her tongue. “No, we can’t go now,” she answered in a tone she might have used on Kelli if she’d had a willful child instead of the one she’d been blessed with. “This is only the first place we’ve been to, Philippe, and just the first display you’ve seen. You have no idea what’s out there,” she insisted. “You might see something you like better.”
It occurred to him, after the fact, that this was the first time she’d addressed him by his first name. It made the whole process seem more intimate somehow, like going out with a friend instead of an employee.
The thought had come shooting out of nowhere. He sent it back to the same place. He was here to get this tile thing over with, not challenge himself with mental puzzles.
“I don’t think so,” he countered. He believed that it was entirely possible to find something he liked immediately instead of having to wade through a sea of candidates. “I don’t have to see every single piece of tile to know what I like.”
She’d bet anything that Zabelle was doing this because he didn’t want to waste time going from store to store. Another contractor would have gone along with this, happy to have the ordeal over with. But she didn’t operate that way. She liked leaving her clients satisfied with their renovations. That was what it was all about to her, matching the person to the changes, not just slapping any old thing together in order to collect her fee.
“I don’t—” Janice got no further.
“If I were my mother,” Philippe continued patiently, “you might have to wait six months for a decision. But I’m not like that.”
Something else was going on here, she thought. But as of yet, she didn’t have a clue so she could only tilt with the windmill she saw. “You can’t go with the first tile you see.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s so much out there that you haven’t seen, that you don’t know about, that you might really fall in love with,” she added with feeling.
He looked at her for a long moment. So long that she felt something inside her tighten in anticipation, although she hadn’t a clue what it was.
And then, whatever it was that was going on, lessened and he said, “That sounds like my mother’s philosophy about men.”
She felt a little like someone who had just stepped in through the looking glass. “Excuse me?”
Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have said that. Of the three of them, he was the most closed-mouth of Lily’s sons. But somehow, around this little dynamo, words just seemed to slip out. “She moves from relationship to relationship, never staying long even if she falls in love.” Especially when she falls in love, he added silently.
For the moment, Janice forgot about the tile. This was more interesting. “Why?”
It seemed ironic that his mother’s reasoning seemed to align itself so readily with what J.D. had said about tile. “Because she feels that maybe she’s settling, that maybe there’s something even more spectacular out there and she’s missing out.” He raised his eyes to hers. “This one,” he repeated. “I’ll take this one.”
So in some odd way, he was rebelling from behavior he’d witnessed as a child, she thought. Rebelling or not, she didn’t want his bathrooms to suffer.
“You’re sure you’re not settling?” she prodded. An odd look came into his eyes, but she pushed forward. “Look, I realize that you’re not marrying the tile, I just want you to like the finished product.”
“I already told you, I like it. You can order however much you need. Can we go home now?” He repeated the question as if this time around it was rhetorical.
Philippe was surprised when she gave him an answer that was different from the one he’d assumed he would be receiving.
“No.”
“No?” he echoed incredulously. How could the answer be no? “But I just did what you wanted,” Philippe pointed out. “I picked a tile.”
This was definitely not going to be her easiest assignment, despite the fact that the man claimed to be easy to please. She didn’t want this to be something to get over with, she wanted it to leave a lasting impression on him, to catch his eye and dazzle him every time he walked into one of the bathrooms—or the kitchen for that matter.
“For the bathroom,” she told him. “I won’t go with the obvious, that there are three bathrooms to be remodeled—”
He cut in with a wave of his hand. “Same tile for all of them.”
Janice pushed forward, pretending she hadn’t heard that. “You still have to choose a slab for the kitchen counter, a backsplash, tile for all the floors, cabinets for the kitchen and bathrooms, fixtures, a tub for one, showers for the other two—”
“Wait,” he cried, raising his hands as if he were physically trying to stuff a profusion of things back into a box that had exploded before him, a box that was not allowing him to repack it. “Wait.”
Temporarily out of steam, she paused to take a breath. “Yes?”
“What the hell is a backsplash?”
She grinned. “It’s the area of the wall that runs along the back of the—”
His hand was up again, dismissing the explanation before it was completed. There was a bigger issue here. “I have to pick all those things out?”
“Well, yes.” She’d shown him the blueprints. Hadn’t any of this registered? Exactly how did he think this was all going to happen? “Oh, plus appliances for the kitchen.”
Philippe stared at her, trying to process what she was saying and what it would cost him, not in the monetary sense but in man-hours. The latter was in short supply and he couldn’t really spare what he did have available to him. At the outset, when he’d agreed to come with her, he’d expected the whole ordeal to last maybe an hour. Less if he could hurry her along. But what she was proposing would take days, days he didn’t have.
This wasn’t going to work out.
His first impulse was to tell her he’d changed his mind about having the rooms remodeled and pay her whatever penalty went with terminating the contract between them. An alternate plan was to postpone the work indefinitely, or at least until his own work was finished. Debating between them, he did neither.
For the same reason.
Instinct told him that J. D. Wyatt needed the money this job would bring in. So he chose another course, one that made complete sense to him. “You do it.”
He couldn’t mean what she thought me meant. “Excuse me?”
“You do it,” he repeated.
A couple had come in with two children, the older of whom seemed to be around three and in excellent voice. He was exercising the latter and could be heard emitting a high-pitched scream from the far end of the store.
Unable to hear what Philippe was saying, Janice moved closer to her client. “Do what?”
“Pick for me,” he told her simply.
“You want me to pick out your appliances.” It wasn’t a question so much as a stunned repetition.
“Yes. And all those other things you mentioned, too,” he added.
“You have no idea what my taste is like.”
He shrugged, fingering the tile he’d just selected and nodding at it as if it was privy to his thoughts. “Match it to my taste.”
It took everything for her not to throw up her hands. Was he being difficult on purpose? “I don’t know what your taste is like,” she protested with feeling. “Other than bland.”
He grinned, the corner of his eyes crinkling. “There you go.”
Again,