“Low overhead,” Janice quipped without hesitation. She ventured a little further. Once people got their feet wet, they usually decided they wanted something else done. She began with the logical choice. “Is this the only bathroom you want renovated?”
“I didn’t even want this one renovated,” he informed her, then abruptly stopped. The quote she’d given him was more than reasonable, coming in far lower than he would have expected. He wasn’t up on the price of bathroom renovations, per se, but one of the people who marketed his software packages had just had a bathroom redone. The man had proudly given him a quote that had taken his breath away. Philippe remembered thinking that his maternal grandfather had paid less for his house when he’d bought it forty years ago than the man had paid to have his bathroom upgraded. “The other two are upstairs.”
“You have three bathrooms?” Kelli asked gleefully, her eyes huge.
He had no idea why the little girl would find that a source of wonder. “Yes.”
“We only have two,” she confided, then leaned into him and added, “And Uncle Gordon is always in one.”
Janice saw Zabelle raise his eyes and look at her quizzically. She didn’t want him thinking that Gordon was strange. “My brother is staying with us while he gets back on his feet.”
Kelli’s silken blond curls fairly bounced as she turned her head around to face her. “Uncle Gordon gets on his feet every day, Mama.”
It was an expression, but she didn’t feel like trying to explain that to Kelli right now. Instead, she stroked Kelli’s hair and said, “Only for short periods of time, baby.”
Instinctively, Janice glanced at the man whose house they were in. She recognized curiosity when she saw it, even though she had her doubts that the man even knew the expression had registered on his face. She felt obligated to defend her brother against what she guessed this man had to be thinking.
“My brother’s had a tough time of it lately.” Lately encompassed the period from his birth up to the present day, she added silently.
Zabelle seemed to take the information in stride. “At least he has family.”
The comment took her by surprise. Janice hadn’t expected the man to say that. It was by all accounts a sensitive observation.
Maybe the man wasn’t half bad after all.
“Yes,” she agreed with a note of enthusiasm in her voice as she came to the landing, “he does. By the way,” she said, leaning outside the bathroom wall and looking at him, “I noticed your kitchen.”
This time, he thought, he was ready for her. Ready to put a firm lid on this before it escalated into something that necessitated his moving out of the house for several weeks. “And?”
“Could stand to have a bit of a face-lift as well.”
“This was about a cracked sink,” Philippe reminded her.
It was never just about a cracked sink. By the time that stage was reached, other things were in need of fixing and replacing as well. “I thought that the oldest son of Lily Moreau would be more open to productive suggestions—even if they do come from a woman who owns a tool belt.” She saw the surprise in his eyes grow. “I have access to the Internet,” she pointed out glibly. “And I try to learn as much as I can about potential clients before I meet with them.”
He noticed that she said the word potential as if it was to be discarded while the word client had a healthy amount of enthusiasm associated with it. The woman was obviously very sure of herself.
Even so, he didn’t like having his mind made up for him.
Chapter Four
“So, are you going to do his bathrooms, Mama?” Kelli piped up as they finally drove away from Philippe Zabelle’s house.
Easing her foot on the brake as she approached a red light, Janice glanced up into the rearview mirror. Kelli sat directly behind her in her car seat, something she suffered with grace. Car seats were required for the four and under set, something she insisted she no longer was inasmuch as she was four and three-quarters.
Kelli was waving her feet at just a barely lesser tempo than a hummingbird flapped its wings. Any second now, her daughter would lift off, seat and all.
Energy really was wasted on the young. “Yes. I’ll be redoing them.”
“And the kitchen, too?” There was excitement in Kelli’s voice.
It never failed to amaze her just how closely Kelli paid attention. Another child wouldn’t have even noticed what was going on. Too bad Kelli couldn’t give Gordon lessons.
“Yes, the kitchen, too.”
That had been touch and go for a bit, but then she’d managed to convince Zabelle there were wonderful possibilities available to him. She wasn’t trying to line her pockets so much as she felt a loyalty to give her client the benefit of her expertise and creative eye.
In actuality, the whole house could do with a makeover, but she was content to have gotten this far. Three bathrooms and a kitchen. Now all she needed was to get to her computer and start sketching.
“And what else?” Kelli wanted to know.
God, but the little girl sounded so grown up at times, Janice thought. Her foot on the accelerator, she drove through the intersection and made a right at the next corner. “That’s it for now, honey.”
Despite the fact that she was a good craftsperson and she had a contractor’s license, obtained in the days when there’d been an actual decent-sized company to work for—her father’s—Janice knew she worked at a definite disadvantage. Philippe Zabelle was not the only man skeptical about hiring a woman to handle his renovations. Her own father had been like that, even though she’d proven herself to him over and over again.
He always favored Gordon over her.
She supposed she was partially to blame for that. Because she loved him, she always covered up for Gordon when he messed up, doing his work for him so that he wouldn’t have to endure their father’s wrath.
Even now, the memory of that wrath made her involuntarily shiver.
Sisterly love ultimately caused her to be shut out. When he died, her father had left the company to Gordon. There wasn’t even a single provision about her—or her baby—in Jake Wyatt’s will.
It was a cold thing to do, she thought now, her hands tightening on the steering wheel as she eked through the next light.
Gordon had had as much interest in the company as a muskrat had in buying a winter coat from a major department store. Without their father around to cast his formidable shadow, Gordon became drunk on freedom. He turned his attention away from the business and toward the pursuit of his one true passion—women. A year and a half after their father died the company belonged to the bank because of the loans Gordon drew against Wyatt Construction, and she, a widow with a young child and three-quarters of a college degree, had to hustle in order to provide for herself and Kelli.
At first, she’d been desperate to take anything that came her way. She quickly discovered that she hated sales, hated being a waitress and the scores of other dead-end endeavors she undertook in order to pay the bills. Dying to get back to the one thing she knew she was good at and loved doing, she’d advertised in the local neighborhood paper, posted ads on any space she could find on community billboards and slowly, very slowly, got back into the game.
But every contracting job she eventually landed was preceded by a fair amount of hustling and verbal tap dancing to convince the client that she was every bit as good as the next contractor—and more than likely better because she’d been doing it for most of her life. She was the one, not Gordon, who liked to follow their father around, lugging a toolbox and mimicking his every