Chapter 18
At ten on the precise dot the next morning:
BING BONG CLANK!
Mac appeared at the door with his laptop. He looked so impersonally brisk it was a wonder he hadn’t tucked a pencil behind his ear and clipped a corporate ID and a pen protector to his shirt pocket. Or pump her hand in a handshake and call her “Ma’am.”
She served coffee on the coffee table box and sat at a safe distance while he showed her abreathtakinglyorganized spreadsheet incorporating her input and his, including time and cost estimates for every element of the project, person power required to accomplish it all, and names of suggested hired help, including Truck Donegal and a few other guys who were unknown to her. He’d even prepared three different bottom-line totals, with variables factored in (new blinds or refurbish old ones?), and a proposed timeline for the work, from floors to walls to fixtures.
She looked at him for a long, silent moment.
He looked back at her. Arched a single eyebrow. “Well?”
She was tempted to say, “I’ve never been more turned on in my life.”
From his expression—the slow, smug smile, all amused, gratified triumph—he knew exactly what she was thinking.
He crossed his arms behind his head contentedly, heaved his feet up onto the box.
Nothingwas more erotic than a big, hot, strong guy armed with a spreadsheet whose object was to make her life easier. Even if she had to pay him.
“I’m very impressed,” she settled upon finally. Faint with admiration and, frankly, feeling a little shy, which made her realize that it had been some time since she was in the presence of breathtaking competence unaccompanied by whining.
“Not my first time,” he said easily.
They were in innuendo territory again.
How very, very easy it would be to just... crawl into his lap again and bury her face against his brownish neck and breathe in the manly cleanness of him and then maybe stick her tongue in his ear.
She had to look away in case her face became as readable as a billboard.
“Here’s our duty roster,” he said, and pulled up another spreadsheet.
“Who are these guys?” She pointed to the personnel column.
“Some guys I know pretty well. Vets who could use the work. They’ll do a great job. I meet with them once a week downtown, so I trust them pretty implicitly.”
Ah,thatwas the mysterious meeting.
She knew good jobs were hard to come by in Hellcat Canyon and in a lot of the surrounding cities. You either created your own business, or you drove to a bigger city to work for a larger employer. Or you drew welfare.
“I put these three guys on wallpaper duty upstairs—including a complete wash and prep of the walls—we’ll have it all finished in a couple of days. Unless you’re really dead set on doing that room yourself.”
She thought about her dream and almost shuddered. “No, I’m happy to hand that off.”
He nodded. “I’ll work on replacing and wiring fixtures that need it—I’ll do a thorough test, first—do the new toilet innards, tear up the linoleum and lay tile, check doorknobs and hinges, fix that obnoxious doorbell and the fourth step of the stair, stuff like that. We’ll get a couple of guys to work on the window frames that are warped, because that’s a bitch of a job. For the windows missing blinds we can get good prefab blinds and I can cut them to fit, or you can get fancier, depending upon how much wiggle room you have in the budget. We’ll make sure wireless internet works in every room and we’ll create a system of surreptitious partitions so that the ballroom can become meeting rooms.
“And we’ll arrange all the work so there will always be a room that you and Chick Pea can migrate to and sleep without breathing in a lot of fumes.”
He’d made a little column labeled “Chick Pea.” Her job was to “be fluffy and savagely attack intruders.”
Which made Avalon laugh out loud.
He’d put Avalon on paint duty downstairs.
She noticed that the two of them would be working in different parts of the house for nearly the entire duration of the project. It was a skillful bit of scheduling, and, she was certain, absolutely deliberate.
And they would likely never be alone in the house.