“Is anyone from around here?” It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but obviously, not for Stone.
“My wife was,” he told her, then added, “and my daughter is.”
Is and was.
Danni was instantly aware of the switch in tense.
He mentioned his daughter in the present tense, but not his wife. Did that mean he was divorced, or—?
She’d always been interested in people, in the way they felt, thought, what their background was, but she also knew that men didn’t like having to answer too many questions at any given time, so she let the questions bubbling up within her all go for now.
Except for one.
“Are you hungry?” she asked Stone. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m fine,” he assured her.
Yes, you certainly are, she couldn’t help thinking. But her Southern training couldn’t accept no for an answer. It wasn’t in her DNA.
“No coffee? Tea?” He shook his head at each suggestion. “How about water?” she coaxed. “Everyone likes water.”
He laughed at her comment and decided he was waging a losing battle. The woman would obviously remain uneasy until she’d given him something.
“All right. I’ll take some water,” he told her, all but raising his hands over his head like a prisoner being taken into custody.
“Great,” Danni declared. “Water it is. And dessert,” she added in a lowered voice, talking quickly. So quickly that he had to replay the words in his head in order to realize what she’d just said. “Kitchen’s this way,” she told him, leading the way to the rear of the house.
“I don’t need dessert,” Stone told the back of her head. At the moment, it was the safest place to look. If he lowered his eyes for even a second, he knew he’d regret it. The view was far too tempting. Her hips were moving at a tempo that was all but synchronized with the beating of his heart.
“Sure you do. Everyone needs dessert,” she assured him.
Reaching her final destination, Danni went straight for the refrigerator and the secret weapon she used to win everyone over.
Her dessert.
Chapter Three
This was obviously a man who did not like being told what to do, Danni decided as she placed the large plate of freshly made dessert on the table. When he was growing up, his mother probably had to suggest that he drink his milk, otherwise, she was willing to bet, he went out of his way not to touch it just to prove his independence.
In some ways, she supposed she could relate to that. While she liked being polite, she was never anyone’s pushover.
Maizie Sommers had sung this man’s praises, which meant that in the Realtor’s experience, the contractor got an overall A rating for both the quality of his work and the prices he charged. That was certainly more than good enough for her, Danni thought. There was no way she wanted to antagonize the man on top of already being late for their appointment and having kept him waiting.
So Danni put on her very best smile and graciously accepted his refusal of her dessert.
“Don’t worry, I won’t force-feed you. But it’ll be right there, waiting for you, just in case you wind up changing your mind,” she told him, moving away from the table. “Okay, why don’t I show you what needs doing?” she offered cheerfully.
Stone barely nodded. “That sounds like a good idea,” he agreed.
Danni began to regret not wearing a sweater. Did this man take time to warm up, or was he always going to be a wee bit cooler than an artic breeze?
It wasn’t that she required Stone Scarborough to ooze personality and charm, it was just that she knew the work she had in mind wasn’t going to be something that could be accomplished in a day or a week—or a month, even if the man moved in to do it. Since this would be a long, drawn out process and they would be around each other for a long stretch of time—unless he had a magic wand in his arsenal or a squadron of eager elves at his disposal—she definitely didn’t want to feel uncomfortable in her own home for the duration of the renovations.
That meant, quite simply, that they had to get along.
More than that, it required, in her opinion, that they liked each other, at least to a modest degree. She wasn’t looking for a best friend, but neither was she looked for someone who behaved as if he might appear on the cover of Grouches Inc., Monthly some time in the very near future.
So, as she showed the general contractor around her two-story house, Danni did her best to break through what she viewed as his crusty outer shell, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t wind up just coming up against a crusty inner shell.
“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