a Brad Pitt smoky blue.
“Well, hel-lo,” he said, propping her back onto her heels.
Unbalanced by the surprise—and the man—she’d only managed, “Hello,” before a black-and-white bear of a dog rushed past them from inside the cottage. On its heels was a young boy wearing a green baseball cap, who paused to slap the man on his muscular shoulder and yell, “You’re it!” before racing down the stairs and across the beach after the dog.
“Time out!” the man shouted to him, then lowered his gaze to Ariel’s. “Sorry. Jake Renner.” He lifted her limp hand and helped her shake his, his eyes full of laughter at her shock.
“Ariel Adams,” she said faintly.
“Can I help you?” He was a little taller than she was and blond, with a deep tan on a muscular body that was pretty much on full display except for baggy Hawaiian-print swim trunks. He was way too relaxed for someone who’d been caught squatting in Trudy’s empty beach house.
“Is this Trudy Walters’s place?” Maybe she’d arrived at the wrong ramshackle cottage. She could only hope.
Something trilled sharply. For a second, in her exhaustion, she feared it was her brain warning it was about to blow. But it was just her cell phone, good for only two more days before service expired.
Jake Renner leaned against the doorjamb and watched her fumble for her phone.
“What?” she said irritably into it before she’d actually activated it. Pushing the button, she said, “Hello?”
“Ariel?” The faint voice belonged to her love-crazed ex-partner.
“Thank God, Trudy. I’m at the beach house, and, you won’t believe this, but—”
“There’s a man there. I know,” Trudy said. “I didn’t get the chance to tell you. I hired him before we left for London to paint and do some fix-up so I could sell the cottage.”
Ariel glanced at Jake—his hair was beautifully sun-streaked—then turned to the side to make the conversation more private. “I wish you’d said something.”
“I’m saying it now. And there’s one more thing….” Uh-oh. “He might be living there. As part of the deal, I told him he could stay until he finishes.”
“You told him he could live here?” Her voice squeaked. She shot Jake a wan smile.
“It’s good to have someone keep an eye on things. This was killing two birds with one stone.”
“You should have warned me.”
“I was a little distracted, I guess. And you took off so fast…. Jake’s a nice guy—completely trustworthy. He’s done work for my neighbor, watched her kids while she did errands. Very sweet. I talked to him several times.”
“But he’s going to live here?” Ariel whispered through gritted teeth. “With me?” Again, she tried to smile at Jake.
“There are two bedrooms, Ariel. And he’s not going to attack you or anything…unless you want that.” Then her voice went low. “If I’d had the time, let me tell you…wowsa.”
Wowsa? So un-Trudy-like. “Why are you telling me this?” she said, exasperated, hoping the cell phone hadn’t leaked Trudy’s words to her eavesdropper.
“Love is all around, Ariel. Stop and smell the roses.”
Smell the roses? All Ariel could smell were dead fish and seaweed…and maybe a faint coconut scent coming off Jake Renner’s gleaming body. “I’ll get back to you on that,” she said, her saccharine smile going sour. Her partner—who had yanked herself up by the straps of her own Aerosoles and, by the way, had once declared relationships speed bumps on the road to success—was now spouting Zen bumper stickers from her outpost in the Twilight Zone.
“I mean it,” Trudy insisted. “Rethink your life. I’ve started doing watercolors again.”
Ariel held her tongue.
“I’m sure you can work something out with Jake. He’s very easygoing.”
Ariel shot a glance at him. Easygoing and hard-bodied. He exuded that lazily confident air that most women went for. She got a little internal zing herself. Biology was undeniable, she guessed, no matter how inconvenient.
“Look at it this way,” Trudy continued. “If you don’t like the paint colors or tile I chose, you can change them—on my dime. If you want, add a few things while he’s available.”
“I can’t afford anything more. I don’t want anything more. I…oh, hell, this is just too much to think about.”
“You’ll do great, Ariel. Soliciting clients is not that hard. Your work speaks for itself.”
Not if she couldn’t speak for her work.
“Start with my leads, use my software and call me if you need a consult. If I’m anywhere I can be reached by phone, of course.” She gave that laugh again. More a trill than a tinkle, now that Ariel thought about it. “Seriously. You have everything you need to be successful.”
Everything except clients. “I appreciate your faith in me,” Ariel said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye-ee.”
Bye-ee? What had the twit on the other end of the line done with levelheaded Trudy? Was she wrapped in duct tape in a trunk somewhere? Ariel clicked off, thrust the phone back in her purse, and looked up at the nearly naked man wearing a bemused expression.
“So I guess you’re the house painter,” she said, trying to smile.
He bowed. “And the framer and the carpenter and the plasterer and, possibly, the electrician, judging from the shorts we’re getting in the bathroom.”
“Shorts in the bathroom?” she repeated weakly. Her already fuzzy brain throbbed with this new quandary. She didn’t deal well with change. Someone had definitely moved her cheese. “I need to sit down,” she said, bending to grab her suitcase handles, intending to head inside.
Jake took the bags from her, hefting them as though they weighed nothing, and held the door. She moved inside, sand grinding in her shoes, anxiety burning in her stomach. She caught more of Jake’s scent as she passed—warm sunshine, sweet musk and coconut—pleasant in a beachy kind of way.
She looked around the tiny living room and her heart sank. There wasn’t even a place to sit. Drop cloths covered what few pieces of furniture fit in the small space. Pieces of Sheetrock were propped against a canvas-covered lump—the sofa. Boards lay on the floor along with boxes of nails, tools, masking tape and a few cans of paint. More drop cloths covered two side chairs and the cocktail table.
There were two fancy bicycles leaning on one wall—one disassembled—and a colorful, battered surfboard braced against the half wall that led to the kitchen.
Jake set down her bags, shoved some of the sofa’s canvas away, and motioned gallantly for her to sit in the space he’d cleared. She dropped there with an unladylike plunk.
“Better?”
