she said huffily.
“Yeah, stupid,” he said.
“Fine,” she said stiffly. “I wouldn’t offer you this job if you were the last man on earth. I will find someone to build my door who has enough integrity that signing a contract doesn’t frighten them. And who doesn’t think my project is stupid! And who doesn’t think I’m an eccentric old—”
“Okay,” he said, mercifully preventing her from having to say it—that she was an old maid. “Nice meeting you. Have a nice life.”
He went to move by her and then paused, sending a wary glance at the couch to see if his work clothes had marked it. Bridget actually felt a treacherous softening for him when he looked relieved to see they had not. He edged his way to the door.
“Look,” he said, an infuriating note of protectiveness in his voice, as if he was the big, strong guy and she was the frail, feeble woman. “Be careful.”
“Of?” She tapped her foot and looked at her watch.
“Anyone who needs those kind of instructions for such a minor piece of work is going to be nothing but trouble.”
“I’ll judge that for myself, thank you.”
“I’m just telling you this because Fred would probably kill me if I didn’t.”
“I am eternally in your debt,” she said, but he missed the sarcasm entirely and kept on talking.
“You can buy a cat door at the local hardware. If someone charges you more than fifty bucks to install it, they’re cheating you.”
“I don’t want the kind from the hardware,” she said tightly.
“Why the hell not? They’re not R28, but I’m sure they work fine.”
She debated telling him the truth. She did not want to, and yet the words just slipped out of her mouth. “Conan might get stuck.”
She felt an instant sense of having betrayed her cat.
Justin turned and studied Conan. “Why do I get the feeling if that cat was any bigger and I was any smaller, he’d have me for supper tonight?”
He doesn’t like you. He’s a good judge of character. But she retained any dignity she had left by not saying it.
“Okay, so you want a custom cat door. No more than a hundred and fifty bucks. The fence is the bigger job. I wouldn’t pay more than fifteen hundred for it, including materials. Two thousand if it’s cedar.”
She felt good manners entailed she should say thank you, but she didn’t.
The thought evaporated instantly when he spoke again anyway.
“And don’t show that SOW-COW thing to anyone. No self-respecting contractor will want to work for you. It makes you look like a nitpicking perfectionist.”
A nitpicking perfectionist? That was at least as hurtful as being called Four-Eyes. Miss Priss. A brainiac. Old maid.
“And let me warn you, there are plenty of contractors out there who aren’t the least self-respecting. Crooks, who would milk a girl like you for all you had.”
“I did a lot of research to prepare that document,” she said with all her dignity. “And I’m not a girl.”
“I’m telling you that SOW COW spells one thing—T-R-O-U-B-L-E.” He looked her over, put his hand on the doorknob and then grinned at her with seducing and wicked charm. “And so do you,” he said.
Then he was gone.
Bridget snapped the front door closed behind Mr. West and then turned her back and leaned her full weight against it as if she had just narrowly escaped…well, something.
She wasn’t quite sure what.
Or maybe she was.
Though she firmly ordered herself not to, Bridget drifted over to her front window and peeked around the edge of the curtain.
She watched as he leaped into a truck that she probably would have needed a stepladder to get into.
Despite her firm orders to her mind not to think about his body, she remembered it in sharp detail: him sitting on her couch, the large muscle in his forearm jumping every time he took a sip of tea, his jeans molded over the ridged muscles of his thighs, his chest huge and solid under a stained T-shirt. He had probably done that on purpose, made those muscles leap, the swine.
“Well, who is swooning over the swine?” she demanded of herself. The truck started with a roar and pulled away from the curb in a spray of gravel.
He would do everything too fast. A blush heated her neck and her cheeks as her mind flew with that one. “I just meant,” she told herself sternly, “that Justin West is a man of rough edges and no refinement whatsoever.”
He had insulted her and treated her like an idiot.
“I’ll show him,” she told Conan. “You wait and see.”
Conan opened an eye and regarded her, looking unconvinced.
But Bridget went right to the phone book and made a list of every contractor in the county. In the morning she would check them out with the Better Business Bureau. Within a week she would have a cat door, and Justin West would be a faint, unpleasant memory.
Only that wasn’t quite how it worked.
Because a week later she was no closer to getting Conan his cat door. After submitting her prospectus by fax or courier to over a dozen contractors, she had been laughed at, sworn at and hung up on.
Even when she reluctantly retired her SOW, no one had the time to do such a small job. The one quote she was given seemed outrageous, and it didn’t even include an automatic cat-door opener. She was reluctantly grateful that Justin had given her a guideline for the pricing of her project.
To make matters worse, Conan seemed to be getting fatter. How could he be gaining weight? She was only putting out a limited amount of the diet food, and he barely seemed to be touching that. She could see the poor cat was depressed. She now saw he needed to be outside.
“Oh, Conan,” she said, touching his head. “The hair will grow back where the bandages tore it off. And you lost a whole two ounces this week. I’m sure of it.”
The cat seemed to know she was lying, just as her inner self knew it was totally untrue that she had not found Justin West just about the most maddeningly attractive man she had ever met.
The house was in darkness and Conan lay sprawled on Miss Daisy’s favorite green Victorian armchair, relishing the amount of orange hair he was successfully grinding into the fabric. Some things were off-limits even to him—this chair and the countertops to name a few—but he considered his trespass a legitimate part of his ongoing protest campaign. As soon as he was certain she was asleep, he would make his nightly raid.
Meanwhile he contemplated how life had deteriorated from the dieting doldrums
