he looked past the boy to the mother, who was leaning against the back door, laughing, and not trying to be quiet about it, either. Her laugh rang out pure and full and with genuine enjoyment, even as she pushed herself away from the door and grabbed a dish towel, handing it to Ryan. “Hi, Mr. Chandler,” she said. “You and Zachary have already bumped into each other, I see. Do come in.”
“Gotta go, Mom,” Zachary said, wiping his hands on his sweatpants. “Tommy’s mother drives today, so I’ll be home around lunchtime, okay? See you, um, Mr. Chandler. Oh, and sorry about that.”
With that, Zachary was off, racing across the backyard to his friend, and Janna didn’t bother to stop him. After all, he had apologized, hadn’t he?
“I didn’t know you had a son,” Ryan said, handing back the dish towel as he entered the house behind Janna and looked around the kitchen, pretty much as if he’d never seen one before today.
Janna looked around with him. She really loved her kitchen. It was the one room in the house where she had definitely let herself go, indulging her love of color as well as cramming every available space with one of her first loves: gadgets.
The kitchen set was a genuine antique, a sort of Art Deco chrome-legged set with Formica top—a turquoise Formica top, with matching padded chairs. She’d seen a set much like it at a local furniture store, new, and had laughed to think that her grandmother’s cast-off set from the fifties had stuck around long enough to show up in decorating reruns.
The walls were also turquoise, bright against the high old, glass-fronted cabinets she’d covered with not one but six careful layers of white paint and decorated with chrome pulls and handles in the shape of pineapples.
Then there was the bright-white tile floor she’d laid herself, with turquoise, pink and yellow tiles scattered throughout, ruffled curtains of turquoise, pink and yellow stripes she’d patched together out of remnants, the colorful prints on the walls, the dozen or so birdhouses and green, trailing plants in the space between the cabinets and the ceiling, the turquoise Formica countertops covered with bread maker, toaster oven, can opener, blender, pasta maker and several other can’t-live-without-it gadgets and…well…it was a “full” kitchen. No doubt.
One might even call it cluttered. To look at Ryan Chandler, he was one of those who definitely would.
“Would you like a cup of coffee before you get started?” she asked, drying off her hands and setting the flowered bowl on the floor, filling it with dry cat food. “Of course you do. You sit down over there while I get it. Oh, and the list is on the table.”
When she turned away from the coffeepot to approach the table holding two stoneware cups, one pink, one turquoise, Ryan was staring at her. In fact, she got the feeling that he had done nothing but stare at her since his first inspection of the room.
She looked down at herself, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. She was wearing jeans. Okay, old jeans. Okay, very old jeans. Very old, soft, and somewhat tight jeans, worn low on her hips and hugging her very long legs.
What else would she wear if she and Ryan were going to be working on odd jobs all day? Well, a knit sweater, for one thing. And she was wearing one. A dark-gray sweater-vest once belonging to her late husband—which had shrunk badly in the wash—that she sometimes wore with a blouse, and sometimes without.
She looked down at herself again. Okay, so she should probably have worn a blouse under it today.
And maybe a bra.
She winced as she looked at herself.
Definitely a bra. I mean, she thought, how was I to know the guy would turn catatonic on me, for crying out loud? They’re just nipples. Everybody’s got them. He’s got them, for crying out loud.
Okay, and so maybe her venerable, shrunken sweater also didn’t quite meet the waistband of her jeans. Hadn’t the man ever seen a belly button before, either?
Still…did she look that bad, that terrible? She had pulled her thick, long, unruly mop of redder than red hair up on top of her head, securing it there with a rubber band, so that curls tumbled all over the place—back, front, sides. She always thought she looked like a really, really big chrysanthemum when she wore her hair this way, but it was comfortable, and it kept the mop out of her eyes and…“What?” she exclaimed at last, exasperated, and nearly spilling the coffee. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ryan answered her, taking one of the cups from her and sipping its contents, his gaze now carefully lowered. “What’s this?” he said before taking another sip. “It’s coffee, yes, but there’s something else….”
“They’re French vanilla coffee beans, with a dash of apple cinnamon strudel flavor tossed in,” she told him, sitting down across the table from him. “Like it?”
“First thing in the morning? No. But, since I’ve already had two cups at home, yes, it tastes pretty good. Some special blend?”
“I pick it up at the mall, actually. There’s a gourmet coffee kiosk on the upper level. Every time we’re at the mall, I pick up another flavor. I’ve got a Jamaican blend that would put hair on your fingernails, I swear, but I didn’t think you’d like it. So,” she said, putting down her cup and bracing her elbows on the table, “what do you want to do first?”
His smile did something very strange, setting off a small explosion somewhere in the pit of her stomach. “Do first? Frankly, I’d like to offer you your money back and the services of a first-class handyman. But somehow I don’t think you’d go for that. Or would you?”
She pretended to consider this for a moment, then shook her head, her mop of curls speaking quite eloquently as they bobbed back and forth. “Nope. No deal. We have a bargain, right?”
She’d stick to that answer: a bargain. She wouldn’t mention anything else, couldn’t mention anything else. Not when she didn’t really understand it herself. She only knew she was doing a nice old lady a favor, and she would never renege on her promise.
Especially when her To-Do list was nearly as long as one of Ryan Chandler’s long arms.
Janna picked up the paper, scanned it. “I think you should start with the garage. Zach thinks it’s his private dumping grounds, but I need more storage space for my own stuff. I bought some shelving—you can put shelving together, can’t you?—and after you take everything out of the garage and hose down the floor, we can get everything arranged. Oh, and I’ll help put the shelves together, I promise.”
He looked at her as if she had just told him to climb to the top of Mount Everest and bring her back a tutti-frutti flavored icicle. “You’re kidding, right?”
She looked back at him blankly. “Kidding? Nope. Why would I be kidding?”
He reached up, scratched at a spot behind his left ear. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I thought you’d want to go for a drive, have lunch at some country inn, maybe take in dinner later? Dancing? You know, the sort of thing every other bachelor is probably doing this weekend with the women who bid on them. But clean a garage? Put up shelves?”
“Put together shelves, then put them up. There’s a difference. These are just inexpensive metal thingies, freestanding shelves we sort of smash back against the walls to load my junk onto.” She rolled her eyes at him. “I mean, I wouldn’t ask you to put together
