of avocado green had given way to paper of mauve and blue. Five years ago, her grandmother had stripped the walls bare, painted them shiny, enamel white and hung brilliantly colored stained glass birds in the windows to throw swaths of azure, magenta and chartreuse into the room.
On days when the sun was brightest, being inside the room was like being inside a kaleidoscope. Bea’s most recent alteration would have slashed color into the room even on the dreariest of days.
“What the…?”
Amy knew exactly what had brought Nick to a dead halt behind her. She’d had the same reaction when she’d first let herself in and seen the mess her grandmother’s accident had created. Her heart actually felt as if it had stopped—just before she broke into a grin at her grandmother’s daring.
The paint her grandmother had chosen for her cabinets was called Crimson Cherry—and when she had fallen from the ladder while painting the upper trim, nearly a gallon of the bright bold red had splattered over the counter, the floor, the front of two upper cabinets and all but three of the lower ones.
Amy had managed to clean the streaks and splatters off the white enamel of the old stove, a project that had taken her most of yesterday, but the shock of scarlet stood out in macabre relief against the yellow and black and white of everything else.
“It looks like a crime scene in here.”
“I know,” she replied. “That’s what I thought when I first saw it.”
“This is what she was doing when she fell?”
Amy nodded, watching his frown move from the worst of the spill on the floor to a rather artful spray of bright droplets on one of the cabinets under the sink. A thick splotch of solid red the size of a dinner plate graced the cabinet next to it.
“Why?” he asked.
“She said she wanted to add a little life to the place.”
“I mean, why didn’t she pay to have it done?”
“Because she wanted to do it herself.”
The frown intensified. “A woman her age has no business doing something like this by herself. She’s—”
“Capable of making her own decisions,” Amy interrupted defensively. “She knows her own mind and once it’s made up, no one can change it.”
“You make her stubbornness sound like a virtue,” he muttered. “The woman broke her hip doing this.”
Amy turned, can in hand. “You sound just like my mother,” she muttered back, and set the can on the yellow Formica counter. The sound, like the admission, was far sharper than she intended. Drawing a breath of air that smelled faintly of paint thinner and the gardenia-scented breeze coming through the open windows, she did her best to tamp down the annoyance eating at her.
“It doesn’t matter now what she did,” she quietly amended. It wasn’t his fault this particular subject so sorely tested the only real virtue she had. “All that matters is getting this cleaned up and getting her back home. There’s an outlet over there,” she said, motioning to her right. “That’s probably the most convenient.”
She wanted him to get on with his task so she could get back to hers. Nick had no problem with that. Getting his job done and getting out of there was infinitely wiser than standing there wondering at how quickly she’d buried the frustration that had been so evident seconds ago. She’d done it too quickly not to have had considerable practice.
Spotting the outlet, he turned to leave.
With some reluctance, he turned right back and motioned to the splatters. “Mind if I ask how long ago this happened?”
“About three months. Why?”
“I just wondered why no one cleaned it up before now.”
The late-afternoon sun slanted through the window over the sink, catching the brilliant colors of the stained glass birds hanging across the upper pane. A slash of ruby touched fire to the dark sweep of her bangs.
A memory stirred at the sight of that light in her hair, but all that surfaced was the thought that her hair had felt incredibly soft and that it had once smelled like…lemons.
“Mom wanted to bring someone in to clean it up,” she said, jerking him from the flash of buried memory. “But her idea of cleaning up was to repaint the cabinets yellow like they were. Grandma said she didn’t want yellow anymore. She wanted red, and that it made no sense to pay for them to be painted a color she didn’t want. So no one did anything.”
“I see,” he muttered, getting a better understanding of the frustration he’d just witnessed. Her mom hadn’t gotten her way, so she’d simply refused to help. “And your sister?”
“She agreed with Mom. She thinks yellow is a kitchen color and red isn’t.”
“I mean, why didn’t she step in and help?”
“Because she’s—”
“Busy,” he concluded, sounding as if he should have already known what she would say.
So that left you, he thought, forcing his attention from the faintly exasperated look she gave him. Standing there in her little tank top and shorts, the long lines of her body firm and lithe, her feet bare, she didn’t look much older than the seventeen she’d been when he’d last seen her. Only, when he’d met her when she was seventeen, her hair had been long and streaked from the sun, her skin had looked like golden satin—and it had felt as soft as silk.
He’d known how soft her skin was even before he’d felt it under his hand in the nursing-home parking lot.
The memories drew a scowl. They were unwanted. Pointless. Dangerous.
Ruthlessly shoving them aside, he crouched down, knees cracking, to inspect a lower cabinet. “This would have been easier if it hadn’t been left to dry,” he muttered, pushing his thumbnail into the plate-sized blotch. “To do these right, the doors need to be taken off, stripped and sanded.”
Looking straight ahead, all he could see was the long length of her shapely legs. Feeling his gut tighten, he jerked his glance upward.
He fully expected to see dismay or displeasure. What he saw in the delicate contours of her face was contemplation.
“Should I strip them all? Even the ones that aren’t messed up?”
“If you want them to match, yeah. You should.”
“Okay,” she said.
Just like that. No questions. No hesitation. Just “Okay.”
Amazing, he thought, rising.
“You can use the same stuff I gave you for the floor. But take the doors into the sunroom or outside. The ventilation is better. Are there any sawhorses around here?”
“I have no idea.” Amy glanced in the direction of the storage shed on the far side of the house. She hadn’t a clue what was out there.
“The job will be easier if you use them.”
She gave him a nod, then saw the muscle in his jaw jerk as he waited, giving her a chance to ask any questions she might have. He was clearly only doing what her grandmother had asked of him—showing her how to best clean up the paint. So she told him she’d be sure to look for sawhorses, and watched his glance settle where her arms crossed over the odd little knot of nerves jumping in her stomach.
He said nothing else. He just gave her a look she couldn’t read at all and, having complied with her grandmother’s request, he headed to the porch for the extension cord. Within minutes, he’d shattered the early-evening stillness with his power saw as he cut a five-foot-wide chunk out of the beautiful porch railing opposite the dining room’s double doors.
He worked until dusk, pounding stakes, running strings, loosening two circles of soil with a pick. Then