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Eddie cleared his throat, waiting for her to look up. But either she was too caught up in the story or he was being too quiet, because Tiffany went right on reading.
He tried clearing his throat again, much louder this time. When that had no effect, he decided to say something outright and tell her that he was leaving for the day.
He had no idea exactly how to address her; calling her “Ms. Lee” just didn’t seem right to him, since the very first time their paths had crossed they’d lived in the same neighborhood. She’d been four and he’d been five at the time. But given the nature of their present relationship, he couldn’t very well call her “Tiffany,” at least not until she recognized him.
So after giving the matter as much thought as he felt it deserved—which was very little—Eddie decided to forgo any salutation whatsoever and merely announced in a resonant voice that was bound to get her attention, “I’m leaving now.”
Startled—Tiffany really had been engrossed in the book she was reading, a fast-paced mystery by one of her favorite writers—she looked up and was truly surprised to find she was no longer alone in the backyard.
Doing what she could to reestablish her poise, she put down her book and then inquired almost regally, “You’re finished?”
Eddie nodded. “For the day.”
“But you’re coming back tomorrow, right?” she asked a little uncertainly as she got up from the small redwood table.
“I said I’d finish remodeling the bathroom, so yes, I’m coming back.” Since they were talking, he had a more important question for her. “Have you given any more thought to what you want?” Realizing she might find the sentence rather ambiguous, he quickly added, “In the way of colors? Fixtures? Styles?”
“I thought we agreed to leave that up to you.” The truth was she hadn’t given any thought to it at all.
He frowned slightly. “I didn’t think you were serious.”
There wasn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t want some sort of input when it came to decorating her living space. At least he’d never met one, he amended. Given how opinionated and stubborn he remembered Tiffany being, he sincerely doubted that he’d met one now.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” he told her. “There’s an entire area in Anaheim that has store after store dealing with bathroom fixtures, tubs, medicine cabinets, tile and marble—”
But she shook her head, holding up her hand to stop him from going on. “There’s no point in telling me where those stores are. I wouldn’t know where to begin, or how much I needed of any particular thing,” she told him.
Eddie frowned inwardly. He didn’t want to put himself out there and volunteer to take her to the various shops. If nothing else, traipsing from one store to another would be very time consuming.
On the other hand, if he didn’t offer to go with her, he’d have nothing to work on tomorrow or next weekend, and this project could drag on indefinitely. He needed the money sooner rather than later.
Besides, he wanted to be able to get his head together for the new class he’d be taking over Monday morning. It wasn’t that he couldn’t multitask, but he definitely preferred not having his mind going in two different directions at the same time. It was a lot less stressful that way.
And just like that, without a single shot being fired, Eddie surrendered.
“All right, why don’t I take you to the different stores tomorrow?” he suggested. “That way, I can at least point you in the right direction and you can make the choices.”
He waited for her to agree. Instead, Tiffany had a strange look on her face. Not as if she was thinking over his offer, but more like she was trying hard to place something.
It turned out to be him.
Out of the blue, her light blue eyes pinning him down, Tiffany suddenly asked, “Do I know you from somewhere?”
She’d almost succeeded in knocking him for a loop, but Eddie managed to regain control over himself and the situation. “Yes, I’m the guy who was swinging the sledgehammer in your master bathroom all day.”
“No,” Tiffany said impatiently, “I mean, do I know you from somewhere else?”
“Possibly,” he allowed. “I’ve been lots of places.” And then, because he didn’t want to risk losing this job—he really did need every penny he could earn—he told her, “I’ve got to get going. I’m meeting someone in an hour.”
For just a split second, she felt her stomach drop. “Oh.” Tiffany immediately took his response to mean that he had a date. She didn’t want to seem to be trying to keep him here, especially if he did have a date—and why shouldn’t he, considering his looks?
She was just trying to place him. It was probably her imagination, anyway, she decided. A lot of people looked like someone else at first scrutiny.
She took a breath, ready to wave him on. “Well, then I won’t keep you.”
Eddie gazed at her without commenting.
He’d told her a lie. He wasn’t meeting anyone, but it was the first thing he could think of, and it must have done the trick because she was backing off.
