Jace had very nearly taken his thumb off because he hadn’t been paying attention as he trimmed a two-by-four on the circular saw, and had just figuratively taken George’s head off for asking a simple question.
“You all right, Jace?” Carl asked from behind him as Jace watched George disappear back inside the addition. “He just wanted to know if you wanted to knock through the wall into Ms. Burton’s bedroom today.”
Jace turned to look at his friend, feeling sheepish, stupid. A total jerk. “I know. I need to go apologize to him.”
“I’ll handle it. You’ve got a lot on your mind.”
“It’s that obvious, huh?” Jace asked, rubbing at the side of his neck. “Carl, how long have you been married?”
The older man’s eyebrows rose, nearly disappearing beneath his hard hat. “Married? Who’s— That is, I don’t know. I should, but I always first have to think how old Carl Jr. is, and then add a year, even though it was really only seven months, not that my Mildred wouldn’t kill me for saying that. Okay, forty. We’re married for forty years this coming September.”
“Then you have experience. With women, I mean.”
“I do?” Carl tipped back his hard hat, grinning widely. “Coulda fooled me. Coulda fooled Millie, too, because she’s always telling me I don’t have a clue. You buy one blender for an anniversary present twenty years ago, and you never live it down. What’s the problem?”
Jace opened the cooler and pulled out two bottles of water, handed one to Carl. “I’m not sure,” he said as they took up seats on top of the picnic table, under the shade of the trees, propping their work boots on the bench. “I don’t think they are, either. About what they want, I mean.”
Carl twisted off the bottle top and took a long drink before pressing the chilled plastic against his forehead. “Oh. That. I mean, good luck with that. Millie will tell me I should know what’s bothering her and won’t tell me because I should know, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t tell me because she doesn’t know, either. Until she finally figures it out. Usually by figuring out that it was all my fault, whatever it was. Then, of course, she tells me it’s too late for me to apologize.”
Jace slanted a look at his employee and friend. “You’re kidding, right?”
Carl raised his hard hat. “See this head? It would be full of gray hair if she hadn’t driven me bald. So, no, I’m not kidding.”
Jace watched Carl replace his hard hat. “But you love her?”
Carl looked at him sharply, his dark brown eyes flashing. “Damn straight. I’d be lost without her, that’s my Millie. I just gave up trying to understand her. So what’s going on, Jace? You got women problems?”
“In theory? No. In theory, Carl, I should be one of the happiest men on the planet.”
“I’m looking at your face here, pal, and I gotta tell you something. If that’s happy, as my granddaddy used to say, I’ll take vanilla. I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”
“I’m not,” Jace said, rubbing the water bottle between his palms. “Not seriously, anyway. You know, no long-term commitment. And not anymore.” Probably the shortest-term commitment in history, Jace thought, grimacing. “We’d agreed on that from the start. Only I think maybe she might be changing her mind.”
“Uh-oh.” Carl waggled his fingers close to Jace’s face. “Just when you think you’re out, they drag you— What’s the rest of that?”
Jace pushed his hands away. “Cut that out, you nut, I’m trying to be serious here.”
“Serious as a funeral. Yeah, we noticed. So you’re trying to figure out how to dump her, let her down easy?”
Jace looked at Carl for a long moment, and then shook his head. “Millie has my complete sympathy. Tell her that for me, will you? No, I’m not trying to let her down easy. She’s gone, it’s over. Except I don’t think she wants it to be over.”
“But you do. Help me out here, bro. Am I getting any of this right?”
Jace unfolded his lean body and got to his feet. “No, but that’s all right. Neither am I. Okay, back to work. Damn. Here comes Marylou. Why don’t you guys break for lunch. On me. Just bring me something back. Not much, I’m really not hungry. And tell George I’m sorry, okay? I’ll catch him later, but you tell him now, so he doesn’t worry.”
“The man is a worrier. Hi, Marylou, good seeing you again,” Carl said, and then took off, pocketing the twenties Jace had handed him.
Jace quickly put on his shirt.
“Oh, sweetie, don’t do that on my account. Just kidding! I can’t believe how much progress you’ve made in such a short time. You’re really quite fast, even faster than I’d hoped,” Marylou said, turning toward the addition.
If she hadn’t been looking toward the addition, Jace would have worried that she’d been talking about something else entirely. But that couldn’t be. Nobody knew what had happened. How could they? Unless Chessie had— No, she wouldn’t say anything. Just like he wouldn’t say anything. Just why neither of them would say anything he didn’t want to dwell on right now.
