A side road led to a development of new houses on a hillside, big pseudomansions made of cheap materials with no style. In Carmen’s mind, even in its current dilapidated state, there was no contest between Jack’s old place and those new ones. She’d take the old house every time.
“It’s great,” she said. “I love it. One of those times I wish C & C Renovations did the whole package, not just kitchens and bathrooms.” She leaned a hand on the cool rock, closed her eyes and turned her face to the early-spring sun to absorb its rising warmth, but then she sensed how closely Jack Davey was watching her and opened her eyes to return the look.
Different from their last looks at each other. Curious, this time.
“Can I ask the obvious question now?” he said. He leaned against the rock and she thought the patch of sun would probably do his aching body some good, as well as his traumatized soul.
“Which question is that?” she asked.
“The one I’m having trouble putting into words without sounding…oh, crass, I guess.”
Okay. She knew.
“You mean what’s a nice girl like me doing in a renovation business like this?”
“That’s the one. Sorry.”
“Yeah. Don’t go all macho and chauvinistic on me, okay?” she blurted out.
“I’m trying not to. But it is a little unusual. Does everyone hit you with it?”
“Or they hit my brother with it. They wonder if I’m going to pull my weight. But then we point out that we work on a contract basis, not by the hour, so if my dainty hand is too feeble to lift a hammer, it costs us, not the client.”
“Which doesn’t tell me why you went into it in the first place.”
“Family reasons, mostly.” He wouldn’t want the details. She found herself giving too many of them, anyhow. For some reason, he seemed easy to talk to. “We needed a business where Cormack could use his building skills and I could train with him while we worked. We didn’t have a lot of capital to invest. There was no money for more education. We had to be able to get off the ground fast. It was tough at first. We had small jobs, with a lot of gaps between them. But then we started getting good references from the work we’d done, and now we sometimes have to turn clients away.”
Although she’d summarized extensively, she wished she’d been briefer. He wasn’t the only one spilling too much information and too much emotion this morning.
“And you like hammering?” He seemed to be mentally contrasting this unlikely personality trait with the traits in other women he’d known, and he wasn’t getting a match.
Curvy girl bits. Hammering. Dangly earrings. Toolbox with pry bar.
She liked hammering?
Shouldn’t she prefer to be shoe shopping at the mall?
“I like knowing how to do it right,” she said, deciding to trust him with the truth. “There’s a satisfaction in getting the rhythm and hitting the sweet spot, feeling the nail go in like a knife through butter. And I like creating a kitchen or a bathroom that works, as well as looking good. If you want, you can call that the feminine touch. For some clients, it’s one of C & C’s selling points. That I have a woman’s eye for where to put the utensil drawer and the hooks for the pot holders.”
He laughed. “I didn’t even know the second half of C & C was female when I talked to your brother.”
“Yeah, that can work pretty well for us, too,” she drawled deliberately.
They looked away from each other again.
“Want to go back in and see upstairs?”
“Maybe you’ll want C & C to tackle the upstairs bathroom next, so I should take a look.” At this stage, they were only contracted to do the kitchen and half-bath downstairs.
He led the way back inside and up to the master bedroom, where his T-shirt drawer hung open with a mess of fabric spilling out. The sight reminded them both of how he’d greeted her an hour ago and what had happened next. He went to shut it, but an awkwardness had come back into the atmosphere now, and the rest of his tour was sketchy and brief.
“We should both probably do some work if we’re going to get much done this morning,” he said.
“Yes, or I’ll have to answer to Cormack as soon as he’s better. I’m not expecting you to help, though, seriously.”
“That’s okay. Got a project of my own.”
Turned out he was preparing to paint the sunroom today, keeping the horrible carpet in place to protect the floor. They arrived back in the kitchen, and with misgivings, she watched him climb a stepladder and start scraping the ceiling. “Are you fit enough for that, Jack? Your chest, I mean.”
“I’ll stop if it starts hurting. You’re right, though, I couldn’t help you pull out those old cabinets, judging from how much it seemed to tear me up, coming too fast down the stairs.”
Carmen had begun working on the cabinets with a pry bar. They weren’t original to the house and weren’t worth saving. The green laminated particle board had swollen out of shape in numerous places, and it was ugly and cheap to begin with.
“Rob should be here sometime this morning to help with the heavy work,” she said. Several nails screeched as the pry bar pulled a strip of wood loose. She added without thinking, “But I’m not as much of a girl as I look.”
From his position on the stepladder, Jack Davey twisted around and looked at her, long and slow. “What’s wrong with being a girl?” he said, his gray eyes teasing and thoughtful and steady at the same time, and that was the moment Carmen first began to understand that she could be in real trouble, that Jack Davey knew it, and that he could be in trouble, too.
The twisting motion on the stepladder had not been a good idea, Jack soon realized. The surgically repaired mess under his left rib cage burned again. Carmen saw him wince and heard the hitch in his breathing.
“Don’t say it,” he warned. “You’re right. I’m going to call the doctor, see if he can squeeze me into his appointment hours to check this out. It keeps happening, and it probably shouldn’t.”
“Are you supposed to be driving yet?”
“No. Wanna call me a cab?”
“I was going to offer to be the cab.”
“That works, too, if you don’t mind doing it.”
“I’m getting the impression today’s going to be slow for C & C Renovations.”
“Add the extra time into your invoice.” He looked down at his chest. “I’d better change my shirt. Again.”
The receptionist at Dr. Seeger’s put him through to the doctor himself, who sounded concerned. “You’re right. I should take a look. You’re not doing anything stupid, are you?”
“Maybe I’d better not answer that. What would you say, just hypothetically, if I told you I was doing paint preparation in my sunroom?”
The doctor sighed down the phone. “Didn’t we go over this in the hospital?”
“You said nothing strenuous. I’m right-handed, and the shot went in on the left. When the pain first tweaked this morning, all I was doing was coming down the stairs a little too fast.”
“I’ll fit you in as soon as you get here.”
They took the C & C pickup truck. Jack liked the way Carmen drove. She was a little sassy at the wheel, delivering sarcastic one-liners to any idiots on the road, but with a thread of humor in the mix that toned it down. She had the windows shut, too, so no one would hear.
“I