on, though. No more management.
“My résumé,” he repeated. He cleared his throat. “Short version—the firm where I worked for the past thirteen years recently went bankrupt, so my résumé would be pretty worthless.” He didn’t bother to add that the firm had belonged to his ex-father-in-law, who had pushed him into an area of management he had been unprepared for. Deliberately, he’d later learned. The result being that by calling a spade a spade—or in this case, calling a crook a crook—he’d lost his wife, his job, and any ambition he’d once had to be the best damn builder in the business.
“Would I have heard of it?” she asked.
“Were you watching the local news last spring?”
“Local? You mean Muddy Landing?”
He shook his head. “Norfolk. Virginia Beach, specifically.” The state line was less than forty-five minutes away. Northeast North Carolina got most of the news from Norfolk feeds.
The way she was eyeing him, she was probably reconsidering her job offer. With no résumé and no referrals, he couldn’t blame her, but now that he’d come this far, he was determined not to let that happen. Something about big, cloudy gray eyes and soft, pouty lips…
Oh, hell no. Any decision he made would be based on his own needs and not on the appeal of any woman. He’d gone that route once before, and look where it had landed him.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” he said.
“For a change?”
Cole didn’t particularly like being called a liar, especially when he wasn’t, but having been grilled by experts, he let it pass. “I can leave now or we can go on with the interview, your choice,” he said quietly. “I’d intended to head on down the Banks and points south in a few days, anyway.”
“Then why did you bother to apply?”
Had he thought gray eyes looked soft? At the moment hers looked about as soft as stainless steel. “I’m beginning to wonder,” he muttered, half to himself. The lady was as flaky as one of the Colonel’s biscuits. “All right, fair question. First, I did a small repair job for a guy who owns the marina where I’ve been living aboard my boat. Yesterday a friend of his happened to mention that she knew somebody who needed a small remodeling job done in a hurry, and asked if I was interested in earning some maintenance money.”
Actually, despite appearances, he had a fairly decent investment income considering his simplified lifestyle. But the market tended to be schizophrenic and, as someone once said, a boat was a hole in the water into which the owner poured money.
“You said that was your first reason. What else? Is there a second reason?”
A second reason. If he said “instinct,” she was going to think he was as big a nutcase as she was. As to that, the jury was still out, but until he had more to go on he’d just as soon not have to defend himself.
It had been instinct that had first tipped him off that Weyrich was dirty. Long before that, it had been instinct that told him Paula was bored with their marriage and looking for bigger fish to fry. Frying them, for all he knew. By that time it had no longer been worth the effort to find out.
“It just struck me as the thing to do,” he said finally. “Small town, small job—good place to get my bearings again.”
“Again?”
She might look like soft, but the lady was a piranha—big eyes, tousled hair and all. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, let’s leave my bearings out of this and get on with the business at hand. Do you need a job done, or don’t you?”
She took a deep breath, hinting at what lay hidden by a baggy turtleneck sweater that showed signs of age. And he wasn’t even a breast man. If anything, he was an eye man, eyes being the window on the soul.
The window on the soul?
Clear case of too much fried food and too much time on his hands.
“It’s a remodeling job,” she explained. “I doubt if it’ll take very long. At least I hope not. I want my downstairs moved upstairs so I can reopen my bookstore downstairs.”
Cole thought for a minute, then nodded slowly as a couple of things clicked into place. “The bookshelves you were painting in your garage.” The smell still lingered, a combination of burnt cinnamon, fresh urethane and paint thinner—but either his olfactory sense was numbed or the stench was starting to fade.
She nodded. “I thought I’d better refinish them now so that they’ll be thoroughly dry by the time my upstairs gets finished so I can move my downstairs upstairs and move the shelves into these two rooms and start restocking.”
Okay. He had the general picture now. “You want to show me what you have in mind?” He hadn’t committed himself to anything.
Marty rubbed her right thumb and forefinger together as she considered whether to show him her drawings first or take him upstairs. She’d burned off her fingerprints, which might come in handy in case she couldn’t get her bookstore reopened in time and was forced to turn to a life of crime.
“Come on, I’ll show you upstairs first so you’ll understand my drawings better. You might as well know, you’re not the first builder to apply for the job. The others turned it down.”
“Any particular reason?” he asked.
Conscious of him just behind her, she made a serious effort not to move her hips any more than she had to. Too much stress was obviously affecting her brain. Just because she’d noticed practically everything about him, from his tarnished brass eyes to the worn areas of his jeans to the way they hugged his quads and glutes and…well, whatever—that didn’t mean he was aware of her in any physical sense.
Sasha would have had a field day if she could’ve tuned in on Marty’s thoughts. Her friend was always after her to add a little more vitamin S to her diet. Vitamin sex. “Maybe then,” she was fond of saying, “you’d get a decent night’s sleep and not be a zombie until noon.”
She wasn’t that bad. Just because she wasn’t a morning person—
He’d asked her a question. He was waiting for an answer. Kick in, brain—it’s four-thirty in the afternoon! “Reason why they didn’t work out? Well, one never showed up, and the next two, once they found out what I wanted done, told me I was wasting their time. Oh, and one of them said he could only work on weekends because the rest of the time he worked with a building crew at Nags Head.” She hadn’t yet mentioned the time constraints, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t a major job, after all. Not like starting from scratch and building a house.
“So—here it is.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the upstairs hall and the spare bedroom, which she planned to move into so that the larger bedroom could become her living room.
She had painted up here less than two years ago. She’d chosen yellow with white trim on the theory that sunshine colors would help kick-start her brain when she stumbled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom early in the morning.
While he looked around, tapping on walls, studying the ceiling, Marty told herself that it would get done. It was going to work. Her life was not in free fall—it
