brand on every single aspect of it. She liked that, the total control, at least at this stage of the planning. The house that Roxy built, or would build, as soon as he got over here and took care of that demon drip from the very bowels of hydrous hell. It was driving her insane right now, not to mention ruining her creativity! And just when she was all set to choose between marble or granite on the…no, wait. That couldn’t be right. Marble or granite dining room chairs? Where’d the bathroom vanity go?
That demented demon drip stole it!
Roxy’s gaze shifted back over to the culpable faucet, the one devising its next move against her, and she scrunched her face into an I-dare-you-to-drip-one-more-time glare. Fat lot of good that did, because at that very moment the fiendish faucet morphed itself into a living, breathing entity, one blatantly defying her to do something about it. Okay bitch, you asked for it. Take this… Drip! One single, solitary drip! A laugh! That’s what it was. The faucet Lucifer was laughing at her. Ddd…ri…ppp! This time an exclamation point after the laugh! “That does it,” she snapped. Roxy stormed across the kitchen floor and smacked the faucet with her open palm. “Ouch,” she squealed, pulling her hand back and shaking it. Didn’t phase the drip at all. In fact, the dribbles started coming in punctuated pairs. Drip, drip! Ha, ha, ha! Drip, drip! Ha, ha, ha! Double-drip dare ya!
Of course, Pounder on the other side of the wall started right up.
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord for ear-plugs, please,” Roxy muttered, pulling open her junk drawer to see if anything in it was up to the task of silencing the one-handled dribble monster. A wrench, a sledgehammer, a stick of dynamite! As she expected, though, there wasn’t a single, solitary usable thing in there—only a red plastic flashlight with dead batteries, naturally, some emergency candles with no matches, of course, and a fistful of wooden skewer sticks, not that she’d ever skewered a thing in her life. Well, maybe Pounder once or twice…in her dreams. But nothing labeled drip-fixer.
Frustrated that a pipe wrench hadn’t magically materialized when she needed it, Roxy started to slam the drawer shut, but caught herself in the nick of time, gently pushing it back into its place lest the wall-banging dervish on the other side started all over. Then she glared at the dreaded wall, “I hate this place, I hate this place.” Close her eyes, click her heels three times and maybe she’d land in the Rose Palace.
But mercifully, this apartment was only a temp—a refuge from the rodents and roaches and fleas, oh my! in her former apartment. And it was a quick hop to work as well—a stopgap until the Rose Palace was built, which she hoped wouldn’t be more than a year down the road. Provided he, the fixer of drips, ever got his pipe wrench over here.
Drip…ka-drip…ka-drip…drrrripppp…
“Okay, that’s it!” Roxy didn’t care what time it was. She’d already been reasonable with the guy, it didn’t work, so now it was time for him to come play on her turf during her hours. And she had his number. Right at the top of an important phone numbers list stuck to her fridge, just below her fave food deliveries—pizza first, then Chinese. So, he was about to make a little home delivery himself, substituting tool belt for pepperoni, and a pipe wrench for egg roll. It was time for Mr. Dazzling Derriere to get over there and prove just what he was good for, other than filling out his jeans in some really unbelievable ways.
“Six-three-three,” Roxy repeated the phone number from the list as she dialed. “You’d better be home…with all your tools ready to go.” She drummed her fingers impatiently on the countertop as the first four rings went by unanswered. By the sixth ring, she was tapping her right foot. “Two more rings, then I’m going to…”
“Hello.” The voice was a little jagged, a little thick, a whole lot gruff. And sexier than anything she’d ever heard at 3:38 in the morning. Or any other time of the morning, for that matter. This guy could be worth two truffles, she thought. But I’ll trade you two truffles for one fixed drip. That’s how desperate she was!
“Is this building maintenance? You are the handyman, aren’t you?” She didn’t even know his name. Hadn’t bothered asking. No need, since enjoying the marvelous view had been more than enough for her—until now.
“Call back in the morning.”
Certainly not a very friendly response for someone who dealt with the public, Roxy thought. “In the morning I’ll need an ark. You don’t happen to have one handy, do you? Or some bailing buckets?”
“Huh?”
“My faucet’s leaking. More like gushing all over the place. By morning my apartment’s going to be flooded.” Well, maybe that was a slight exaggeration, but demented drips called for desperate measures. “I need someone to come over here right now to fix it, before it starts leaking through the floor into the apartment below.” Well, maybe another teensy, weensy exaggeration. But if that’s what it would take to get him over there…
“Do you know what time it is, lady?” He was making no attempt to hide his irritation. “Because if this isn’t an emergency…” Bordering on downright hostile. But still so sexy she was thinking junk food. Always the infallible substitute.
“Well…” Roxy shrugged, then looked at the bug-eyed, tail-ticking cat clock on the wall. “Yep, I know exactly what time it is. I know what time it was when I called before—both times. And I called at respectable times then—you know, during the day, when you had that message on your voice mail saying to leave a message, that you’d call right back. But that didn’t work, did it? Since you never called back, and you never came over. So this time I thought if I called in the middle of the night when you’d probably be sleeping, I could wake you up and talk to you directly.” Roxy shut her eyes, trying to conjure up his sleeping image. Dark and brooding, hair tousled, sheet coming up only to his waist. Strong arms, naked chest…He wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing under the sheet because men like that always slept in the nude. Or they should, anyway. Damn waste of a lot of good maleness if they didn’t. God, she needed a Twinkie. “And since you’re up right now, why don’t you come on over here and do something about the drip? Okay?” With or without clothes.
“I’ll put you on the list for first thing in the morning,” he grumbled.
A turndown? He was actually refusing after she pleaded her case so eloquently? Well, that wasn’t good enough. If she had to suffer the drip, so did he. Roxy gritted her teeth for the next round. “Which is when? Nine o’clock? Ten o’clock? It can’t wait that long. It’s already oozing through the floorboards. You’ll be getting a call from my downstairs neighbor any minute.”
“Then go stick your finger in the dike, lady. That’ll hold it until morning.”
Roxy’s foot began its impatient tapping again. At this rate there really would be a flood before he got over there. “So, will a bribe work on you?” she blurted into the phone. Drip, drip. “Anything I have, short of sexual favors.” Of course, if he came over there the way she’d pictured him in bed… “Just please, come and take care of it right now. Okay? Or bring me a pipe wrench so I can do it myself.”
“You ever used a pipe wrench, lady?”
“Well, no. But how hard could it be? You clamp it on the pipe then twist.”
“All that leaks isn’t in the pipe.”
“Hey, I’ve got plenty of Bob Vila tapes and I know how to use them.” The only response to what she thought was a reasonable request was an audible, and very vexed, sigh. So she continued. “And if you let me use your tool I’ll promise not to ever call you at three-thirty
