Fixer-Upper

by Linda Seed

  “You made these?” Martina looked appreciatively at a mushroom cap before popping one into her mouth.

  “I did.” He looked pleased with himself. “I had some help, though. I called my friend Will, and he called his friend Jackson, who’s the chef at Neptune.”

  Martina reconsidered the mushroom caps. “Don’t tell me Jackson Graham made these.” The mushrooms were good—very good—but they weren’t quite Jackson Graham quality.

  “No. He e-mailed me the recipe. I did all the work.”

  It pleased Martina that Chris had made the food himself, especially because he didn’t have to. With his money, he could have brought in a chef from France for the occasion.

  He hadn’t done that, and instead had gone to some trouble on her account, and that made her feel like he was taking this date seriously. If he’d bothered to cook—something he didn’t usually do, she was guessing—then he must think this could lead somewhere.

  That idea made Martina simultaneously pleased and scared. For one thing, any serious relationship with Chris would be a threesome: her, him, and his money. It was both intimidating and unsettling.

  “So, what do you think?” He gestured toward the mushrooms.

  “Really good. I love a good appetizer.” She couldn’t help grinning, thinking of her private joke with Benny.

  He would kiss her sometime tonight. He had to, after his failure to do so the last time he’d had an opportunity. Besides, he wanted to. The wanting to and the needing to combined to make his palms sweat, and that was making it hard to chop vegetables for the ragout.

  In the interest of not losing a finger, he put down the chef’s knife and moved a couple of feet to where she was standing with a glass of white wine in her hand.

  “I was going to do this later, but …” He hesitated, then put his hands on her shoulders and moved in for the kiss.

  Her lips were soft and tasted of chardonnay. She tilted her head to accommodate him, and a gentle sound escaped her as he caressed her mouth with his own.

  He wanted more, but not yet. There would be time for that. Usually in a situation like this, if the signs pointed to yes, he would try to get a woman into bed before the main course. But he was doing things differently this time. Taking a different tack.

  So, instead of deepening the kiss, he pulled back, enjoying the look of her as she stood there with her eyes still closed, her lips still slightly parted.

  “I should have done that last time,” he said.

  She opened her eyes as though waking from a deep sleep. “Better late than never.”

  The kiss had been very good.

  The thing about kisses was that they could go either way, and you couldn’t know how it would be until it happened.

  Bad kisses came in a whole range of awfulness, from the surprise collision of teeth to the unwanted tongue, lips too hard and dry or too soft and wet, or the times when everything seemed technically okay, but the kiss nonetheless left her feeling a vast chasm of nothingness—no passion, no warmth, no desire for more.

  But this kiss had that undefinable something, that unknowable ingredient that elevated it from a mere meeting of lips to something transcendent.

  It had been gentle at first, soft, tentative, and then had become more assured. As her mouth had fit comfortably with his, something in her body had relaxed and grown warm and happy, and she’d leaned into him without realizing she’d done it.

  The kiss had been excellent, and it made her wonder what other excellent things he might offer her.

  Chris was not unhappy with how the dinner turned out. Vegetarian ragout over polenta, with a salad and, of course, the mushroom caps. He’d have to thank Jackson Graham; the recipes he’d provided to Chris had been relatively easy to make but looked and tasted as though Chris had far more advanced skills in the kitchen than he did.

  Jackson should consider publishing a cookbook: Date-Night Meals for Men Who Can’t Cook, or something like that. Was there anything similar out there? He’d have to check. It could be a real moneymaker. Paired with one of Chris’s dating apps—

  “What are you thinking about?” Martina looked at him from across the dining table, a forkful of salad poised above her plate.

  “Oh, just … a business idea.” He was embarrassed she’d caught him with his mind wandering. He didn’t want her to think he wasn’t focused on her. It was just how his brain worked.

  “Oh.” She ate the bite of salad, and he could see by the way her expression changed that she’d taken the comment exactly the way he’d feared.

  “I’m not bored,” he blurted out.

  “Okay.”

  “I just meant, if you thought I was thinking about business because I’m bored or because I don’t want to be here with you, that’s not it. When I get an idea, it’s hard to turn my mind off. You’re probably that way with interior design. Or maybe you’re not. But for me …” He was rambling, and he had to force himself to stop.

  “I can be that way sometimes.” She smiled at him, and he felt relieved. “It’s hard to visit someone’s house without thinking about how I’d redo the living room.”

  “Exactly.” He took a sip of wine. “You know, I got my best idea while I was losing my virginity.”

  Martina’s eyes widened, and her grin spread. She put down her fork. “Literally at the moment you were having sex for the first time?”

  “Literally at the moment.” This was probably a bad story to tell a woman he hoped to sleep with, but it was already out there, and there would be no turning back now.

  “How old were you?”

  “Nineteen. I was a freshman at Stanford, and I was in the girl’s dorm room while her roommate was away. MacKenzie Cameron. She was an English major. Really pretty. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  “Okay, so what was the idea?”

