Love Inspired November 2014 #2 (3 page)

Helen Bearson. He could have guessed she'd made the sale. Helen was a sweet lady, but the kind Jesse referred to as a “hobby broker.” Dollars to donuts the inspector was her brother. “Larry Barker?” Even someone he resented as much as Charlotte Taylor deserved better than that guy—Jesse wouldn't pay him to inspect a shoe box.

Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “A mistake, huh?”

He couldn't just sit there and let her make choices from what was likely bad information. Well, he
could,
but he wasn't the kind of guy who would—even under these circumstances. Jesse shucked off his heavy firefighter's coat and squatted down in front of the appliance, opening the oven door and peering inside. “Let's just say he wouldn't be my first choice,” he said, giving Barker more benefit of the doubt than he deserved. “I haven't seen anything that should have stopped your sale.” In fact, he knew there were no massive problems because he'd given the house a thorough once-over himself, far beyond his ten-minute walkthrough just now. Still, the word
sale
stuck in his throat. “This could really be just an old stove, not faulty wiring or anything.” He stared at a layer of grime so thick he could sign his name in it with a fingernail. “I don't think this has been used in a couple of years. You'll want to replace it.”

She groaned. “But I love the way this one looks. Does it cost a fortune to rehab a stove?”

Dark brown eyes and blond hair—the effect was striking, even with a frown on her face. “You can't really rehab a stove. Still there are ones that look old-fashioned but function like new. They're pricey, but you had to have known you were going to put some money into the place.”

“Well of course I did, but I was hoping to wait longer than two hours before the first repair.”

Despite his irritation, Jesse liked her sense of humor. He glanced out the window to where the three other firemen were putting gear back into the truck. Normally he didn't fish for contractor work while on firefighting duty—especially given this particular circumstance—but she was pretty and clearly on her own and, well, seemed at a loss. Sure he'd regret it but unable to stop himself, Jesse swallowed the last of his pride and pulled a business card from his pants pocket. “I'm a licensed contractor over at Mondale Construction. If you like, give me a call tomorrow and I'll walk through the house with you over the weekend. I can go over what Larry said and either confirm it or tell you differently. I'll help you figure out what really needs work right away and what can wait until you've gotten over the sticker shock.” If he couldn't have the house, maybe he could at least get the work, much as it would dent his ego.

She narrowed her eyes. “Why would you do that?”

He hated when people gave him “the contractor out to take you to the cleaners” look. “Because you're a friend of the chief's. Because I'm a nice guy.”
Because I'm an idiot and am trying not to be a sore loser.
“And because I can make sure Mondale gives you a good price for work I could do and recommend a couple of guys for the other stuff—guys who will do it right and not empty your checkbook for the sport of it.”

She took the card but still eyed him. Good. She shouldn't be trusting everyone who walked in here offering to help her, even him. She looked smarter than that, and he could bring himself to be glad she was acting like it. “So maybe you really are a nice guy,” she said, still sounding a bit doubtful.

“Don't take my word for it. Look, you ought to know I don't normally pitch work on duty. Only I think Chief and Melba might ride me if I didn't offer my help, given the—” he waved at the smoke now almost completely gone from the kitchen “—circumstances. It's the least I can do.”

She looked unconvinced, and a part of him was ready to be rid of the obligation. He'd tried, wasn't that enough? He gave it one last shot of total honesty. “Frankly, this place is a contractor's dream—good bones but needing loads of work. And I could use the work.” After a second, he looked out the window and added, “Why don't you think about it? I've got to get back to the truck anyway—the guys are waiting for me.”

She planted her hands on her hips. “No, I don't need to think about it. Can you come by after church Sunday?”

She went to church. Of course she went to church; she was a friend of Chief Bradens and his wife. Not wanting to look like the stranger to services that he was, he hazarded a guess based on when he usually saw his friends out and about on Sundays. “Eleven-thirty?”

“Perfect.” She smiled—an “I'm rattled but I'll make it” lopsided grin that told him she'd do okay even if this wasn't the last disaster of her new home. Her new home. Life was cruel some days.

Jesse nodded at the kitchen's vintage molding and bay widows. “This will make a nice weekend place. You'll do just fine.”

She made a face. “That's just what I was telling myself when the stove caught on fire.”

“Everything looks okay, but I'd hold off on teatime until we check out all the appliances if I were you.” His radio beeped, letting him know the rest of the crew outside was getting impatient. “Once you get the rest of your utilities up and running, turn on the fridge so we can check how cold it gets.”

She perked up. “Did that already. Turned it on, I mean.” To prove her point, she opened the ancient-looking refrigerator and made a show of peering inside. “Chilling down, nothing scary inside.” Her head popped back out and she shut the door. “The dishwasher, I'm not so sure. It looks older than I am.”

