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He expected Kelli’s mother to step in and admonish the little girl for talking so freely to a stranger. But there was nothing forthcoming from J.D. and Kelli was apparently waiting for him to give her an answer.
“Yes,” he finally said. “Two.”
“Do they live here, too?” Kelli asked. She seemed ready to go off in search of them.
He shifted his eyes toward the so-called handy-person. “Don’t you think you should teach her not to be so friendly with strangers?”
Janice had never liked being told what to do. She struggled now to keep her annoyance out of her voice. The man probably meant well and he was, after all, a potential client.
But who the hell did he think he was, telling her how to raise her daughter?
She took a breath before answering, trying her best to sound calm. She was dealing with residual anxiety, as always when Gordon went out on a date. He had a very bad tendency to overdo things and shower his companions with gifts he couldn’t afford.
When she finally spoke, it was in a low voice, the same voice he’d heard on the answering machine. “I don’t see the need to make her paranoid if I’m around to watch her. Kelli knows enough not to talk to someone she doesn’t know if she’s alone—which she never is,” Janice added firmly. “Besides,” she continued, “Kelli’s a very good judge of character.”
Now that he found hard to believe. “And she’s how old?”
He was mocking her, Janice thought. Probably thought she was one of those doting mothers who thought their kid walked on water. But Kelli seemed to have a radar when it came to nice people. She turned very shy around the other type.
“Age doesn’t always matter,” she told Zabelle. Gordon, for instance, had the impaired judgment of a two-month-old Labrador puppy. Everyone was his friend—until proven otherwise. The later happened far too often. He had a V on his forehead for victim and self-serving women could hone in on it from a fifty-mile radius. “Sometimes all it takes are good instincts.” Something Gordon didn’t seem to possess when it came to women. He fell prey to one gold digger after another. The sad part was that he never caught on. And if she said anything, her brother felt she was being a shrew.
It was hard to believe that he was the older one.
Because he’d asked and her mother hadn’t answered, Kelli held up four fingers and bent her thumb to illustrate what she was about to say. “I’m four and three-quarters.” She dropped her hand and then added in a stage whisper that would have made a Shakespearean actor proud, “Mama says I’m going on forty.”
The unassuming remark made him laugh. “I can believe that.”
“Why don’t we get down to business?” Janice suggested. She wanted to wrap this up as quickly as possible, especially if it didn’t lead anywhere. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare dinner yet. That had been Gordon’s job, but then Sheila, the latest keeper of his heart, had called and he’d forgotten everything else. When she’d come home from wrapping up a job, he’d all but run over her in his haste to leave the house.
“Good, you’re finally home. Gotta run.” And he did. Literally.
“Dinner?” she’d called after him.
“Yeah,” he’d tossed over her shoulder. “I’m taking her out. Seems she’s free after all.”
Which had meant that whoever Sheila had planned to go out with had cancelled.
There’d been no time for Janice to prepare dinner before her appointment, so she’d tossed an apple to Kelli, strapped her into her car seat and driven over to the address she’d copied down. But now her stomach was making her pay for it by rumbling. She wished she’d grabbed an apple for herself.
“Fine with me,” Philippe told her. He gestured toward the sink. Running the length of the sink from one end to the other, the crack was hard to miss. “I need that replaced.”
Instead of looking at the sink, Janice slowly examined the bathroom, taking in details and cataloguing them in her head. Judging by appearances, no one had done anything to the oversized powder room with the undersized shower in about thirty years.
The dead giveaway was the carpet on the floor. It was very 1970s.
Finished assessing, she turned to him. “Looks to me as if you could stand to have the whole bathroom replaced.”
He hadn’t given any serious thought to any large-scale renovations, but he knew he wouldn’t want them handled by a wisp of a woman. “Oh?”
She nodded as if he’d just agreed with her. “The tile is very bland,” she pointed to the wall. “It dates the room, as does the carpet. And you’re missing grout in several places.” She indicated just where. “My guess is that it was probably scrubbed out over the years.” She based her assumption on the fact that there didn’t appear to be any visible mold. Left to their own devices, most men had bathrooms that doubled as giant petri dishes, growing several different strains of mold and fungus. “Whoever’s been cleaning your bathroom has been doing an excellent job, but scrubbing does take its toll on tile and grout after a while.”
He wasn’t sure if she was giving him a compliment or trying to get him to volunteer more information about his personal life. In either case, he shrugged. “I just find things to spray on it—whenever I remember,” he added, thinking of the last time he’d had the opportunity to go to the grocery store.
