by Bryn Donovan
“That doesn’t bother you at all?”
David snorted. “No.”
“Well, you just never know with wills. But you didn’t answer my other question. How come your dad left this place to you?”
“Like I told you before,” David said. “He hates me.”
“Hated.”
“Yeah.”
Even if he wanted to, David wouldn’t have been able to describe to anyone what it was like to see that place again. And ever since Andi had opened the door to that bathroom, the worst memory of all had been haunting him.
He had been seven years old, and he’d woken up in the middle of the night, needing to go to the bathroom. The last time he’d gone in there, he saw a spider, so he took the comic book from his nightstand just in case he needed to squash one.
In his pajamas with the trains on them, he walked down the hallway. He really had to go, but he couldn’t run because then his father would hear him, and he wasn’t supposed to be out of bed after nine for any reason at all. So he tiptoed. It seemed like a very long walk.
When he opened the door to the bathroom, there was a lady in the tub. It wasn’t his dad’s girlfriend. Maybe he had a new girlfriend again. He could only see her head, leaning against the back of the tub. She had fallen asleep, David thought.
The water was supposed to be clear, but it was red. It looked like she was taking a bath in cranberry juice.
He thought he should wake her up, but he was scared that she would be mad at him. Maybe she’d scream and his dad would come and he’d be in big trouble. David still clutched his rolled-up comic book as he leaned over the tub. Her eyes opened and she stared up at him, her mouth moving as though she were trying to speak. He realized she lay in bathwater gone red with her blood.
And then she was gone. The bathroom was empty. The tub was empty. Not even a spider.
The next morning, his father found out that he wet the bed, and things were very bad.
“David,” Gloria’s voice came to him. “You sure you’re all right about your dad? Maybe you need to talk to someone.”
“What? No.” He rubbed his hand across his face. “I just want to get this place off my hands. It’s a wreck, but I’m getting it fixed up.”
“If you hate it so much, why don’t you sell it as-is?”
“I’d barely get what I owe in taxes for it.”
She still looked skeptical. It made David uncomfortable.
He couldn’t explain even to himself why he felt so motivated to get the damned place into good condition again. He should sell it and be done with it. Hell, he should give it away. But no matter how many times he’d told himself that, it hadn’t made a difference. Just leaving it alone felt completely out of the question.
“I guess old habits die hard,” he told her. “I fix this place up, I can make a good profit. Even in this market.”
“Probably so,” she conceded. “Is it insured? People forget about that sometimes when they inherit.”
He nodded. “It’s covered through the end of October.”
“And when do you think you can have it ready?”
“I’m thinking before Thanksgiving. I’ll have to extend the insurance.”
David’s front door intercom sounded. They both looked up.
“Expecting someone?” Gloria asked.
“No.” He went over to the speaker box and pressed the button. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Girard, there’s a Ms. Andi Petrowski here to see you.”
What the hell? David wondered. His blood stirred with anticipation. Okay, he told himself. Unprofessional. You weren’t supposed to lust after your contractors…which was why he’d resisted the urge to go back to the mansion a dozen times today.
It wasn’t even completely lust. That was the worst part.
“Mr. Girard?” the voice on the speaker said.
“Yeah,” he said, snapping back to attention. “Send her on up.”
“So, who’s this?” Gloria asked. “A girl you’ve been dating for, what, two weeks? And you’ll be together a week more?” She knew about his brief fling with the woman from whom he’d bought the condo. As a conservative married lady, she hadn’t been too impressed.
“What? No. She’s, uh…she’s a contractor.” He added, “You know, I haven’t even told her why the house is mine.” He hadn’t explained this to Carlos, either.
Gloria looked offended. “What do you take me for? You know I’m discreet.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“I wonder what she wants,” she mused. “Hope everything’s all right.”
David felt a sudden sense of dread. What if it weren’t? “I don’t know. You know how old houses are.”
The doorbell rang. “Hey Andi,” David said as he opened the door and realized he seemed to be a little out of breath for no good reason. “Come on in. What’s up?”
She stepped in the door and her eyes landed on Gloria. David saw the crimson rush through her face, to the roots of her hair.
God, she was sweet.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”
“It’s all right,” David assured her. “Gloria, this is Andi Petrowski—she’s redoing the woodwork in the house. Andi, Gloria Baker, my real estate agent.”
Gloria had already gotten up from the sofa, and she glided over to shake Andi’s hand. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “How’s the work going so far?”
“Um, okay. Nice to meet you,” Andi added. “I just…I’m sorry. I wonder if I could talk to David alone. It’ll only take a minute.”
Hell yes, you can talk to me alone. His whole being felt charged by her presence. “Come into my office. Gloria, if you’ll just excuse us for a minute.”
Gloria raised her dark brows. “I told you I couldn’t stay long, anyway. David, I’ll be in touch.”
“Okay. Thanks, it’s good to be working with you again.”
“Likewise,” she said, walking over to the door.
