“Don’t laugh,” Kari said, letting them into her house, nerves making her belly flutter. “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”
Rob’s face assumed a comically serious expression. “No laughing. Got it.” Following her into the dining room, he looked at the wall with its paint chips. Then looked back at her, his face puzzled. “What am I supposed to be finding not-funny?”
“Do people really do this? Tape up paint chips?” She hated the way her voice squeaked, her nerves made audible.
“Of course. How else do you think they get an idea of what the color will look like on the wall? Paint looks different in different light.”
“It looked kind of…overwhelming when they were all up there.” She waved at the dining table, with its heap of discarded chips, everything from neon chrome yellow to a color so soft it was a first cousin to ecru.
Looking at the pile, Rob’s lips quirked up. He bit them together, dark eyes darting to meet Kari’s. “Nope. Not laughing.”
Kari folded her arms across her chest. “What’s so not-funny?”
“Usually people have a little more of an idea of what they want than…every yellow possible. That’s seriously impressive.”
Kari’s chest heaved and she flung her arms out, letting them slap against her sides. “See? I knew I was doing this wrong.”
“Not wrong. Just…overambitious, maybe.”
Kari massaged her temples, not knowing how to assess how ridiculous she was being. “Oh, that’s me. Such an overachiever.”
“I get the feeling you sell yourself short.” Rob turned back to the wall, with its taped paint chips curling off of it. “So, what do you want from me?”
“I’ve hit the wall. Literally, apparently. I can’t decide between this group of colors.”
He looked at them for a few moments, then swiveled back to her. “They’re almost identical.”
“I know. That’s what makes it so hard.”
He blinked. “You really think if you paint your wall this color…” He stabbed his index finger at one of the cards, pressing it against the drywall. “In six months you’re going to be kicking yourself that you didn’t choose this one?” He poked at another card. “You’re not even going to remember the difference. You’re clearly in the right ballpark for you. Eeny-meeny-miney-moe it and move on.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay.” Kari tapped the paint chips in quick succession. “Elle melle, deg fortelle, skipet går, ut i år, rygg i rand, to i spann, snipp, snapp, snute, du er ute.” Her finger rested on a chip. “That one. I guess.”
Rob stared at her. “What did I just hear?”
“You told me to eeny-meeny it.”
“And you turned into the Swedish Chef.”
“Get. Out.” Kari pointed toward the front door. “I am not Swedish.”
Rob laughed. Then saw her face and the laughter dried up. “You’re kidding, right?”
“About not being Swedish? No. About getting out? Yes.” She smiled to let him know she’d actually been joking.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Ergen fergen,” he said, his voice swooping in an exaggerated version of a stock Scandinavian accent that sounded—yes—just like the Swedish Chef.
Kari blinked. “I learned that at my mother’s knee. Probably literally. It’s a Norwegian counting rhyme. Like eeny-meeny.”
“That’s right. When I met your niece she teased you about whining for your mom in Norwegian.” He had heard Sam say “Mor” and asked, “More what?” Kari suppressed a laugh at the memory.
“Yeah. My folks emigrated here when they were younger.”
“So you said. You speak fluent Norwegian?”
“No.” Kari’s face went hot. “I understand a lot more of it than I speak. My parents used it as a sort of ‘private language’ between them. But I internalized a few things.”
“Things like a counting rhyme.”
She thought about it. Why had she remembered it so easily? “It’s the kind of thing that gets repeated in context. And rhymes are easy to remember by design.”
“I suppose. So. We going to go get your paint?” Rob turned a grin on Kari that made her swallow hard.
“We?” Kari struggled to get her breathing back under control. She felt like she was twenty again. And she was more than twenty years away from twenty. Get yourself under control.
Rob’s face fell, erasing the eager grin and Kari felt awful. “I’m sorry. That was presumptuous,” he said.
“No!” Kari waved her hands in front of her face. “No, I was just surprised.”
“Surprised? Why?” His eyebrows lifted.
“You have your own life, your own stuff to deal with. I’m intruding on it with my being a neurotic home-owning newbie who has no idea what to do with any of this.” She waved her hands again, this time taking in the interior of the little house. His gaze tracked around the area she indicated, coming to rest on the sketch pad she had dropped on the couch.
“You draw?” He pointed at the pad, his eyebrows lifting.
“A little. I was thinking of doing some Scandinavian motifs on the walls. I was sketching some ideas out.”
“May I?” He angled his head toward the pad, his eyes on her face.
She liked that he didn’t just walk over and pick it up. Didn’t assume anything. Maybe that’s why she kept opening up to him.
“Sure.”
Rob moved to the sofa, lifted the sketch pad. A lovely, simple motif of flowers and scrollwork sketched in blue pencil adorned the page. It was simple and solid, but comfortable somehow. The kind of adornment that seemed suitable to a Northern climate. Stark, but it reminded you of spring. In fact, it reminded him of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
He looked back at Kari, whose foot seemed to be trying to drill into the floor, her sneaker-clad toe swiveling into the hardwood in a nervous motion. “This is beautiful,” he said.
