By Design (11 page)

But it didn’t matter. This was Emmie’s job. She would just have to forget that she was doing it for Juliet’s benefit. So she took a breath and looked at the handsome man before her—the man she had never had a chance with, because when they met he had already been dreaming of feathering this majestic nest for another woman. “Absolutely,” she said. “You can count on me. I will make this place . . . beautiful. Perfect.” For emphasis, she slapped her hand on the wall next to her.

And suddenly, with a muted
whoosh
, the entire expanse of plaster detached itself from the lath, and the room was filled with a cloud of blinding, choking plaster dust.

Emmie screwed her eyes shut, coughing, and stretched her hands out to feel her way to the doorway. She connected with Graham’s arm and he rasped out, “This way,” grasped her shoulders, and directed her out of the room.

In the hallway, Graham bent over, his hands on his knees; Emmie leaned back against the wall. When their coughing subsided, Graham squinted up at her and broke out in a grin.

“What in the world could possibly be amusing at this moment?” Emmie asked, her words punctuated by more coughing.

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

He held out a hand and instinctively Emmie took it, realizing a split second later it was probably a bad idea. But she couldn’t pull away now, so she let him lead her down the hall and into the kitchen. A yellow and red water jug stood on the orange counter. Graham pulled two plastic cups out of a package next to the cooler, filled one, and handed it to Emmie, who drank gratefully, then filled the second for himself. After he had taken a couple of sips, he said, “Better?” She nodded, so he gestured toward the powder room. He squeezed in behind her and pulled the string on the light over the sink.

“Oh, no,” she whispered as she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. Then she started to laugh. Her head, face, neck, and shoulders were white with dust, except for a Joker-like smile curving up from both sides of her mouth where her skin showed through—the line the plastic cup had made.

“You know,” Graham said, “if you wanted to start knocking down the old plaster that badly, all you had to do was say so. I could have gotten you a mask and a sledgehammer.”

Emmie could feel the warmth of his chest against her back as he smiled down at her in the mirror’s reflection. Suddenly the powder room was
way
too small for her comfort. She escaped to the larger expanse of the kitchen and busied herself brushing off her shoulders and the front of her coat. She heard Graham turn off the light in the powder room.

Emmie bent at the waist and shook her hair out. “You don’t mind if I get a little of this on the floor, do you?”

Graham ripped a few paper towels off a roll on the counter and dampened them with water from the cooler. “Look up,” he said, and he gently brushed the paper towels over her cheeks, chin, and nose. She sneezed, and Graham started to laugh. He seized her chin and commanded, “Hold still!”

Emmie was extremely aware of the roughness of his fingers gently cradling her face. She tried to look everywhere but at him, but her gaze returned to his, and she forgot to breathe. He was staring at her again.

Finally she said hoarsely, “Is it that bad?”

He let go of her chin, shook out the paper towels, and started wiping his own face more vigorously. “Let’s just say you’re going to be sneezing white for a while.”

“I’ll try to avoid run-ins with the DEA in the meantime.”

She took a few more swipes at her coat front when Graham suddenly burst out, “Emmie . . .” in a different voice—rougher—and he seemed suddenly awkward. She looked up into his blue eyes, and those tiny multicolored butterflies behind her navel started doing the Macarena again.

But whatever he was going to say was cut off by the sound of rushing feet in the hallway and a cry of “Daddy! Daddy!”

Graham tore his eyes away from hers. “In the kitchen!” he called, and the swinging door flew open. A little girl in a bright yellow quilted jacket burst into the room. “There’s my girl!” he exclaimed, hugging her and planting a kiss on her cheek.

She looked him up and down and exclaimed, “Daddy! What happened?”

“Do I look funny?”

She started giggling. “Yes! What did you do?”

“Oh, it’s all part of the job.” The girl then noticed Emmie and became shy, wrapping her arms around her father’s thigh. He rested a hand on her head. “This lady’s name is Emmie. And guess what? She’s going to decorate your bedroom.”

“Really?”

“Really. Emmie, this is my daughter, Sophie. Remember when I said I wanted to make this house perfect for somebody very important to me? Well, here she is.”

Emmie looked from the little girl—oh, she had the same vivid blue eyes and dark hair as her father—to Graham and back again.
This
was who he was talking about? “It’s nice to meet you, Sophie,” she managed to say. “You’re going to have a really cool house pretty soon.” She couldn’t help but ask Graham, “All this space for just the two of you?” She had to know.

