Wish Upon a Matchmaker

“Have you been a general contractor long?” Danni asked, trying to draw him into a round of pleasant smalltalk.

She actually knew the answer to her own question—she’d Googled Stone Scarborough during the very short lunch break she’d taken at the studio and found the contractor’s website—but it was the first question that occurred to her. In her experience, people liked to talk about themselves. It tended to put them at ease.

“Long enough to get it right,” Stone answered crisply. “I can give you references from former clients if you’d like,” he offered.

It couldn’t hurt, Danni thought. “I’d like,” she echoed out loud.

More than his caliber of work—which, because Maizie had recommended him she assumed was top-drawer—Danni wanted to talk to the women whose houses Stone had worked on. She wanted to find out if he’d been as monotone with them as he was being with her. At least then, if his personality came across the same way with them as it did with her, she wouldn’t feel as if she’d offended the man.

“Then I’ll get them to you tomorrow morning,” Stone promised her. “Do you want to wait until you’ve had a chance to look them over, or do you want to go ahead and tell me what you had in mind by way of changes for this house?”

Danni looked around for a moment, as if making up her mind one final time before speaking. As it happened, she’d already decided and she wasn’t seeking other’s opinions on his work to see if he was equal to the project. She just wanted to know if he ever turned out to be a “real, live boy” or continued being as wooden as Pinocchio for the entire time he worked on their renovations.

Turning toward him, Danni summed up the answer to his question regarding the work she wanted done in one succinct word. “Everything.”

Because he was waiting for an answer to the first part of his question first, her answer initially confused him. “Excuse me?”

“Everything,” Danni cheerfully repeated. “I need a great many changes made to this house, from top to bottom.”

Stone found that that made no practical sense at all to him. “If you want to change everything, why’d you buy the house in the first place, if you don’t mind my asking?” He knew that in her position, he wouldn’t have. But then, he’d come to realize that the female mind worked much differently from the male one.

For one thing, logic appeared to have little or no place in it, or in making final decisions.

“No, I don’t mind,” Danni replied.

From her tone, he felt she wasn’t just putting on an act or pretending not to mind the personal question he’d just asked—God knew that he would have. So far, she sounded pretty guileless, considering her gender. Maybe she wasn’t so typical, after all.

“I bought the place because it had a price range I could afford,” she admitted honestly, “the front yard had a great orientation for my flower garden and, as they say in real estate, the house looked like it had ‘a lot of potential.’”

Stone shook his head when she was finished. “That’s usually real estate speak for ‘the house is a real clunker.’”

“But it does have potential,” Danni insisted. “I can see it.” And she really could. When she walked through the fifty-year-old house, she could visualize the changes she wanted. The transformation would make the two-story house into a showplace.

Stone merely shrugged. It was her money. “If you say so,” he conceded. And then he got back to something she’d said about the property’s orientation. “You have a flower garden?” he asked. When he’d come up the front walk, he hadn’t seen a single bud and when she’d brought him into the kitchen, he had a view of the backyard—which also barren. Where was this so-called flower garden of hers?

Her smile held promise rather than embarrassment. “Not yet. But I intend to.”

Stone took a wild guess. “This is more of that ‘potential’ the property has, right?”

The woman practically beamed at him, as if to congratulate him that he was finally getting the hang of it. “Right.”

Why did she feel as if she were on trial? Maybe he was just trying to see if she committed to this and wouldn’t lose interest and send him on his way in the middle of the job. If that was what he thought, he didn’t know her. Once she signed on to something, she remained committed for the duration.

For the time being, she decided to stop trying to make a personal connection with the man and just get his input on the house. Danni continued showing the contractor around.

Stone quietly followed the woman through the first floor, listening to the sound of her voice as she pointed out room after room, giving him a thumbnail summary of what she wanted changed or added or redone in each one.

The first floor was comprised of a living room, a dining room, a kitchen that fed into a family room and a slightly larger than closet-size bedroom that was located all the way in the rear, just off the family room. The entire floor had one bathroom.

