Smitten

  “It’s that dang big car,” Elsie said. “It don’t fit in one lane. When I get some money I’m going to get myself one of them nice little Japanese cars.” She noticed Matt standing to one side of the family group. “Who’s this?”

  “This is my boss, Matt Hallahan,” Lizabeth said. “He’s come over to take a look at the house for me. Matt, this is my aunt, Elsie Hawkins.”

  Elsie Hawkins had tightly curled steel gray hair, sharp blue eyes, and an uncompromising mouth. She was dressed in support hose, tennis shoes, and a tailored blue shirtwaist dress that came to just below her knees. Matt thought she looked like she could wrestle alligators and win.

  Lizabeth affectionately ruffled Jason’s hair. “And these are my sons, Jason and Billy.”

  Both boys had brown hair that had recently been cut. They were dressed in board shorts and T-shirts and had skinned knees and quick smiles.

  “Wow, he’s got a tattoo,” Jason said. “Neat!”

  Elsie looked at the tattoo. “What’s that funny writing on it?”

  “It’s Chinese. I joined the navy right out of high school. We made a port call in Taiwan, and I got drunk and ended up with this tattoo.”

  “Pretty fancy,” Elsie said. “What do those Chinese squiggles mean?”

  “Uh…” He shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s sort of a rhyme. It has to do with…sexual relations with a duck.”

  Elsie clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. “That’s terrible,” she said.

  “I know what it is!” Jason said. “I heard it on cable television. It’s…”

  “Jason Kane!” Lizabeth said. “Don’t you have a football to throw around?”

  “Ferguson ate it.”

  “Ferguson’s our dog,” Lizabeth explained to Matt. “He eats things.”

  Matt grinned. The place was a loony bin. He loved it.

  Lizabeth made an expansive gesture with her arms. “Well, what do you think of the house?”

  He looked around critically. Even if he helped her, he doubted she could afford to do all the necessary work. His guess was she was trying to make it on her own, without her father’s or her husband’s money, and she was having a tough time of it. “Needs a little paint,” he volunteered. “Maybe a few new shakes for the roof.”

  Elsie looked at him sideways. “Cut the baloney. What do you think it really needs?”

  “A lot of paint. It has to be scraped and primed, then painted. It needs an entire new roof, new aluminum gutters, and all of the shutters need to be rehung.”

  “So, you’re in the construction business,” Elsie said. “I suppose you got ladders and paint scrapers and such. Why don’t you stay for supper. We’re having meat loaf.”

  Lizabeth groaned. “Aunt Elsie, that’s not very subtle.”

  “I’m an old lady. I don’t have to be subtle.”

  Matt grinned. “Meat loaf sounds great.”

  Elsie looked him over. “You a bachelor?”

  “Yup.”

  “You could do worse,” she said to Lizabeth.

  Lizabeth glared a warning at Elsie. “He’s my boss!”

  “He make a pass at you yet?”

  Lizabeth felt her ears burning.

  “I knew it,” Elsie said, turning back to the house. “Supper’ll be ready at five-thirty.”

  An hour later Matt sat on the porch steps and reviewed his findings with Lizabeth. “The toilets are easy and inexpensive to fix. You can do them right away. I have some rollers and brushes you can borrow, and for a relatively small amount of money you can paint the interior. You can do it one room at a time, if you want. The floors are going to need a professional. You have a new water heater, and the furnace doesn’t look half-bad. That’s on the plus side.”

  “Someday, this house is going to be beautiful,” Lizabeth said. “I’m going to paint it yellow with white trim, and I’m going to plant flowers everywhere.”

  Matt leaned against the railing and closed his eyes. He was jealous of her, he realized. She had two kids and a wacky aunt, a dog, a cat, a house she loved. She had a future that was filled to the brim with life. Somehow, he hadn’t fashioned that for himself. He lived in a rented town house, all alone. And he built houses for other people. It had always been enough, but right now it seemed depressingly deficient.