“You think?” Her anxious expression eased a touch.
“I do.” He glanced around the room. “Where would you put it?”
“Mostly over doors and windows.” She strode across the room and stood beside him, sweeping her hand to indicate the arched entry to the dining room. “Like there. But also maybe a modified version there.” She turned and indicated the front door and the area over the picture window. “I could pick out pieces of the motif and recombine them for different purposes.” She took the pad from his hands and paged back. “Like this.”
A mark on the page marred the motif she showed him. As if someone had bumped her arm. “What happened here?” he asked.
She craned her neck to look at the page, then her eyes flicked down to the floor. “Sam texted.”
“She did? That’s great.” Rob took in Kari’s averted gaze, the tense set of her face. “It’s not great?”
“No, no. It’s good.” Despite her blithe words, her eyes looked haunted.
“What’s the matter?”
Those haunted eyes flicked up to meet his gaze, then flicked away again. “Sam has a boyfriend. And…I didn’t even know.”
Damn. There was that sheen of moisture across her eyes again. He hated seeing it. “How long have they been seeing each other?” he asked.
“A month? I mean…it makes sense. We talked a couple of weeks before my trip, and then when I got back…” She waved a hand to indicate the topic she obviously didn’t want to re-hash. “You know. Her life wasn’t on hold just because she wasn’t speaking to me. Which I understand. But I’ve never not been in her life. And this seems serious.” She took a deep, shuddering breath and said in a rush, “So I invited them over for dinner.”
Comprehension flooded through him and he wished he could hug her again. Wished he had the right even to ask. “Hence the sudden need to paint your dining room?”
She shrugged. “Maybe? I’ve wanted to paint since I bought this place. It needs color. Life.”
“So let’s give it color. And life.”
She gave him a hard look. “Let’s? As in you and me?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
She shifted, her gaze ranging around the room, not meeting his eyes. “You want to do this with me? It’s not your house.”
He spread his hands out in front of him. “I got caught up in your enthusiasm. Consider me your assistant. If you want to.”
She pinned him with a hard stare. “Why are you so invested? You hardly know me.”
That stopped him. Why was he so invested? “Um. I like you?” It was the truth. A little too close to the bone, but he found he didn’t care just now.
Kari’s eyelids fluttered, her face going blank for a moment. “Uh. I like you too,” she said. That shouldn’t have triggered such a warm feeling in his belly, but it did. “But I’m starting to feel like you’re doing me too many favors.”
“How many is too many?”
“When the ledger is firmly balanced on your side. You’ve fixed my sink and helped me sort my paint situation. I’ve made you a sandwich.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“I am. I come from a long line of people who don’t get beholden.”
“Okay then…” His brain whirred into overdrive, seeking something that would balance her ledger. “File my paperwork? Since you seem to want to do it so much.”
“What?” Kari gave him a suspicious look. Which he guessed he deserved.
“I mean…You know what to do with furnace receipts and…mail.” It was true, after all, pathetic as it might sound. He was useless with paperwork. What he should file and what he could safely throw away. Liz had been good at that stuff and disdainful of his uselessness there. Maybe that’s why he hated it so much.
She folded her arms over her chest. “Mail frightens you?”
“I don’t know what to toss, what to keep.” Her face remained stony. “It’s true,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Maybe that sounds pathetic to you, but it’s true.”
She nodded. “Okay. Fine. I deal with your mail trauma and you teach me how to paint a room.”
“Deal.”
“I am so glad I brought you with me,” Kari said, her eyes wide as she surveyed the cart. He had started by measuring the room to gauge how much they’d need. Then he followed it up with knowing what sort of paint to get—Kari could have handled the indoor/outdoor distinction, but would probably have frozen, at least initially, in trying to decide what finish to get.
“Eggshell,” he said. “If we were doing a kitchen or bathroom, something a bit glossier and easier to wipe down, but not for the dining room.”
Then he had known to take the can to the paint counter and have them custom tint it based on the color on the paint chip. She probably could have figured that out too.
But then he had filled the cart with paint trays and rollers and roller covers and brushes and blue tape and a tarp and…her eyes had pretty much glazed over at that point. She barely knew what she had in there.
“Wow. That’s a lot of stuff.” She looked at Rob, who was looking at what he had collected, a crease of concentration between his eyebrows.
“Yeah. Don’t worry. This stuff isn’t very pricey. And it’s not so bad when you do the other rooms. You’re not going to need to buy another roller or tray, for instance. Just the covers.”
“If you say so.”
They started for the registers and Rob snapped his fingers. “Forgot something I need. Go ahead on and get checked out.”
