by Bryn Donovan
Not that she was exactly a classic beauty. Her features were a little too quirky, her curves a little too curvy for that. But she was seriously cute. And smart.
When he’d told her that she wasn’t right for the job, he’d seen a hot glint of hurt and anger in her eyes—blue eyes, with a halo of gold around the pupil.
Clearly she thought he was a sexist asshole.
It wasn’t true. He had expected her to be a man, sure, but in a normal house, he wouldn’t have hesitated to hire her. The truth was that she just looked too nice to be anywhere near the house. This was no place for nice women.
And did she somehow understand this? When he’d called the place a hellhole, why did she say, I knew it?
“When was the house built?” she asked as he led her into the dining room.
“Eighteen eighty-three.”
She nodded. “Did you ever live here?”
A natural question, but it stung, like a splinter driving under a fingernail. “In the shape it’s in? It’s been vacant for a long time.” It wasn’t an outright lie.
She would think the old house was an investment property. Only an idiot would purchase this place, in this economy, hoping to make a quick buck. David hadn’t bought any property for years: he’d gotten out of that well before the housing market chilled. He hated to have her think he was the stupidest investor on the planet.
Who cared what she thought? It was better than telling her the truth.
She looked up as they both heard pounding from the other room.
“It’s the guy working on one of the fireplaces,” he told her.
Andi nodded, looking around at the dining room that could hold maybe forty guests with a big enough table. “Has all the woodwork been painted over?”
“All through the house. Now, the front hall, this room and the other parlor—”
“There are two parlors?”
“Yeah. It’s a thirty-room house.”
“Wow,” Andi said, her eyes widening. “What a place.”
Oh, yeah. It’s fantastic. “These three rooms have a lot of woodwork, and they’re some of the first ones the buyer will see, so that’s all I want to get refinished. Oh, and the staircase railing, that’s going to be a bitch—sorry.”
Her full lips curved in an impish smile. “You’re not going to offend my virgin ears.” She reached out to touch one of the columns that stood on either side of the doors to the dining room. She had short, square nails with a ragged cuticle on the ringless ring finger.
She was nothing like the women he dated, when he did date at all. They had perfectly manicured nails. They had perfectly styled hair instead of a messy ponytail. And they appeared perfectly happy to have a no-strings-attached fling. David always made sure up front that this was the deal.
Something about Andi—the sincerity in those blue eyes, maybe, or the way she stood up for herself and demanded respect—told him she’d never be into a deal like that.
She said, “So, first thing, I’ll use a heat gun and a scraper to get the paint off.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to use a chemical stripper?”
“The fumes are dangerous. I’ll only use it for the really carved parts.” She wandered over to the center of the room, looking up at the chandelier hanging from its cracked plaster medallion. Even under its coat of dust, it was an impressive piece, with six tulip-shaped lamps of frosted glass and myriad ropes of crystal. “This gasolier is pretty. Is it original?”
“I heard it was added a little later.”
Her back was to him. Stretching up on her tiptoes, she tried to touch one of the garlands of crystal, but she couldn’t quite reach. She seemed to want to touch everything.
He couldn’t help but notice the way she looked in her faded blue jeans, rounded and satisfying. She was the kind of woman you wanted to take onto your lap…and go from there.
Why was he even thinking about that? She was there to do the woodwork, not do him. Her talk about the sex ads had put ideas in his head. No doubt she’d be deeply annoyed if she knew he was staring at her ass.
Andi turned around to him. “Too bad about this over here.” She pointed to the large cracks in the corner where the ceiling met the wall, not at an exact right angle. One chunk of the plaster molding was missing.
“Yeah. I’m going to get a guy to repair the wall and molding.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “You may need a new joist.”
That was so typical of contractors. They always exaggerated the problems at hand. “Let’s take a look at the bigger parlor,” he said.
The pounding grew louder as they went in. The guy he’d hired, Carlos, was chiseling out charred, crumbling bricks from a hole that had once been a fireplace.
He stopped pounding, straightened up and turned around. He was older than David, a big man, mostly bald, with steel-rimmed glasses. “Hello,” he said to David, then looked at Andi with some curiosity.
“Hey Carlos,” David said. “How’s it going?”
He shrugged. “Fine. This thing is so damaged, I just pulled out some of the bricks by hand.”
“Andi, this is Carlos Ruiz. He did two other flips with me. Carlos, this is Andi Petrowski. She’s going to be refinishing the woodwork.”
She gave a small, triumphant smile.
“Right. Nice to meet you,” the older gentleman said. “I don’t meet too many lady contractors. How’d you get into it?”
David was glad the man asked. He wanted to know himself.
“My folks always did remodeling. They would buy a house and fix it all up themselves and sell it.”
“No kidding,” Carlos said. “Here in Chicago?”
“Yeah. Avondale, mostly.”
“Sure.” Carlos nodded. David was also familiar with the neighborhood, mostly Polish but with a strong Latino presence as well.
“They started out pretty broke,” Andi told him. “But they bought their first little run-down house and my dad learned how to do all kinds of stuff…wiring, plumbing, everything. And my mom, too.”