  “Lizabeth, your house is beautiful now. It will always be beautiful. It doesn’t have anything to do with paint or plumbing or petunias. Your house is beautiful because you’re beautiful.”

  It was a full minute before she could respond. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. It was the most perfect compliment she could imagine. Her eyes filled with tears, and she bit into her lower lip. “Thank you.”

  “Oh damn, you’re not going to cry, are you?”

  “I’m very emotional. It’s one of my faults.”

  It was the sort of fault he could get used to, he thought. You would always know where you stood with her. She was guileless.

  Jason ran across the lawn after a softball. He swept it up and threw it to his brother. “You want to play with us?” he asked Matt. “We need a pitcher.”

  “Do I get to bat?”

  “Sure, you can be up first, but you’ll never get anything off of Billy. He stinks as a pitcher.”

  Matt took the bat and knocked it against his rubber-soled boots a couple of times. He shuffled his feet and practiced his batter’s stance. He looked Billy in the eye and set himself back for the pitch. “Okay, Billy Kane, give me your best shot,” he said.

  Billy slow-pitched him an underhand bloop. Matt smiled and swung, enjoying the feel of connecting with the ball. It was a perfect line drive, fast and hard, and zoomed straight as an arrow to Elsie’s Cadillac, where it shattered the passenger-side window.

  There was a full minute of silence.

  “You’re a dead man,” Billy said. “She’s gonna kill you.”

  “Quick, get the baseball,” Jason said. “We’ll tell her a meteor did it.”

  The screen door squeaked on its rusty hinges and Elsie stepped out onto the porch. “What was that crash?”

  There was an audible gasp when she saw her car, and then her false teeth came together with a sharp click. She surveyed the group of bystanders with steely eyes and with her mouth drawn into a tight little line. Her eyes locked in on Matt, standing flat-footed, grinning his most endearing, sheepish grin, still holding the bat.

  “Got good stuff on the ball?” she asked him.

  “He’s going to help us fix the toilets,” Lizabeth said.

  Elsie didn’t blink. “The toilets, huh?”

  “She doesn’t look impressed,” Matt whispered to Lizabeth. “Maybe we should up the ante. Tell her I’m going to paint the living room. Tell her I’ll put a new floor in the bathroom.”

  “That isn’t necessary,” Lizabeth said. “It was an accident.”

  “I know that, and you know that, but Elsie looks like she’s contemplating death by meat loaf.”

  He looked over Lizabeth’s shoulder at Elsie. “New bathroom floors,” he called to her. “Ceramic tile.”

  That caught Elsie’s attention. “Ceramic tile? Does that include new grout around the tub?”

  Matt leaned into Lizabeth and murmured into her hair. “Everybody has his price.”

  Lizabeth glanced at Matt from the corner of her eye. “Really? What’s your price?”

  “What do you want to buy?”

  “What would you be willing to sell?”

  The question hung in the air. He didn’t know what he wanted to sell. He was afraid it might be everything. His heart, his soul, his chromosomes. He suspected that he offered to tile the bathroom not because he was afraid of Elsie but because he wanted to impress Lizabeth.

  More than that, he wanted to do something nice for her. And he wanted to do something nice for the house. Now that he’d had a chance to see it up close, he realized it had wonderful potential. The basic structure was sound despite yea
rs of neglect. It was well laid out and had nice detail. Most important, it was the sort of house that grew on you. It had character. Just like Lizabeth.

  When he didn’t answer immediately Lizabeth’s mouth curved into a grim smile. “Pretty scary question, huh?”

  “The question’s okay. It’s the answer that’s got me shaking in my boots.”

  Two days later Lizabeth looked at the can of paint Matt had set out for her and felt her temper kick in.

  “I’ve been on this job for three days, and all I’ve done is paint trim. I’ll admit I’m not too bright about construction work, but I’m smart enough to realize that trim does not ordinarily get four coats of paint.”

  Matt sighed. He didn’t know what to do with her. He’d never had a woman on the job site before. Equal rights was fine in theory, but he didn’t know how to go about putting it to work.