For an intriguing second, Jesse wondered just how old that was. She looked about his age, but he'd never been good at guessing those things. “Yeah, I'd hold off.” He gestured to the single mug sitting beside a box of fancy-looking tea on the otherwise bare 1950s-era Formica countertop. “Not like you've got a load of dishes to do anyhow.”

That lit a spark in her eyes. “Oh, I own tons of dishes. I collect vintage china. I've got enough to fill all the shelves in this house and my apartment back in Chicago twice over. Not that I'd put any of them in this old dinosaur, anyway.” She shrugged. “Well, thanks, Officer—” she squinted down at the card “—Sykes.” She held out her hand.

He shook it. “I'm not an officer, I'm just part of the volunteer brigade. So Jesse will do. I'll see you Sunday at eleven-thirty. And as for your new house celebration, go on down to Karl's Koffee and tell him what happened. If I know Karl, he'll give you a free cup of tea and maybe some pie to smooth things over. You deserve a better welcome to Gordon Falls than one from us.” Jesse decided he'd call from the truck and ask Karl to do just that. Only, knowing Karl, he'd have done it with no nudging at all.

He felt a tiny bit better for pulling that sweet smile from her. “Maybe I'll do just that. Thanks.”

Jesse tried to ignore the teasing looks that greeted him as he climbed into the truck. “Isn't she the prettiest run of the day.” Yorky, an older member of the department who could never be counted on for subtlety, bumped Jesse on the shoulder.

“Of the week,” Wally Forman corrected, waggling an eyebrow for emphasis. “Only it's not so fun for you given the circumstances, is it, Jesse?”

“Could have fooled me,” Yorky snickered.

Jesse merely grunted and settled farther down in his seat. Maybe Wally would let it go.

Wally stared at him. “It is, isn't it? That's the one?”

Narrowing his eyes in the strongest “not now” glare he could manage, Jesse didn't answer.

Wally leaned back in his seat and pointed at Jesse. “It is. I knew it. Oh, man, tough break.”

Yorky looked at Jesse, then at Wally, then back at Jesse again. “What? What am I missing?”

Jesse cocked his head to one side in an “I'm warning you” scowl aimed straight at Wally.

Not that it did any good. “That's the house. The one Jesse talked about buying. Sweetie-Pie up there just bought it right out from underneath him. How many more months before you would have saved up enough for the down payment, Sykes? It had to be soon.”

Was Wally going out of his way to drive the sore point home? “Two.” Up until this moment Jesse had managed to let Little Miss China Cabinet's sweet smile tamp down his irritation at being beat to the purchase table.

Yorky hissed. “Ouch!”

“Yeah,” Jesse repeated, craning his neck back to look at the tidy little cottage. “Ouch.”

Chapter Three

“M
elba, I'm not the first person in the world to lose my job,” Charlotte told her dear friend as they sat at her table after dinner that night. Charlotte had managed to avoid the topic of conversation with Melba for days, but tonight Clark was down at the firehouse for the evening and her friend had cornered her in the kitchen. “I wasn't even the last at Monarch—there were three other envelopes on Alice's desk.”

Melba had Maria settled in the crook of her arm. “I'm just worried about you. Are you okay? You seem to be taking it well, but...”

Charlotte kept telling herself that she was handling it as well as could be expected, but she also spent too many moments stuffing down a deep panic. “Do I have a choice?”

“Not you. You'd never go to pieces, even at something like this.” She caught Charlotte's eye. “But you could. I mean, don't feel like you have to put on any kind of front with me. I've gone to pieces enough times in front of you.”

While Charlotte was sure Melba meant what she said, the idea of giving in to the fear—even for a moment and even with a dear friend—felt like opening the big green floodgates at the end of town. Best to keep that door firmly shut. “I'm okay. I think I'm okay. I mean, I'm scared—you're supposed to be in my situation—but I can push through this. I'm choosing to feel more like I'm waiting for whatever God's got around the corner than I've been broadsided by a job change.”

Melba leaned in. “The best part is you get to wait here. I'll be so happy to have you around.”

“Well, part of the time. I expect I'll need to take lots of trips back to Chicago for job-search stuff and interviews eventually. Only it'll be great to have the cottage as a distraction. All the books say to take on inspiring new projects so it doesn't become all about the job search. This is a great time to get a serious creative groove on. I need a place outside of my résumé to channel all this energy.”

All that was true, but there was still a small corner of her chest that felt as if she had planted her flag at the top of a very high mountain with no idea how to climb back down. She nodded to the thick file of plans, the one she'd taken from her desk on her last day at Monarch. “I wonder if Mima had any idea the incredible gift this is going to be. To get to fix this place up exactly the way I want it? To have enough to do that after I bought it? Debt free? It's a huge blessing.”

