turned back, now studying the new plywood underlayment for the kitchen floor. “Do you mind if I go upstairs?”
Still curious about what she was up to, enjoying the distraction, he pushed himself from the door frame and idly motioned for her to proceed.
Seeing her smile in the general direction of his chin, he watched her slip past him and into the dim living room. The faint scents of cinnamon and something impossibly fresh drifted behind her. Her shampoo, maybe. Or her soap.
She headed for the door at the far end of the room, only to stop as she reached the fireplace a few feet from the stairs. Looking as if she might be remembering something about the fireplace, too, she slowly ran her hand along the carved wood mantel.
It had taken him an entire day to sand the mantel down and repair the cracked corbels. All he needed to do now was stain it the dark cherry his sister had picked out and apply a few coats of varnish.
“You’re doing all of this yourself?” she asked.
“My uncle helped me tear out the kitchen and bathroom. And he or one of his workers will help me install the new cabinets when they arrive next week. But other than that…yeah. Pretty much.”
“This feels like satin.” The tips of her fingers caressed the smooth surface, her brow knitting as if she were savoring the velvety feel of the grain. Or, maybe, marveling at it. “I thought you were a detective.”
“I am.”
She glanced toward him. “Then, how do you know how to do all this?”
He gave a dismissing shrug. “Where I grew up, nobody called a carpenter unless he was a relative. Same went for a plumber or an electrician. Dad did the repairs around the house and I watched.”
“And helped,” she concluded, stroking the wood again. “A lot.”
That was true, he thought, though he’d all but forgotten the hours he’d spent watching his dad turn wood scraps into picture frames or the little tables and chairs he gave away to his cousins and the kids in the neighborhood. Pete MacInnes was a cop, too. Nearing retirement now. But carpentry always had been his escape and he’d seemed to enjoy sharing it with his son. He had never said as much. His father had never been big on words. He still wasn’t. But he was a patient man. He’d been a good teacher. And a slap on the back was still high praise.
“Yeah,” he finally murmured, pulling his thoughts back in. He didn’t want to think about his dad. Specifically, he didn’t want to think about what his dad had said about taking more leave than had been recommended.
Take a little more time, son. Think about supervising. Or working internal affairs. Your mom worries about you when you’re undercover.
He knew his mom worried. But his mom worried about everything. As for moving up the chain of command, the last thing he wanted was to sit behind a desk supervising a sting. He needed to be in the heart of it.
“You do beautiful work.”
As she spoke, Kelsey dropped her hand from the perfectly prepared wood. She’d had no idea all those years ago that they’d had so much in common. Years of watching and assisting her mom tend whatever had broken or malfunctioned around the diner had left her with a few eclectic skills of her own. She was probably the only student to graduate from the Boston Culinary Arts Academy who’d taken apart and reassembled a sink drain her first week of sauce class because another student’s engagement ring had been rinsed down the drain with her burned beurre blanc.
She might have told Sam that, too, had she not noticed the small white scar under the hard line of his jaw. Another peeked above the band of his T-shirt near his collarbone. The thin silvery line widened, looking slightly pink where it disappeared beneath the worn fabric.
Realizing she was staring, her glance jerked up.
He was waiting for her to move.
Her purpose for being there had her starting for the stairs. But she’d barely taken a step before his hand clamped around her arm.
“Be careful,” he told her. “The third and fifth steps are loose.”
Sam’s fingers circled her biceps. Beneath the thin fabric of her sleeve, the heat of his broad palm seeped into her flesh. The sensation unnerved her. More unnerving still was the way that heat slowly moved through the rest of her body.
Doing her best to ignore the disturbing effect, she murmured a quiet, “Okay.”
“Watch where you’re going when you get up there, too.”
Her response this time was only a nod. Yet, it satisfied him enough to let her go. Even then, the heat of his touch lingered, distracting her, making her even more aware of the feel of his eyes on her back as she started up the stairs, and carefully climbed past the boxes of nails and odd-looking metal brackets. The handrails had been removed, the steps were trailed with sawdust and most of those that weren’t loose creaked. But she was mostly conscious of the big man moving behind her—and the way he watched her when they reached the top and she stopped to glance around.
Many of the interior walls had already been removed. Piles of old lumber and sheets of knotty pine paneling were stacked everywhere. With little left to divide it, the area was mostly a series of upright studs and dangling wires.
With her back to him, Kelsey looked past a pair of sawhorses and a table saw with a long orange cord that ran to an electrical outlet beneath an open window. The glass globes had been removed from the overhead light fixtures. Bare bulbs and afternoon sunlight illuminated the varying degrees of destruction. In some places, the ceiling was missing.
The only room she was concerned with, however, was the one at the end with most if its paneling still intact. She could see into it through the row of studs that had once been the hallway wall. The wall separating it from what had been Grandma B’s sewing room was still there.
Sam lifted a board angled across what remained of a doorway. It landed with a clatter and a puff of dust on the stack behind him. “There’s not much left up here to see.”
Hugging her purse to her side, growing more uncomfortable by the second standing between him and her fantasies, she skimmed a glance past the open window. The window in Michelle’s old room was open, too.
Before he could catch her calculating, she glanced around once more.
“It feels different in here without the furniture and the walls. It’s sort of…”
“Unfinished?” he suggested.
“I was thinking more like…lonely.”
There always had been so much laughter there. Reminding herself there would be again once his little nephews moved in, she nonchalantly nodded toward the room that had been Michelle’s. In the middle of the wall jutting toward her, presumably resting on the floor, was the object she had no hope of reclaiming at the moment.
“Is that room going to stay the same size, or are you going to take out that wall, too?”
“It’s coming out.”
Her heart jerked. “Oh?”
“My