  He had some old-fashioned ideas about women. His natural instinct was to protect and pamper. Asking a woman to clean half a ton of construction debris from a basement made him feel like a brute.

  And to make matters even more complicated, he was sort of in love with Lizabeth Kane. Every day his feelings for her grew stronger. He’d asked her out, but she’d turned him down. Probably a weekend in Paris hadn’t been a good choice for a first date. He’d gotten carried away, he admitted.

  “I want to be treated like any trainee. I want to learn how to do carpenter things,” Lizabeth said. “I’ve been watching the carpenters work on House Three, and most of what they’re doing seems pretty straightforward.”

  “Lizabeth, it’s ninety degrees outside, and it’s only eight o’clock in the morning.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.

  Matt made a frustrated gesture and kicked the can of paint into a corner. “You win. But you have to work with me. I want you where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “What kind of an attitude is that?”

  “It’s the best attitude I can manage right now.”

  Four hours later Lizabeth pushed her damp hair from her forehead and readjusted the baseball hat Matt had given her. She hadn’t been more than three steps away from Matt all morning, hammering one nail for his twenty, and she was sure he was slowing his pace so he wouldn’t embarrass her. He’d slathered suntan lotion on her fried neck, bandaged the bleeding blisters on her hands, and kicked a carpenter off the project for unnecessary cussing. He was driving her crazy.

  He looked up when she paused in her hammering, and he smiled at her. “Want a soda?”

  One more soda, and she was sure she’d float away. He’d been pouring liquid into her since ten o’clock. Undoubtedly he knew what he was doing, but she couldn’t take any more. “We have to talk.”

  Thank goodness. He didn’t think he could endure another half hour of watching her work. She seemed so frail, with her curly hair tucked under the baseball cap and her yellow T-shirt clinging to her slim frame. He wanted to whisk her away to a cool restaurant. Get her all dressed up in something pretty and feed her strawberries dipped in chocolate.

  “We could take an early lunch break and talk in the shade, under the trees,” he suggested hopefully.

  “I don’t want to take an early lunch break. I want to work like the rest of the men. I just don’t want to work with you.”

  “Want to run that by me again?”

  “You’re overprotective. It’s sweet of you to want to take care of me, but I need to stand on my own.”

  She began to hammer while she talked. “I want to be accepted as an equal out here. That’s never going to happen if you keep hovering over me like a mother hen.”

  He had a news flash for her. She was never going to be an equal. She was going to be the boss’s wife. Equal that!

  “This is just your first day as a carpenter. You don’t know anything.”

  “I know lots of things. I know how to hammer a nail. I can’t hammer nails as fast as you can, but I can hammer them just as well. Look at this one. It’s perfect.”

  Matt looked at the nail and agreed it was pretty good. “Okay, so you can hammer a nail, but you have no common sense. You let yourself get sunburned and blistered. And you try to carry things that are too heavy for you.”

  He was right. She’d been stupid. “I’ll be better. I’ll keep my hat on, and I’ll wear gloves.”

  “What about the heavy stuff?”

  “You’ll have to settle for two out of three. I want to pull my weight.”

  Matt pressed his lips together. Damn stubborn female. She had him. There was no way he’d ever fire her as long as she wanted the job. And there was no way he could force her to obey his every command. He couldn’t exactly duke it out with her if they had a disagreement. She’d never go out with him then.

  He took a deep breath and studied the toe of his work boot while he got his temper under control. “If you want to continue to work here, you’re going to have to work with me.” He saw her nose belligerently tip up a fraction of an inch, and he held up his hands. “However, I’ll try to be less of a mother hen.”

  “I suppose that’s an okay compromise.”

  The truth was, she enjoyed being next to him. The excitement was always there, but running parallel to that was a comfortable rapport. Matt Hallahan felt like a friend. Despite his tattoo, he felt like someone she’d known and liked for a very long time.

  And as long as she was being honest with herself, she had to admit that a part of her enjoyed being clucked over. It had been a lot of years since anyone had regarded her as fragile, probably because she wasn’t, and while she couldn’t let it interfere with learning her job, she secretly treasured the attention.