“And you.”
“Mm-hmm. I worked with my dad during the summers, too. He worked for a small business that did kitchen remodels.” Pride tinged her voice. It must be nice to feel that way about your family.
“That’s great,” Carlos said. “I worked with my dad when I was a teenager, on a road construction crew. My wife says I’m a little deaf ’cause I used a jackhammer so much back then.”
“You wouldn’t just be ignoring her sometimes, would you?” Andi teased.
“Not that I would admit,” he replied, eyes twinkling behind his glasses.
They were certainly hitting it off. Of course, it didn’t matter that much. Andi wouldn’t be on the job site that long.
“How long do you think it’ll take to get those three rooms and the stairs done?” he asked her.
“I can start tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe three weeks, total? If I can work a few evenings, too. I’m in Rogers Park, not too far from here.”
“You don’t want to come here at night,” Carlos said.
David couldn’t help but agree. “Yeah, the woodwork doesn’t even need to be that fast. It’s going to take at least six weeks to get all the work on the house completed, even if everything goes right.”
“Which it won’t,” Carlos added.
Andi smiled. “You’ve always got to expect the unexpected.”
“Exactly,” David said. “You don’t need to kill yourself.”
Kill yourself. There was that pain again, sharper now, the big splinter going all the way in.
Jesus. This place was going to make him crazy if he wasn’t careful.
Just like it always had.
It’s just a house.
He showed her the unremarkable kitchen, last finished in the ’80s, in need of another update. “I could give you the whole tour, but you probably want to get going,” he told her.
“No, I want to see the rest!” she insisted. “I mean, if you have time.”
He was sure now that she had no idea how bad the house really was. She was sweet, wholesome. She wasn’t the type who had a dark night of the soul. More the type who stayed up late to bake cookies.
“I’ve got a little time.” He led her up to the bedrooms on the second floor, one with ornate floral wallpaper, another painted a vibrant lavender. “People were out of their minds,” David quipped, and Andi’s giggle rewarded him.
On the third floor he tried to evade the corner bathroom, but Andi paused in front of it. The door stood ajar, and she nudged it open.
David himself hadn’t looked in there in more than twenty years.
“Wow,” she said. “This place hasn’t been touched in a while.”
He made himself look in.
The black and white checkerboard tiles on the floor and the turquoise tiles on the walls had probably been the height of chic when they had first been installed. Now, several wall tiles were missing and stains appeared around the tub and the pedestal sink. Rust stains—he assured himself of that fact.
“This bathroom’s going to be as-is,” he said.
She was quiet for just a moment. “Why?”
“There are five other bathrooms on the first and second floors. By the time the buyer gets up here, they’ll have already made up their mind.”
Andi tilted her head. “Not necessarily—”
“Someone might even want to rip it all out and make it into a closet. There aren’t a lot of closets.”
He tried to walk on, but Andi didn’t budge. “This could be so cute if it was redone.” She looked at him closely, as though gauging his reaction. “I’m good with tile work. Why don’t you let me take care of it?”
“No!” he growled at her.
She flinched.
He said more quietly, “I don’t want you anywhere near this bathroom. Is that clear?”
“Okay.” Andi looked as though she had just now realized that she was dealing with a psycho.
Good. It was better for her to think that.
Chapter Two
“And then he said, ‘I don’t want you anywhere near this bathroom,’” Andi told her sister Lissa. “Isn’t that weird?”
They sat on the couch in their apartment, polishing off some pita and hummus from the Lebanese deli around the corner. The last rays of the sun turned the yellow walls almost orange, making it even cozier.
Andi left out the part of the story where the bathroom, even more than the rest of the house, gave her a momentary feeling of panic. She wanted to forget about that. It was better just to think that all the strangeness lay with David.
“It all sounds weird,” Lissa said. Two years younger than Andi, Lissa looked quite a bit like her: a little taller and thinner, with their father’s longer nose instead of the snub one Andi had inherited from their mother. They both had the same blond-brown hair and blue eyes, though only Andi had a smattering of freckles.
Lissa licked her finger. “So first he doesn’t want to hire you ’cause you’re a woman. Then he yells at you ’cause you want to tile the bathroom?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know. Maybe he’s all right underneath.” Andi dragged a piece of pita against the side of the bowl of hummus. “Anyway, I think he’s kind of rich. He wrote me a check for half the job up front, when I only asked for a third.”
“Nice.”
As a teacher, Lissa didn’t make a ton of money, but it was steady, while Andi’s income was more uncertain. In the past, Andi had worked office jobs, but she’d left the first one and started doing contract work after being laid off from the second company.
Despite her degree in marketing, Andi thought she just wasn’t that good at the typical cubicle gig. She had felt like a clumsy misfit, as though she perpetually had dirt under her fingernails.
As a contractor, she usually did have dirt under her nails at work, and it was fine. Remodeling just suited her better.
“He’s really handsome,” Andi said suddenly.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m talking ridiculously handsome. I’ve hardly ever seen anyone like him.”
“Hmm. I think someone has a crush.” Lissa didn’t sound too encouraging. Her younger sister, happily engaged, probably thought Andi was wasting her time by lusting after a hot, rich guy. “Is he single?”
