What the Heart Wants

by Cynthia Reese

  And her bank account lost. The little nest egg she’d saved over the years was down to a pittance, and the outside of the house hadn’t yet been touched. Well, that wasn’t strictly true—she’d caught Jerry scraping down one of the cast-iron porch posts, but she’d put a stop to that pretty quickly.

  And Kyle? He’d made himself scarce after that set-to they’d had the other morning. She’d caught Jerry and him putting their heads together a few times this week, but Kyle always had some excuse to rush out the door as soon as he saw her.

  Was it that he knew he should help her with that variance, but was too chicken to recommend it to his committee? Or...

  Did he just decide he didn’t much care for her?

  Maybe he never had. Maybe the only fascination Allison held was the key to Belle Paix’s front door.

  Now really, what should she have expected? It wasn’t as if she had time for any sort of relationship. She was here for her grandmother. What’s more, Kyle, with his exasperating ideas of “doing right by Belle Paix,” drove her nuts. Pragmatism was the thing. Good old-fashioned horse sense.

  And Kyle needed it by the boatload.

  Cleo hissed and erupted from her perch high on a ladder in the corner of the room.

  Allison stared up to see the feline stretching out in a graceful downward cat yoga position. At least Cleo didn’t seem to mind Jerry. It was almost as if the blasted cat knew they were closer than ever to getting her Person home—at least for a visit.

  “That’s right, Cleo. We both need a break.” Allison reached over and tore off a strip of plastic wrap to protect the paintbrush, then laid it aside. “I’m taking a walk, and I don’t care if I am covered in paint. This room has waited twenty years for a new paint job. It can wait another twenty minutes.”

  Downstairs, she found Jerry muttering over the installation of new subway tiles behind the kitchen counters, the old ones having been damaged as he’d made holes to access the wiring. It was 7:30 at night, but he showed no sign of heading home.

  “Jerry...your crew has left you. Don’t you think you ought to call it a day?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’m okay. Besides, this here? This is on the house. I can’t leave the old girl like this, with her tile half done. I get this in for you tonight and you can grout it first thing in the morning. Save you some bucks if you do it yourself.”

  Allison didn’t know where his sudden economies had come from in the past few days, but he’d begun to suggest little things she could do to help speed his crew along. She’d learned a lot—like how backbreaking and tedious grouting bathroom walls could be. Her right hand and fingers had ached so much afterward that she’d been reduced to a leftie for a day and a half—not a good thing when you were pulling a busy weekend shift in the ER. Now it looked as if the kitchen walls would be hers, too.

  Oh, well. She appreciated every nickel he saved her, even if she secretly suspected he hoped she’d spend it on some other project to “tickle the old girl’s toes.”

  “Er, okay. I need some air. I’m going to stretch my legs for a few minutes. I’m about halfway through with the baseboard in Gran’s room.”

  “That plaster finally matched up, hey?” But his grin was short-lived as he went back to the current irritation at hand. “Jumpin’ Jeh—”

  She left before he could tell her what her latest only option was.

  Outside, the air was warm and muggy, even this late in the evening. Despite that fact, she walked briskly, heading away from downtown to the newer part of the historic section.

  Most of these houses were smaller than those on the main drag, and newer by a few decades. They’d been built probably in the thirties or forties, around a park, with neatly groomed yards and picket fences.

  Allison could imagine wives in dresses with nipped-in waists and flared skirts setting out pies to cool on the wide kitchen window ledges, men in crew cuts wielding push mowers to keep the lawns lush and manicured, girls in dresses and penny loafers running away from brothers chasing them with frogs or spiders.

  Some of the houses were like Gran’s, just a touch sad and neglected. But most were breathtakingly restored to perfection. They sat back on their perfect lawns and practically glowed in the twilight, set off by the lightning bugs.