  She was working on the second deck of the house, laying four-by-eight sections of three-quarter tongue-and-groove plywood. She stuck a nail into the wood and whacked it three times, driving it home. She moved over six inches and set another nail.

  She was beginning to understand why Matt liked building houses. Every hour you could stand back, look at your progress, and know you were making something that would last a long, long time. Children would grow up in the house, they’d leave for college, get married, and return with children of their own—and still the house would remain. It was important that the house be built correctly, she decided. It wasn’t just a matter of safety. It had to do with pride and creativity and immortality.

  She stood up, took a step backward to admire her handiwork, and fell into the open stairwell.

  Benny Newfarmer, all 254 pounds of him, was there to break her fall. He caught her square in the chest and crashed to the floor with a thud that carried the length of the cul-de-sac. Lizabeth sprawled across Newfarmer, stunned by the impact, then rolled off his huge belly as if it were a giant beach ball.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said to him. “Are you all right?”

  Newfarmer stared unblinking into space, his breath coming in short gasps.

  Bucky Moyer ambled over. “Cripes,” he said, “I’ve never seen him flat on his back like this. He looks like a beached whale.”

  Lizabeth nervously cracked her knuckles. “Why isn’t he saying anything? Why isn’t he getting up? Maybe we should call an ambulance.”

  Bucky grinned. “Nah, he’s okay. You just caught him by surprise. He’s not used to women jumping on his body like that.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” Newfarmer said, struggling to get up. “You just took me by surprise.”

  Lizabeth glanced over at Matt. He had his hands on his hips, and his face looked as if it had been chiseled in granite. It was the sort of steely-eyed, hard-jawed look you get when you grit your teeth for a long time. She grimaced. “Are you mad at me?”

  He unclenched his teeth and expelled a long breath. “No, I’m not mad at you. I’m just glad you didn’t kill him. It would take a forklift to get him out of here.” He unbuckled his carpenter’s belt. “Lunch, everyone.”

  Matt sat back and waited until the men had dispersed. When he was alone with Lizabeth, he stare
d at her for a long time before speaking. He was torn between wanting to take her in his arms and hold her close and wanting to shake her until her eyes crossed.

  “Lizabeth…”

  He was at a loss for words. What the hell was he supposed to say to her? He’d known her less than a week, and his heart had stopped when he saw her disappear down the stairwell.

  “Lizabeth, you really scared me.” He gave a frustrated shake of his head, because what he’d said was so inadequate.

  He pulled her to him and took her face in his hands while he slowly lowered his mouth to hers. He kissed her with infinite tenderness, pressing her closer, needing to feel her soft warmth, needing to be reassured that she was all right, that she was his, at least for the moment.

  Lizabeth tilted her head back so she could look at him. “That felt like a serious kiss.”

  “Mmmm. I’m having some pretty serious thoughts.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for serious thoughts.”

  The pain went straight to his heart. He clapped a hand to his chest and grunted. “Boy, that hurts. The first time I have long-term plans for a relationship and look where it gets me. Heartbreak City.”

  He was a flirt, Lizabeth decided. The nicest man she’d ever met, and also the most outrageous. Long-term plans probably meant an hour and a half. She thought about his offer to take her to Paris and smiled, wondering what he would have done if she’d accepted.

  “Sorry, I never get serious in the first four days.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” he admitted. “Four days isn’t a lot of time. How long do you think it will take?”

  “To get serious?” Lizabeth smiled. “I don’t know. I don’t mean to be insulting, but it’s not high on my list of priorities. I have to find myself.”

  “I didn’t know you were lost. Maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong places.”

  “Easy for you to joke about it,” Lizabeth said. “You have a secure personality. You didn’t grow up as ‘Mac Slye’s Kid.’ And you didn’t spend ten years as Paul Kane’s wife and Jason and Billy Kane’s mother. I used to buy T-shirts with my name written on them, hoping once in a while people would call me Lizabeth.”