Fixer-Upper

by Linda Seed

  “What does ‘oh’ mean?” Martina asked.

  “It means this is really bad timing,” Sofia said. “We put most of our savings into the wedding. You know Bianca doesn’t pay me much—sorry, Bianca—and Patrick’s salary …”

  “Right.” Martina nodded. She’d known that, but she’d hoped …

  “God, Martina. I can’t come up with that kind of money.” Benny looked at her sister with regret. “I really wish I could. I’d love to help you, but I’ve still got my student loans.”

  “I know. It’s okay.” Martina felt tears welling up in her eyes, and she willed them to go away. She didn’t want Benny and Sofia to feel bad for something that wasn’t their fault.

  “TJ and I could buy your share,” Bianca said. “Couldn’t we?” Bianca looked at her husband.

  “Maybe.” TJ rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “We’d have to run the numbers.”

  “Really?” Martina jumped out of her seat. She couldn’t seem to help herself. Her excitement made sitting impossible.

  “Maybe,” TJ said again, this time emphasizing the word. “If we look at the numbers and it doesn’t make sense for us to do it …”

  “Of course,” Martina said. “Of course I wouldn’t want you to do anything financially irresponsible.”

  “But,” TJ went on, “it’s coastal real estate, and that’s never a bad investment. So, I tend to think—”

  “Thank you!” Martina launched herself at TJ, who was sitting on the sofa. She threw her arms around him and squeezed.

  TJ patted her back and said, “Oh. Ha, ha. Well.”

  Bianca put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and said, “I love you, you know.”

  “That’s convenient, since you’re having my baby.” He gave Bianca’s midsection an affectionate rub.

  “Now that we’ve got that out of the way,” Benny said, “how are you going to pay for the renovations? You said the place is a wreck. The Realtor is calling it a teardown. That’s not going to be cheap.”

  “Are you going to be able to get a mortgage?” Patrick’s brows drew together in concern. “With the damage to the house …”

  “I won’t be able to get a conventional mortgage,” Martina admitted. “I’ll have to apply for an FHA 203(k).” Because of Martina’s work—especially involving homes that needed extensive repairs—she was well aware of the financing options. But her sisters and the men were giving her blank looks. “It’s a rehab mortgage,” she said. “I can finance the cost of the purchase as well as the costs of repairs. If I qualify.”

  That was the questionable part. The cost of the property plus the renovations was substantial, and Martina was self-employed. Her business had been doing well the past couple of years, but the decision on the mortgage could go either way.

  The Cooper House renovation would help—a lot—if Chris decided to do more than just the kitchen. But she didn’t want to count on that, partly because you could never count on what a client might do, and partly because of the personal relationship developing between them. The last thing she wanted was to start dating him, then put pressure on him to continue working with her so she could get approved for the mortgage.

  She would just have to keep Chris out of it. She simply wouldn’t tell him about her need to improve her financial profile in order to apply for a mortgage. That would be too fraught with complications.

  If he continued to hire her to work on his house, she wanted it to be because of her talent and because of his own vision for his home. She didn’t want him doing her favors to get her into bed.

  If he did, in fact, want to get her into bed. Which she was pretty sure he did.

  “So … this means you’re going to move out, right?” Sofia’s face had taken on that pink, pinched look it got when she was feeling emotional.

  Martina reached out and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Eventually, yes. I love it here. Really. Being here after losing Mom and Dad …” Now she was the one who was probably pink and pinched. “It’s just meant a lot. But I want a place I can make my own.”

  “It makes sense from a business standpoint.” Benny was standing with her arms crossed over her chest, looking at Martina appraisingly. “As an interior designer, you need your house to be a place that shows off your style, especially when you’re working out of your home. This place shows off Mom and Dad’s style, which is great. But it’s different than yours.”

  “Exactly.” Martina was grateful Benny understood. “And I need a home office. Spreading my stuff out on the kitchen table just isn’t working anymore.”

  When Bianca had moved out, Martina had considered asking her sisters if she could take over the vacated room, but that hadn’t seemed fair to the others, so she hadn’t brought it up.

  So far, the room had been used mostly to store Patrick’s belongings until he and Sofia could afford a place of their own. The space where Bianca’s bed used to be was now occupied by U-Haul boxes marked KITCHEN and MISCELLANEOUS. If Martina wanted to use that space, Sofia and Patrick would have to rent a storage unit, and that would set back their efforts to save for their eventual home.

  It was better for everyone if Martina figured out something else.

  “We’ll miss you.” Sofia looked like she was on the verge of tears.

  “I’ll be two and a half miles away.” Martina got up from where she was sitting and hugged her sister.

  In truth, two and a half miles was going to feel like much more. She and her sisters had grown close since they’d moved in together in the wake of their parents’ deaths. They’d needed each other then, when they’d all been gutted by grief, unable to see their way forward in a world that no longer had Aldo and Carmela in it. Being here, in this place their parents had lovingly made, had been a big part of their healing.