The tiny snippet of information impressed her. “A man who cleans his own bathroom.” She said it the way someone might announce they’d just discovered a unicorn. “I’ll have to have my brother come meet you.”
That was the last thing he wanted—unless her brother was part of her crew. The second he had the thought, he realized she had somehow subtly gotten him to consider the idea of renovations rather than a simple replacement.
Still, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He looked at her in silence for a minute, then decided to ask a hypothetical question. “Okay, pure speculation.”
“Yes?” she returned gamely, mentally crossing her fingers.
“If I were to do this bathroom over.” And now that he thought of it, it did look pretty washed out and lifeless. “What would something like that run?”
There was no easy answer. She was surprised that he expected one—was he the type that liked having everything neatly pigeonholed? “That depends on what you’d want done.”
Nothing until five minutes ago, he thought. “Nothing fancy,” he said aloud. “Just replacing what’s here with newer fixtures.”
She glanced down at the worn short-shag carpeting that went from one wall to another. Why would anyone have ever considered that acceptable? “And tile for the floor.”
That surprised him. J.D. had hit on the one thing he’d been toying with having done—when he got around to it. He’d never cared for having a carpet in the bathroom. It got way too soggy from wet feet.
“And tile for the floor,” he echoed, agreeing.
Well, at least they were beginning on the same page. “Different quality fixtures affect the total sum,” she maintained.
“Ballpark figure,” he requested, then amended it by saying, “what you’d charge for your labor, since I’m guessing the materials would cost me the same as you if I went and got them myself.”
“More,” she corrected. He looked at her quizzically. “Unless you just happen to have a contractor’s license in your pocket.”
He patted either pocket, causing Kelli to giggle. He realized he liked the sound of that. “Fresh out.” He hooked his thumbs in the corners of his front pockets. “So I get a break hiring you?”
She didn’t want to come across as pushy. People who applied too much pressure wound up losing their potential customers. It was the one thing she’d learned by watching her father. “Or any contractor.”
He couldn’t ask what the materials would come to until he decided on the materials. But he could ask her about her fee. He’d never liked flying blind. “Okay, what’s your bottom line?”
This time the giggle needed two hands to keep it restrained—and still it came through. “Mama doesn’t have a line on her bottom,” Kelli piped up, her eyes dancing with amusement.
For a second, as he stared down into the eyes of the improbable woman behind the initials, he’d almost lost his train of thought. He’d definitely forgotten that her daughter was there.
Philippe laughed now at the serious expression that had slipped over what had been an incredibly sunny little face. “I didn’t mean—”
“The bottom line means what things will cost,” Janice explained to her daughter, speaking as if Kelli were a business associate being trained on the job.
Maybe she was, he thought, then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. It was way too soon to be training that little girl to do anything but enjoy life to the fullest and he had a sneaking suspicion those lessons had already been given.
“Oh,” was all he trusted himself to say.
Janice turned toward him and after pausing a moment to take things in again and, doing a few mental calculations in her head, she gave him a quote.
He stared at her incredulously. “You’re serious,” he asked.
“Yes, why?”
The why was because she’d given him a bid that sounded much too low, even if it did only include her labor and not the cost of materials. “How do you stay in business with fees like that?”
She breathed a silent sigh of relief. He wasn’t one of those tightwads who thought everything had to be haggled down.
“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 move. Dolls held no interest for her, drill bits did.
“Mama,” the exasperated little voice behind her rose another octave as Kelli tried to get her attention, “I asked you a question.”
Their eyes met in the mirror. Janice did her best to look contrite. “Sorry, baby, I was thinking about something else for a second. What do you want to know?”
“Is he gonna want more?”
For a second, Janice had lost the thread of the conversation Kelli was conducting. “Who?”
She heard Kelli sigh mightily. She pressed her lips together, trying not to laugh. Sometimes it almost felt as if their roles were reversed and Kelli was the mom while she was the kid.
“The man with the pretty painting, Mama.”
Now Janice really did draw a blank. “Painting?” she echoed, trying to remember if she’d noticed a painting anywhere. She came up empty.
“Yes. In the living room.” Kelli carefully enunciated every word, as if afraid she would lose her mother’s attention at any second. “There was a big blue lake and trees and—didn’t you see it, Mama?” Kelli asked impatiently.
“Apparently not.”
Art was definitely Kelli’s passion. The little girl had been drawing ever since she could hold a pencil in her hand. The swirls and stick figures that first emerged quickly gave way to recognizable shapes and characters at an amazingly young age. Beautiful characters that seemed to have personalities radiating from them. It was her fervent dream to send her daughter to a good art school and encourage the gift she had. Kelli was never going to go through what she had, wasn’t going to have her ability dismissed, devalued and ignored.