  “Well, we were both gamers, and we were both into the same MMORPG.…”

  She looked at him blankly. “What’s an MMORPG?”

  “It stands for massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Anyway, we were both into this game called DarkSpace, and that’s how we ended up talking to each other, through this community of people who played the game. And I thought, There’s no other way a girl like this is going to get together with someone like me. And that made me think.…”

  “Oh, my God.” Martina put a hand over her mouth. “You had the idea for PlayDate during sex?”

  Of course she knew about PlayDate, the app that had made him his fortune. It was a damned good app, and all these years later, it remained the thing he was best known for.

  “I did. And … I probably shouldn’t have told you that story.”

  “No, it’s a great story,” Martina said. “Though I kind of doubt that’s the version you’ve told the media over the years.”

  A little embarrassed, he looked at his plate instead of at her. “I did tell them I thought of it during a date with MacKenzie, but in the public version, we were at the movies.”

  “Probably smart,” she said.

  After dinner, they left the mess where it was and took their wine into the library, where Chris lit a fire and they sat together on the sofa in front of the fireplace. It had started to rain during dinner, and the sound of rainfall tapping on the windows made the room, with its classic look of dark paneling and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, feel warm and inviting.

  Martina had already decided she wasn’t going to sleep with him. At least, not tonight. For one thing, it was far too soon. For another, she’d be lying there wondering what multimillion-dollar business scheme he was cooking up while he was making love to her.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t make out for a while before she went home.

  They drank a little more wine, making Martina feel loose and relaxed, and then he took her glass from her and put it on the coffee table with his own.

  “I liked our kiss earlier,” he told her. “I’d like to do it again, if that’s okay.”

  “It is.”

/>   He gently lay the palm of his hand against her cheek, then leaned in toward her. He hesitated just a moment, just long enough to extend the anticipation, then took her mouth with his own.

  Martina felt a sense of weightlessness, of floating. That was when she knew she might be in this deeper than she’d realized. She’d never felt weightless during a kiss before, but here she was, untethered, as though the world around her had lost its very substance.

  She opened her mouth to him, and he deepened the kiss. She put her arms around him, hands splayed on his back. He smelled like the wine they’d been drinking, and some light and spicy aftershave, and something else.… Oh, yes. Trouble. He smelled to her like the very essence of trouble.

  He pulled back a little and said her name, and it sounded sensual, erotic on his lips. He threaded her long hair through the fingers of one hand.

  “I should go,” she said.

  She hadn’t been aware she was going to say it until it was out of her mouth. Part of her wanted to tell herself to shut the hell up. Why not stay? Why not enjoy everything he had to offer?

  But another, stronger part of her knew leaving was the right thing to do. It was absolutely too soon to sleep with him, and that was what she was going to do if she stayed.

  If she didn’t get out of here now, this moment, not only would she sleep with him, she’d be tempted to follow this yellow brick road so far away from Kansas that she’d never see Auntie Em again.

  She said it again, just to steel her resolve: “I … I really have to go.”

  “Okay.” He nodded and swallowed hard. “Just … are you going because it was a really bad date and you didn’t like the kiss? Or …”

  “I’m going because it was a really good date and I don’t want to do anything I’m not ready for.”

  “Good. That’s good.” His goofy grin gave Martina all kinds of feelings and urges that were inconvenient for her to be feeling this early in their relationship.

  She stood up to go, then leaned down and kissed him, her hand on the back of his neck. “Thank you for dinner.”

  Even though she was running like hell, that didn’t mean she couldn’t be courteous.

  19

  Chris felt pleased with himself the morning after his date with Martina as he went through his routine: shower, coffee, getting dressed, and planning his day.

  True, the date had not ended in sex, but he’d been pretty sure it wouldn’t, so that was fine. He could wait. The kisses had been exceptional, so he was betting the sex—if it happened—would be worth waiting for.

  And it wasn’t just the promise of exceptional sex that interested him. He enjoyed talking to her, even if they were talking about something trivial, something that, were he talking to anyone else, would be boring or tedious. Just listening to her voice was enough.

  He found himself wanting to tell her things he didn’t want to tell anyone else.

  Case in point, the lost virginity story.

  He could see, in retrospect, it probably hadn’t been a good idea to share that particular anecdote with her. When they finally had sex—if they had sex—she’d be wondering whether he was running through a sequence of coding in his brain. (Which, in fairness, he might actually do if he was worried he wouldn’t last long enough.)

  He wasn’t as smooth with women as some guys were, but he knew a woman didn’t want to have to compete with a complex algorithm while she was in the throes of passion.

  Still, it hadn’t seemed to put her off. The way she’d kissed him just before she’d left made him optimistic and, frankly, happy. He hadn’t felt simply happy in a long time.

  He wanted to call her, and he didn’t want to wait—he wanted to hear her voice now. But even with his problematic social skills, he knew better than to do that. He would have to wait at least long enough to convince her he had a modicum of self-control.

  He needed to call someone, though, so he called Will.

  It was still early, but Will had a young daughter who tended to wake him at the crack of dawn. And this was well past dawn. Surely, Will would be up.

