lacking. Besides, she took exception to Zabelle’s question. It wasn’t any of his business if Kelli came along or not as long as everything else was conducted professionally.
Without meaning to, she squared her shoulders. “My sitter had a date.”
Philippe supposed that was a reasonable excuse, although the woman could have rescheduled. “Good for her.”
“Him,” she corrected. “Good for him,” she added when he looked at her quizzically. “My sitter’s my brother, Gordon.”
Mentally, Philippe came to an abrupt halt. He was getting far more information than he either needed or wanted. If he did wind up hiring this woman to tinker and fix the couple of things that needed fixing, he wanted to keep their exchanges strictly to a business level.
But that wasn’t going to be easy, he realized in the next moment when the little girl took his hand in hers and brightly informed him, “I don’t have a brother. Do you have one?”
He expected Kelli’s mother to step in and admonish the little girl for talking so freely to a stranger. But there was nothing forthcoming from J.D. and Kelli was apparently waiting for him to give her an answer.
“Yes,” he finally said. “Two.”
“Do they live here, too?” Kelli asked. She seemed ready to go off in search of them.
He shifted his eyes toward the so-called handy-person. “Don’t you think you should teach her not to be so friendly with strangers?”
Janice had never liked being told what to do. She struggled now to keep her annoyance out of her voice. The man probably meant well and he was, after all, a potential client.
But who the hell did he think he was, telling her how to raise her daughter?
She took a breath before answering, trying her best to sound calm. She was dealing with residual anxiety, as always when Gordon went out on a date. He had a very bad tendency to overdo things and shower his companions with gifts he couldn’t afford.
When she finally spoke, it was in a low voice, the same voice he’d heard on the answering machine. “I don’t see the need to make her paranoid if I’m around to watch her. Kelli knows enough not to talk to someone she doesn’t know if she’s alone—which she never is,” Janice added firmly. “Besides,” she continued, “Kelli’s a very good judge of character.”
Now that he found hard to believe. “And she’s how old?”
He was mocking her, Janice thought. Probably thought she was one of those doting mothers who thought their kid walked on water. But Kelli seemed to have a radar when it came to nice people. She turned very shy around the other type.
“Age doesn’t always matter,” she told Zabelle. Gordon, for instance, had the impaired judgment of a two-month-old Labrador puppy. Everyone was his friend—until proven otherwise. The later happened far too often. He had a V on his forehead for victim and self-serving women could hone in on it from a fifty-mile radius. “Sometimes all it takes are good instincts.” Something Gordon didn’t seem to possess when it came to women. He fell prey to one gold digger after another. The sad part was that he never caught on. And if she said anything, her brother felt she was being a shrew.
It was hard to believe that he was the older one.
Because he’d asked and her mother hadn’t answered, Kelli held up four fingers and bent her thumb to illustrate what she was about to say. “I’m four and three-quarters.” She dropped her hand and then added in a stage whisper that would have made a Shakespearean actor proud, “Mama says I’m going on forty.”
The unassuming remark made him laugh. “I can believe that.”
“Why don’t we get down to business?” Janice suggested. She wanted to wrap this up as quickly as possible, especially if it didn’t lead anywhere. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare dinner yet. That had been Gordon’s job, but then Sheila, the latest keeper of his heart, had called and he’d forgotten everything else. When she’d come home from wrapping up a job, he’d all but run over her in his haste to leave the house.
“Good, you’re finally home. Gotta run.” And he did. Literally.
“Dinner?” she’d called after him.
“Yeah,” he’d tossed over her shoulder. “I’m taking her out. Seems she’s free after all.”
Which had meant that whoever Sheila had planned to go out with had cancelled.
There’d been no time for Janice to prepare dinner before her appointment, so she’d tossed an apple to Kelli, strapped her into her car seat and driven over to the address she’d copied down. But now her stomach was making her pay for it by rumbling. She wished she’d grabbed an apple for herself.
“Fine with me,” Philippe told her. He gestured toward the sink. Running the length of the sink from one end to the other, the crack was hard to miss. “I need that replaced.”
Instead of looking at the sink, Janice slowly examined the bathroom, taking in details and cataloguing them in her head. Judging by appearances, no one had done anything to the oversized powder room with the undersized shower in about thirty years.
The dead giveaway was the carpet on the floor. It was very 1970s.
Finished assessing, she turned to him. “Looks to me as if you could stand to have the whole bathroom replaced.”
He hadn’t given any serious thought to any large-scale renovations, but he knew he wouldn’t want them handled by a wisp of a woman. “Oh?”
She nodded as if he’d just agreed with her. “The tile is very bland,” she pointed to the wall. “It dates the room, as does the carpet. And you’re missing grout in several places.” She indicated just where. “My guess is that it was probably scrubbed out over the years.” She based her assumption on the fact that there didn’t appear to be any visible mold. Left to their own devices, most men had bathrooms that doubled as giant petri dishes, growing several different strains of mold and fungus. “Whoever’s been cleaning your bathroom has been doing an excellent job, but scrubbing does take its toll on tile and grout after a while.”
He wasn’t sure if she was giving him a compliment or trying to get him to volunteer more information about his personal life. In either case, he shrugged. “I just find things to spray on it—whenever I remember,” he added, thinking of the last time he’d had the opportunity to go to the grocery store.
The tiny snippet of information impressed her. “A man who cleans his own bathroom.” She said it the way someone might announce they’d just discovered a unicorn. “I’ll have to have my brother come meet you.”
That was the last thing he wanted—unless her brother was part of her crew. The second he had the thought, he realized she had somehow subtly gotten him to consider the idea of renovations rather than a simple replacement.
Still, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He looked at her in silence for a minute, then decided to ask a hypothetical question. “Okay, pure speculation.”
“Yes?” she returned gamely, mentally crossing her fingers.
“If I were to do this bathroom