“I’ll have to go look at it the next time I’m there,” she told her daughter, then paused before asking, “You are talking about Mr. Zabelle’s house, right?”
Kelli sighed again. “Right.” And then she got back to what she’d said initially. “Maybe he’ll want you to do more when he sees how good you are.”
Bless her, Janice thought. “That would be nice.” To that end, she’d left the man with a battery of catalogues, some of which dealt with rooms other than the kitchen and the bath. A girl could always hope.
“If you do more, will we have enough for a pony?” Kelli asked.
Ah, the pony issue again. Another passion, but one that had far less chance of being realized. At least for the present. But she played along because it was easier that way than squelching Kelli’s hopes. “Not yet, honey. Ponies need a special place to stay and special food to eat, remember?”
The golden head bobbed up and down. “When will we have enough for a pony?”
“I’ll let you know,” Janice promised.
Making another turn, she looked down at her left hand. She still missed the rings that had been there. The ones she’d been forced to pawn in January to pay bills. January was always a slow month as far as business was concerned. The month that people focused on trying to pay off the debts they’d run up during the Christmas season. Room additions and renovation moved to the back of the line.
If there was any money leftover after the Zabelle job, she was going to put it toward getting her rings out of hock. The stone on the engagement ring wasn’t very large, but Gary had picked it out for her and she loved it.
A bittersweet feeling wafted over her. She and Gary had gotten engaged one week, then married two weeks later because he’d discovered that his unit was being sent clear across to the other side of the world to fight. He never returned under his own power.
She fought back against the feeling that threatened to overwhelm her. Five years and it was still there, waiting for an unguarded moment. Waiting to conquer her. Again.
But you did what you had to do in order to keep going. Pawning her rings had been her only option at the time. Bills needed to be paid. The rings didn’t mean very much if there wasn’t a roof over Kelli’s head. After Gordon had lost the business, she was very mindful of not putting her daughter and herself in jeopardy of losing the things that were most important to them. That meant not waiting until the last minute before taking measures to safeguard home and hearth.
“Can we go out to eat, Mama?”
Trust Kelli to ground her, she thought. She felt guilty about letting herself get sidetracked. “You bet, kid. You get to pick the place.”
That required absolutely no thought on Kelli’s part. “I wanna go to the pizza place.”
Pizza was by far her daughter’s favorite food. Janice laughed. “You are going to turn into a pizza someday, Kel.”
Her comment was met with a giggle. The sound warmed Janice’s heart.
“Where’s your cheering section?” Philippe asked two evenings later when he found only J.D. on his doorstep. He leaned over the threshold and looked around in case the little girl was hiding.
“Home,” she informed him. He stepped back to let her in. “My babysitter doesn’t have a date tonight.” When Gordon’s newest flame found out about his cashflow problems—basically that it wasn’t even trickling, much less flowing—she quickly became history. When she’d left to come here, Kelli and Gordon were watching the Disney Channel together. “Kelli wanted to come along.” But this was going to involve long discussions of fees and she preferred not subjecting her daughter to that. “I think she likes you.”
Walking into the living room, Janice abruptly stopped before the framed twenty-four by thirty-six painting hanging on the wall.
My God, it was so large, how had she missed that the first time?
Because she was focusing on landing this job, she thought. She tended to have tunnel vision when it came to work, letting nothing else distract her. Although she had to admit that she had noticed Philippe Zabelle would never be cast as the frog in the Grimm Brothers’ “The Frog Prince.”
Janice redirected her attention to the painting. It was breath-taking. Kelli had an eye, all right. “I know she likes your painting.”
“My mother’s painting,” he corrected, in case she thought that he had painted it. “I’ll let my mother know she has a new fan. I know she’ll be delighted to hear that she’s finally cracked the under-ten set. Most kids don’t even notice painting unless they’re forcibly dragged to an art museum.”
Forcibly dragged. Zabelle sounded as if he was speaking from experience. Had his mother forced art on him, attempted to make him appreciate it before he was ready? She’d taken Kelli to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles when the little girl had still been in a stroller. Kelli had been enthralled.
“Most kids didn’t start drawing when they are barely three,” she countered.
He led the way to the kitchen table. She had paperwork for him, he surmised. He eyed her quizzically. “Drawing?”
Pride wiggled through her like a deep-seated flirtation. “Drawing.”