  “Chris. How’d it go?” The sound of some cartoon on TV—Chris thought he heard SpongeBob—offered a background to Will’s greeting.

  “Really well. I wanted to thank you for getting Jackson to send me the recipes. Martina liked the food. The mushroom caps especially.”

  “No problem. But I can’t believe you actually cooked.” Will chuckled. “It’s like Thurston Howell the Third making his own coconut cream pie—it just doesn’t happen.”

  “Well, it happened this time.” Chris was unperturbed by Will’s Thurston Howell comparison. “And it was very good … um … pie. Metaphorically.”

  Will hesitated. “If somebody ate somebody else’s pie, I don’t know if I—”

  “We kissed. That’s all. Then she thanked me for dinner and went home. It was nice. It was better than nice.” Chris found himself grinning like an idiot, and he thought it was probably better Will wasn’t here to witness it. Though Will could probably hear the grin over the phone.

  “Nice is good,” Will said. “Better than nice is very good.”

  “Yes.” After a moment, Chris added, “Though, I’m wondering if maybe I shouldn’t have told her about how I got the idea for PlayDate.” Will had heard the story before, and surely he would understand the full implication of what Chris was saying.

  “You told her that story?”

  “I did.”

  “But you didn’t tell her the entire circumstance, the whole when and where and—”

  “Actually, I did.” Will’s reaction—that surely Chris hadn’t been fool enough to do such a thing—made him wonder if it really hadn’t been such a good idea.

  “Oh. Wow.”

  Will was too kind to say the word asshole, but it was clear he was thinking it.

  “This could get to be an issue if Martina and I take things to the next level,” Chris admitted.

  “You think?”

  Well, there was only one thing to do. Chris would have to make sure when the time came, Martina was entirely too busy, and too immersed in pleasure, to have any thoughts at all.

  He looked forward to meeting the challenge.

  “Fun fact,” Martina said at breakfast the morning after her date. “Did you know Chris came up with the idea for PlayDate during sex?”

  She, Sofia, and Benny were at the kitchen table with their various breakfast items: Pop-Tarts for Benny, cold cereal for Sofia, and homemade granola with Greek yogurt for Martina.

  Benny had been raising a Pop-Tart to her mouth, and the toaster pastry froze in midair. “Wait. What?”

  “Not only that,” Martina continued, trying to sound casual. “It was while he was losing his virginity.”

  Sofia let out a rude laugh. “Oh, my God. That’s …”

  “I know,” Martina said.

  She was probably violating Chris’s privacy by saying anything to anyone else about it, but she told her sisters everything. Besides, it wasn’t as though either of them would ever tell Chris they knew.

  “I can’t imagine why he told you that,” Sofia said. “Usually a guy is so worried about whether you’ll think he’s a good lover that he edits those kinds of stories. My God, I would.”

  “But it’s kind of cute, right? That he told me, I mean.” Martina considered it. “It’s cute he wasn’t worried about how he’d look or what I’d think, he just told me a true thing. He made himself vulnerable.”

  Benny rolled her eyes. “There’s that word.”

  “What word?” Martina said.

  “Vulnerable. Usually you only hear it from therapists and self-help books. And women talking about their crap relationships.”

  Martina had to conceded the point, except she wasn’t talking about a crap relationship—she was talking about a potentially promising one.

  “Well, anyway,” she went on, “it’s sweet, right? Kind of?”

  “Yeah,” Sofia said, “unless he’s thinking about his
taxes while he’s in bed with you.”

  “On the other hand,” Benny said thoughtfully, “if he’s thinking about his taxes, it might give him a little extra endurance, if you know what I mean.”

  “Unless he’s turned on sexually by his taxes,” Sofia added. “Which, with a guy like him, is not entirely out of the question.”

  “So, when are you going to see him again?” Benny asked.

  “I don’t know. We didn’t say.”

  She was going to have to see him again for his kitchen remodel, obviously. But she wanted to see him sooner than that, and more often. That worried her a little. She liked her independence, and in her experience, when you started to feel like you wanted to see someone soon and often, independence was the first thing to go.

  20

  Over the next week, Martina worked on the final designs for Chris’s kitchen, firmed up plans for Sofia’s wedding shower, and went out with Chris two more times.

  On the first of the two dates, they had lunch on the patio at Linn’s Easy as Pie Café. On the second, they took a walk on the boardwalk at Moonstone Beach, then had coffee at Jitters on Main Street.

  On that second date—the coffee and beach walk date—she mentioned she was going through the process of having Bianca and TJ buy her share of the cabin on Happy Hill. Bianca and TJ had said yes, and she expected to sign the paperwork in the next few days. Bianca and her husband each would have to liquidate some investments to get the money, but it looked like the thing was going to go through.

  “Why are you selling them your part of the house?” Chris had asked over lattes and scones. “Are you having money problems?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head and wiped a bit of milk foam from her upper lip. “It’s not that. It’s just … I’m looking to make an investment myself, and I needed the capital.”