He fidgeted. “Yes . . .” And then he said, stronger, “Yes. It’s complicated—”

The kitchen door opened again, and a short, older woman entered, a little out of breath, carrying Sophie’s backpack. “You forgot this in the car, Sophia,” she said to the little girl.

“Thanks, Annamaria,” Graham said to the woman, who nodded.

She placed the backpack on the counter and stuffed her hands in her camel-hair coat pockets. “I see the place is treating you right already, Graham,” she said, looking him up and down.

He brushed more plaster dust off his shoulders. “It’ll be worth it in the long run.”

Annamaria looked skeptical. “If you say so.”

Graham said to Emmie, “This is Annamaria, Sophie’s babysitter. Annamaria, this is Emmie, my interior designer.” The woman nodded to Emmie, and she returned the greeting as she thrilled at Graham calling her “my” anything. He said, “Annamaria’s a godsend—she really helps out when I’m working weird hours.”

Or playing footsie with Juliet,
Emmie added silently, her excitement at being called “his” evaporating in a blink.

The woman waved a dismissive hand at him, embarrassed, and said, “You know, I can take Sophia to the dentist if you’re busy—”

Graham was in the process of politely refusing her offer when Sophie approached Emmie. “Can I have yellow?”

“What’s that, sweetie?”

“Yellow. Can my room be yellow?”

“Sure! We can make it any color you want.”

Sophie smiled; one of her front teeth was missing. “Yay. It’s my favorite color. All the other girls like pink, but I don’t.”

A little rebel,
Emmie thought.
I like this kid already.

Graham interrupted. “All right, you two schemers. We’ll have plenty of time to pick colors later. But right now, missy,
you
have to visit the dentist. I’m going to walk Emmie out to her car, and then you and I are going to hit the road, all right?”

“All right,” she mumbled, pulling a face.

Emmie bent down to whisper to Sophie, “I’ll bet you’re going to see Dr. Turner, aren’t you?” Emmie took a chance that Graham would have made sure Sophie went to the best pediatric dentist in town; some things never changed around here, the best dentists included. Sophie nodded glumly. “I happen to know she gives presents to good patients.” The little girl looked up, intrigued but cautious. “They’ve got a whole drawerful.”

“Candy?” Sophie asked hopefully.

Emmie rolled her eyes. “Now, do you
really
think a dentist would give out candy?”

Sophie giggled. “I guess not.”

“Tell Dr. Turner Emmie Brewster sent you. She’ll hook you up with the good stuff.” Emmie proffered her fist, and Sophie bumped it with her own small one.

Then she looked eagerly at her father. “Daddy? Can we go now?”

He smiled. “In a minute.”

As Graham followed Emmie out the front door and down the rickety porch steps, he murmured, “Thanks for that.”

She shrugged, embarrassed and awkward once again. At her car, he pushed his hands into his jeans pockets as the cold winter wind buffeted him.

“You should get back inside,” Emmie said.

“Yeah. I just . . . I wanted to . . .” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “When I said I was fixing up this house for someone special . . . it goes beyond just doing this for my kid. She’s . . . had a rough time lately. My . . . well, my wife died two years ago.” Emmie caught her breath. “Cancer. It was quick. So it was a shock.” Emmie started to express her sympathy, but Graham cut her off. “It’s all right. Really. We’re doing a lot better now. Not to say that it was easy. It was hell for both me and Sophie. But I’m not telling you this to get you to feel sorry for me or for her. I just . . . thought you should know,” he finished awkwardly.

Emmie tried to speak around the lump in her throat. She watched the wind ruffle Graham’s hair, sending puffs of plaster dust into the air to mingle with the fine snowflakes that had begun to fall. Finally she managed to say, “I’m glad you told me.”

He nodded, looking at the ground for a moment, then back into her eyes, his own squinted against the cold. “I don’t tell many people. I view it as our private business, you know? Sophie’s gone through so much . . . We moved here in August, she’s started a new school, we’re renting this crappy little place and . . . I try to make everything good for her, but it’s tough. I think once we settle into a nice home of our own, she’ll be happy.”

“You know what?” Emmie said softly. “Sophie already looks happy to me—and I’ll bet anything it’s because you’re being a great dad.”

