“Idiot,” Calli said, hugging her. “You pay us back in a thousand ways that you don’t even notice. Ma told me about the dinner set. It was the hit of the evening on Friday, and it was your idea and your dinner set. You didn’t have to do that. And that’s only a small example of your generosity. Now we’ve got the carpet settled, let’s go and choose one. We can leave the guys to do their stuff here without our supervision.”
“That’s if you don’t mind us being in your house without you?” Hagen began rolling up his sleeves.
“I’m happy to be elsewhere while the floor is being sanded. So, see you later.” She turned and hooked her hand under Calli’s arm.
With a toodle-oo twiddle of her fingers and a cheeky smile, Calli led Marigold from the room.
“Let me get the sander out of the car first,” Kell said, following behind the ladies. “You’ll want the tray top if you’re moving carpets. The Porsche isn’t big enough.”
Kell returned back into the house with the sanding machine. “I had a look at the floor before you arrived,” he said to Hagen who was checking last night’s paint finish in the bedroom. “It’s never had wall-to-wall carpeting, therefore we won’t find nails everywhere. We’ll want to fill a few gaps, but we can get this job knocked off in an hour or so.”
“Did you bring filler?”
“I’ve brought everything. Good to see you sanded the edges. You’re not just a pretty face.”
“When your parents run a construction company, you tend to be handy.” Hagen grinned at Kell. “Though, Marigold taught me how to strip wallpaper and paint yesterday. I let her. She’s rather earnest at times.”
Kell smiled back. “You’ve known her for a long time. I’ve only known her since I married Calli. I think she’s kind of earnest, too, but I wouldn’t have thought she was your type.”
Hagen pushed his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t say she was.”
Kell stared at him but made no comment. In silence, they filled the cracks between the floorboards. Hagen blocked out the window while Kell loaded the sanding disks onto the machine, and he went on with the job after Hagen shut the door. With the loud whine of the motor reverberating in his ears, he had little to do while Kell was sanding. Tempted to glance around Marigold’s house, he didn’t resist.
Her tiny bedroom was one of two singles, separated by the only bathroom, and built at the back of the house. The early fifties construction would have been contracted by her maternal grandparents. In those days, just after the Second World War, builders and supplies were scarce. Too many young and healthy tradesmen had been lost overseas, too few had been trained in the meantime, and the many houses built for those who returned were over-constructed by amateurs. As Hagen knew, knocking one over to repurpose the land was like tearing down a bunker. Often, the only part worth salvaging was the flooring. When she left this place, sure as heck the house would be demolished, having been built in a good area on a generous-sized block.
The third bedroom had been set up as a craft room, holding a sewing machine, rolls of fabric neatly stacked, and labeled boxes on shelves. Her sitting room was also neat but old fashioned. The couch would have been at least twenty years old and her television set was small. Anyone could see nothing had been spent on this house in years.
He wanted her to be more comfortable, but short of helping her renovate, his hands were tied. She wouldn’t, he knew from bitter experience, accept handouts. Sighing, he texted Calli. M needs QS bed. Get AA discount at Choose to Snooze.
When the dust settled, he swooshed the first coat of sealer on the floors, while Kell fixed the leaky tap in the kitchen.
* * * *
“What do you think of this one?” Calli unrolled one of the bigger carpet pieces, navy blue with a pattern in white.
Marigold stood, watching the zigzags slowly reveal. “That’s not bad. I think I would get away with the angled lines. The patches on the quilt are varicolored and multi-patterned triangles set into a darkish blue background. The colors my mother used will give the bed a starring role. I’ll probably make a white blind and have sheer white linen either side of the window.”
“Sounds good.” Calli began to roll up the carpet again. “That was quicker than I thought. Now for a bed.”
“I’ve got a bed.”
Calli grinned. “You’ve got a single bed. Your new room will look far better with a bigger one. I think you’re grown up enough to qualify for a bed you might like to share occasionally.”
“I suppose that could happen one day. At least I’ve begun dating. Well, that doesn’t happen until Friday but it’s a start, at least.”
“Who?” With a delighted expression on her face, Calli grabbed her arm.
“Morgan Evans, a prof from the engineering department at the uni.”
“Oh, good.” Calli moved away and lifted one end of the carpet. “Pick up that end, and we’ll get it into the car. Then we’ll go off to Choose to Snooze. We can get a huge discount there but they also have lower prices on Sundays. Don’t look like that. You must have been paid and the bed will cost almost nothing, I promise. So, Morgan Evans, huh? I don’t know him. What’s he like?”
Marigold followed Calli carrying the front end of the carpet. “A bit taller than me and a bit older. Quite nice looking and clever, book clever. I don’t know how much we’ll have in common, but if I don’t try out a few guys I’ll never know if one might suit me.”
“You certainly have to check out Morgan. If all else fails, you ought to get a good meal.” Calli pushed open the loading door of the warehouse with her foot.
