by Sarah Title
“Hello?” the woman asked.
Jake grunted in response.
“Hi, this is Grace Williams. Um, your sister sold me that house?”
Right. The professor who lived in that money pit. He thought he was off the hook with that obligation. If she needed him to hang her cat pictures, he was going to be pissed.
“Yeah, hi. What’s up?” he said in the most uninterested way possible.
“Sorry, did I wake you?”
Years of maintaining relationships with difficult clients had taught Jake to politely deny when he was being inconvenienced, no matter how big a lie it was.
“Yeah,” he replied. He wanted her to know that she was inconvenient.
“Oh. Sorry. Like I said.”
“What do you want, Professor?”
“Um. You know what? Never mind. I’m fine.”
He heard her hesitation, and he knew she wasn’t fine.
“What do you need, Grace?” It did not, in fact, kill him to be a little bit nice.
“I told you, I’m—”
“I promised my sister I’d help you out, and if she finds out you need help and I wasn’t there for you, I’ll have to pay big time. So do me a favor and tell me what’s wrong.”
He heard her dramatic sigh loud and clear.
“What do you know about plumbing?”
Jake thought briefly about all of the bathrooms he’d upgraded or built from scratch, but he didn’t like the way that Grace asked. It sounded as if she assumed he didn’t know anything.
“Enough,” he told her.
“Okay. Mary Beth said you were handy, but I didn’t know if that would apply to plumbing.”
Mary Beth had said he was handy? That’s the last time he fixes her garbage disposal.
“Or do you know a plumber I can call? Someone with a good reputation who won’t charge me too much.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s my sink,” she said.
He waited for her to give him a little more information.
She didn’t.
“What’s wrong with your sink?”
“It sort of exploded all over my kitchen floor.”
Great. Of course that house would have leaky pipes.
He heaved himself off the couch and gave his own dramatic sigh. “Do you know how to turn the water off?”
“I’m not an idiot, Jake.”
Whoa. Sassy. “I didn’t say you were.”
“No, but your tone implied it. Mary Beth showed me the water shut-off and the breakers before I bought the house. So I do know enough not to kill myself, thanks. But I’d really like someone to come take a look at this so I can go to the bathroom sometime before the end of the week.”
Well, this should be fun, he thought, sliding his feet into his shoes. “I’ll be over in a minute. Just let me stop at home and get some tools.”
“Oh, you’re not at home?”
He thought she sounded surprised, which offended him. He was a single, red-blooded man. Why should he sleep at home every night? Then he thought there was some judgment in her surprise, which offended him even more. He was going over there to fix her plumbing for free and now she was judging him?
He also blamed her for causing his intense overreaction. Normal women didn’t push his buttons the way the professor did.
Jake put his hand over his phone, just enough so the sound was muffled, but she could still hear. “I’ll call you later,” he said in the loudest whisper he could muster.
“Okay, Professor, see you in a minute,” he said into the phone.
She didn’t say anything. Well, she might have, but Jake hung up before he could hear it.
“Who are you talking to?”
Jake looked up to see Missy, in one of Kyle’s oversized T-shirts, coming down the stairs. When had Missy gotten here?
“I gotta go fix a sink,” he told her, trying not to notice that the shirt was the only thing she was wearing.
“Oh, for that new girl?”
Jake stared. At her face. Only at her face.
“Mary Beth told me. She said she was nice. Really funny.”
“That’s not my impression of her.”
“Yeah, MB told me she was kind of a b when she first moved in.”
“Kind of?”
“Please, Jake, like you’re never a jerk when you’re cranky.”
Jake just grunted. He wasn’t cranky, dammit.
“Okay, well, have fun. I’m going to make pancakes if you want to come back when you’re done.”
Missy made the best pancakes. If it wasn’t for the professor, he could hang out, not look at Missy’s legs, and enjoy pancakes. There would probably be bacon and everything.
“Of course, Kyle will probably eat them all. And I’m trying not to fight with him, so I don’t want to make him save any for you. So I guess there’s no point in your coming back.”
“Thanks, Miss. You know how to make a guy feel wanted.”
“Hey, you know who wants you? That cute professor with the broke-down house. Go on. Go on and be her knight in shining armor.”
Jake snorted.
“You know you love it. ’Bye, Jake,” she said, shoving him out the door.
This professor better really need him.
Chapter 5
Grace saw Jake sitting on her porch swing as she pedaled up to the house. His hair was shoved under a baseball cap and his face looked as scruffy and disheveled as the rest of him. He did not look happy.
But he still looked handsome.
“Sorry,” she said, jumping off her bike and hauling it up to the porch. “I had to pee.”
Now he looked unhappy and confused.
“No water,” she reminded him. “So I rode to the Daily Drip, which is a terrible name for a coffee shop, by the way.”
He didn’t laugh. “Let’s look at this so-called plumbing problem.”
She unlocked the front door and led him into the kitchen. “It’s not a so-called problem. When I turn on the tap, the water comes out everywhere but the tap.”
“Did you turn the water back on?”
“No. Because of the ‘water comes out everywhere but the tap’ problem.”
“Let me turn it on and then we’ll see what’s really going on.”
