Page 4 of The Fixer

She clamped her mouth shut to keep it from dropping open. “You’re serious.”

“Dead. One condition, though: I call the shots on the design and the fix-up.”

This time her mouthdiddrop open; her jaw nearly hit the old floorboards. Talk about your balls of brass. This guy’s might have been bigger than hers.

“This is a win-win for you,” he pressed. “You can go back to Chicago, and I’ll take care of everything so you don’t have to. You pay the usual taxes, insurance, and utilities, then you sit back and pocket the cash when it sells.”

“And I suppose you get paid for your contracting work?”

“You suppose right. I have to pay my crew, and I have to feed my dogs. But—” He paused to hold up his index finger. “I’ll give you the friends and family discount. Naturally.” His smile burst dazzlingly white.

“Naturally,” she deadpanned. She wasn’t falling for it. “No.”

The smile slid from his face, and his dark brows knotted together. “Why not?”

“I want—no, Ineedto get rid of this place as quickly as possible. Being in business with you would not only be counter to my objective, but it would make a difficult situation unfathomably complicated.”

“Being in business with me would take the load off your shoulders and put it on mine, which would actuallyuncomplicate your life,” he argued, and not badly at that.

She gave him a vigorous headshake.

He parked a hand on a trim hip. “That’s it? No negotiating? Just no?”

“Just no.”

He stared at her for a beat or ten, then nodded and slipped a spiral notebook the size of a half-sheet of paper from where it was tucked under his arm. He laid it open on the display case, plucked a pencil from where itwas nestled in the wire binding, and smoothed a blank white sheet. From his front pocket, he extracted a device that resembled a cell phone but was slightly smaller. He began writing on the clean paper with his left hand.

Huh. Joy was left-handed too.

She peered at his surprisingly meticulous handwriting but couldn’t read it. “What are you doing?”

“Recording measurements,” he replied cheerfully, not even glancing at her. “I need those if I’m going to get you estimates.”

“Estimates? Plural?”

Standing back against one wall, he pointed the rectangular thingie at the opposite wall. A narrow beam of red light shot from it. “Uh-huh. I like to give my clients choices. You’ll get three estimates. One will be bare-bones, the other will be a middle-of-the-road solution”—he jotted numbers in the notebook—“and the final bid will pull out all the stops for the max selling price.”

She blinked at his back. “But I only want bare-bones.”

He side-eyed her. “I know. But when someone’s not sure which is the best way to go, I like for them to see all their options.”

“Iamsure which way to go, and it’s bare-bones. You’re wasting your time.”

His mouth lazily curved into a sly grin. “It’s my time to waste.”

“But …” she spluttered, then fell in behind him as he traveled around the space, his movements as spare as they were sure.Use your words, she told her frustrated self, but she couldn’t call up the right ones. Nothing seemed to be coming out the way she intended; everything was off-key, a tangled wad of thoughts she couldn’t tease apart.

The man was infuriating … and so was her choice in footwear. Soon she couldn’t dog him without risking an accident, so she lingered beside the display case and let her mind wander over the inventory occupying every minuscule inch of the store. The clutter seemed to grow and multiply like an alien creature in a B movie.

Besides the mounds of junk, every bad memory conjured by being here was fighting for space inside a brain overwhelmed by those bad memories. Being in her mother’s shop was akin to having a five-hundred-pound gorilla straddling her chest, and she fought for breath. The air was so stale and dust-laden that what little she could pull in nearly made her choke.

An overwhelming need to clear her head took over, and she stepped outside and gulped in the clean mountain air.

You can do this. You can do this.

You. Can. Do. This.

Her ringing phone nearly shot her out of her shoes. Hesitating a few ticks of the clock before picking up, she plastered on a smile, hoping it would come through in her voice. “Already lost without me, Sterling?”

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