Andi drew her knees up on the sofa and wrapped her arms around them. “He doesn’t have a ring.”
“I thought you didn’t trust guys who were too good-looking.”
“I don’t,” Andi admitted.
Her last boyfriend had been very attractive, and a real charmer. At first, everyone had thought Andi was lucky to land him. But after over a year of dating, he’d skirted even the most tentative attempts on Andi’s part to discuss the future. It turned out that Andi hadn’t been the only woman charmed by him. Andi’s dad had never liked the guy.
“I don’t know if I trust rich people, either,” Andi said.
“I know. They’re usually spoiled. They’ve had everything handed to them.” Lissa’s fiancé was also a teacher. They would never be rich, but Andi was pretty sure they would always be happy.
“You know what’s funny,” Andi told her. “Right after I met him, I was walking ahead of him to look at something…and I swear he was totally staring at my ass.”
Lissa laughed. “Really? Well, you’ve got a cute ass.”
“I’ve got a huge ass.”
“Oh, please. I’m sure he was staring at your ass. The horndog.”
They both laughed, but Andi felt unsatisfied. She couldn’t tell Lissa that she felt like she and this guy, for all his odd behavior, had some sort of connection.
“What’s his name again?” Lissa asked.
“David Girard.”
Lissa frowned. “David Girard.”
Andi shrugged. “It’s a nice name.”
“I think I’ve heard it before.” Lissa grabbed her laptop off of the coffee table. “How do you spell it?”
Andi told her, and Lissa typed. In a moment she cried, “Yes! I knew it!” She turned the laptop toward her sister. “He was the Bachelor of the Year a few years ago. When I was at the magazine.” Lissa had done an internship at a gossipy, second-rate metro magazine before she got her teaching certificate.
“What? You’re kidding.”
“No, really. Take a look.” Lissa shook her head, scrolling down the article. “Huh. Andi, he’s not just sort of rich. He’s loaded. His family’s had money since the beginning of time.”
Andi gazed at the picture of David in an elegant suit, stepping out the door of some restaurant. A willowy blonde clung to his arm; the caption identified her as “just a friend.”
Under another picture of David, the caption read, So hot, it ought to be against the law. It talked about how he’d gone into practice for himself, taking on big personal injury cases. There was a discussion of his extremely profitable real estate deals, and the article asked, But will he ever settle down and play house with anyone else? It doesn’t seem likely. Girard is rarely seen with the same companion for long.
Andi found the whole thing incredibly depressing. “This isn’t your story, is it?” she asked Lissa.
“No.”
“Good. ’Cause it’s really cheesy.”
Her sister took the laptop back from her and took another good look at David Girard. “I don’t know, Andi. He might just be a douche who likes to screw around.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Andi felt like a fool for getting a crush on the guy. He was the kind of guy all women got crushes on: a rich, shallow player. She decided not to think about him anymore.
* * *
David couldn’t stop thinking about her.
It was past 3 a.m. That was pretty late, even for him.
He tried to pay attention to the file for his latest case. A young woman had been killed when a semi charged through a green light and smashed into her car.
The driver had been asleep. David had evidence that the trucking company pressured their employ
ees into doing illegal marathon shifts, saying they would lose their jobs otherwise. The management was as much to blame as the driver. David was pretty sure they’d settle.
But his thoughts kept spiraling back to Andi. When he had met her, he’d felt that she was in danger just being in the house…that something would come out of nowhere to harm her.
And now she thought he was a jerk who didn’t like to hire women and who snapped at people for no reason.
It wasn’t right to leave things that way. A contractor ought to be able to trust the client. He picked up the cell phone on the desk. He’d set up a ringtone for when she called, if she ever did. It was the first time he’d ever done so. For everyone else, he still had the default ringtone.
Then David remembered this was not exactly a normal time to be calling people. The momentary lapse in thinking made him realize that his motives were not strictly professional. David set the phone down gain.
She was not his type. His type was that woman he bought his condo from some years back, who’d been interested in a fling before moving back to L.A. A good time, no attachments. More recently, there’d been the woman he met at his real estate agent’s party who wanted to date someone to make her ex-boyfriend jealous. She was gorgeous.
But at the moment he couldn’t picture her. He kept thinking about Andi’s faint freckles, the strand of sandy-blond hair escaping her ponytail to graze the curve of her cheek.
She was adorable, but that was only the beginning of it. There was something about her. She was serious when it came to the job—a woman couldn’t be in that business without being serious about it—but she was also funny and sweet.
And he couldn’t shake the idea that she somehow knew about the house.
It drew him to her, because nobody knew about it. Not all of it, anyway, and he wouldn’t have even tried to explain it to anyone. He had this illogical feeling that maybe she was the one person who could understand him.
No. She probably just thought he was crazy.
And given the way he was obsessing about her, maybe she was right.
* * *
Andi got to the mansion at just a little after eight the next morning. It felt good to get an early start. She got out of her truck, grabbed her latte in one hand and her toolbox in the other and closed the door with her hip.
