The Unexpected Landlord

by Leigh Michaels

  Political connections, she thought blankly. Did Hank mean things like Lawrence, and the campaign that would come up someday for the mayor’s seat? What was wrong with that?

  “And little deals like this stay hidden pretty well down at city hall,” Hank went on.

  Something seemed to echo in the back of her mind. You hear lots of things when you hang around city hall, Rowan had said once. She shook her head. What did that have to do with anything?

  “You’ve heard about the civic center?” Hank said.

  “Of course. Are they still talking about building it on this side of town?” Kaye would like to know if that was so, she thought.

  Hank shook his head. “Not on this side of town, exactly.” He pointed at the floor. “They’re going to build it right here.”

  Clancey’s throat closed up till all she could manage was a whisper. “You mean this house?”

  “This block,” Hank said impatiently. “No wonder McKenna bought himself an old, decrepit house in the middle of a decaying neighborhood. I’ve always thought that was strange. He’s too smart with his money to do that kind of thing for kicks. But now I know why.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve got to be wrong, Hank.”

  “Honey, I’ve seen the list of sites.”

  Clancey swallowed hard. “No,” she said. It was almost a plea. “He wouldn’t do all this work and then let the city condemn it.”

  Hank looked around. “All of what work?” he asked bluntly. “I don’t see a lot of evidence.”

  They’d been through this same argument once before, Clancey reminded herself. “Hank, last time we had this talk, you thought Rowan wanted to get rid of me just so he could rent to less-particular tenants.”

  He shrugged. “That was before I got the facts about the civic center. And before I found out that McKenna’s been looking into a whole lot of other properties around here, too.”

  Clancey blinked. “He has?”

  “Yes, he has. And what would he do with them all, Clancey? A man can only live in one house at a time.”

  And this one, she remembered, he’d bought before he’d even been inside. She’d thought it a quixotic impulse, odd and eccentric. But when she considered it, what kind of fool was crazy enough to invest perfectly good money in a house without even knowing if it was livable?

  He’d said it was a great house and that it was everything he had hoped for, and more. But what, precisely, had he meant? The house of his dreams? An architectural wonder? Ideally suited for his purposes?

  And just what purposes had he been thinking of?

  “What’s he done to the place? Anything that amounts to much?”

  “Paint,” Clancey began automatically.

  Hank nodded. “That was smart. It increases the curbside appeal, for when the appraiser comes around and estimates how much they’ll have to pay to get the place. The better it looks, the higher the first offer will be and the better the deal he can negotiate. Anything else?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Not really. The roof...”

  Hank chewed on his bottom lip. “That surprises me. I can’t see that kind of work returning a profit.”

  The shock was lessening now, as the realization sank slowly into Clancey’s brain that Hank’s arguments actually made sense.

  The roof, she thought. Rowan had complained about the workmen and the delays. In truth, though, there was no evidence whatsoever that he’d even talked to a contractor.

  But why would he say he had, if he hadn’t? What would he have to gain from the lie?

  Delay, she found herself thinking. All sorts of work needed to be done, from the missing bedroom ceiling on down, but until the leaky roof was replaced even Clancey had agreed that it made no sense to do much of it. And so he could slide by with doing nothing at all and avoid all the questions about why, if he was so eager to renovate the place; he was making so little progress.

  Come on, Clancey, she told herself. Hank’s wrong, that’s all. Rowan ‘s been scraping wallpaper for days on end.

  That nagged at her a little, too. She wasn’t quite sure why.

  The fact that he’d been so silent about his plans for the house took on ominous implications once she started to think about it. Was it possible there were no plans, after all? Was it possible that he had just been letting her babble, not because he was interested in another point of view but just to fill up time and prevent her from asking about his own designs?

  He was going to live here, she’d told Hank just minutes ago. But had Rowan ever actually said that?

  Why do people usually buy houses? he’d said when she first asked about his plans. He’d answered a question with another question, not with a statement that tied him down. Had he ever actually committed himself? She couldn’t remember; she’d assumed that her answer was the correct one, and she hadn’t given it another thought.

  When she’d asked him not to tear out the kitchen without warning her, he’d smiled and told her not to worry. What, exactly, had he meant?

  He’d talked of budgets and time schedules, but those things could have dual meanings. Had he ever said anything about actually renovating the house?

  Oh, in vague terms, he had. He’d talked of the modern equivalent of ceiling plaster, for instance, and how difficult it would be to install against the irregular old timbers. But had he ever said, “This is what I’m going to do”?

  Not that Clancey could remember.

  Was it possible she had been so very wrong?

