“Eldagirt owns Wirt Supplies and Packing—she’s one of the people your dad wants you to call. I’ll just say this—she eats concrete-and-barbed-wire pie for breakfast and asks for seconds.” Lucy giggled, reached for one of the two thick files she was carrying, leafing through them until she found one paper in particular, which she shoved across the small table to Robin. “Here’s her number. If I were you, I’d wait ‘til after lunch to get in touch. Definitely not a morning person.”
Robin scoffed at that, proclaimed she wasn’t afraid of Eldagirt, and turned her attention to the file’s contents while Lucy very helpfully put forth her theories about why the office had burned. Which boiled down to her pinning it on nonexistent transients.
When Lucy finally headed back to the freight yard, where she’d set up a temporary office, Robin stayed on at the coffee shop a while longer, reviewing the fascinating and titillating account files. The way she saw things, she had two choices. Either she could mope about her rotten stupid luck, or she could prove her father and Evan wrong. How hard could it be? She could learn everything there was to know, just plunge right in and show them that she had what it took. Starting with an understanding of exactly how Styrofoam peanuts were made. She was so excited by the prospect, it was all she could do to keep from skipping back to her house.
While Robin was trying to mine her way through the information about the two packing materials company, Jake was learning it would be the following week before Zaney would be back to work. At least that’s what Jake thought he said—the music was blaring so loudly in the background, he could hardly hear him.
He was still brooding about that and how he was possibly going to stay on schedule when Robin came sailing through the door, tossing keys, purse, and files onto the already overloaded dining table. If she saw him, she certainly didn’t acknowledge it. She thrust one leg to the side, cocked her hip and flipped through the mail she held in one hand, then carelessly tossed the envelopes onto the pile on the table. Only then did she turn, hands on hips, and face him. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
She shifted her gaze to the window frame. “What are you doing?”
“Stripping the old paint on this casing.”
Robin wrinkled her nose. “Shouldn’t you do the walls first?”
“The casing needs to be stripped before I put the chemical peel on the wall,” he said patiently, as if she required any explanation at all, even if she was so goddam gorgeous.
She moved forward to stand beside him. “It just seems like the windows would be last.”
In spite of the distraction of the faint scent of lilac, Jake couldn’t let it go. “That may be the most uninformed thing you have said yet.”
“Yet?” she protested. “That would imply I have said other misinformed things, which I have not, Handy Andy. I haven’t found the stained glass I want yet.”
“Handy Andy, huh?” All right, lilac scent aside, he was going to have to establish some ground rules if he was ever going to complete this job. “Okay. How about we have a deal since we’ll obviously be working so close, Miss Burned-Down-My-Office. I won’t tell you how to buy a packing materials company, and you don’t tell me how to renovate this house. Deal?”
She laughed. A dark curl wrapped itself around her eye. “If that isn’t so typically male, I don’t know what is— ‘don’t tell me how to do my job,’ blah blah blah—”
“Well, that’s a pretty typical female response if you ask me, the old I-know-how-to-do-everything-better-than-you attitude. I bet you’re used to having everyone at your beck and call.”
“And just what is that supposed to mean?” she asked, squaring off.
The woman did not lack for confidence, which, in spite of her being a little off her rocker, he found appealing. “Well, in a word, you’re bossy.”
She gasped. “Bossy!”
“Bossy.”
“So a woman offers you some sound advice and you see it as bossy? Doesn’t that seem kind of sexist?”
“No. A woman butts into a project when she doesn’t have a clue what she is talking about and starts offering free advice. I see that as bossy.”
“You are obviously confusing bossy with assertive. I just want the job done right, of course.”
“I can’t help but wonder why, if you know so much about renovation, that you hired out to begin with. Which reminds me—I’ve been meaning to ask you about that huge hole in the wall upstairs.”
That shut her up. Her brows burrowed into a frown. “Oh gosh, look at the time,” she said, looking at her watch. “I’ve got work to get to work.” She walked on, leaving the scent of lilac behind.
“Just as long as it’s your work and not mine,” he said, and with his back to her, smiled broadly when she muttered something about a goat.
For a while, she worked, occasionally mumbling under her breath. Then she got up, started walking around the table, lost in thought. And just when Jake thought she might actually walk through to the basement, she snatched up the phone and punched numbers. “Yes . . . Robin Lear calling for Eldagirt Wirt, please.”
Jake almost choked.