Kari did, collecting her bags from the cashier and waiting for him by the exit. He joined her with a single bag in his hand. “Ready to go?” He asked. She nodded and they went out to her car. Before she could get it started, he handed her the bag.
“What’s this?”
“Housewarming present.”
“What…” opening the bag, she found a small plastic container of designer paint—periwinkle blue—and a set of fine brushes.
“To do the motif in your living room. If that’s not the color you want I can take it back right now and get something you like better. But I wanted to surprise you.”
“No. It’s perfect.” Kari resisted the urge to clutch the little pot of paint to her chest. “So sweet. Now I just have to cut a stencil.”
“I have a better idea. Let’s swing by my office before we go home.” Puzzled, Kari let him direct her to a nondescript office building only a short detour from their route home. He darted inside and returned minutes later, a case in his hand.
“Is that a bomb? Are you going to blow my house up? You look like someone out of a James Bond movie with that thing.”
Rob lowered his head, looked up at her from under hooded eyes. “Fox…Rob Fox.” And suddenly she couldn’t breathe because she was laughing too hard. Laughing at his horrible Sean Connery impersonation, and laughing because his name was Fox. Of course it was. A silver fox named Fox. It was all too perfect.
“I’m going to have to work on my international super spy cred, I see,” Rob said, settling back into the seat and fastening the belt.
“It’s…original.” Kari wiped her fingers under her eyes to capture the tears that had leaked out while she was laughing. “Rocket surgeon, master plumber, and now international man of mystery.”
“I have to say, I prefer to see you cry that way than the way you did earlier today.”
Kari’s face flooded with heat and she started the car. Also, was that only this morning? It felt like they had known each other for months now. How was it even possible that she was so comfortable so quickly? “I’m sorry about that.”
“No worries.” Rob waved a hand. “I raised a daughter. I don’t melt around tears. Although I thought I would sometimes when she was in her teens.”
Kari piloted the car out of the parking lot and thought as she drove. “You’re a really good guy, aren’t you?” she said finally.
Rob shrugged, slapped his hands on his thighs. “I try?”
“You going to tell me what’s in the bomb briefcase?”
“It’s another surprise.”
“Okay. You’re one for one on surprises so far, so I’ll allow it.”
“You’re a guarded person, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t most women?” Kari let her eyes cut sideways to him for a second before returning to the bumper of the car in front of her.
“I don’t know. I don’t seem to know a lot of women these days.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Kari couldn’t keep the dry note out of her voice. See above, silver fox.
“That sounds like a compliment. Is it a compliment?”
She gave his profile a quick glance before returning her attention to the road. “It might be.”
The sidelong glance Kari slid at him while giving her almost-compliment arrowed straight through Rob, pulsing through his body. The idea that Kari might find him attractive was more than a little arousing.
And she lived right next door.
On the other hand, Rob’s disastrous marriage and his equally wretched post-divorce dating life hadn’t given him much confidence in his ability to successfully navigate an adult, functional relationship. He prided himself on being an honest, self-reflective guy and what was the common denominator to all of those disaster stories?
Him.
And, as he had noted, she lived right next door.
He could just continue to enjoy her sense of humor and her companionship. He could teach her what he knew about being a homeowner. They could be friends.
That sounded like a much better idea than having sex with her, having a good time for a while, discovering that despite being upfront and honest about not wanting to get married again that would be a sticking point, and then having the whole thing explode spectacularly.
And still having her living right next door.
Just the idea of going out back to barbecue or mow the lawn and being met with her retreating back and a slammed door was enough to tamp down the arousal he had felt just a moment before.
“I suppose it’s probably too late in the day to start painting,” Kari said, sounding disappointed.
Rob checked his watch. “Yeah. We can move the furniture if that makes you feel any better. It’ll put us one step ahead of the game tomorrow morning.”
Kari laughed. “What a treat. But you don’t have to help me if you don’t want. I can do it. There’s not that much furniture in there and none of it is large.”
“No, I really do want to,” he said.
“Okay. If you really want to.”
“I do. Besides, I can patch any areas that need it now and let it dry overnight.” He considered what he had observed of her so far. “Why do you find it so hard to accept help?”
Her eyes cut to look at him, then returned to the road ahead. “Do I?”
“Well, either that or you want to keep score when you do accept it.”
Kari shrugged. “It’s at least partly a family trait. Now I guess it’s a habit. Especially with people I don’t know very well. Though I admit, I have to keep reminding myself that you and I really only just met. You’re a very comfortable person to be around. Mostly.”
“Mostly? Why only mostly?”
“I’m going to plead the Fifth on that one,” she said, pursing her lips. She kept her eyes on the road at this, avoiding his gaze.
Rob wondered if her fraction of discomfort had anything to do with the half-admission of attraction she’d made. Well, if he was going to continue to pursue the just-friends approach, he’d best not know if she was attracted to him. If she was, it would make her harder to resist.
And dammit, he really liked her.