the bulldozer when we tried to rip off an add-on porch. Now she has the neighbors signing petitions about everything. I’ve had two project managers quit.”
He had not expected this: that it felt so good to unburden himself.
“And what do you want me to do?”
“Take it over. Be my project manager.”
Her mouth fell open. “I can’t do that.”
“Bail me out, Linda. I made a mistake,” he admitted. “I fell in love with the place. I bought it on pure emotion, never a good thing to do.”
Pure emotion, he reminded himself, was always a bad thing. Always. Which is why he had to be very careful around Linda. He felt things he didn’t want to feel, even after just being with her for a few minutes.
She turned away from him, and dumped her coffee in the sink, but not before he’d seen the look in her eyes.
Memories.
This was the problem with having come to see her. Their lives intersected and crossed, drifted apart and then intersected again. In her eyes he had seen the memory as clearly as if it had flashed across a video screen.
Him and her and Blair, so young, at the very beginning, buying those horrible old houses, slapping on paint, filling flower boxes, making cosmetic changes and then keeping their fingers crossed when the For Sale sign went up.
“Flip-flop,” he remembered out loud. That was what she had called it. Blair had wanted a more sophisticated name for the company, the one they had gotten from combining both their surnames.
She turned from the sink and smiled weakly. In her eyes, he saw yearning. For the way things had once been? For the laughter and excitement of those first few sales? Of those early years?
Bobbi had asked him to help her. More than asked. She had begged him. And Linda still loved these old houses, as much as he did, maybe more. He wanted to walk away from her, for his own self-preservation. But he did not think a man who would walk away from a woman who needed something just to protect himself was a man he wanted to be.
“Will you come?” he asked. “At least have a look at the house I’ve invested your daughter’s college fund in?”
What he saw in her eyes was way more powerful than that.
“I don’t think I should.”
It wasn’t the out-and-out no that he’d expected to hear.
“You do still own half the company,” he reminded her.
“No, really.” She pointed at the unpacked boxes. “I’ve got a ton of stuff to do. Really.”
It was the fact that she said really twice that made him know what she really wanted.
“Come,” he said softly, foolishly. “Just help me talk to this woman. Look at the house. See if you get a feel for it.” He knew if he got Linda over to that house the rest would be a done deal.
“You don’t need me,” she said.
She was not the only perceptive one. Because in those words he heard how she longed to be needed, how the death of her husband and the departure of her daughter had set her adrift.
Bobbi had been right. He had abandoned Linda when she most needed a friend. It did not make him think highly of himself.
“No,” he said. “I don’t need you.” He wagged his eyebrows devilishly at her. “But I want you.”
She laughed, just as he had hoped she would. It was a good sound and a bad one both. It was the kind of sound a man could get addicted to, that could stop him in his tracks when he was way too sure he was doing the right thing.
She threw up her hands in surrender. “Okay,” she said, and he could tell the answer shocked and surprised and frightened her nearly as much as it shocked and surprised and frightened him.
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