Melba gave her a cautious smile. “I know you got it at a great price, but it needs so much work.” She thumbed through the file of clippings and swatches with her free hand while Maria gave a tiny sigh of baby contentment in her other arm. “Don't you think it's a big risk to take at a time like this?”

Charlotte shrugged. “Yes, it is a big risk. But it's a worthwhile risk. Just the thought of being able to do this up right gives me so much energy. I don't care if I have to buy shelving instead of shoes. Or stop eating until October.”

“You're not going to fix up the whole place and decorate it all at once, are you?” Melba turned to a magazine page showing chintz kitchen curtains. “Won't that cost more than you have?”

“I
have
to do some of the fixing up as soon as possible. The stove, the heating, the upstairs bathroom—they need renovation before they'll be usable, and all that stuff has to be done if I'm going to be able to live there. Do I need the designer concrete sink right away? Well, I don't know yet. It's probably smarter to get exactly what I want now—once you start ripping stuff out, you might as well do it right the first time rather than rip stuff up again a year later.”

“Charlotte...”

“I know, I know. Stop worrying—I'm not going to take my aggressions out at the home decorating store. I should probably have the home improvement channels blocked off my cable service for now. But since I don't have a job, I can't even afford cable television, so that solves that anyway, doesn't it?” She leaned back in her chair, as if the sheer weight of Melba's doubts had pushed her there. “This is going to be fine. Really. I won't let this get out of hand.”

Melba pushed the file back across the table to Charlotte. “Easy to say now, but these things have a way of snowballing. Even the remodeling costs for the house I inherited from Dad sent Clark and me reeling.”

When Melba's father had died last year after a long battle with Alzheimer's, it left Clark and Melba to remake her childhood home into the one that now housed her new family. The transition had been complicated and expensive—going beyond what it would have cost in both time and money to start fresh with a new house—but it just proved Charlotte's point: the house gave off a palpable sense of history. She'd felt something like it from the cottage that first visit. The once-charming cottage seemed to beckon to her, begging to be restored. She knew it was a risky prospect, but she couldn't make herself feel as if she'd made the wrong choice. She'd chosen a challenging path, yes, but not a wrong one. “I'm going to be fine, Melba. Now let's drop the subject and let me hold that baby.”

Melba stood up and handed Maria to Charlotte. As Maria snuggled in against her shoulder, Charlotte breathed in the darling scent of baby-girl curls. “You've got the best of both worlds, Maria. Your mama's curls and your daddy's red hair. You may hate it when you're five, but guys are gonna follow you like ducklings when you're seventeen.”

Melba laughed as she warmed Charlotte's tea and set down a plate of cookies. “Clark's already informed me Maria will be banned from dating until she's thirty. And no firefighters.”

Charlotte applied an expression of false shock. “Well, I'll back him up on the ‘no firefighters' policy, but that's kind of a tough sell. He's the fire chief, isn't he?”

Sitting back down, Melba laughed again. “I think it's
because
he's chief. He's seen a little too much of the department's social life or heard a little too much in the locker room.”

“They don't seem that rough around the edges to me. As a matter of fact, Jesse Sykes seems like a stand-up guy.” Charlotte could feel Maria softening against her shoulder. Melba was right—the world was always a better place with a baby drooling on your shoulder.

“He's an original, that's for sure.” Melba selected a cookie and dunked it in her tea. “I don't know about stand-up, but he sure stands out. You can trust him, though. He did some of the work here on the house. Good work, if you don't mind the singing.”

“The what?”

“Jesse has a habit of breaking out in Motown hits. If you haven't heard him yet, you will. Don't you remember he sang at Alex and JJ's wedding?”

“
That
was Jesse Sykes?” Charlotte recalled a rather impressive version of “My Girl” at her cousin's wedding. She tried to imagine Jesse's soulful voice echoing in the cottage living room, but she couldn't conjure up the image. “Mostly he just made wisecracks when I talked to him this time. Funny guy.”

“Oh, he's a cutup, that's for sure. And a good firefighter. Clark wouldn't put up with his antics otherwise.” Melba got a conniving look on her face. “You should hire him. I think he'd be good for you. An upbeat guy to have around in a tight spot.”

Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “Oh, no, you don't.”

“Don't what?” Melba's innocent blink hid nothing.

Charlotte whispered into Maria's ear, “Your mama's getting ideas.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, yes, you are. I know you too well. Look, I know we were discussing behavior, not profession, but he's a fireman, Melba. I won't get into a relationship with a first responder no matter how well behaved. We've been through this how many times? Nothing's changed. I've got way too many memories of sitting up nights with Mom at the kitchen table.”

“Your dad was a policeman, I know, but—”

“But nothing. Same stress, different uniform. Melba, I've got nothing against you and Clark, and goodness knows JJ's done terrific at the firehouse, but I know what I can handle and what I can't. I've never dated someone who does that kind of work and I don't plan to start now.”