  But it was important to move forward rather than standing still. Moving forward meant finally buying her own place. And it also might mean a new relationship with a man she found very appealing.

  Funny how Chris kept popping into her thoughts even when he wasn’t with her, even when she was thinking about things that had nothing to do with him.

  That was probably something to think about.

  17

  New Year’s Eve had come and gone, and Chris still hadn’t asked Martina out again. Once he did, it could—depending on the criteria you used—be considered their third date. The third date, in his experience, was often the sex date. But he and Martina hadn’t kissed yet, so if all went well, it would definitely be the kissing date.

  If he could just get up the nerve to ask her.

  Okay, yes, he’d had problems with women. But those problems had always been about keeping a relationship going in the long term. He’d never had trouble with the initial phases—asking someone out, negotiating those first dates, the first time getting physical.

  So what the hell was his issue now?

  He remembered the many times in his career when he’d found himself unable to come up with new, creative ideas, unable to hit on that original concept that could be parlayed into a profitable piece of software. He’d have called it a creative block.

  Well, now he was having a similar type of block, this one related to his personal life.

  The good news was, in his experience, the worst bouts of creative block were often followed by his biggest breakthroughs.

  He thought about all of that as he worked his way through an early morning run on the bluff trail at Fiscalini Ranch. Coastal fog shrouded the landscape in a soft white glow as the surf crashed against the rocks below. Sea birds screeched and cawed, and a squirrel dashed across the path ahead of him. He was feeling loose and relaxed, a pleasant sheen of sweat on his face and body. The contrast between the cool morning air and the heat of his exertion made him feel energized and exhilarated.

  This was why he’d come to the Central Coast in the first place—this feeling of being in nature, of being part of the rugged landscape around him. He’d never run until he’d come to Cambria. There�
��d seemed to be so little reason to go outside in his previous life, before he’d sold his company. Before he’d moved out of the concrete and traffic of the city and found his way here.

  As his sneakers pounded the dirt path, his mind kept wandering back to Martina.

  The best way out of a creative block, he’d found, was to change what he was doing and try something different. Sometimes all it took was some small variation in his routine, such as going to a different coffee place in the morning or taking a different route to work.

  It was all about the patterns. When you changed your pattern, you changed the way your brain processed everything you were doing. And when your brain started processing things differently, sometimes good things happened.

  He’d already changed so much, though. He’d sold his company. He’d moved here. He’d broken up with Alexis. He’d finally started working on his Mustang.

  What else was there to change?

  Only everything about the way you deal with women, dumbass.

  Yes, there was that.

  Maybe he needed to do the opposite of whatever his instincts told him to do. He could try that and see what happened.

  His instincts told him to wait a while longer, then text Martina to feel her out on whether she was amenable to seeing him again. So, he stopped, breathing hard, sat down on a bench overlooking the ocean, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and called her.

  He didn’t wait, and he didn’t text her—he called her.

  She answered on the third ring. It wasn’t until then he realized it wasn’t even eight a.m. What if she hadn’t been up yet? What if she’d been sleeping in? He silently cursed himself for his idiocy. She wasn’t going to be in a favorable mood toward him if he’d interrupted some pleasant dream or if—

  “Hi, Chris.”

  Her voice interrupted his thoughts, and he realized if he didn’t say something, he was going to seem like a crank caller, especially because he was still breathing heavily from his run.

  “Martina? Hello. Ah … I’m sorry for calling so early. I didn’t realize … I was out for a run, and I hadn’t looked at the clock.…”

  “That’s all right.” She didn’t sound as though she’d been asleep, so that was good. “What’s up?”

  His heart rate, for one. His anxiety. His fight-or-flight response.

  “I was just … I was wondering if you’d like to come to the house and have dinner with me. Tonight.” There. He’d gotten it out. And he’d continued with his strategy of ignoring his instincts. Usually at this stage, he’d take a woman to the most expensive restaurant he could find. Inviting her to his home for a meal was an entirely new approach.

  “You called me at seven forty-five in the morning to ask me if I’d have dinner with you?”

  He was encouraged that she sounded amused rather than annoyed.

  “I didn’t realize it was so early. I can hang up and call back if you—”

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  Mixing things up was going pretty well so far.

  Usually when Chris got around to inviting women to his house for dinner, someone else cooked the meal—someone who was being paid to do it. Since he’d resolved to do everything differently this time, he decided to cook the food himself.

  The problem was, he didn’t know how to cook any more than he knew how to restore an old Mustang.

  Still, he was trying with the Mustang, with the help of instructions and YouTube tutorials he found on the Internet. There was no reason he couldn’t approach the dinner the same way.

  The fact that he didn’t currently have a job—or any obligations at all, for that matter—allowed him to focus all of his energy on the task. Once he’d gotten home from his run and had showered, shaved, and dressed, he applied himself to the question of what to cook for Martina.

  He settled in at his desk and Googled the phrase, what to cook for a date night. The first page of results looked promising—until he noticed most of them involved meat of some kind. Martina didn’t eat meat. He tried again, this time typing, what to cook for a date night vegetarian.