“That was my caveat, too, but, well, he’s interesting. I’m rather keen on brainy guys. Hold on. I need to take the step more slowly. I can’t see where my feet are.”
Calli turned back to wait for her. “Speaking of brainy guys, I love that you’re getting Hagen interested in something other than work.”
“I don’t know that I am. He had to help me because he wants me to help him and if he doesn’t, I won’t have time. I need to get this room done before Christmas. And he wants his house done before Christmas, too.” Marigold huffed a little as Calli paced quickly to Kell’s car.
“He’s redoing the house? Fantastic! Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but that house was furnished by Mercia whose ideas came from pictures of the houses of movie stars.”
Marigold laughed. “Well, she was kind of a movie star herself. I think the house suited her.”
“I do, too.” Calli put down her end of the carpet so that she could open the back of the tray top. As soon as the door swung down, she grabbed the carpet. She and Marigold stuffed the roll in with much huffing and puffing. “But it’s a good sign that Hagen’s ready to move along.”
“It’s not as easy as you might think to stop grieving for someone you love.”
Calli gave a helpless gesture with a lift of her hands. “I know. I haven’t experienced losing any of the people I love. Hagen’s still young enough to find someone else. As an onlooker, I don’t want him to mourn forever.”
“No one does that. He already has a divorcee chasing him.”
Calli nodded. “Scarlett. I think she was keen on him while Mercia still was alive.” She walked around to the driver’s seat.
Marigold took the passenger seat and let herself be driven to buy a new bed. She did need one, and she could afford one, but being economical was a hard habit to break. Fortunately, the price of the bed and a comfortable mattress, with an AA discount, worked out to be about half the price she had imagined. “I’ll have to go shopping with you more often,” she said happily to Calli on the way home.
“You certainly will. What are you going to do about furniture in that room?”
“Aha. I have my mother’s cupboard in the shed, waiting to be done up. It’s a beauty with a set of drawers down on one side. It’s authentic fifties and it will loo
k just right once I have painted and restored it.”
“You don’t want a built-in?” Calli pulled out of the car park, concentrating on the traffic she meant to join.
“Maybe one day, but for now what I have is okay. I don’t need luxury. Just comfort.”
“I hope the guys have been working hard. I don’t want to get back and find out that they’re not ready for lunch.”
“Is it that time already?” Marigold glanced at the car clock. “I don’t have much food in the house. Would you mind stopping off somewhere so that I can buy something?”
“Well…I was hoping you and Hagen would come with us to Kell’s brother’s place for lunch.”
“The one who married Vix Tremain?”
“They like to do family things and when we said we were helping you today, Vix asked if we would ask you, too.”
“Me? Or Hagen?”
“Both. Vix used to have a crush on Hagen at school, or so she said.”
“Didn’t everyone?”
“You didn’t.”
“The competition was too heavy for me,” Marigold said, hoping the warmth of her cheeks would be attributed to the car’s heater rather than show that in those days she wasn’t as casual about Hagen as his sisters supposed. “Plus, he was your brother. How awkward that would have been!”
Calli gave a noncommittal smile. “I think we could have forgiven you a letch or two. It seemed unnatural that two people who had so much in common had no interest in each other.”
Marigold had nothing to say to that. Everyone had known that Hagen’s main interest when he’d left for his university college had little to do with study. Each time she had seen him he had been with a different girl. He was hardly about to engage her in conversation when he had one of his vegan, gluten-free girlfriends to placate about his mother’s delicious Greek cuisines.
Soon enough, Calli pulled the car up outside Marigold’s house. The guys had put the first coat of sealer on the floor, after waiting for the dust to settle, and Hagen said the second coat could be done later in the afternoon.
“And my new bed will arrive tomorrow,” Marigold said to him with some satisfaction. “I’ll have to leave the key with next door because I won’t be home.”
“I thought you were taking off tomorrow.” Hagen frowned at her.
“I already said I wouldn’t. I have to choose new carpeting for the Rundle Street apartment block and haggle about the new reception chairs. I might need to swap around a few pictures as well. It seems a better idea to change the whole area rather than just replace the worn out things, and we have plenty of pictures in the warehouse that are dying to have an outing.”
“They communicate with you, do they?”
“So to speak.” She grinned.
“I don’t know if Kell asked you, Hagen,” Calli said tentatively. “But we’re off to Jay’s house for lunch. You’re invited, too. Marigold is coming.”
Hagen glanced at Marigold. “Sure. I can’t do much more here. I might go home and change out of these dusty clothes. I’ll pick you up, Marigold.”
She nodded. He always looked better than anyone had a right to look. For a lunch he would dress in something smart but casual in exactly the right colors. Fortunately, at a family lunch where every other woman was married, she wouldn’t have any competition so that during the next couple of hours she could fantasize that she was his chosen date. Already her insides had gone into meltdown.
She straightened her shoulders and stared directly at Hagen, keeping her tone more on the friendly side than on the wishful side. “Before you leave, could you and Kell bring in the wardrobe from the garage?”
He raised his eyebrows at Kell, who nodded.