  Allison saw one house that just took her breath away—a smart white two-story, with blue shutters. A pair of window boxes on the upstairs windows and another perched over the front door spilled sunny yellow marigolds, orange nasturtiums and dark purple petunias. She marveled at the green thumb the home owner must have, for the rest of the yard was just as beautiful.

  The house was one of those with a white picket fence, complete with still more petunias running rampant alongside it. Out front, by the door and its peaked gothic dormer, a wooden bench seemed to invite guests to walk up the brick path and have a seat.

  And if it was too hot to enjoy the bench, a person could most likely sneak under the covered porch and have a snooze on the enameled glider. Really, Allison could have believed she’d been swept back in time to the 1930s.

  The flawless restoration made her envious and restless at the same time. This was what Kyle had been talking about when he’d gone on and on about historical accuracy. Now that she had seen the real thing, the house next to it, despite its neat exterior, didn’t hold a candle to it.

  Those folks sank a fortune into that house, she thought, trying to ward off a wave of despair. If she got her variance, Belle Paix would always be missing that little something extra—something that an accurate paint job would do for it.

  Oh, for a cool twenty grand to be able to have Belle Paix painted the way it should be. If it weren’t such a huge old white elephant, it would cost only about half that. But that’s what she kept hearing from every contractor—if a painter even bothered to bid on the job.

  Could she paint it herself? No. She’d considered that notion already and had to dismiss it. The project was definitely one for the pros.

  Sighing, Allison started walking again, past the house, to circle the rest of the park. From one of the houses drifted the delicious smell of someone’s supper on the grill, and her rumbling stomach reminded her that she’d taken time to grab only a piece of cheese and bread for her lunch.

  “Hey! Allison!”

  When she heard her name, she stopped, turned around. Yes, it was Kyle. He stood on the covered porch, his hand cupped around his mouth as an impromptu megaphone. She blinked. With his dark pants, crisp white shirt and cropped hair, he fit perfectly with the rest of the house’s ambience.

  She took a few hesitant steps back toward it. Kyle loped down to the gate and threw it open. “I saw you through the patio doors. Did you need to see me?”

  “Uh, no, I was just taking a walk. To stretch my legs. So...this is your house?” she asked.

  Of course it was. She should have known from its immaculate exterior that it was Kyle’s.

  “Yeah.” He turned and regarded the house with evident pride. “A 1926 Sears kit house...kind of rare, actually. The model was Glen Falls.”

  “It’s gorgeous. I love your window boxes.”

  “I cheated.” He winked. “A local nursery guy helped me with them—he picked out all the flowers that would do well. I’m not much of a gardener, I’m afraid.”

  “Ha. My cheat would have been to take the window boxes down,” she told him.

  For a moment, he frowned, as though trying to figure out whether she was joking or not. “Just kidding,” she said.

  His face relaxed into a smile. “Ah. Would you...would you care to see the inside? I’ve bored everybody here in town with tours. Can I inflict my house pride onto you?”

  “Sure,” she said, but her uncertainty must have shown through.

  He took her by the elbow. “Come on. If you’re worried about getting back to your current pro
ject, it will still be there, waiting for you.”

  She tugged away from him. “How’d you know I was in the middle of a project?”

  “The paint in your hair and, uh, everywhere else was an excellent clue,” he told her.

  “I have paint in my hair?”

  Kyle pulled a curl tipped in white primer to show her in the fading evening light. “Yep. But it will wash out. Now your jeans—that might be a different story.”

  She stared down at the paint-spattered pair of jeans she was wearing and laughed. “These? They are beyond saving. I’ve actually started recycling them so I don’t ruin another pair,” Allison confessed.

  “Smart girl,” he said. He hadn’t released the lock of her hair, though, and his nearness unnerved her. Then, his lips still quirking upward at the corners, he tucked the curl behind her ear, his fingers slipping along her cheek.

  She shivered and reflexively covered his hand with her own. Kyle froze and raised an eyebrow in surprise.