  Okay, better.

  Now he was faced with a new problem: since he wasn’t a vegetarian himself, he found many of the recipes both odd and offputting.

  Cauliflower steaks? Curried tofu? Miso-tahini noodles?

  The miso-tahini part was beyond him, but noodles seemed safe. He searched for a good vegetarian pasta recipe. At least he was familiar with pasta. It would probably help if he’d at least, at some point, eaten the type of food he was trying to make.

  He was starting to feel good about the idea of pasta until he realized Martina was Italian. Generally speaking, it didn’t seem like a good idea for someone with marginal cooking skills to try to impress an Italian woman by making pasta.

  The whole thing was like a booby trap waiting to go off.

  “I don’t know how to cook,” he told Will during a desperate phone call.

  “And I’m not very good at skeet shooting,” Will responded. “But I find it doesn’t come up much in my daily life.”

  “Well, cooking is coming up in my daily life. Today, specifically. I invited Martina over for dinner, and I want to make the meal myself. Only, I don’t cook.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  “Exactly,” Chris said.

  “I know some good caterers if you want to—”

  “No. I’m doing this. I just … I don’t know where to start.”

  Will was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You really like her.”

  “Of course I like her,” Chris said irritably. “Would I be dating her if I didn’t like her?”

  “Maybe.” Will was unperturbed. “I always got the feeling you didn’t really like Alexis. Or Melinda, for that matter.”

  It was a fair point. He’d liked being with those women because they were attractive and the sex was good, and it kept him from being lonely. Also, he’d liked being seen with beautiful women, had liked it when pictures showed up on social media of himself with his arm around someone who hit a solid nine on the one-to-ten hotness scale.

  But had he liked the women themselves? Had he liked talking to them, just being with them when everyone was clothed and there was no one around to see who he was with or what he was doing?

  “All right, maybe I didn’t like Alexis all that much. Or Melinda. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “You like Martina, though. Really, truly like her. Because you’re putting yourself out for her, and that’s not something you usually do.”

  Chris frowned. “I was going to have Cooper House remodeled for Alexis. How’s that not putting myself out for her?”

  “You were going to write a check,” Will said. “Or several of them, I imagine. But someone else was going to do all the work. This is different. This is you doing the work. You like her.”

  Chris hadn’t thought about it in exactly that way, but Will was right. This was different, not just because he was consciously applying himself to the task of acting differently. It was different because Martina was special.

  He wasn’t ready to say that out loud, though, so instead he asked, “So, what am I supposed to make to impress a vegetarian?”

  18

  Martina tried not to think too much about her date with Chris. If she thought about it, the whole thing would be too fraught with expectation—she’d be too preoccupied with what might happen at the end of the evening, when he would either correct his failure to kiss her, or he wouldn’t.

  What if he did? And, just as importantly, what if he didn’t? It was all too much to think about, so she spent her day focused on other things.

  The Hall house, for one thing.

  She didn’t want to pressure Bianca and TJ on their decision about whether to buy her share of the family home, but time was an important consideration. She needed to move on the property before someone else did.

  If Bianca and TJ did decide to buy her share of the cabin, that would take time. She was pretty su
re they didn’t have a couple hundred thousand dollars lying around, so they would have to liquidate investments. Then there would be contracts to be drawn up and signed.

  Martina hoped by the time all of that was done, it wouldn’t be too late. It seemed likely the property would sit on the market for a while, given that the house was uninhabitable. But the land was lovely, and it had an active water meter, so it could go either way.

  Sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, Martina ran the numbers again. She created a spreadsheet with her bank account balances, her debt—which was minimal—her assets, and the likely mortgage payment on the property.

  She’d inherited some money from her parents as well as her share of the house, so that would help.

  “What are you doing?” Benny looked over Martina’s shoulder at the computer screen. Benny was dressed for work, her bag already slung over her shoulder.

  “I’m not thinking about Chris,” Martina responded.

  “Not thinking about Chris requires an Excel spreadsheet?”

  “It does this morning.” She closed the laptop and looked at her sister. “He called me just after dawn to invite me to his house for dinner.”

  “Ooh!” Benny plopped into the chair next to Martina, grinning. “Dinner at his place! You know what that means. And this is date three, right?”

  “This is not a sex date,” Martina insisted. “We haven’t even kissed yet.”

  “Just because you haven’t sampled the appetizer doesn’t mean you can’t dig right into the main course,” Benny said.

  “It does for me.”

  Benny nodded. “Fine. But there’d better be kissing. If there’s no kissing …”

  “I know. He didn’t even serve the appetizer last time. Tonight, I’d better at least get a damned bread basket.” Martina went with the metaphor, because it seemed apt.

  It had been a long time since she’d eaten—metaphorically—and she was pretty damned hungry.

  The appetizer was served right after Martina’s arrival, though it was a real, and not metaphorical, appetizer of stuffed mushroom caps. She was hungry—actually, not just metaphorically—and she loved stuffed mushroom caps, so it was a welcome development.