“Tell Michael I said hello.”
After shutting the door, David turned to Andi.
“She seems nice,” Andi offered.
“Yeah, she’s the best,” David said. “Come on in, sit down.”
She looked around her as she followed him to the sofa. “So, this is your place.”
“Yeah.”
She gave a wry look. “Homey.”
“You hate it,” David guessed.
“It’s a little…spare.”
David supposed it did have all the charm of an executive boardroom. “Yeah, well. I haven’t gotten around to decorating or anything.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three years.”
She grinned. “You’ve got one picture, at least,” she said, walking over to the side table in the corner and bending down to look. “Who’s this?”
It was a picture of him and Scott at the top of Mount Whitney. Another hiker had taken it for them.
Great, David thought. She would think he was gay. Not that he’d be so offended by that, but in the case of Andi, it would be an unfortunate misunderstanding. “It’s my roommate from college. We climbed up that mountain. It’s a fourteener.”
“Wow.” She was probably still wondering why it was his only framed photo. It wasn’t like he’d climbed Everest. But he wasn’t going to explain.
He had done that hike right after he’d told his father once and for all to go to hell. His father threatened to cut him off financially, and David told him to go ahead. As always, his dad made good on the threat.
But the next morning, David woke up feeing buoyant, almost giddy. He and Scott did the climb, as planned, and at the summit, David felt that he’d won. He’d gotten above it all. It was the most exhilarating moment of his life.
“Cool.” Andi put the frame back down again and looked around her. “Well, I’d love it if our place was this clean.”
“I have a cleaning service.” Our place, he noted. “You live with someone?”
&nbs
p; “My sister.”
“Oh.”
Andi sat down on the couch and looked up at him. He looked away briefly. Those big blue eyes, he thought. It was a little daunting to look right into that much sincerity.
She said, “I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have come.”
He sat down himself. “What’s up?”
“First of all, you forgot your phone.” She pulled it out of the back pocket of her jeans and laid it on the gleaming glass table.
“Right. I figured I left it at the house. Thanks.” He picked it up. “But you said you wanted to talk privately.”
“Yeah.” Her face scrunched up a little. “There’s a problem with that house.”
David felt a surge of protective anger. This was just what he’d feared. If anything, well, unnatural had happened to her, he didn’t know how he would forgive himself. “Andi, what is it?”
“You’ve got rats.”
“What?”
She nodded, her brow furrowed. “In the basement. And it’s like the mother of all rat’s nests. I even saw one of them. It was almost the size of a cat.” She shuddered. “God, it was so awful.”
David came close to laughing. “That’s all?”
“It’s disgusting! It’s this huge, massive thing by the water heater. There might be, like, thirty rats down there.”
“You’re sure it’s rats?”
“I know what a rat’s nest looks like,” she said. “I just never saw one this big. Listen, I’m sorry, but you need to take care of them as soon as you can.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. This is what you wanted to tell me in private?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, she’s showing the house…if she knows something, she has to disclose it, right?”
“True. If anyone asked about it, I wouldn’t lie.”
“Right. But if it’s taken care of, I don’t think it’s something you have to talk about up front,” she said. “But you have to really take care of it.”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I know a guy.” He’d dealt with this in the first flip he’d done. “Just stay away for a week. I’ll tell you when you can come back.”
“Why should I stay away for a week?”
“That’s how long it took to get them all cleared out last time. He seals up where they can get in, and he’s got these traps that electrocute them—” he broke off. “Which you probably really don’t want to hear about. Anyway. I figure you’re not going to want to work there until it’s taken care of.”
Andi shook her head. “No, that’s all right. Obviously it’s not my favorite thing…but as long as I don’t have to go down in the basement, I can just try to forget they’re there.”
He had to admire her attitude. She wasn’t scared off easily. “You and Carlos both discovered this?”
“Carlos had already left. It was just me.” She laughed a little. “It kind of freaked me out.”
“I bet. Really, I’m sorry. It sounds horrible.” It occurred to him that he was being a crappy host. “Let me get you something to drink. Relax your nerves.”
Andi sighed. “I could use a glass of wine, actually. If you’ve got some.”
“What kind? I’ve got everything.”
“Chardonnay?”
“Sure.” He went to the kitchen, opened the built-in wine cellar and took out his best bottle of Chardonnay. It had been in there a long while. Kate, the last woman he was involved with, had informed him that she knew a lot about wine and had said, “ABC—anything but Chardonnay.” Apparently wine snobs found it unacceptable. David felt pretty sure Andi wasn’t a snob about anything.
He poured Andi a glass and set it, along with the bottle, on the table. He sat down next to her on the leather sofa then remembered that before he’d been sitting in the nearby chair. It wasn’t normal to sit right next to somebody on a sofa, not if you only had a business relationship. But it would be really stupid to get up and move.
Andi sat up a little straighter. But she didn’t put any more distance between them. In fact, she came even closer to him as she leaned forward to look at the wine. “I’ve never seen that label before.” She took a sip. “Oh. This is yummy.”