“We’ve had a setback, Marylou. Like I told you on the phone this morning. You really should have a staircase in there, a direct connection between workroom and storage room.”
“Oh, and I agree. So does Chessie. She doesn’t agree about the alarm system, but she isn’t going to fight us on it.”
“So, uh, she’s not on her way out here?” Had he sounded disappointed? He didn’t want to sound disappointed. Except now it was pretty plain that she was avoiding him. “Because, you know,” he added quickly, “I thought I could get your opinions on where to place the staircase. There are two possibilities.”
Marylou smiled a close-mouth smile—rather like the Cheshire Cat—and shook her head. “Nope. I sent her upstairs to rest. You know, I think she didn’t sleep much last night. And look at you. You don’t look much better. Why don’t I make this easy for you, and we’ll pretend I just said yes to everything? Because I really want to help.”
Every word Marylou said was innocent. It was just the way she said them. And the way her smile kept getting wider.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. Positive. But I doubt you need it. My help, that is. I have every confidence in you, Jace. You’ve just proved to me that I still know what I’m doing, although I was worried there for a minute, I’ll tell you that. I’m sure you’ll find a way to work things out.” She patted him on the cheek. “Now I’m off to buy something expensive and unnecessary. I feel this need to reward myself. Ciao!”
Jace lifted his hand, gave her a fairly weak wave. “Right. Ciao,” he said, and then added once she was out of earshot, “Jace, old buddy, you have been played. Both of us were played. I wonder if Chessie has figured it out.” Then he thought about that for a moment, and decided that he wasn’t going to be the one who told her. “This could get interesting.”
He unclipped the cell phone from his belt and punched in Carl’s number. “Hey, where are you guys heading? Okay, I’ll meet you there. Order me two steak sandwiches with the works. Yes, two. Suddenly I’m hungry.”
The salon was open Saturday, but the crew constructing the addition clearly worked a five-day week.
Sunday lasted six months, and that was figuring conservatively.
Monday, Chessie woke from the exhausted sleep of the dead to the sound of hammers and electric saws. Music to her ears, even as a knot began to form in the pit of her stomach.
A new week. A new beginning.
She’d spent hours, what seemed like years, thinking about what had happened between Jace and herself. What had started it all, how it had gone wrong.
What had been right about it.
Yes, she’d told him, nearly sworn to it, that she didn’t want a relationship. He’d said the same thing.
Poor guy, he’d probably believed that, too. She had.
But what she’d thought was all about the sex hadn’t turned out to be all about the sex. Not that there had been anything even the least bit wrong with the sex—she didn’t have a whole lot of experience to draw on, but she was pretty sure the man was very, very good at what he did!
Still, it was the night spent talking in the kitchen that she’d thought about most often over the past endless days. His stupid smile. The story about how he’d tried to rescue a cat from a tree when he was twelve, and the fire department had ended up having to rescue him. The way he looked like a fish out of water when confronted with the frillier and more intimate bits of bridal apparel in the shop.
The way he’d played Toby Nieth like a fiddle. That memory got funnier the more she thought about it.
What she and Jace needed to do, what had seemed rational and possible in the dark of last night at least, was for the two of them to start over. Get to know each other. Talk more. See where it led. They’d put the proverbial cart before the horse, that’s what they’d done, hopping straight into bed. Now it was time to see if the horse could catch up…or something like that.
Because she missed him. She really, really missed him, and she couldn’t forget the hurt and anger in his eyes when she’d tried to be so adult, so hip, the morning after they’d been together.
They’d been so…attracted to each other. On such an immediate and intense level. But now that was out of their systems. She guessed. They wouldn’t know if there were anything else they had in common if she hid herself away from him, nerve-racking as it would be to see him again after what they’d done.
But this first meeting? Man, talk about awkward. She really dreaded it. Asking him if they could start over, as friends, would be the most difficult thing she’d ever done, and that included calling all the wedding guests and telling them to enjoy themselves at the reception, because the food and the band were already paid for, but they could just skip the church, as the groom wasn’t going to be there.
He could say no, avoid her. But he could just as easily say yes, and they could get to know each other as people, see where it might lead. There was that cart-and-horse thing again.
Because she really did like him. Take away the six-pack, the crazy monkey sex that had been like nothing she’d ever experienced or had even hoped to experience, and she really did like him.
Maybe this time she wouldn’t muck it up….
As the hammering and sawing seemed to get louder, she rolled out of bed, yawned and stretched in her thigh-high sleep shirt, and walked into the bathroom with both hands raised to her head, scrubbing at her tangled curls.