  She remembered Kaye’s comment that Clancey was the only person who’d ever kept Rowan from getting what he wanted. She’d thought Kaye meant that he was impatient to get the necessary work done and move in. But had she meant instead that Clancey was standing in the way of his profits? And hadn’t Kaye said something that day, as they drank tea while Rowan finished taking out the fallen ceiling, about his destructive instincts? Had there been some hidden meaning in her banter then?

  Did Kaye know what he was planning? Had she decided on her quiet, indirect approach to opposing the civic center because if she took a more public stand she’d also be loudly opposing her brother-in-law?

  Rowan had the connections to know what was going on at city hall; he’d said so himself. Besides, newcomers to the field of politics weren’t generally asked to help run campaigns. If a site had been chosen for the civic center, it wouldn’t be unlikely that Rowan would know which one, on that list of possibilities, it would be. Projects like that were planned years in advance, sometimes. He’d have had plenty of time to act.

  And what if he had decided to capitalize on the knowledge? An investment of a few thousand dollars, tied up for a matter of months, and then a tidy profit, collected from city funds. It was unethical, at best. In most cases it was illegal to profit like that from inside knowledge of government business, to take advantage of public trust to defraud the taxpayer.

  Not Rowan, her heart was whispering. He wouldn’t do that. Would he?

  Her head was swimming, and a cold drop of sweat was trickling down her spine with agonizing slowness.

  “He did offer to let me stay on.” She was almost unaware of saying it aloud.

  There would be advantages to letting you stay, he’d said – or something like that. She’d thought at the time it was only a bit of black humor, a reaction to the booby traps that seemed to be waiting all over the house.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to take the offer,” Hank said. “Without a lease he can evict you anytime. And when they finally move on this project, they won’t want delays.”

  Clancey shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t stay.”

  Hank looked worried. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said awkwardly. “I thought it would be some comfort to know exactly what was going on.”

  She forced herself to smile. “Yes. Of course it is.”

  Hank wasn’t even off the porch before Clancey climbed the stairs, hand trembling against the banister, to see what Rowan had accomplished in the past
ten days in the little bedroom where he’d been stripping wallpaper. It was his business and no concern of hers, she’d told herself, and once all her possessions had been stacked in a corner and covered with plastic to protect them, she hadn’t even looked in again. But now she found herself wondering what he’d been doing up there for a couple of hours every day. In that amount of time the wallpaper should be gone and the mess cleaned up. It should be ready for paint or new paper....

  It wasn’t. In fact, the walls looked as if they’d developed a bad case of chicken pox, with eruptions from the size of a saucer all the way up to three feet in diameter. In fifty different places the uneven surface of the dull yellow paint had been broken and the layers of wallpaper underneath partially scraped away. The walls were stained with dirty water and the remnants of old paste and glue.

  And in the center of the room were a couple of boxes. They were Clancey’s, part of her collection of odd and unusual toys. She’d checked that they were sealed, and had stacked them herself so they’d be out of Rowan’s way.

  Now they were open, and the packing tissue pulled back.

  Fury rose in her, bringing a harsh metallic taste to her mouth. So this was what Rowan had really been doing. He’d been killing time, playing with toys, and creating only the illusion of renovation, so that when an appraiser walked through he could point out the house’s potential, and the work already done, and the value that would be destroyed if it was to be taken away from him.

  Clancey turned aside, feeling sick. Eileen had noticed, weeks ago, how slowly things were progressing, and put her finger squarely on the reason — Rowan wasn’t working very hard. If it had been so obvious to her, why hadn’t Clancey seen what was happening?

  “Because I didn’t want to see it,” she muttered. “That’s what you get for falling in love before you check out the facts, Clancey Kincade. You did it with the house, you’ve done it with Rowan...”

  No wonder he’d agreed to let her stay those few weeks till Christmas, for now she remembered the other half of that deal — her promise not to sue. By letting her stay, he’d prevented the lawsuit she’d threatened to file, a legal action that would have caused nagging delays and fatal publicity.

  She managed to fight off tears, but only by reminding herself that Rowan would come back sooner or later. She didn’t want to explain herself or suffer his sympathy.

  When he came in, she was standing behind the cash register, hands folded, looking into space, wishing she could run somewhere very far away and hide her head until she felt less like a fool.

  He set a big bag down on the counter beside her arid said with an easy grin, “I got two scrapers this time.”

  Clancey bent over suddenly to straighten out the stack of bags on the bottom shelf. It was the best excuse she could find to make sure he had no opportunity to repeat that casual kiss-on-the-cheek routine of his, and to hide the bleakness in her eyes. “In case another one breaks?” she asked in almost a monotone.

  His eyes darkened a little as she dodged away. “No, in case you decide to help.” But there wasn’t quite so much humor in his voice. “I also got some Christmas lights on sale. You don’t mind if I put them up on the porch rail, do you?”

