What the Heart Wants. Cynthia Reese

No disturbing the lead. And it would be easier to fix later on.”

      Jerry practically hissed. Kyle rubbed his forehead again. “Allison,” he began.

      “I’ll have no part in putting drywall in a 126-year-old house,” Jerry told her, his back ramrod straight.

      “But—but why not? Just because it’s not authentic? I can’t afford authentic! Not in time. And certainly not financially.”

      The contractor opened his mouth, started to speak, stopped, started to speak again. Finally, he growled at Kyle, “Tell her. I’m too—too...” He couldn’t finish his thought.

      “Jerry is saying... Uh, what he means is it’s not going to solve the problem. The issue is the unstable plaster underneath. From the condensation. And...if you put drywall up, the plaster may hold. For a little bit. But then it will come down. In chunks. And cause cracks. And mess up the drywall, since the moisture in the plaster is probably still there. But Jerry would put a vapor barrier up when he removed the plaster... Are you listening? You are not listening, Allison. Allison? Where are you going?”

      But she had left. She stalked out into the hall. He thought she was going to march down to the front door and throw them out, but no. The footsteps were on the back stairs, not the front, and they were going up, not down.

      So what was he supposed to do now?

CHAPTER SEVEN

      ALLISON REACHED OUT a hand to steady the Victorian dressmaker’s form before the stained linen-and-wire monstrosity toppled. A cloud of dust billowed out and she sneezed. With the form as steady as it could be on its wobbly center pole, she pushed past it and several hulking pieces of furniture to her object.

      The window seat.

      The cushions released another cloud of dust from their faded damask upholstery fabric when she sat on them.

      The little window seat, overlooking the front lawn from the highest point in the house, had been her favorite bolt-hole when she was a kid. For a home ec project in high school, she’d redone the cushions. It was probably the newest upholstery in the whole house.

      She inspected the wobbly seams and the clumsily installed zipper with none of the starry-eyed sense of accomplishment she’d had as a sophomore. What was she thinking? She couldn’t fix this house, any more than she had any business trying to cover seat cushions.

      Allison curled up on the cushions and waited for the reverberation of the bangs of the door. They’d go, of course. They’d bail on her, once they saw she was in over her head, with no money to get out of this hole.

       All I wanted to do was paint Gran’s room.

      Her embarrassment faded with the first flare of anger. What had she expected, anyway? Of course Kyle would bring in a restoration-nut as a contractor—it probably was some sort of scheme. Not an out-and-out con, but more paternalistic—an “oh, we know better” sort of deal.

      She heard thumps on the stairs—thumps coming up, not going down. Her irritation grew. They were coming up here? To her bolt-hole?

      “Go away,” she called. Yeah. It was rude. Probably juvenile. No, definitely juvenile, but if she’d wanted to talk, she would have stayed in Gran’s room.

      A golden ray of sun hit the crest of Kyle’s head as it appeared in the stairwell. A pang of regret coursed through Allison—but only for a moment. It was snuffed out by more irritation.

      Because obviously he was not listening.

      “Allison?” She could see him blinking in the dim light. He coughed from the dusty air. “Where are you?”

      She didn’t answer, just pressed back into the recesses of the dormer, away from the window so that he couldn’t see her outline against the bright sunlight. The dressmaker’s form offered her the cover it had back in her teen years when she’d been escaping Gran’s hard-to-combat common sense.

      Nevertheless, he stumbled in Allison’s direction, following a narrow path through over a century’s worth of her family’s junk—and they’d been good about throwing things out, it occurred to her. What if they’d been garden-variety hoarders?

      He stopped, poking his head into the billiard room. “Wow. Is that the original billiard table? And...oh, this is a mint-condition spittoon—well, not quite mint.”