Her scream probably was heard in nearby Bethlehem and points east.
“What?” Jace said, looking way too happy to be standing in her bathroom with a hammer in his hand, the wall beside the toilet now half-open to the addition. “We were already down to just breaking through the last bit of wall on Friday. Oh, wait. Did I forget to call you? Damn. You know what? I did. I completely forgot to call you. Sorry about that.”
“You…you…” She held both hands to her chest, waiting for her heart to start beating again. “You! You did that on purpose!”
He walked farther into her bathroom. In his tight jeans and work boots. His tool belt that hung provocatively, like a gunslinger’s holster. Not wearing a shirt. His yellow hard hat rakishly tipped over one eye.
Sex on a stick. He was still sex on a stick. And he knew it, damn him!
“You get out of here,” she told him, even as she backed up, stupidly tugging at the hem of her sleep shirt. Yeah, girl, like there’s something he hasn’t seen yet. “I have to shower, I have to get ready for work. I’ve got to brush my teeth and—damn it, Jace, you’re standing there looking like one of the Village People, and I have to pee!”
“We all have our little problems,” he said, still with that maddening smile on his face. “Tell you what. How about you get me a sheet or a blanket, or something, and I’ll tack it up until you’re…done. But after that, this bathroom is out of commission for at least three days. Sorry.”
“A sheet? You expect me to…with only a…with all of you out there and— Are you out of your tiny mind?”
“You don’t like that idea?” Jace slipped the hammer into a loop on his tool belt. “You’ve got that half bath downstairs.”
She was so angry she could barely see straight. “There’s no shower in that bathroom. I want to take a shower. Three days? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“You’re right. More like four, probably. We broke through downstairs, too. So, you know, we’re going to be in and out. A lot. I know where the linen closet is. Do you want me to get you that sheet?”
“No, I do not want you to get me that sheet,” Chessie said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “I want you to go straight to—”
“You’re really never a morning person, are you?”
She picked up her liquid-soap dispenser—it was the closest thing to her—and winged it at him. Instead of catching it, Jace stepped neatly to one side and let it go crashing out into the addition, the bisque china shattering on the raw floorboards.
“Why didn’t you catch that!” she yelled at him when he grinned. “That was part of a set. It’s three years old, and I’ll never be able to match it. Now I have to get a whole new— Oh! Just get out of here.”
“I don’t know, Chess. You’ve still got that toothbrush-holder thing. Are you sure you don’t want to give it another shot? Since it doesn’t match anything anymore. I promise not to duck this time.”
She turned on her heel and stormed out of the bathroom, heading for the stairs and the powder room below.
“I’m going to hang a heavy canvas tarp,” he called after her. “You’ve got an hour, and then we rip out the shower stall.”
She didn’t bother answering him. It was only when she was halfway down the stairs that she realized that she’d spent an entire weekend worrying about how awkward it would be when she next saw him. What would she say? What would he say? How uncomfortable would it be?
“At least I don’t have that to worry about anymore. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve pretty much moved past the awkward stage….”
“Hi, I’m Elizabeth,” the very pretty and considerably pregnant woman said, holding out her hand to Jace. “I thought I should ask if you need anything in here moved out of your way.”
They were standing in the stockroom, or whatever the area was called. There were long, clear zippered bags suspended everywhere on long metal rods, each one of them holding a wedding gown or some other sort of gown. There were veils, and nearly one wall of shoe boxes and other boxes. There was this frilly thing displayed on a headless mannequin made of birch twigs or some damn thing. It was about the size of a bathing suit, strapless, with lace and long garters he’d been sort of staring at—yeah, they were called garters—hanging from it. A girdle? Nah, something fancier than a girdle. Chessie would look like a million dollars wearing something like that. Not that he’d let her wear it for long.
“Hi, Elizabeth. Jace Edwards,” he said, pulling off his leather work glove to shake her hand. “We’re pretty good, actually, thank you. I was just thinking about the sawdust factor. I think we can keep it to a minimum, do our cutting mostly outside. But not the noise, I’m afraid, when we frame out this new door. Is that going to be a distraction to your customers?”
“We’re not booked too solidly for the next few days, so we’ll manage.” She stepped through the opening to look at the addition. “Wow, this is larger than I thought it was going to be.” She turned in a slow circle, and then frowned. “Something wrong?”
