“And after Christmas?” he prompted.
Clancey couldn’t quite see where this was leading, but she couldn’t deny the truth, either. “Sales drop off. It’s the slowest time of year, in fact.”
“So an interruption in business would be less disruptive.”
“It would hurt less, yes,” she conceded, and couldn’t hold back any longer. “What kind of accountant are you, anyway, that you don’t know all this stuff?”
“Making assumptions is what got us both into this situation,” he pointed out. “Here’s my proposal. You can stay through the Christmas season. Then you move — both you and the store — without further argument or delay.”
Clancey dug her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans and bit her tongue to keep from agreeing instantly. It was far from ideal from her point of view. She’d have to face the grinding demands of the Christmas sales season with the need to find a new location for the store hanging over her head. But what alternative did she have? Compared to the present situation, it looked like manna from heaven.
“Why would you agree to that?” she asked suspiciously.
“Regardless of what you may think, I am not Simon Legree. Besides, I expect a promise in return — no more threats of frivolous lawsuits and no convoluted claims against me or my house. Ever.”
“I see. You’re afraid I’d win the case.”
“No. I know perfectly well you’d lose — eventually — but we might as well save the costs of the battle. We both have better uses for the money than to give it to people like Gleason.”
She glanced up at him through her lashes. “He doesn’t waste any respect on you, either,” she murmured.
“I’m not surprised. He wasn’t very happy with the outcome the last time we disagreed.”
Clancey concluded, regretfully, that there was no plausible excuse for asking for details. “I thought you were anxious to get the house.”
“I am. I’ve waited a long time for this deal to come through.” His voice was flat. “But another three months won’t kill me, if I’m free and clear at the end of it.”
She walked on. “This agreement only includes you, right?”
In the yellow glow of a streetlight she saw his eyebrows lift and draw together.
She added hastily, “I mean, I could still sue Leonard?”
“I hope you do,” he said, teeth gritted. “He’s the one who deserves it.”
They turned the last corner and the house came back into view.
“All right,” Clancey said. “It’s a deal.”
He nodded. “Then the place is yours till the first day of January, at the same terms as in your lease with Leonard.”
“How about the first of February?” Clancey bargained. “You said I could stay the Christmas season, and there’s such a thing as inventory reduction after the holiday, you know.”
“The size of your inventory is not my problem. Price it right, and you won’t have to worry about it.”
“But—”
“Would you rather give up the house on the day after Christmas?” There was no mistaking the threat.
She smiled up at him. “January first,” she conceded.
There was satisfaction in his tone. “I thought you might see sense.”
They shook hands on it under the sugar maple at the corner of the house. Rowan McKenna’s hand was strong and firm, and it was with reluctance that Clancey let her fingers slip out of that comfortable grip. She hadn’t realized how cold she had become on that short walk. How had he managed to stay so warm?
She thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and hunched her shoulders against the crisp evening air. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say, and yet he was still standing there as if he expected something more.
She looked over his shoulder at the house. Eileen had turned on the rest of the lights, and the glow spilled out of the windows and across the porch, casting long shadows on the frosty grass. Inside a warm and welcoming haven waited, ready to envelop the chilled and weary traveler.
She looked up at Rowan McKenna. He had turned a little in order to follow her gaze, and the beam of a street lamp fell across his face, accenting the chiseled lines of his profile and catching in the thick dark lashes to throw heavy shadows down across the strong cheekbones.
She could tell from his eyes that he was thinking the same thing she was — that the house was waiting for her. Not for him, not yet. His dream would have to wait.
Her heart twisted. It was no wonder that he was anxious to have his house, to realize the potential that was so apparent only at this hour of the night, when all the work waiting to be done faded into the soft shadows and the simple promise of loveliness remained.
“It’s very generous of you,” she said. There was a little catch in her voice; it was hardly more than a whisper. “Rowan, thank you for giving me a break.”
He turned his head to look down at her, and smiled. It was a long, slow smile that started with a sparkle in his blue-green eyes and lit his whole face. There were tiny laugh lines by his eyes, she saw, and his teeth gleamed white in the harsh light from the street lamp. The transformation startled her so much that she almost stopped breathing.
He touched two fingers to the brim of his cap and then he was gone, leaving her standing there in the cold air with her arms folded across her chest to conserve what warmth her body still possessed.
And Hank had said Rowan McKenna didn’t possess any kind of charm!
*****
Hank wasn’t pleased, when he stopped by Small World the next morning, to find that the work he’d done was in vain because the injunction was no longer needed.