* * *

A tiny war was going on in Jesse's chest—and in his pride—as he walked up the overgrown sidewalk to Charlotte's cottage Sunday morning. This was supposed to be his cottage. The place needed loads of work, and he knew he was the best man to complete it. He'd planned the rehab of this place a dozen times, imagining living in the home as he upgraded fixtures, appliances and wiring until he could turn around and sell it for a tidy profit. Or even stay there and use it as the showcase for what he could do with other properties. But that opportunity was lost now.

The only opportunity left in this situation was to be the guy hired for the renovation job. If a woman could afford a vacation cottage at Charlotte's age, she probably wouldn't haggle over the cost the place would require to be done up right. His business sense knew that made her an excellent customer even if she was a thorn in his side. The house needed loads of work, and loads of work could mean a big check for Mondale and for him. As he lay in bed last night, Jesse told himself a job this size could leave him with even more funds than he'd anticipated making over the summer. Funds to buy another house—bigger and better to soothe his wounded pride and show his father just how savvy a businessman he could be.

All this should have had him dreaming up the perfect sales pitch as he approached the door—and yet for some reason, he wasn't. He prided himself on knowing how to optimize a customer with deep pockets, only Charlotte Taylor didn't have that entitled look about her. In fact, she looked a little...lost. The way he'd looked when he'd first put on the bulky, cumbersome firefighter's gear—right at the launch of a dream, forcing an outer confidence that didn't quite cover the dazzled and doubtful person on the inside.

As he pushed the rusty doorbell button, Jesse still wasn't sure how he was going to play it for this meeting.
Just wing it,
he told himself.
You wing it all the time.
He pushed the button again, listening for the chimes inside the house once he noticed the living room window was open to his left.

No sound. Sometimes it was useful to start a customer off with a small project, but he'd planned on something larger than a broken doorbell. He knocked on the door loudly and leaned over the wrought-iron railing to yell into the window. “Charlotte!”

A second knock and another yell produced no reply. He pivoted to see her little blue car wasn't in the cottage drive. Maybe church ran long today. He could just start without her while he waited. After checking his watch, Jesse pulled out his notes.

He'd already made his own list of what the house needed, but he'd go through the process of re-creating a list to suit her taste. He just hoped it wouldn't clash with the character of the house he saw so clearly. Catering to a client's whims was one thing—ignoring his own clear ideas on this particular place was going to be quite another. Still, he'd do it to rack up enough funds to move forward. He was bone-tired of delays and detours, not to mention his father's ever-increasing digs.

Pacing the cottage's front stoop, he toed boards and pushed harder on the railing only to have it creak and pull out from its mountings. He added the doorbell and railing to his handwritten list and began scanning the front of the house for anything he'd missed.

He'd added four more items by the time Charlotte's small blue hatchback pulled into the drive behind his large brown pickup.

“Sorry!” she called, breathless and airy in a blue print dress with a lacy sweater that rippled behind her as she came up the steps. “Church went on forever. I mean, a good forever, but enough to make me late. I hope you weren't waiting long.”

Jesse waited for her to say something like “I noticed you weren't in church.” Or “Have you ever gone?” or the half dozen other thinly disguised recommendations he got from Melba, Clark and various other friends around town. “No, I'm fine. Hey, JJ told me you're her cousin. You were at the wedding, too, weren't you? On the boat?”

“Wedding of the year, wasn't it?”

As the only female firefighter in Gordon Falls, JJ Cushman stuck out already before her legendary wedding to Alex Cushman on a steamboat on the Gordon River. “A big shindig, that's for sure.”

“And then there's my other cousin, JJ's brother, Max.” She fished for her keys and wrestled the old door lock open. “And Melba's baby is my new goddaughter. I know lots of people in Gordon Falls.”

They walked through the front hallway to the kitchen, where she plunked an enormous tapestry handbag—a vintage artsy-looking thing, he was glad to notice—down on the kitchen counter. “And now I know Karl. You were right. He did give me a slice of pie for my troubles.” She sighed, a happy, shoulder-heaving, contented sigh. “This is a nice town.”

It was, most of the time. “It has its moments.”

Charlotte began digging through the massive bag. “I made a list last night of the things I think the house needs—as a jumping-off point.” She pulled out a notebook with Victorian ladies dancing on the cover. “I'm no expert, though.”

Jesse put a hand to his chest. “That's okay, because I am. Only there's an awkward question I really should ask first.”

“Where do I want to hide the bodies?” She didn't need the pink lipstick to show off that dynamic smile; her eyes lit up with humor.

The joke made the next question easier to ask. “No, what's your budget?”

“Oh, that.” He couldn't quite gauge her response.

“I mean, you don't have to tell me,” he backpedaled, suddenly feeling his poor-loser wounds had run off with his diplomacy, “but it's better if I know. I can make smarter recommendations if I have a total-figure picture on the whole project.”