His eyes narrowed slightly. “Did you get my number from the personals?”
He watched as her mouth formed as close to a perfect O as he had ever seen. He saw her hand tightened around Kelli’s.
“Mommy, you’re squishing my fingers,” the little girl protested.
“Sorry,” she murmured, never taking her eyes off his face. She was looking at him as if she thought that perhaps she should be backing away. Quickly. “I got your number from my machine, Mr. Zabelle,” she told him, her voice both angry and distant now.
Okay, he was officially lost. “Your machine?” That made no sense to him. “I called the newspaper this morning.”
She cocked her head, as if that could help her make sense of all this somehow. “About?”
“The ad,” he said, annoyed. Had she lost the thread of the conversation already? What kind of an attention span did she have?
“What ad?” she demanded. She sounded like someone on the verge of losing her temper.
Taking a breath, Philippe enunciated each word slowly, carefully, the way he would if he were talking to someone who was mentally challenged. “The…one…you’re…here…about.”
Her voice went up several levels. “I’m not here about any ad.”
Suddenly, something unlocked in a distant part of his brain. Her voice was very familiar. He’d heard it before. Recently.
Philippe held up his hand, stopping her. “Hold it. Back up.” He peered at her face intently, trying to jog his memory. Nothing. “Who are you, lady?”
A loud huff of air preceded the reply. When she spoke, it was through gritted teeth. “I’m J. D. Wyatt. You called me about remodeling your bathrooms.”
And then it hit him. Like a ton of bricks. He knew where he’d heard that voice before—on the phone, last night. “You’re J. D. Wyatt?”
J.D. drew herself up. He had the impression she’d been through this kind of thing before—and had no patience with it. “Yes.”
He wanted to be perfectly clear in his understanding of the situation. “You’re not here about the housekeeping job?”
“The housekeep—” Oh God, now it made sense. The weekly shopping, the cleaning. He’d made a natural mistake—and one that irked her. “No, I’m not here about the housekeeping job. I’m a contractor.”
He thought back to what Vincent had said when he’d given him the card. “I thought I was calling a handyman.”
J.D. shrugged. She’d lived in a man’s world all of her life and spent most of her time struggling to gain acceptance. “A handy-person,” she corrected.
The discomfort he’d been feeling grew. It was bad enough not being handy and feeling inferior to another man. Aesthetically speaking, all men might have been created equal, but not when it came to wielding a hacksaw. Feeling inferior to a woman with a tool belt? Well, that was a whole different matter. He wasn’t sure he could handle it.
It felt like he’d been deceived. “What does the J.D. stand for?”
She eyed him for a long moment, as if debating whether or not to tell him. And then she did. “Janice Diane.”
“So why didn’t you just put that down on the card?” he asked. “You realize that’s false advertising.”
“My mama’s not false!” Kelli piped up indignantly, moving between her mother and him.
“Kelli, hush,” J.D. soothed. “It’s okay.” And then she looked at him and her sunny expression faded. “There’s nothing false about it. Those are my initials.”
“You know what I mean. By using them, you make people think that they’re hiring a man.”
That was the whole point, she thought. This man might look drop-dead gorgeous, but he was as dumb as a shoe—and probably had the soul to match. She spelled it out for him.
“People do not call someone named Janice Diane to fix their running toilets or renovate their flagstone fireplaces. They do, however, call someone named J.D. to do the same work. This world runs on preconceived notions, Mr. Zabelle. One of those notions is that men are handy, women are not. Your reaction just proved my point. You thought I was here to clean your house, not to renovate it.”
She was right and he didn’t like it, but he couldn’t come up with a face-saving rebuttal. “Well, I—”
It wouldn’t have mattered if he had, she wouldn’t let him finish.
“I’ve been around tools all my life and I know what to do with them.” She folded her arms before her. “Now, are you going to let your prejudice keep you from hiring the best handy-person you’re ever going to come across in your life—at any price—or are you going to be a modern man and show me what exactly you need done around here?” It was a challenge, pure and simple. One she hoped he would rise to.
Out of the corner of her eye, Janice saw Kelli mimic her actions perfectly, folding her small arms before her.
Mother and daughter stood united, waiting for a reply.
For what felt like an endless moment, two different reactions warred within Philippe, each striving for the upper hand.
Ever since he could remember, he’d had it drummed into his head—and had come to truly believe—that the only difference between men and women were that women had softer skin. Usually. His mother had enthusiastically maintained over and over again that women could do anything a man could except go to the bathroom standing up. And even there, she had declared smugly, women had the better method. At the very least, it was neater.
But there was another, equally strong reaction that beat within his chest. It was based on the deep-seated philosophy that men were the doers, the protectors in this dance of life. This notion had evolved very early in his life and had come from the fact that he’d been the responsible one in the family, the steadfast one. His mother flittered in and out of relationships, fell in and out of love, while he held down the fort, making sure that his brothers stayed out of trouble and went to school. And occasionally, when there was a need for it, his was the shoulder on which his mother would cry or vent.
He grew up believing that there were certain things that men did. They might be partners with women on a daily basis, but in times of crisis, the partnership tended to go from fifty-fifty to seventy-thirty, with the man taking up the slack.
And under that heading, but in a much looser sense, came the concept of being handy. Women weren’t supposed to be handy, at least, not handier than the men of the species. Women were not the guardians of the tool belt, they were the nurturers.
Right now, as he vacillated between giving in to his pride and being fair, Philippe could almost hear his mother whispering in his ear.
“Damn it, Philippe, I raised you better than this. Give the girl a chance. She has a child, for heaven’s sake. Besides, she’s very easy on the eye. Not a bad little number to have around.”
At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to have J.D. give him an estimate. If he didn’t like it, that would be the end of that. Mentally, he crossed his fingers.
With a barely suppressed sigh, he nodded. “All right. Let me show you the bathroom.”
Philippe began leading the way to the rear of the house, past the kitchen. Somehow, Kelli managed to wiggle in front of him just as they came to the bathroom that had begun it all, the one with the cracked sink.
Hands