“You could at least have called me as soon as you and MeKenna worked out this little deal.” His voice was level, but Clancey knew quite well that he was exerting icy control to keep it that way. “I ought to have been preparing for a client’s tax hearing, but I interrupted that to take care of your emergency. Then to find out that it’s no emergency at all...”
Clancey, who was kneeling on the floor to finish a model train layout, looked up and said contritely, “I’m sorry, Hank. I was so happy to have things worked out that I truly just forgot.”
“That will not be a great comfort to my client. It’s an important hearing. It could cost him millions.”
“Well, everything’s relative, isn’t it?” Clancey muttered.
Eileen called from the hallway, “Look what I found hanging around outside, Clancey. I brought him in the back way rather than fight with the front door. Have you phoned the locksmith yet?”
Clancey didn’t reply. She was watching Rowan, who’d followed Eileen across the hallway and was now leaning against the cash register table and looking at Hank with a wary gleam in his eyes.
Clancey scrambled up from the floor. “Did you come around to tell me where to pay the rent, and all that sort of detail?”
Rowan’s dark gaze shifted to her. “Oh, I’ll stop by the first day of the month to collect it.”
She’d half expected he would give her a mailing address. But she shouldn’t have been surprised that he intended to keep an eye on the place.
Hank snorted. “Don’t you work, McKenna? Or do you just specialize in minding other people’s business?”
That’s what was different, Clancey thought, what had been nagging at her as she watched him. It was Thursday morning, and the ordinary professional man would be on his way to the office. But, in vibrant contrast to Hank’s three-piece suit, Rowan was wearing jeans that were nowhere near new, sneakers, a faded flannel shirt and the almost inevitable cap.
“I am working,” Rowan said mildly. “I’m a landlord now, too, on top of my other responsibilities. I’m just taking care of business — inspecting my property.” He wandered into the parlor and stopped to study the teddy-bear tree. Or was it the mantel he was looking at? It was hard to tell.
“Well, some of us have more important things to do. Clancey, don’t forget our date for Saturday ni
ght.”
She blinked. “Saturday? Oh, the fund-raiser for the new civic center? But that’s next week, surely, not two days from now.”
“Oh, yes, that’s what I meant. These tax hearings are going to tie me up all next week.” He shot a look at Rowan and kissed Clancey’s cheek. “Back to the grind, I’m afraid.”
“Tax hearings?” Rowan said as soon as Hank was gone. “I warned him not to let his client take those deductions, but would Hank listen?” He shook his head.
“How would you know which client he’s talking about?” Clancey asked.
“When you hang around city hall, you hear things. Are you making sales yet?”
“The doors actually don’t open till tomorrow, but I wouldn’t turn down cash if someone insisted. Why?”
“I need a teddy bear.” He took the top one off the tree and brought it over to the cash register.
“That’s my favorite bear in the whole store.” Clancey gave the sad-eyed panda a last, almost surreptitious pat and carefully clipped the price tag from the loop at the back of his neck. “I’m a little sorry to see him go.”
“It’s a good cause.” Rowan MeKenna pulled a money clip from his pocket and pulled a bill loose. “He’s going on a peacekeeping mission.”
That’s odd, she thought. Unless the bear was a gift for a child who was disappointed that he — or she — wouldn’t be moving to a new house just yet, after all.
It was funny she’d never considered the possibility that Rowan McKenna was a father, or even a husband. But it made sense; a single man wasn’t likely to be interested in a house the size of this one. What would he do with it all? And he was certainly eligible enough to be married, and old enough to be a father.
And also, she reminded herself, decent enough not to use a child’s disappointment as a weapon to make her give up the house.
The stab of gratitude made her feel a little sentimental. She bundled the panda into a bag, turned back to the cash register and did one more calculation, and told him the cost. “I’ve given you a discount,” she added. “Since this is the very first sale in my new location, you get a break.”
Rowan shook his head sadly. “You can’t keep on with that sort of thing,” he warned. “You know how villainous landlords can be.”
“I know — you’ll tie me to a railroad track if I can’t pay the rent.”
He looked over her shoulder at the model train she’d just completed. “That’s right. I see you’ve even got the track. How handy.” He pulled a single sheet of paper out of his back pocket. “As long as we’re talking about the rent, here’s the new lease covering all the terms we talked about last night.”
Clancey took it warily. Why hadn’t he given her this when Hank was standing there? “You don’t mind if I look it over and get back to you later?”
Rowan shrugged. “How long do you think it will be till Hank has adequate time to study it?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll find a few minutes for me, even with the tax people hanging over him,” she said sweetly.
Rowan only smiled and went out whistling, with the panda tucked under his arm.
Eileen appeared with a stuffed leopard and began to arrange it on the stairway above Clancey’s head.