  She couldn’t help it; all she could concentrate on was the texture of his skin. These weren’t a professor’s hands. A callus or two and a muscular leanness saved them from the softness she’d learned to associate with men who did little but push a pencil. And these weren’t from tennis or handball or squash...no, these hands had wielded shovels and hammers.

  “Can I have my hand back now?” he asked.

  “Sorry. You just— I...” Allison decided that she should just shut up before she humiliated herself any further. “I’d like to see your house. Give me the nickel tour.”

  So he led up her up his herringbone-pattern brick path and opened the front door with a flourish. “See what being totally obsessed with a house can result in? I warn you, you may run away screaming.”

  She stepped across the vestibule and under an arched opening into a perfectly quaint center hall with stairs leading to the second floor. Down the corridor she caught a glimpse of another room—a study, she deduced, based on the big desk in front of a big window.

  “Like I said, this was a kit house from Sears. The original owner ordered it from the 1926 catalog, and put it together himself, with the help of his brother. Cost him just over five grand. which was a pretty significant sum in those days.”

  “But this is beautiful! I thought Sears kit homes were tiny things...I mean, didn’t they have to be, in order to have them shipped?”

  “No. There are even bigger homes that Sears sold—the Magnolia, for one, a large antebellum type with huge columns. They didn’t sell as many of them as they did the smaller ones that you’ve heard of, but Sears was a big player back then. The company did a lot to standardize expectations. Before, you got whatever your local builder was willing to do, with not a lot of recourse. But once they had to compete against Sears and other catalog dealers...well, the local guys had to step it up a notch. Come on. I’ll show you the rest.”

  The living room shouldn’t have surprised Allison, but somehow it did. It wasn’t girlie in the slightest, but wasn’t the stereotypical man cave, with oversize leather couches and faux wood paneling. In one corner sat a grand piano, smaller than Gran’s, but very respectable. The room was well lit by French doors, one pair at the back of the house, leading to a screened-in porch, another at the front, obviously how he’d spotted her.

  And the room looked...new, but old at the same time, like a 1940s magazine ad.

  Then it hit her. “No electronics! Where’s the big screen TV? C’mon, you’re a guy. You’ve got to have gadgets.”

  Kyle laughed. “Very observant. Yep, I do. I like my college football—I admit, I’m pretty much an equal-opportunity ESPN sports junkie, as well, when I’m not working on something.” He crossed over to the wall near the front French doors and touched a hidden switch on what looked to be an old-fashioned hi-fi console. A good-sized flat screen slid up. “I just couldn’t bring myself to spoil the effect by putting the television on the wall. So when my brother was on leave and here stateside—he’s in the military—we rigged up this console table. Neat, huh?”

  She gawked at it, realizing the hours of work that must have gone into hiding an anachronistic device like a television. Shaking her head, she didn’t bother to smother the chuckle of disbelief that escaped her. “You are nuts. Did you know that?”

  “That’s what Pete told me. Why buy a flat screen if you can’t show it off like art, huh? But this was the only room where I went to that trouble. The others...well, see for yourself.”

  They headed upstairs. As she followed him, Allison asked, “So how long did it take you? I mean, it looks perfect, so it was in pretty good shape to begin with, right?”

  “Oh, you have no idea. It had this awful vinyl siding on it that had to come down, and someone had closed in the screened porch to make another bedroom.” They had reached the top of the stairs, which ended at a window with a generous window seat.

  “Up here are all the bedrooms,” Kyle began, and then he must have seen her blushing like crazy.

  What on earth has gotten into me? Allison resisted the urge to fan her flaming face. I’m acting like an idiotic middle schooler. Of course he doesn’t mean anything at all.

  Kyle sank down on the seat’s upholstered cushion. “Tell you what. You go on and poke around all you want. I’ll wait here. Holler if you have any questions.”

  Allison discovered more back-in-time rooms, complete with twin beds in one, antique furniture and simple coverlets. Tucked in out-of-the-way places were touches of modern life—digital alarm clocks, a stack or two of magazines—all of which, she had to admit, really did ruin the effect.

