Her Man Upstairs (2 page)

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.” Ignor
ing 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.”

Okay. He had the general picture now. “You want to
show me what you have in mind?” He hadn't committed himself to anything.

Marty rubbed her right thumb and forefinger together as she considered whether to show him her drawings first or take him upstairs. She'd burned off her fingerprints, which might come in handy in case she couldn't get her bookstore reopened in time and was forced to turn to a life of crime.

“Come on, I'll show you upstairs first so you'll understand my drawings better. You might as well know, you're not the first builder to apply for the job. The others turned it down.”

“Any particular reason?” he asked.

Conscious of him just behind her, she made a serious effort not to move her hips any more than she had to. Too much stress was obviously affecting her brain. Just because she'd noticed practically everything about him, from his tarnished brass eyes to the worn areas of his jeans to the way they hugged his quads and glutes and…well, whatever—that didn't mean he was aware of her in any physical sense.

Sasha would have had a field day if she could've tuned in on Marty's thoughts. Her friend was always after her to add a little more vitamin S to her diet. Vitamin sex. “Maybe then,” she was fond of saying, “you'd get a decent night's sleep and not be a zombie until noon.”

She wasn't that bad. Just because she wasn't a morning person—

He'd asked her a question. He was waiting for an answer. Kick in, brain—it's four-thirty in the afternoon! “Reason why they didn't work out? Well, one never showed up, and the next two, once they found out what I
wanted done, told me I was wasting their time. Oh, and one of them said he could only work on weekends because the rest of the time he worked with a building crew at Nags Head.” She hadn't yet mentioned the time constraints, but that shouldn't be a problem. It wasn't a major job, after all. Not like starting from scratch and building a house.

“So—here it is.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the upstairs hall and the spare bedroom, which she planned to move into so that the larger bedroom could become her living room.

She had painted up here less than two years ago. She'd chosen yellow with white trim on the theory that sunshine colors would help kick-start her brain when she stumbled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom early in the morning.

While he looked around, tapping on walls, studying the ceiling, Marty told herself that it
would
get done. It
was
going to work. Her life was
not
in free fall—it only felt that way because time was wasting. She kept racing her engines but not getting anywhere.

Following him around, she tried not to get her hopes up—tried not to be distracted by the fact that he smelled like leather and something spicy and resinous, and that he looked like—

Well, never mind what he looked like. That had nothing to do with anything except that her social life had been seriously neglected for too long.

They were standing beside the closet she wanted taken out and turned into part of a new kitchen when he said, “You want to show me your drawings now?”

There was plenty of room. It was only her imagination that made it feel as if the walls were shrinking, pushing them closer together. Breathlessly, she said, “Come on,
then, but remember, I'm not an architect. You can get the general idea, though.” Turning away from her yellow walls, she was aware again of how early it grew dark in late January—especially on cloudy days. “I'll make us some coffee,” she said. Heck, she'd cook him a five-course dinner if that was what it took to get him to agree.

Marty saw him glance into the spare bedroom where she'd stored dozens of boxes of paperback books, plus the bulletin boards where she used to tack up cover flats, bookmarks and autographed photos. She hated clutter, always had, and now she was wallowing in the stuff. As Faylene, the housekeeper she could no longer afford, would have said, “You buttered your bread, now lie in it.”

Hmm…alone, or with company?

“T
hey're there on the coffee table,” Marty said, leaving Cole to look over her plans while she started a pot of coffee. Too late to wish she'd taken time while they were upstairs to pull her hair back with a scrunchy and put on some shoes—and maybe add a dab of her new tinted, coconut-flavored lip balm. Not that she was vain, but darn it, her feet were cold.

Okay, so he was attractive. He wasn't all
that
attractive. Not that she had a type, but if she did, he wasn't it. She'd been married at eighteen to Alan, whose mother had left him this house. Whatever she'd seen in him hadn't lasted much beyond the honeymoon, but as she'd desperately wanted a family, she'd stayed with him. After he'd been diagnosed with MS, leaving was out of the question.

A few years after Alan died she had gotten married again, this time to Beau Conrad, a smooth talker from a
wealthy Virginia family—F.F.V., U.D.C. and D.A.R.—all the proper initials. Only, as it turned out, Beau was the black sheep of the family.

Looking back, she could truthfully say that both her husbands had been far handsomer than Cole Stevens. So what was so intriguing about shabby clothes, shaggy hair, and features that could best be described as rugged? Was she all that starved for masculine attention?

Evidently she was. When she'd first mentioned her building plans, Sasha had offered to buy her a stud-finder. Four-times-divorced Sasha, ever the optimist. It had taken Marty several minutes to realize that her friend wasn't talking about one of those gadgets you used to find a safe place to hammer a nail into a wall.