“Too bad such a nice guy has to have a receding hairline,” Eileen said, tugging the leopard’s head between the balusters so it appeared to be guarding the cash register.
“You mean Rowan? He doesn’t have a receding hairline.”
“Isn’t that why he wears that hat all the time?”
“No. And what are you complaining about, anyway? At least it’s not a toupee.”
“That’s true.” Eileen retied the leopard’s red velvet bow. “You got onto a first-name basis awfully quickly.”
Clancey had to run her memory back over the conversation before she realized that Eileen was right. When had she started thinking of Rowan by his first name?
“You were going to explain this system of yours to me,” Eileen reminded her. She settled herself on the stairs just down from the leopard as if she intended to stay there till the promise was kept. “The one for finding men, I mean.”
“I’ve decided it was no good.”
Eileen stared at her. “It brings you masculine treats like Rowan McKenna and you’re giving it up?”
“Men who buy stuffed panda bears are generally not what you’d call available, Eileen.”
“And he’s in that category? I knew it. All the good ones are taken, so I might as well not worry about it anymore.” She dusted off the back of her slacks. “What’s next?”
“Organizing the stockroom,” Clancey was just starting to say when a noise interrupted her. It sounded like the front porch collapsing — a grinding, slithering, sliding noise that grated on her ears like a steak knife squealing across a plate. “What in the world was that?”
Eileen hadn’t even jumped. “Oh, that’s probably just Rowan on the roof. He was climbing a ladder by the front porch last time I saw him, so I assume—”
Clancey clenched her jaw. “And what is he doing on the roof?”
“Beats me. Maybe you should ask him.”
The front door had jammed again. Clancey gave up on it and headed for the window on the hexagonal landing at the head of the stairs, overlooking the porch roof.
Sure enough, Rowan was crouched on the asphalt surface, a pry bar in his hand, yanking pieces of the roof loose. The sound she’d heard was old shingles sliding down and falling into heaps in the flower beds around the porch.
She struggled to open the window, but it, like every other one she’d tried, had been painted shut. So she rapped on the glass to get his attention.
He looked up and waved cheerfully.
Clancey yelled, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Checking out the bad spots in the roof,” he called back, moving over to the window.
She bit her tongue and then pointed out as calmly as she could. “I’m having a grand opening starting tomorrow. Remember?”
“Certainly I remember. I told you the roof needed work, didn’t I? You don’t want your customers to get rained on, do you?”
Clancey swallowed hard. “The roof leaks that badly?”
“Obviously you haven’t been in the attic. There’s water damage all over the place.”
Her voice was rising. “Are you seriously going to tear the roof off this house today?”
“Not all of it.”
She closed her eyes in pain.
“I’m just taking a couple of layers off the porch to see how far the roofers will have to go. I want to speed the job along so it’s done before the bad weather.”
Clancey gritted her teeth till her jaw ached. Finally she was able to say politely, “You do realize that you agreed to leave the house entirely in my possession till January, don’t you? And it’s not January yet.”
He shrugged. “Be reasonable, Clancey. I can’t replace the roof in January. It will be too snowy, too cold and too windy. Besides, you’ve got the inside all to yourself. What else do you want?”
What she wanted right then was a window that opened. If she had one, she could’ve climbed out onto the roof herself and pushed him off.
*****
The first day of Clancey’s grand opening was a perfect autumn Friday, the kind that kindergartners were apt to draw. There were puffy white clouds in a perfect blue sky, yellows and red and oranges of all shades draped across the trees, and the still-green grass was like a carpet.
It was almost as if Mother Nature had decided to deck herself out in brilliant crayon colors just to complement Small World’s sign, Clancey thought a little giddily as she checked the front of the house one last time. Yes, the sign was still there, straight and easy to see, hanging on the porch rail. Yes, the sidewalk was swept clean. Yes, the lawn was free of obstacles – for amazingly, Rowan had cleaned up his own mess yesterday before he’d gone away.
Best of all, there were a few cars pulling in along Pine Street
and people were getting out and coming up the walk to Small World. As the morning wore on, the numbers grew.
It was busier than she’d anticipated for the first day. She’d allowed herself to hope for good traffic over the weekend, but she’d expected to be able to work out any glitches in the system before the rush began. However, both she and Eileen were run off their feet, and by midmorning Clancey was beginning to feel that if she could manage to look up and smile when the front door opened she was doing well.
That was about the time the florist’s van double-parked in front of the house and the delivery man lifted a big vase of cut flowers from the back. He had some trouble negotiating his way across the crowded porch and through the door, for attached to the vase with long ribbons were more than a dozen helium-filled balloons reaching for the heavens.
The Unexpected Landlord Page 4