“No,” she said, now tipping her head to one side. “It’s just that—is that what’s called a weight-bearing wall?” she asked, pointing to what had been the rear exterior wall of the house.
“You could say so. Why?”
“Well, then it doesn’t matter, does it? But it would have been really terrific if we could have made this all one huge room instead of two. That way we could extend the hanging bars most of the way on two sides, you know, with the storage on the short walls and in the middle, making it a lot easier to access the gowns. The way we have it now, with row after row of gowns, sometimes when you’re in the racks you can feel like you’re being swallowed up by the gowns. Right now especially,” she said, putting a hand to her belly.
“We could do it,” Jace said, eyeing the same weight-bearing wall. “That would give you, oh, roughly thirty-five feet of hanging space on each wall. It wouldn’t be cheap,” he added, smiling. “There would have to be two posts across the new, wider opening. Yeah, two support posts. And I’d have to have an architect draw up the plans, redo the permit again. The bathroom expansion is already approved, and I’ve got another new application in for the staircase. But I can see what you mean, I think.”
“Marylou would love it, I know she would. She’s always complaining about how crowded the gowns are. Let me go get Chessie,” Elizabeth said, clearly excited by the prospect. “Can you stay here a minute?”
“Sure.” Jace had been hanging out in the stockroom like a stalker anyway, while the crew was on their morning break, hoping to see her. She’d been really funny this morning. And really mad. But at least they were talking again. He’d had a feeling she’d avoid him until the job was over unless he made the first move. Breaking into her bathroom might not have been much on finesse, but it had worked.
Pulling a small spiral notebook from his back pocket, Jace began sketching out the addition and the stockroom, drawing in the existing windows and considering how much free floor space there would be for perhaps a free-standing double-sided shelving area running floor to ceiling, still allowing room for easy maneuvering through the area. Elizabeth had good ideas, but he thought he might be able to improve on them, actually more than double the capacity of the new space.
“Elizabeth said you wanted to see me.”
Jace turned around, surprised to see Chessie had come alone.
“She got a walk-in,” Chessie said, as if that explained Elizabeth’s absence. “So?”
“So?” He smiled, noticing that her hands were balled up into fists. They still had some work to do if they were going to feel comfortable with each other. “How did that work out this morning? For your shower, I mean.”
“Okay. But that’s it? Now the shower is gone? I didn’t know I was getting a new shower stall. Will I like it?”
“It won’t be as…cozy as the old one,” Jace told her, and watched as color invaded her cheeks—he got a real kick out of her blushes, which probably made him sick and twisted in some way. “But it’s a steam shower as well, all glass, no metal framing the edges. And it has a seat. And, uh…lots of showerheads. Body jets, I think they’re called. A rain shower. A handheld. Lots…lots of body jets.”
“Really?” Chessie seemed to have some difficulty swallowing. “I think I remember Marylou telling me she and Ted had something like that installed at their house last year. She…she, uh, said they’re…very nice. I didn’t know I was getting all that. When did that happen?”
“Comes with the package,” Jace said, speaking with the part of his brain that wasn’t busy imagining himself and Chessie in that shower, together. Lingering there, experiencing all the shower had to offer. Adjusting the spray heads from massage, to power spray, to pulsating. Definitely to pulsating. Reclining together on the built-in seat, their bodies all wet and slippery and tingling, while the water…
He probably should talk to her about installing a new, larger water heater.
“Jace?”
He snapped back to attention, realizing he’d been staring at her, and shifted his tool belt so that it hung lower on his waist, the hammer handle hopefully concealing the bulge in his jeans. How the hell was he going to convince her this wasn’t all about the sex, that he really wanted to get to know her? As a person.
“Do you want to take a ride? Talk?” he heard himself ask her. “We could…go feed the ducks?”
“Feed the— Well, I guess I…” She looked toward the shop, and then at him. “You’re serious?”
She was so beautiful. So vulnerable. He could taste her, feel the silk of her curves against his palms. See her lying naked in the middle of her bed, unashamed, reaching for him, taking him in, taking him deep, taking him to where he’d never been, to experience an intensity of feeling he’d never experienced, bringing him home…
He wanted her so badly he shocked even himself. And then he wanted more; all of her, mind as well as body. “I think it might be better if we stick to public places for a while, don’t you? Otherwise, I don’t know how much talking we’re going to get done.”
The corners of her kissable mouth turned up slightly before she nodded. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll go get the loaf of bread and a box of crackers from my kitchen.”
“And I’ll go stick my head under the hose until at least part of me cools off,” he muttered once she’d gone.