Maybe he’d enlighten her tomorrow about why she thought she knew him. But he wasn’t up to going into any of that tonight. Especially if, after he told her that they’d gone to school together and wound up competing against one another more than once, she decided to tell him to get lost. He needed to be fresh and on his toes if it turned out that he had to talk her out of terminating him.
So for now, Eddie quietly took his leave. “I’ll be here early tomorrow,” he told her, just before he turned toward the sliding-glass door.
“Of course you will,” she murmured under her breath. She meant to say that to herself, but it was loud enough for him to hear.
He took it as a complaint about the time.
“All right, then how about eight thirty?” he proposed gamely, thinking that was a compromise.
It might have been, but obviously not in her eyes. “Eight thirty is still early,” she pointed out.
He wondered if she was being deliberately difficult or if it was just an unconscious reaction on her part. “It’s half an hour later than this morning.”
“Half an hour only means something if you’re a fruit fly,” she said in exasperation. “What time do those stores you mentioned open?”
He didn’t have to think to answer. All this had become second nature to him in the last few months, ever since he’d lost his teaching position. “They open up at eleven on Sunday.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was better, she thought, and she said as much out loud. “Okay, come at ten thirty,” she instructed.
He didn’t like getting a late start, not when there were other things he could do while he was waiting to take her on that hardware safari.
“If I come earlier, I can do prep work,” he told her. That was important, since he was fairly confident they were bound to come home with at least some of the things needed to remodel her bathroom.
“If you come later,” she countered, “then I can sleep.”
“You can always sleep,” he responded. “Besides, sleep is highly overrated.”
Tiffany could feel her blood pressure rising. This was the most annoyingly stubborn man... Regrouping, she blew out a breath.
“Tell you what, let’s compromise. You can come here at eight.” She shuddered as she contemplated the early hour. “As long as you promise not to make any noise. And I get to sleep until it’s time to leave for those store you’re so anxious to have me go to.”
Eddie suppressed a frown. He knew it was useless to argue; and if memory served him correctly, Tiffany could argue the ears off of a brass monkey without blinking an eye.
So he gave in. “You’re the boss,” he finally told her.
In response to his capitulation, her grin was positively beatific.
“Yes, I am, aren’t I?” Anxious to have him leave before he changed his mind, she quickly led the way to the front door. “Okay, see you tomorrow.” Tiffany opened it and held it wide. “Have a good night,” she said as she waved him on his way.
She thought she heard him grunt in response, but she wasn’t sure.
What she did know was that the house was suddenly quiet.
Blissfully, wonderfully quiet.
After a few moments, though, it seemed almost too quiet. Especially after all the noise she had endured for most of the day.
“I’ve got to be going crazy,” she muttered.
Turning away, she headed into the living room. She was just about to turn on the TV—which was her usual method of combating the almost oppressive late-afternoon quiet—when she heard the doorbell ring.
Now what?
With a sigh, Tiffany pivoted on her heel and hurried back to the front door. Without stopping to look through the peephole to make sure it was the contractor, she opened the door and asked, “Did you forget something?”
“Not that I know of. But perhaps you have forgotten your manners.”
It wasn’t the contractor. Instead, there on her front step was five-feet-nothing of angst and the source of not a few of her headaches.
Too surprised to even force a smile, Tiffany asked, “Mother, what are you doing here?”
The model-slender woman raised her small chin. “Is that any way to greet the woman who gave you life?”
That was her mother’s opening salvo in almost every exchange they had. “It is if I’m not expecting to see the woman who gave me life.”
Mei-Li shook her head. “Someday, when I am gone, you will wish that you could see me just one more time,” she told her youngest daughter, uttering the words like a prophecy. “But for now, while I am still alive, you should always expect to see me.”
Rather than ask if that was supposed to be some sort of a curse, Tiffany took a breath. She stepped back and opened her door a little wider—her mother didn’t need much room to come in.
Trying again, Tiffany asked in her best upbeat tone, “And to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure, dear Mother?”
Mei-Li did not appear placated. “There is no need to be sarcastic, Tiffany.”
Tiffany squelched the temptation to raise her voice in total frustration. Instead, she struggled for patience and tried a third time, keeping her voice even and respectful, despite the fact that to her own ear, it sounded almost singsong. “Mother, is there something I can do for you?”