It made him almost unreasonably happy that she liked it. “Are you hungry? I can order something. Emilio’s has this pasta with lobster. It’s really good.” He liked the idea of feeding her delicious things. He wanted to keep her there longer. Her simple presence transformed the place for him.
“Thanks, but I’m a vegetarian. And I had an early dinner.” She laughed. “I always eat early, like around five, maybe six. It’s not very sophisticated, right?”
“You probably get hungry after working all day.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She took another drink of the golden wine. Her plump lower lip was wet.
“You know, I wanted to talk to you about the other day,” David said after a moment.
She looked up at him, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“About me not wanting you to work there. I wasn’t worried about you doing a good job. I just thought the house…might be a lot of trouble.”
“Well, I can handle it.” Andi said this with a little bit of a smile that seemed, to David at least, to have a lot of steel behind it. He was starting to feel that maybe she could deal with the place.
A long moment of silence hung between them. David broke it by asking, “How long have you been contracting?”
“About a year. Before that I was working at regular jobs, you know. Like, associate marketer jobs?”
“Associate marketer…what would you do?”
“Mostly set up meetings. And make PowerPoint decks for other people.”
“Really.” He tried to picture Andi in business casual wear, maybe standing over a printer in some anonymous cubicle land. “It’s hard to imagine you doing that.”
“I kind of sucked at it.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“And I hated it.”
“Well, that’s a different issue.”
She toyed with the stem of her glass. “What kind of lawyer are you?”
“I started out as a prosecutor for Cook County. Then I went to a big firm. But I have my own practice now. Personal injury, mostly.”
He braced himself for the usual comment about being an ambulance chaser. That always grated on him. His clients were usually people who’d gotten hurt as a result of someone else’s greed or stupidity. They often faced powerful people or corporations, and without a good lawyer, they didn’t have a chance at getting the retribution they deserved. They needed someone to defend them.
Andi commented, “Good for you. I guess you’re better at the career thing.”
“Everyone’s good at something.”
“Maybe. I am good at renovating. And I’m just really drawn to some houses, especially old houses, you know? I feel like maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. But I’m not even sure of that either.” She shrugged. “It must be nice to have things figured out.”
“I don’t have anything figured out,” David said.
Andi shot him a questioning look. He didn’t know how to explain any further.
“Sometimes I think about moving away. You know, fresh start,” she told him. “But my family’s here. Are you from Chicago?”
“Yeah. More or less.”
She nodded. “You have family close by?”
He wished the questions weren’t going this way. “My mom died. When I was born.”
“Oh…I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well. I didn’t know her.”
“And you never see your dad?”
“He’s dead.”
She winced. “Geez, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I should shut up.”
“You can say whatever you want.”
She swirled the last bit of wine in her glass. “You know, I’m kind of surprised you bought that place. It seems like you hate it…and I read this article that mentioned your o
ther investments, and it didn’t sound like your kind of flip.”
David stiffened. “What article?”
A dimple showed at one corner of her mouth. “I believe it was an article called, ‘Chicago Bachelor of the Year’?”
Shit. “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even know about it until somebody told me.” What must she think of him, if she’d read that?
She laughed. “It must have been kind of flattering.”
“It was humiliating.”
“It certainly made it sound as though you have a lot of…dates.”
He wondered what she had almost said before substituting the word “dates.” He snorted. “Yeah. It made it sound like I have two or three a day.”
“Not quite as much as that, then?”
“Not quite.”
“So you’re, like, always going to be single?”
He didn’t especially love this subject either. “I don’t know. What about you?”
She laughed. “I shouldn’t have asked you that. I should know better. My mom asks about every time I see her.” She shook her head. “It’s really bad now that my younger sister’s getting married.”
David could imagine what that might be like. “What do you tell her?” He had drawn even closer to her on the sofa. He could tell she noticed, though she pretended not to.
“What do single women always say?” Andi answered. “I tell her I haven’t found the right man.” She pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“You think you’ll know the right man when you meet him?”
She looked like a woman with a secret. “Yeah. I think I will.”
He leaned over and kissed her.
* * *
Andi was shocked.
She had imagined it a dozen times already. His arms around her, his amazing mouth on hers. But she hadn’t expected it to actually happen. Her imagination had always been more vivid than she wanted it to be, but in this case it hadn’t been nearly as good as the reality.
Currents of pleasure vibrated through her, as though her whole body were lighting up from inside. The slight roughness of his day’s growth of beard made her lips tingle. He smelled like nighttime and soap. He tasted fantastic. Images swirled through her mind: the glittering skyline, stars, his bare body joined with hers…
She reached around him, her hands exploring the warmth of that body, solid and strong. Her mouth opened under his. He was passionate, demanding, seeming to want as much from her, as much of her, as it was possible to get. Instinctively her back arched, pressing her breasts closer against him.