“You see what I mean, don't you?” she called now from the kitchen. There'd been no sounds from the living room for the past several minutes. “Where I want the closet taken out and added to the back wall to make room for a couple of counters and whatever else I need for a small kitchen.” She could mention the plumbing and wiring later. She didn't want to scare him off until she had him on the hook. She was rapidly running out of time. If it didn't happen with this one, she might not make the deadline, in which case she might as well have a humongous yard sale, sell off her remaining stock and then look for a job in an area where there weren't any. Either that or pull up stakes and move, which wasn't an option. The closest thing to roots she had was this house. Beau had tried to force her to sell it, but she'd held out. God knows, it was about the only thing of hers he hadn't forced her to sell. The paintings and antiques he'd inherited from his own family had been sold off soon after they'd married, along with the few nice things she'd been able to accumulate.

Damn his lying, thieving hide. She hoped wherever he was now, he was married to some bimbo who would take him for every cent he had.

Marty laid a Tole tray with two mugs, sugar, half-and-half and a plate of biscotti. As a bribe, it wasn't much, but at the moment it was the best she could do.

“Of course, I guess I could always get a camp stove and a dorm refrigerator,” she said as she joined him in the living room. “It's not like I did a lot of entertaining.”

No comment. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? At least he hadn't walked out after seeing her drawings. The stick figures might have been overkill. Occasionally in moments of desperation she got carried away.

“I guess we need to discuss money,” she said, searching his face for a clue. If knocking out a wall or two and putting in a kitchen on the second floor was going to cost too much, she might have to—

Might have to do what? Open her bookstore in the garage? It wasn't even insulated, much less heated.

So then what, rob a bank? Get a loan? She hated debt with a vengeance, having been in it for one reason or another most of her adult life.

He'd taken off his leather bomber jacket. Good sign or not?

Who knows. The Sphinx was a chatterbox compared to Cole Stevens. He wore a faded blue oxford-cloth dress shirt with frayed collar, and turned back his cuffs to reveal a pair of bronzed, muscular forearms lightly furred with dark, wiry hair. She couldn't help but notice his hands, but then, she always noticed a man's hands. They said almost as much about him as his shoes. Shoes were something she had noticed ever since hearing her friend Daisy, who was a geriatric nurse, talk about this doctor who wore neat
three-piece suits and silk ties, but whose nails were dirty and whose shoes were always in need of a polish. It turned out that for years he'd been killing off his elderly patients.

Okay, so his carpenter's deck shoes weren't the kind you polished. They were old, but obviously top-of-the-line. He had nice hands with clean nails, and she liked the way he handled her drawing pad, treating it as though the drawings had real value.

How would those hands feel on a woman's body? It had been so long….

Breathe through your mouth, idiot, your brain's obviously starved for oxygen!

She waited for him to speak—to say either “This looks doable,” or “No thanks, I'll pass.” The faded blue of his shirt made his skin look tan, which made his hair look even lighter on top and darker underneath. She was almost positive the tan was real and not the product of a bottle. Sasha, who was a hair person, could tell in a minute, but Marty didn't want Sasha to get even a glimpse of this guy. Her redheaded friend was a Pied Piper where men were concerned, and Marty intended to keep this one around for as long as it took.

For as long as it took for what?

To finish the job on schedule, fool!

“I didn't know if you took anything in your coffee,” she said when he finally glanced up.

Despite a lap full of drawings, he'd made an effort to rise when she'd come in. She'd shaken her head, indicating that he should sit. Obediently, he'd sat, knees spread apart so that what Sasha called his “package” was evident.

You are
not
having a hot flash! You're nowhere near ready for menopause!

“Black's fine,” he said, and took a sip of coffee.

“I could open another window. The rain's let up,” she said. The odor inside was still pretty awful.

“No need,” he said, and went on studying her drawings.

Hopefully he hadn't noticed her burning cheeks. “The stick figures are silly, I know,” she said in a rush. “I was just doodling. Sort of—you know, illustrating me washing dishes, leaning over to use the under-the-counter fridge. Anything you don't understand, I can explain.” That is, she could if she could manage to get her brain back online.

“They're clear enough. Thing is,” he said, “this right here is a weight-bearing wall. I'll need to leave at least three feet of it, but then I can open your entryway right here and shift this wall down to here.”

She forced her eyes to focus on the area he was indicating instead of his pointer finger. Then, because they needed to share the same vantage point if they were to discuss her drawings, Marty left her platform rocker and settled onto the sofa beside him.

Even without the bomber jacket he smelled sort of leathery with intriguing overtones. Salt water, sunshine and one of those subtle aftershave lotions that were babe magnets.

“Mmm, what was that?”

“I said the space can be better utilized if you don't mind using part of the closet for your range and oven. Stacking units would fit.”

Marty realized their shoulders were touching—in fact, she was leaning against him. She sat up straight, but as he outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, she had to struggle to overcome the slope of the cushion.

Damn sofa. She'd never liked the thing, anyway. Sasha
had bought it at a huge discount for a customer who also hadn't liked it, so she'd let Marty have it at cost.

“Well,” she said brightly, wriggling her butt away from his until she could hang on to the padded arm. “Uh, there are a couple more things we need to talk about. That is, if you're still interested in taking the job.”

