty-mile radius. “Sometimes all it takes are good instincts.” Something Gordon didn’t seem to possess when it came to women. He fell prey to one gold digger after another. The sad part was that he never caught on. And if she said anything, her brother felt she was being a shrew.

It was hard to believe that he was the older one.

Because he’d asked and her mother hadn’t answered, Kelli held up four fingers and bent her thumb to illustrate what she was about to say. “I’m four and three-quarters.” She dropped her hand and then added in a stage whisper that would have made a Shakespearean actor proud, “Mama says I’m going on forty.”

The unassuming remark made him laugh. “I can believe that.”

“Why don’t we get down to business?” Janice suggested. She wanted to wrap this up as quickly as possible, especially if it didn’t lead anywhere. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare dinner yet. That had been Gordon’s job, but then Sheila, the latest keeper of his heart, had called and he’d forgotten everything else. When she’d come home from wrapping up a job, he’d all but run over her in his haste to leave the house.

“Good, you’re finally home. Gotta run.” And he did. Literally.

“Dinner?” she’d called after him.

“Yeah,” he’d tossed over her shoulder. “I’m taking her out. Seems she’s free after all.”

Which had meant that whoever Sheila had planned to go out with had cancelled.

There’d been no time for Janice to prepare dinner before her appointment, so she’d tossed an apple to Kelli, strapped her into her car seat and driven over to the address she’d copied down. But now her stomach was making her pay for it by rumbling. She wished she’d grabbed an apple for herself.

“Fine with me,” Philippe told her. He gestured toward the sink. Running the length of the sink from one end to the other, the crack was hard to miss. “I need that replaced.”

Instead of looking at the sink, Janice slowly examined the bathroom, taking in details and cataloguing them in her head. Judging by appearances, no one had done anything to the oversized powder room with the undersized shower in about thirty years.

The dead giveaway was the carpet on the floor. It was very 1970s.

Finished assessing, she turned to him. “Looks to me as if you could stand to have the whole bathroom replaced.”

He hadn’t given any serious thought to any large-scale renovations, but he knew he wouldn’t want them handled by a wisp of a woman. “Oh?”

She nodded as if he’d just agreed with her. “The tile is very bland,” she pointed to the wall. “It dates the room, as does the carpet. And you’re missing grout in several places.” She indicated just where. “My guess is that it was probably scrubbed out over the years.” She based her assumption on the fact that there didn’t appear to be any visible mold. Left to their own devices, most men had bathrooms that doubled as giant petri dishes, growing several different strains of mold and fungus. “Whoever’s been cleaning your bathroom has been doing an excellent job, but scrubbing does take its toll on tile and grout after a while.”

He wasn’t sure if she was giving him a compliment or trying to get him to volunteer more information about his personal life. In either case, he shrugged. “I just find things to spray on it—whenever I remember,” he added, thinking of the last time he’d had the opportunity to go to the grocery store.

The tiny snippet of information impressed her. “A man who cleans his own bathroom.” She said it the way someone might announce they’d just discovered a unicorn. “I’ll have to have my brother come meet you.”

That was the last thing he wanted—unless her brother was part of her crew. The second he had the thought, he realized she had somehow subtly gotten him to consider the idea of renovations rather than a simple replacement.

Still, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He looked at her in silence for a minute, then decided to ask a hypothetical question. “Okay, pure speculation.”

“Yes?” she returned gamely, mentally crossing her fingers.

“If I were to do this bathroom over.” And now that he thought of it, it did look pretty washed out and lifeless. “What would something like that run?”

There was no easy answer. She was surprised that he expected one—was he the type that liked having everything neatly pigeonholed? “That depends on what you’d want done.”

Nothing until five minutes ago, he thought. “Nothing fancy,” he said aloud. “Just replacing what’s here with newer fixtures.”

She glanced down at the worn short-shag carpeting that went from one wall to another. Why would anyone have ever considered that acceptable? “And tile for the floor.”

That surprised him. J.D. had hit on the one thing he’d been toying with having done—when he got around to it. He’d never cared for having a carpet in the bathroom. It got way too soggy from wet feet.

“And tile for the floor,” he echoed, agreeing.

Well, at least they were beginning on the same page. “Different quality fixtures affect the total sum,” she maintained.

“Ballpark figure,” he requested, then amended it by saying, “what you’d charge for your labor, since I’m guessing the materials would cost me the same as you if I went and got them myself.”

“More,” she corrected. He looked at her quizzically. “Unless you just happen to have a contractor’s license in your pocket.”

He patted either pocket, causing Kelli to giggle. He realized he liked the sound of that. “Fresh out.” He hooked his thumbs in the corners of his front pockets. “So I get a break hiring you?”

She didn’t want to come across as pushy. People who applied too much pressure wound up losing their potential customers. It was the one thing she’d learned by watching her father. “Or any contractor.”

He couldn’t ask what the materials would come to until he decided on the materials. But he could ask her about her fee. He’d never liked flying blind. “Okay, what’s your bottom line?”

This time the giggle needed two hands to keep it restrained—and still it came through. “Mama doesn’t have a line on her bottom,” Kelli piped up, her eyes dancing with amusement.

For a second, as he stared down into the eyes of the improbable woman behind the initials, he’d almost lost his train of thought. He’d definitely forgotten that her daughter was there.

Philippe laughed now at the serious expression that had slipped over what had been an incredibly sunny little face. “I didn’t mean—”

“The bottom line means what things will cost,” Janice explained to her daughter, speaking as if Kelli were a business associate being trained on the job.

Maybe she was, he thought, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. It was way too soon to be training that little girl to do anything but enjoy life to the fullest and he had a sneaking suspicion those lessons had already been given.

“Oh,” was all he trusted himself to say.

Janice turned toward him and after pausing a moment to take things in again and, doing a few mental calculations in her head, she gave him a quote.