Walking in, the small woman scanned the room, taking in everything at once even as she rolled her eyes in response to the question. “More things than I could possibly enumerate in the space of a day,” she replied.
“But you didn’t come to enumerate a long list of things,” Tiffany pointed out. “I know you, Mother. You came here for a very specific reason. You always do,” she added as her mom opened her mouth to deny the assumption. “Now what is it?”
“How was he?” her mother asked without any preamble.
Tiffany was caught completely off guard, her mind a total blank. “‘He?’”
Mei-Li sighed, exasperated. “Surely you are not so dumb as you pretend, Tiffany. The young man I am paying to remodel your bathroom,” she said with emphasis. “Did he do a good job?”
She made it sound as if renovating a bathroom could be done in a single afternoon. If only, Tiffany thought wistfully. But at the same time, the question irritated her. “Mother, he’s just gotten started.”
To her surprise, her mother actually seemed pleased rather than annoyed that the job hadn’t been magically completed.
“Oh. Good,” Mei-Li commented. Then, because they were supposed to be discussing remodeling the bathroom and not remodeling her stubborn daughter’s life, she requested, “May I see what he has done?”
“Mainly, he left a mess,” Tiffany told her. “Right now, if you saw it, you’d probably be horrified.” And she had no desire to listen to her mother criticize what she saw. Why Tiffany felt almost protective of the man who had jolted her out of her bed was beyond her, but it didn’t change the way she felt. “Why don’t you wait until he’s finished and then I’ll show you just what he managed to do.”
Much to her astonishment, her mother smiled and nodded. “I can hardly wait.”
Tiffany wondered if Mei-Li was getting more eccentric as she got older—or if she was just becoming strange.
Tiffany found herself leaning toward the latter.
Chapter Four (#ulink_ef9d712f-7d02-549e-b904-f1af06a69285)
“I thought women liked to go shopping,” Eddie said, in response to the less-than-pleased expression on his passenger’s face.
True to his word, he had arrived at eight in the morning. And as per their agreement, he had gone straight to work on the master bath, preparing it for the items he hoped they would wind up purchasing later today. That allowed Tiffany to get back to bed—downstairs in the guest room—temporarily.
Back to sleep, however, was another story. She couldn’t seem to fall asleep because she kept waiting for the noise to begin.
It didn’t. However, the ensuing quiet didn’t allow her to drift off. After a while, Tiffany gave up her futile quest for sleep and got ready for the trip she told herself she didn’t want to make.
They’d left at a few minutes after ten, with her looking less than pleased about the forced field trip she was facing.
“I do like to go shopping,” Tiffany said when the silence became too uncomfortable. “I like to go shopping for clothes, for shoes. I even like to go shopping for electronic gadgets that I don’t need but that capture my attention.”
She shifted slightly in the passenger seat. Her seat belt dug into her hip. “But I have never even once fantasized about going shopping for bathroom faucets, or showerheads, or medicine cabinet mirrors.”
“Then this should be a new experience for you,” he told her cheerfully.
Tiffany caught herself thinking grudgingly that he had a nice smile, but she didn’t exactly appreciate the fact that the smile was at her expense.
“And a quick one, I hope,” she retorted.
“That all depends on you.” For her benefit, Eddie went over the list of various hardware and fixtures needed in her bathroom, concluding with, “You find ones that you like and we’ll be on our way back to your house in no time.”
“What’s the catch?” she asked.
Eddie shook his head as he guided his truck onto the freeway ramp. “No catch.”
“Then why aren’t we on our way to O’Malley’s Hardware, or One Stop Depot?” she asked, naming two local hardware stores in the area that boasted having everything a home owner might need.
Taking advantage of a space, Eddie merged into the middle lane. “Because I’m assuming that you want quality, not shoddy.” After he resumed the acceptable freeway speed, he spared Tiffany a quick look. “At least, that was what I was told by the person who hired me.”
“O’Malley’s Hardware sells shoddy goods?” she questioned.
Tiffany wasn’t all that familiar with the store, only the ads that seemed to pop up every hour on most of the television stations. Even the jingle had begun to infiltrate her brain on occasion.
“They sell ‘make-do’ goods,” he told her. “The stores I’m taking you to carry higher-end items that are made to last.”
“And higher prices,” she guessed.