 

Cole flexed his shoulders and tried not to breathe too deeply. Yeah, he was still interested in taking on the job. Construction jobs were plentiful all up and down the nearby Outer Banks, but then, Muddy Landing was undergoing a small building boom as more and more Virginians moved south of the border. And while wages might be higher on the Banks, working conditions, especially in January, could be a lot worse. Climbing all over a three-story building some fifty or more feet above ground level, with a howling wind threatening to blow him out into the Atlantic? No, thanks. If he had to relearn the building trade after more than a decade in management, he'd sooner start out in a slightly more protected environment, even if his employer did happen to be a bit of a flake.

“The first man who answered my ad told me the job was a boondoggle. I'm not exactly sure what he meant. Actually, I'm not even sure what a boondoggle is, and words are my business—in a manner of speaking. Something to do with the government, I guess.”

Cole had to smile—something he hadn't done too much of in the recent past. “I think it's a general description of most bureaucracies. You mentioned time constraints?” He reached for another biscotti—his third. The things were meant for dunking, but he figured he didn't know her well
enough for dunking, so he bit off a chunk and tried to catch the crumbs in the palm of his hand.

“Right. There's this deadline,” she said earnestly. “New zoning laws go into effect the middle of March, and unless I'm in business before then, I won't be grandfathered. That means—”

“I know what it means.”

“Yes, well—of course you do. See, there are already several businesses in the neighborhood, but they won't allow any new ones to open after the fifteenth.”

She hooked her bare toes on the edge of the coffee table, then dropped them to the floor again. She kept rubbing her thumb and forefinger together like a crapshooter calling up his mojo. Her eyes darted to the clock, and she bit her lip.

“Ms. Owens, are you sure this is what you want to do? Tear up your house so you can open—what, a bookstore?”

“I have to,” she said simply. Then, with another glance at the clock, she quickly explained about Marty's New and Used. “Up until last fall I rented a two-room cinder-block building that used to be a garage and a bait-and-tackle shop and some other things. Anyway, the rent was cheap enough and the location was okay, I guess, but the income still couldn't keep up with the overhead. Some days I didn't even sell a single book.” She gave up rubbing her fingers and folded her hands together, resting them on her knees. Her toes were back on the coffee table. “So I thought if I reopened here, I'd at least save the rent because I own my house. It's all paid off. My first husband inherited it from his mama.”

Whoa. Her first husband? He was nowhere near ready to share personal histories.

The third time he caught her looking at the clock he asked her if she had a problem.

“Not really, but there's this dog I walk twice a day. I'm running late today because I was waiting for—”

She hesitated, and he filled in the blanks. She'd been waiting for him to show up.

“For the rain to stop,” she finished.

The rain had stopped. A few chinks of salmon-pink sunset broke through the dark clouds.

Cole said, “Then why don't I leave you to it? I need to run a few errands if I'm going to stick around the area.”

She looked so hopeful, he could have kicked himself. They hadn't even reached a concrete agreement yet.

“Are you? Going to stick around, I mean? Like I said, if things don't work out just right, I'm stuck with a garage full of bookshelves and a spare room filled with thousands of used paperbacks.”

“Two things we still need to talk about—your deadline and my wages.”

Looking entirely too hopeful, she said, “When can you give me an estimate?”

If he didn't watch it, Cole told himself, those big gray eyes of hers were going to influence his decision. That was no way to start rebuilding a career. “How about we both think it over tonight and I come back first thing in the morning with an estimate. If we reach an agreement, I can start right away. I should be able to bring it in on schedule, depending on how much time you need after the job's completed.”

They both stood. Her eyes and her ivory complexion and delicate features called to mind the word fragile, yet he had a feeling she was nowhere near as fragile as she looked.

She said, “Come for breakfast. You're not organic or vegan or anything like that, are you?”

“Methodist, but sort of lapsed,” he replied gravely, and heard a gurgle of laughter that invited a like response. He managed to hold it to a brief smile.

They agreed on a time and she saw him to the door and said she'd see him in the morning. It sounded more like a question than a statement, but he didn't reply. He had some serious thinking to do before he made a commitment. One thing for certain—he was nowhere near ready for retirement. As to what he was going to do with the rest of his life and where he was going to do it, that was still up for grabs.

 

Standing in the doorway, Marty watched as the most intriguing man she'd met in years adjusted his steps to her flagstones. She sighed. What a strikingly attractive man—and yet he wasn't really handsome. It was something else. Something in the way he carried himself, the way he…

Maybe Sasha was right and she was seriously deficient when it came to vitamin S.

 

Mutt was all over her the minute she opened his gate at the kennel. His owners, the Hallets, who lived three streets over in the development that had grown up around Alan's mother's old house back in the seventies, were on a two-week cruise out of Norfolk. Marty was being paid to pick Mutt up twice a day for a run, as the space provided by the boarding kennel hardly sufficed for a big, shaggy clown that looked as if he might be part St. Bernard, part Clydesdale.