“Thanks, guys. I’ll paint it sometime during the week and use it in my new bedroom. Put it in the passage outside the dining room,” she called to the two retreating furniture movers. Then she shrugged at Calli. “No point in wasting muscle power.”
Calli laughed. “I love seeing Hagen out of office mode and no longer the property prince.”
“He’s not bad when he takes off his suit.” Marigold made a mock lecherous expression, waggling her eyebrows, too overdone to be taken seriously. She cleared her throat. “So to speak.”
Calli nodded. “So to speak.”
The job duly performed, the others left, Calli making sure her brother knew where Jay and Vix lived. Marigold put on clean jeans and the cream top Hagen had given her. Best not to overdress when everyone else at the lunch could buy and sell her ten times over.
* * * *
After a satisfying and companionable lunch with Calli’s husband’s interesting family, Hagen slid into his car beside Marigold, wondering if his day with her would end as soon as he had sluiced the second coat of sealer onto her floor. He hoped not. The more time he could spend with her, the more he could see that if she had ever been an ice-maiden, not a trace remained. She was no longer rigid in her opinions, set in her ways, or as unlikely to misbehave.
Like him, she had been left without the main focus of her life. Humanity had grabbed hold of her and, with luck, wouldn’t let go. He had always suspected that if she stopped dismissing him as rich and irresponsible, she would find out that he wasn’t as shallow as she thought.
“Vix hasn’t changed, has she?” He smoothly transitioned his car into the end-of-weekend traffic, which wasn’t too different from peak hour in the weekday mornings.
“She was in your year at school. You would know her better than me, but I always thought she was nice—one of those quiet achievers.”
“Except at Calli’s and Kell’s wedding, I hadn’t seen her in years. She was at uni with me, but she married young and we lost touch.”
“I lost touch with most people a few years ago, except for your family. It got too hard trying to fit in friends and earn a living.”
He changed into the left lane. “While looking after your mother?”
“She would have done the same for me,” she said in defensive voice.
“Any parent would do that for her child. Not every child would do that for her parent. I had no idea, back then, that you were about to be her home caregiver.” He hadn’t meant to voice those words aloud and he wished them back. Yet, at some time he needed to confront the past. During the last few days, he had forgiven himself for Mercia’s death and he wanted to turn back the clock on his life to pre-Mercia days.
For a moment she sat unmoving, while the air between them made a space that begged to be filled. “I was twenty,” she finally said. “A young twenty. The whole thing was growing hot and heavy too fast.”
“That’s what happens in relationships.”
“I didn’t have time for a relationship. I needed to be my mother’s support.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I never expected you to walk out on me without any explanation. You didn’t give a thought to my ego.”
“I thought it was large enough to sustain you.”
He glanced out the side window. “Maybe these days, but then I thought I was hot stuff.”
“I was just another warm body to you.”
“Of course you weren’t. I had known you for years.”
“I couldn’t maintain a relationship with anyone, Hagen. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t me. It was the situation. We had nothing going for us. You were being supported by your parents, and I was working to supporting mine. How could that work?”
“What should I say? Thank you for sparing me?”
“You could, yes.” Her laugh sounded dour.
“I can’t, of course.” He tried for a smile as he pulled up at a red light. “I don’t have your sort of grace.”
“Grace? Is that a mixture of love and duty? I’m sure if you had been in the same situation you would have done the same, but you weren’t. Your sisters unwitt
ingly kept me up to scratch with your life. Within weeks of you trying to get me into your bed, apparently you suddenly started to date every woman who blinked at you. Date is a euphemism, but the word they used. If I happened to hear about it on the grapevine, they didn’t want me to be shocked about their brother’s extreme sex life.”
“And were you?” He lifted an eyebrow at her.
She turned away and stared out the window of the car. “Not shocked, no. I always thought you were a player. I was more shocked by my own behavior.”
He glanced at her. “Shocked that you’d been so adamant about not seeing me again.”
“Shocked that after only two dates and a couple of kisses that I had raced back to your college rooms to have sex with you.”
“And what about you? How was your sex life after refusing me?”
“None of your business.”
“What if I want to make it my business?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You brag about yours, and I apologize about mine? Stuff you, Hagen. You, at least, had Mercia.”
“At least I had Mercia.” He tightened his fingers on the steering wheel and bit out his next words. “Which seemed like the right thing to do at the time.” An ache filling his chest, he stared straight ahead at the lines of traffic. At the next set of lights, he would turn left up Kensington Road and drive to her house to finish her damned floor.
To be with her, the woman he’d never had, for a full day had been physical agony. In fact, he’d had a half erection for two weeks. He flicked a quick glance at her and noted her stillness. She had wrapped her hands together, and she stared into her lap, blinking hard. He’d as good as told her he still wanted her and all she could do was tell him he was lucky to have had Mercia—about as lucky as owning a million dollar note. He breathed out, trying to relax his shoulders. “Are you deliberately ignoring my last suggestion?”
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