“Thanks. But I still want to do this for her.” He looked over at the house. “I wish I had found this place earlier. Looks like we won’t be able to move in till next summer . . . at the earliest . . .”

“You’ve got a lot of people on the job; maybe we can move things along faster.”

“Yeah, now that you’ve already made some progress on the plaster,” he teased with a sly grin. “I’d better get going, get some of the guys started on cleaning up your handiwork in the library before I leave. I’ll be in touch soon, so we can talk about what we’re going to do to get this place in shape.”

“You bet,” Emmie said.

Graham started to say something else, paused, then said simply, “Take care, Emmie,” before he made his way back up the front walk.

 

“Okay, let’s talk dentil molding.”

Graham shuffled a few papers on his cluttered work area—a piece of plywood stretched across some spare sawhorses—and pulled out one of Emmie’s sketches for the dining room, shifting it so they could both see it at the right angle. Emmie, chin propped on her hand and her elbow in the way, gazed stupidly at his gorgeous profile and didn’t notice that Graham was waiting for Emmie to budge so he could put the sketch down. Graham was looking at the paper, but when she didn’t move, he glanced up. At the sight of his deep blue eyes twinkling at her, Emmie flushed scarlet to the roots of her hair and tucked herself into as compact a size as possible, her hands in her lap.

Graham smiled. “You all right?”

“Sure!” she squeaked, then cleared her throat. “Fine. I’m fine. You were saying? About the . . . the . . .”

“Dentil molding.”

“Right!” Emmie nodded. “Good stuff, dentil molding. Er, what about it?”

Graham ran the tip of his tongue over his lower lip, the corners of which were still upturned in an amused grin, which nearly sent Emmie into fits. He returned his attention to the sketch, but he glanced up at her every few seconds, almost to make sure she was functioning properly, as he asked her how much of the original molding they could salvage, and how much they’d have to replicate and with what type of materials. Emmie put on a studious frown to appear deep in thought, but whenever Graham’s gaze was on the desktop, she went back to mooning at him like a love-struck dope. Which she was. This was their fourth meeting in two weeks, and she hadn’t gotten tired of being with him yet. He was so . . . so . . . yeah. That. Gorgeous, sure. But so smart, too. And gorgeous. Self-assured. Talented. And, you know, gorgeous.

She shook herself. She really should be paying attention to what he was saying instead of staring at his perfect lips and wondering what they tasted like. After all, she wasn’t there to drool over him. She had to make with the interior design.

Graham sighed and leaned back in his wooden folding chair. “Okay, I can see that dentil molding isn’t lighting your fire today.”
Oh, my fire is lit,
Emmie thought.
But definitely not by molding.
“So let’s figure something else out.”

It dawned on Emmie that she was going to have a second chance to sound brilliant.
Focus.

“The master bath. Obviously it’s too small as it is. But I’d hate to lose a bedroom to expand it.”

“Totally understandable. You’ve only got so many—like, fifty.”

Graham smirked. “Forty-eight, and you know it. Seriously, I think that front bedroom is worth keeping, and I don’t want to cut into it. What do you suggest?”

And Emmie’s second chance to sound brilliant died on the vine. She had no clue. As she scrambled to come up with something, her phone chimed, and she jumped. She glanced at the screen; the reminder for her afternoon meeting with Wilma popped up.
Ugh.
“Sorry,” she said to Graham (boy, was she ever), “I’ve got to get back to the office.” Was she hallucinating, or did Graham look a little disappointed? For the thousandth time since she started spending time with him on this project, her heart started beating triple time. Who needed the gym? Just being around him was giving her enough of a cardio workout. “But, uh, before I go”—she had to salvage this meeting somehow—“I wanted to ask you about the wallpaper in the master bedroom.”

“The answer is no, I don’t want to keep it.”

Emmie grinned. “Yeah, you don’t seem like a forget-me-not kind of guy.”

“Well, under the right circumstances. But surrounded by them every night? Not so much.”

“What I meant was, what do you think of having it recreated, custom, for Sophie’s room? It’d be a nice delicate touch above the chair rail, add some color variety to offset all that yellow.”

“Great idea. She’d like that. Her second-favorite color is purple.”

Ooh, praise from Graham always gave Emmie the wibbles. “I’ll get some for a sample before I go, then.”