He was talking like he didn’t believe she really had a plumbing situation. But she could not imagine why he thought she would call his grumpy butt, not to mention bike into town to use the bathroom, if she didn’t really have a problem. She started to lead him to the water main in the basement, but he held a hand up to stop her.
“I know where it is. I’m the one who showed Mary Beth,” he said as he stomped down the stairs.
“Okay, Smarty,” she said under her breath to his retreating back. She pretended she didn’t see his shoulders shake in a laugh. She also pretended not to notice how nicely those scruffy jeans fit.
In no time at all, Jake was back and sliding under the kitchen sink while Grace propped the swinging door open with her hip, ready to make a run for it.
She told herself she was standing in the doorway so she could revel in her victory when he discovered she was right about the plumbing. She told herself she was not standing in the doorway because of the way his long legs stretched out across her kitchen floor, or the way his shirt rode up a little, revealing a taught, tanned stomach. Or the way the muscles in his legs played against his jeans when he moved.
It was just so she could prove herself right.
Although she should probably not drool.
“Okay, turn the faucet on,” he called from under the sink.
“Are you sure?” Grace asked. “Because last time . . .”
Jake edged out from under the sink and gave her a look she was becoming familiar with: the Why-do-you-think-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing? look. She should give him the benefit of the doubt, even though all her recent experience with the kitchen sink told her that what he was asking her to do was also asking for disaster.
Fine, she told herself. If he fancies himself the expert, I’ll follow his instructions. The worst that can happen is that he’ll be right and I’ll get my sink fixed. So she scurried over to the sink (all the while reminding herself never to scurry again), and pulled the faucet handle up.
And jumped back as water shot out of the pipes under the sink.
Right onto Jake.
And his shirt.
Which was now sticking to his chest.
She was so distracted by the wet shirt and the chest that she didn’t hear Jake yelling at her to turn the water off, but she did register him scrambling to his feet and lunging over the sink. She also registered him whirling on her, his eyes on fire, his shirt dripping. She tried not to swoon.
Because she hated this guy. And he had just proved her right, that she needed a professional to do this job, not some guy who was trying to prove how manly he was by throwing his tools around. She was right. Therefore, he did not deserve the swoon.
Although, standing in front of her, dripping and seething, he looked pretty damn manly.
Jake continued to stare, and she continued to will her knees not to buckle. Then he reached down and tore his shirt over his head and she was pretty sure she was going to die.
I hate this guy, she reminded herself as she counted . . . yup, that’s a six-pack.
She peeled her eyes away from those abs and, holy crap, that chest, to meet Jake’s eyes. They were still dark, and he still looked peeved. She’d never appreciated how expressive brown eyes could be, but these were really quite fine. She would hate to have to rethink . . .
“Can I have a towel?” he growled.
She shook off the fine eyes and scurried (no more scurrying, she reminded herself) toward the linen closet. He was arrogant and rude and he had seriously just growled at her. No amount of physical beauty could overcome that personality. She ventured one glance behind her. Well, probably not.
Jake caught the towel Grace tossed at him. He noticed that she was no longer meeting his eyes. Good, he thought. He knew he was being childish, but he was glad that she was embarrassed. He was embarrassed, dammit. That was a rookie mistake, blasting the water through the pipes to see where the leak was. Still, he had just turned the water on. It shouldn’t have had time to build up that much pressure. He shouldn’t be standing in Grace’s kitchen, sopping wet and pissed off.
He’d been fixing up houses since he was in high school. Heck, before that, even. His earliest memories involved following his dad around their old farmhouse, handing him tools whether he needed them or not.
That was before his dad screwed everything up and moved into the apartment above his mechanic shop. It didn’t matter that his mom was deliriously happy with Will, or that it really was all his dad’s fault. Or that Jake was now living in an apartment above Mary Beth and Todd’s garage. There was no parallel; that was Jake’s choice. Jake knew the housing market hadn’t recovered enough for him to start flipping houses again, so he didn’t. There was no sense in losing money on a mortgage for a house he couldn’t sell, not when he could live off his plentiful savings and pick up odd jobs now and then just to stay out of trouble.
He’d flipped his first house the summer after he graduated from high school. He’d used the money he got for graduation and a loan from his dad to buy one of the falling-down houses right off Main Street. Then he fixed it up, Mary Beth sold it, and Jake was able to pay his dad back with enough left over to put a big down payment on his next flip. Sometimes he took his business further out of town—the closer he got to the big cities, the more lucrative the sale. He did most of the work himself, or he got Kyle and some other buddies involved. He was banking on his good reputation to keep him going while the market recovered. His reputation was everything, and he made sure he earned it. He never did shoddy work, and he had the clientele and the experience to back that claim up.
Which was why he was so pissed off at being sopping wet in Grace’s kitchen. He had made a fool of himself. This damn sink should have been an easy fix. But Grace had been standing there, watching him work, and that made him just want to get out of the house as quickly as possible.
He couldn’t leave a job half-done. And this job wasn’t even close to half-done. He picked up his shirt and wrung it out in the sink. Then he tossed it on the counter and got himself back under the sink.