  She could tell Kyle’s bedroom at a glance, even if it was as neat as a pin. A little more tailored than the other rooms, it sported a big stack of DYI magazines, and history books on the bedside table. The attached bathroom, fitted out with enough old-fashioned ceramic fixtures and black-and-white floor tile to choke a goat, held more clues. The toothpaste and toiletries on the sink attested to the fact that, yes, this was his.

  Allison let her fingers slide over a shaving brush beside a razor and a mug. The brush was damp, a testament that he really did use the silly old thing. She had a sudden image of him swathing his face with foam, then running the razor through thick, fluffy drifts of lather.

  Jerking her hand back from the brush, she quickly headed to the hall, where Kyle patiently awaited her.

  “Ha. I’m surprised you even allowed a digital alarm clock on the premises,” she teased.

  He sighed. “My brothers insisted the retro-look one I had in there to begin with went off in the middle of the night. I have to say, the digital ones are easier to set.”

  “Aha! So you do admit that modern life has its benefits!” she said as she took the first step back downstairs.

  “Uh, I guess. I would miss ESPN,” he allowed.

  “So how long did you work on this house?” she asked, once downstairs and standing in the dining room, with its dark, antique furnishings.

  “I’m still working on it. You know old houses. You fix one thing and something else goes wrong.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m one ‘jumping Jehosaphat’ from bankruptcy,” Allison muttered darkly.

  “Ouch. I should have warned you about that,” Kyle said. “Those Jehosaphats are pretty expensive. Here, come into the kitchen. I’ve saved the best for last.”

  She pushed open an honest-to-goodness green baize door to see another rarity in modern homes. Tucked into a little slice between the dining room and the kitchen was a butler’s pantry and a dining alcove with a built-in table under a window.

  “They loved those little guys in the twenties,” Kyle told her as she slid her palm over the table. “I’ll bet it was a way a mom could have five minutes of peace at breakfast time—stick the kiddies in here, kiss the hubby goodbye and have herself a nice welcome cup of coffee with a dollo
p of solitude.”

  “It’s so cute!”

  “And tough to find a replacement. I thought I was going to have to rebuild a modern version. One of the previous owners had yanked it out and put a washer and dryer in here. At least the butler’s pantry was still intact.”

  Allison rolled her eyes. “You took out a washer and dryer to replace a table, just to get things back to the original state? Dare I ask how you wash your clothes?”

  “All in good time, all in good time. The kitchen awaits. If you think this is cool, the kitchen will knock your socks off.”

  So she pushed open another green baize door and gasped. “Oh. My. Word. This looks...this looks like Gran’s!”

  And it did, down to the checkerboard tile floor, the simple enameled cabinets, the single-basin sink. Unlike Gran’s, though, the counters on either side of the sink were the same subway tile as the backsplash underneath the pair of windows above it.

  “I did concede to a modern stove, only because my budget ran out before my wishes,” he told her. “But...look, I even found the little swing-out seat that goes under the sink.” He demonstrated. “This was where the lady of the house could rest her aching feet and back as she fixed supper.”

  “Oh, so cooking was only women’s work?” Allison asked archly, taking a seat on the metal stool for a trial run.

  “Heck, no, not always. My granddad cooked way better than my grandmother. She said so herself. And he taught my brothers and me what we know about cooking, because my mother didn’t know how to boil an egg. Grandpa said if a man could learn to cook, hunt and fish, he’d never go hungry. No, when I refer to the lady of the house, I’m just going by the probabilities and the custom of the day.”

  Allison whirled around on the stool’s slick red surface and took in the room. “I have to say, even though it looks like Gran’s, it feels fresher. Newer. And brighter—plus you have a real, honest-to-goodness vent fan and—is that a French door fridge hidden over there? Honestly, I wish Gran’s was tricked out this nicely. I’ve always hated cooking in it. I’m not looking forward to all those tomatoes.”