The second floor, with its wide-open staircase and carved wooden banister, contained three more bedrooms, including the less-than-masterful “master suite.” There was a bathroom between the two bedrooms and another bathroom within the master suite. The second floor also had a recreational room which, she discovered when he corrected her, was called a “bonus room” in Southern California.

Stone listened without comment as she pointed things out, saying things like “I’d like bookshelves all along that wall” when they were in the bonus room, and “a walk-in closet here would be nice,” in the master bedroom. He neither nodded, nor said a word one way or another until the “tour” was over and they came back downstairs to the kitchen.

Unable to endure the man’s silence any longer, Danni finally asked, “Well? What do you think? You haven’t said a single word during the whole tour.” Did that mean he wasn’t going to take the job? Was she just wasting her time with him?

“You were right,” he replied quietly.

She watched him, waiting for him to continue. Right? Right about what? She’d done a lot of talking in the last twenty minutes.

“Yes?” she asked.

“When you said ‘everything.’” He’d thought she was kidding at the time, but it was obvious that she had to be serious. Every room needed to be redone in order to make it more useful, more pleasing to the eye and part of the twenty-first century.

He had one all-encompassing suggestion for her. “You just might be better off tearing everything down and starting from scratch.”

“Not everything,” Danni protested. “I actually do like the fireplace in the living room, and the staircase. And the balcony in the rec—The bonus room,” she corrected herself.

In response, she saw what looked like a hint of a smile on his lips. At least she’d managed to make a very slight connection, Danni congratulated herself. It looked like the man was human, after all. And that meant that there was hope. Maybe they would be able to get along in the long run.

She crossed her fingers.

Stone watched her for a long moment. Just as she was going to ask what he was thinking, he said, “You like the balcony, huh?”

The feature, visible from the street, was what had attracted her to the house in the first place. That and the colors it’d been painted: gray and Wedgwood-blue. Like her parents’ house had been, back in Atlanta. It made her a little homesick to see it, even though the actual structure looked nothing like her old home.

“Yes,” she responded, then after a beat, asked, “You don’t?”

He dismissed the appendage under discussion with a wave of his hand. “Well, since the balcony doesn’t look out onto anything but the cul-de-sac and the house across the street, I was going to suggest you close that up and extend the bonus room by the balcony’s square footage.”

Danni rolled the idea over in her head, trying to picture a large window rather than the two sliding-glass doors currently there. The glass doors separated the bonus room from the balcony. The latter ran the width of the room, which in turn was the length of two of the three garages. Because the bonus room ended over the second garage, the third one had never been finished. Something else she wanted Stone to add to his list. She wanted the garage to be finished and to have an attic put in, complete with stairs that folded out onto the garage floor.

“It’s worth considering,” she told him. “I’ll think about it.”

The balcony would continue to thrive, he could see it in her eyes. He had one more suggestion for her. “It might be less expensive if you just sell this place and get something more to your liking.”

She looked at him, confused. Didn’t he want the work? “Are you trying to talk your way out of a job, Mr. Scarborough?”

He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. “Just wanted you to be aware of all the possibilities.” He paused, letting that sink in and then informed her, “All those suggestions you made during the tour, they’re not going to come cheap.”

How dumb did he think she was? “I didn’t expect them to. That’s why I waited before looking into having it done until my contract was renewed,” she told him. “I wanted to be sure the money was there before I started to undertake all this.”

That was commendable, Stone thought. He’d seen far too many people who harbored grandiose plans, only to allow themselves to get overextended and in over their heads when they neglected to take escalating prices and building costs into account.

He took another long look at her. The woman might look like one of those fluffy blondes who seemed to be almost everywhere you looked in Southern California—most of them would-be actresses—but she seemed to have a head on her shoulders.

Maybe they would be able to work things out, after all.

“When would you want me to get started?” Stone asked, then added a coda. “Provided, of course, that the estimate that I’m going to work up for you doesn’t turn your hair gray.”