“Can you hand me the pipe wrench?” he asked, sitting up just enough to see whether Grace was still in the room. Of course she was. She was probably going to make sure he didn’t break anything else with his cloddish workingman’s hands.
“This claw-looking one?” She held up the pipe wrench, which looked nothing like a claw.
He rolled his eyes and held out his hand for it. Maybe it was a little claw-like, but he refused to be charmed.
After some tightening and re-tightening, he asked Grace to run the water again, slowly. He braced himself to jump out from under the sink, even though he didn’t see how, at this point, getting wetter would make a difference. But it didn’t matter. There was no leak.
Jake wasn’t really sure what had been broken, but it looked like he’d fixed it.
He heard Grace kneel down next to him. “Is it leaking?”
He scooted over so she could see for herself. She hesitated—surely he didn’t smell bad after that impromptu shower—but then her head joined his under the sink. The water was running into the drain above them, and through the pipes so smoothly it was like music. Grace was close enough that some of the hair that had come loose from her ponytail tickled his chin. Close enough that he could see that her hair wasn’t just brown, but had hints of red in it, too. Close enough that he could tell she smelled like citrus.
Jake was having a moment with the professor.
“It’s staying in the pipes!”
And the moment was gone.
Her lack of faith in him was really getting on his nerves.
“That’s what pipes are for,” he said, disentangling himself from her citrus-smelling hair and sitting up.
“Well, it wasn’t doing that before. What did you do?”
He shrugged. “No big deal. You just have to know what you’re looking for.”
“Can you show me? That way I can fix it if it happens again.”
He appreciated her initiative, and he would’ve liked to make her more independent—that way she wouldn’t have to call him again. But he really had no idea what he’d done. He’d just tightened a joint that wasn’t loose to begin with, and it was fixed.
And he’d taken his shirt off. He’d taken his shirt off and tightened something.
Well, it could be interesting to show Grace his new method of home repair. She was wearing another one of those horrible cat sweatshirts again, this one featuring an orange cat with rhinestone earrings. It was truly appalling. It was, Jake thought, a shirt made for tearing off.
“Like I said, you have to know what you’re looking for. It shouldn’t happen again.” He hoped.
She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Well, thanks. I really appreciate it. Can I pay you something? I know Mary Beth said—”
“You don’t have to pay me. Mary Beth is making me do you a favor.”
“I know, but that doesn’t seem right.”
“Well, I gave her my word, so it’s as right as it’s going to get.”
“But still, if you need the money—”
Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa. She thought he needed her money? That he was some charity case? That she was doing him a favor by being incapable of finding a plumber on her own?
“Forget it, Professor. On the house.” He stalked toward the door, then turned back to grab his shirt off the counter. It was still soaking, but he wrestled himself into it anyway. It clung to his armpits and his shoulder blades, but, dammit, he was working on a dramatic exit.
She started to say something, but he didn’t want to hear it. Shirt half-on and all wet, he stalked out the front door, got in his truck, and prepared to drive away from Grace and her arrog
ance forever. As he pulled out of the driveway, he caught a glimpse of her in the doorway, her arms crossed over her cat sweatshirt. She caught him looking, and she slammed the door.
Good, he thought. Good riddance.
Chapter 6
Grace signed for the package and as soon as the UPS man’s back was turned, she did a little happy dance. Of course, trying to carry it upstairs was another story. Was it packed with stones?
She had seen the Regency reproduction wallpaper online, and she simply had to have it for her office. The aesthetic of the rest of the house was basically transported from her condo—modern and comfortable—but she was going crazy on the walls. The homeowner’s association at her old condo had rules about painting only neutral colors—pretty lame considering she owned the unit, but she had complied. This house was her first chance to paint with actual colors.
The logistics of getting gallons of paint home from Harry’s Hardware on her bicycle were easily managed by the friendliness of the eponymous Harry, who sent his nephew Dylan (and Dylan’s car) over with her order. She had barely opened the first can of paint before she realized the handle of the roller she bought was way too short to reach the tops of the tall walls. So she biked back, and rode home one-handed with a four-foot retractable pole tucked under her arm. Fortunately, the drivers of Willow Springs were pretty bike-friendly and gave her a wide berth, or stopped to offer her a ride. Well, all of them except for Jake, whom she ran into at an intersection. He didn’t offer her a ride, which was fine because she wouldn’t have accepted anyway.
Her back was still killing her from her marathon painting week, but a nightly soak in her gigantic claw-foot tub gave her plenty of time to fantasize about living in a house without cardboard boxes everywhere. And the wallpaper was the last step of her aesthetic stamp before she started unpacking in earnest. This wallpaper was the icing on the cake.
Grace wanted her office to look like what she imagined Jane Austen’s writing room would. Regency reproduction furniture was a little out of her budget, though. So she settled for a garage sale chaise longue, the deceptively sturdy writing desk she’d used as a child, and lots and lots of bookcases. The Regency touch would be the wallpaper. The more she looked at Regency patterns, though, the more she thought they were probably a little much for her modern sensibility (and her budget—even on sale, that wallpaper was expensive), so she settled on one accent wall.