  “You mean tonight?”

  “Or tomorrow, when I can see what I’m doing,” he countered. “What difference does it make when I put them up?”

  Clancey shrugged. “None. Why don’t you stop playing house, Rowan? I’m not interested anymore.”

  He stopped digging boxes of lights out of the bag. “What the hell does that mean?”

  She raised her chin. “Putting up Christmas lights doesn’t get the wallpaper scraped off, does it?”

  “Why are you so worried about the wallpaper all of a sudden? It’s been there for years. Another week won’t hurt.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember now. You said you’d waited for this deal to come through for a long time, so another few months was no big problem. I suppose that goes for the wallpaper, too.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, his eyebrows drawn together, and then said quietly, “I’m pacing myself. My hands aren’t quite back to normal even yet — I still have a little numbness in my fingers. You wouldn’t want me to add a good case of carpal tunnel syndrome to my problems, would you?”

  Yes, she thought. In fact, part of me wishes that I’d broken every bone in your hands with that window.

  She didn’t look at him. “I thought you were anxious to work on the house, that’s all. I’m surprised, if you’re not enjoying it as much as you expected, that you’d want to buy more property. What are you trying to do, anyway, own the neighborhood? Settle down in your own little estate?” There was a sharp edge to her voice.

  He looked up with a scowl. “Where did you hear about that?”

  Then it was true. And if that much was fact, it was all true. Clancey’s fists clenched at her sides—out of sight, she hoped. It was the only way she knew to keep her whole body from trembling.

  “What difference does it make where I heard it?” The sarcasm had died out of her voice. She shook her head slowly, sadly. “It was unfair, it was cruel, and it was stupid — not to tell me the truth, Rowan.” The words were almost gentle.

  His eyes dropped to the box of brightly colored lights in his hands, and she watched as a dull red flush crept high into his cheeks.

  A cold prickle of fear raced through her before she realized it wasn’t anger that had made him turn red. There was no fury in his eyes and no threat in the set of his jaw. Instead, Clancey realized with compassion, the color in his face was embarrassment. It might even be humiliation. And if he felt ashamed of what he was doing...

  “There’s still time to clear yourself,” she said softly. “I suppose it’s too late to convince the city to change the site, but even if the house can’t be saved—”

  He shook his head abruptly as if trying to clear his ears. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The civic center.” Surely he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t understand. “If you didn’t actually make money from the deal, then it would be all right, wouldn’t it? I mean, it’s profiteering that’s illegal, not an honest sale, even if you did use your inside knowledge to get the house in the first place.”

  He didn’t answer.

  She was suddenly angry again. “Look, I’m only trying to help you out of a tight spot, Rowan. And I know what I’m talking about. Hank told me about your little scheme to collect a share of the taxpayers’ money. If the city is going to buy land for the civic center, then you might as well get a handsome settlement — that was it, wasn’t it? Don’t bother to deny it.”

  “I’m not going to bother to deny anything.” He began to gather up the scrapers and the boxes of lights. The very precision of his movements as he put things back in the paper bag was almost frightening.

  He was admitting it, then. There was no remorse in his voice now, and no doubt — only a hard edge that sounded almost hateful.

  Still, for just a moment there he had seemed sorry, as if he would welcome a way out. She had to try again.

  “Won’t you at least talk about it?” she said as gently as she could. “I’m sure we can still find a way for you to make things right, Rowan. If you want to, that is.”

  He didn’t even look at her. “No, thanks, Lady Bountiful. If your idea of helping is to rescue me from my criminal tendencies, I can do without your interference.”

  “Rowan!”

  He picked up the bag and turned toward the front door. “I’ll expect you to be out by January first.”

  As the cold air swirled around her, Clancey sagged onto the stool by the cash register and put her head down into her hands.

  This time she hurt too much even to cry.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Despite it all, she wanted to run after him and beg him to come back. And even though Clancey knew her only possible option was to keep her distance from him, it was the weakness in her knees that kept her perched on
that high stool, and not the strength of her convictions. Deep inside, she knew that no matter what he might have done, or intended to do, she still wanted him. She still loved him.

  You love the man you thought he was, she told herself. But that’s not who he turned out to be, at all.

  She sat there behind the cash register and fought a battle with herself, and it was well past closing time when she finally raised her head. She had no choice right now, she painfully concluded. She couldn’t run away, for she had nowhere to go. But she could devote every spare hour to finding a new place for the store, so that the moment the Christmas season finished she’d never have to cross Rowan McKenna’s path again.

  The decision didn’t soothe the raw and aching corners of her heart, but she knew it was the only way. Things would get better eventually — if she could just survive the next few weeks.