Trying not to give him time to dwell on that little failure, she slid the key into the lock.
As the lock clicked, he moved behind her. Reaching past her head, he flattened his broad hand on the heavy wood door.
His heat inches from her back, the nerves in her stomach had just formed a neat little knot when he muttered, “Then let’s get to it,” and pushed the door open.
Intent on ignoring the knot, disconcerted by their less-than-auspicious start, she hurried into the store to the warning beeps of the alarm system.
With the front display windows shuttered for the winter, the only light came from what spilled in behind them. Relying on that pale shaft of daylight, she headed straight for the checkout counter and the inner door behind it, mental gears shifting on the way.
Feeling his scowl following her, she deliberately sought to shift his focus, too.
“I’m going to start the coffee. While I do that, would you look over the floor plan I came up with? It’s right here on the counter.” Fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered as she snapped switches on. Punching the security code into the pad by the inner door, the beeping stopped. “I’ll be right back.”
In less than a minute, she piled her purse, coat and scarf onto the dining table, flipped on the coffeemaker she’d already filled and grabbed the tape measure she’d left on the island.
She’d barely turned back into the store when the hard line of Erik’s profile had her freezing in the doorway.
He’d tossed his jacket over the far end of the U-shaped counter’s now-bare surface. Without it, she could see Merrick & Sullivan Yachting discreetly embroidered in sky-blue on the navy Henley hugging his broad shoulders. Ownership, she thought. He had a definite sense of it. He had it stitched on his shirt. His initials, she’d noticed before, were on the latch of his briefcase.
On the scarred beige countertop lay the file she’d left open. His frown was directed to the new floor plan she’d come up with.
“You did this?” he asked.
With a vague sinking feeling she walked around to him. She might not know anything about the little doodads in the bins and on the Peg-Boards hanging in her new store, but she was a consumer with her fair share of shopping hours under her belt. If the interior didn’t have some appeal, people might run in to buy what they needed, but they wouldn’t stick around to browse and buy more.
“The store needs updating,” she said simply, certain he could see that himself. “I thought it might make the space more interesting to have three shorter horizontal shelving units in back than that one long one down the middle. The floor space along here,” she said, pointing to the front and back walls on the drawing, “would be a little narrower, but the endcaps would allow for ninety-six more inches of display space. I could use part of the longer piece—”
“I’m not asking you to defend this,” he interrupted mildly. “I’m just asking if you drew it.”
Erik’s only interest when he’d first arrived had been in tackling the task they hadn’t even started the other day. As far as he was concerned, they were already behind schedule if she was to open in April. Not wanting to fall further behind and risk her not making a success of the business, he’d just wanted to get in, get out and get back to work until the next time he had to meet with her. It had been that ambivalent sort of annoyance eating at him when he’d realized what she’d done to accommodate him.
The trip by air between the store and Seattle was nothing for him. Minutes from takeoff to touchdown, depending on head-or tailwinds and whether he left from his houseboat on Lake Union or the boatworks in Ballard. The drive and a ferry ride for her was infinitely less convenient. People commuted from the inner islands every day. But she had actually come back from Seattle just to meet with him, and would have to return later that day to pick up her son.
Even the time it would normally take her on other days seemed an enormous waste of time to him. She was right, though. How she did what she needed to do was her problem. Just as it was his problem, not hers, that he didn’t want to consider changing the store from exactly as it had been for decades.
The need to play nice so they could reach their respective goals wasn’t what had his attention at the moment, however. It was the detail in the drawing. It hadn’t been generated using a computer program. The floor plan had been drawn with pencil on graph paper. While the layout was admittedly simple, the measurements and identity of the elements were all perfectly drawn and precisely printed. It had the touch of a professional.
“Oh,” she murmured, apparently understanding. “I took a drafting class a few years ago. We’d thought about building our own home and I wanted to understand what the architect was talking about.” She gave a shrug, the motion nowhere near as casual as he suspected she intended it to be. “We never got to the blueprint stage, though. We bought instead.”
We.
The freshness of her soap or shampoo or whatever it was clinging to her skin already had him conscious of her in ways he was doing his best to ignore. He’d caught the light herbal scent of her windblown hair when she’d pointed out the walls on the drawing. He caught it again now. Whatever it was she wore seemed too subtle to define. But the elements managed to hit his gut with the impact of a charging bull.
Telling himself he didn’t need to know anything about her that didn’t apply directly to his reason for being there, he deliberately overlooked her reference to the man she’d married—along with the subtle havoc she wreaked on certain nerves—and indicated a rectangle she’d drawn by the front door.
“So what’s this?”
“That’s the armoire over there. It just needs to be moved back against that wall and down a few feet and it’ll be perfect. A couple of neighbors stopped by to welcome me yesterday. Actually, I think they came to check me out,” she admitted, because their curiosity about the “single woman who’d bought the store” had been so obvious. “But one of them mentioned that she makes organic soaps and creams. She has a friend up the road who makes candles for craft shows. I thought I’d see what else is made locally and put a gift display in it.”
He eyed her evenly. “This isn’t a boutique.”
“Are you saying it’s a bad idea?”
He wasn’t going to commit to anything yet. He was still back on her having taken a drafting class just because she’d wanted to understand her architect.
“When did you do this?”
Realizing he hadn’t shot her down, a hint of relief entered her eyes. “After Tyler went to sleep in the evening. And between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m.”
Sleepless nights, he thought. He’d once been there himself. Having one’s world turned upside down did tend to promote a certain degree of restlessness. He figured it didn’t help matters that she was trying to sleep in an unfamiliar house, in a bed she apparently wasn’t accustomed to, either. She’d said the one she was now using had been in a guest room.
The thought of her in bed, tossing, turning or otherwise, had him reaching for his old briefcase.
“Let’s get to the inventory. Once you know what you have to work with here, you’ll know what you need to order and how much shelving space you can actually use.”
“So you think this floor plan might work?”
The layout of the shelves his grandfather had built had served its purpose effectively for years. Changing anything about it hadn’t even occurred to Erik. The old-fashioned footprint of the place was simply part of the store’s personality. It always had been.
He’d thought it always would be.
He gave a mental snort, blocking his reaction to the change as irrelevant. No one knew better than he did how transient “always” could be. The store was hers now, he