Page 20 of Hero Next Door
Not the buzz running along my skin at the memory of her breathy, surprised voice. And certainly not the thrill running up my spine at the idea of having surprised—and even pleased—her.
* * *
It took us a solid hour to get everything into the house. I’d brought pipe to work on anything we could reach in the walls—I hated plumbing but I knew how to do it, and I hadn’t lied when I said it made more sense to do things ourselves if we could—as well as new fixtures for faucets. I’d brought the makings of new cupboards and cleaning supplies and tools and magazines with ideas for the floors.
I’d even brought her a bouquet of roses, for reasons I hadn’t understood when I bought the things and still didn’t really get.
She gasped when she saw them, though, and hugged them to her chest like they were some sort of treasure. “How did you know pink roses were my favorite?”
I hated the electricity that ran through me, the surge of adrenaline in my veins, and cursed Past Dev for having through roses would be a good way to welcome her to the neighborhood.
Only here to make sure she doesn’t sell to a developer,I told myself.Only here to help renovate the house. Get it together, Dev.
“I didn’t,” I said gruffly. “But they match the ones growing on the outside of the house and I figured you probably liked things that matched.”
A pathetic excuse, but it was the best one I could come up with on such short notice.
“Let’s go.”
I picked up one side of the last remaining set of cupboards and waited for her to pick her side up, then started up the stairs to the front door, my eyes on the wood in front of me rather than the widely grinning—and entirely too vindicated—face of Parker Pelton as she carried the other side.
After much shuffling and some muffled arguing about the best way to do it, we finally made it into the kitchen and set the last of the cupboards down. Then we did more pondering of the space.
“Soooo...” she said eventually, doubt clear in her voice again. “Is this where you tell me that we’ve reached the end of your knowledge base? That we need to call in the professionals?”
I looked at her, snorted, and started giving her the directions for what we were going to do first.
It made sense to do the pipes first, since we ran a good risk of flooding the place if we did something wrong, and as long as we were looking at flooding, I wanted to restrict the water damage to the cupboards we’d be tearing out. We moved the new cupboards back out of the kitchen and to the dining room—with Parker teasing me the entire time about having to change my plans—and then made our way back into the kitchen.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now I go out and turn off the water, and we start working on the pipes.”
She nodded, frowning and looking around, and I could already see her trying to figure out how this was going to go. Where we should start and where we should finish. I left her to it and darted out to the main water valve, turning until I hit the end of it. When I got back into the kitchen, she’d already unpacked most of the tools and sorted them into some sort of set of classes—judging, I guessed, by how the tools looked—and was laying plastic sheeting over the floor.
“I figured this is what you brought it for,” she said quickly. “You know, protect the floor. Even though we’re going to be replacing it.”
“It is,” I said, rewriting my opinion of her.
Evidently we were through the Girl Who Doesn’t Know What She’s Doing phase of the day and into Parker Pelton Solves Problems.
It was kind of... cute.
Not that I would have repeated that out loud to anyone.
I moved for the kitchen sink and, with Parker’s help, moved the sink and its support system away from the wall, leaving the faucet and exposed pipe isolated and easier to work on. Parker looked at it all with narrowed eyes and pursed lips.
“So we’re going to what, take the faucet off, check the pipes, and then put a new fixture on?”
“Exactly.”
Her look of suspicion increased. “And how do we know we’re not going to get soaked doing this?”
“That, my dear, is why I turned the water off. We can move about the place with no fear of water suddenly erupting from any unexpected source.”
She turned her suspicious look on me, but then shrugged and asked what I needed her to do. I told her I would do most of the heavy lifting—ie, unhooking of things—and that her job was to stand there with the tools and hand me what I needed, then take the things I handed her. I moved to the right of the faucet and got to work while she stood right in front of it, her hands full of tools and her eyes on what I was doing.
I was just as shocked as her when two twists of the faucet sent the thing shooting off its foundation at the head of a geyser of water. The faucet flew right over Parker’s shoulder, missing her by inches, but the firehose of water suddenly unleashed from the wall, stronger by half than it would normally have been because I’d evidently turned the spigot the wrong way entirely?
