Remodeling The Bachelor. Marie Ferrarella

was all he trusted himself to say.

      Janice turned toward him and after pausing a moment to take things in again and, doing a few mental calculations in her head, she gave him a quote.

      He stared at her incredulously. “You’re serious,” he asked.

      “Yes, why?”

      The why was because she’d given him a bid that sounded much too low, even if it did only include her labor and not the cost of materials. “How do you stay in business with fees like that?”

      She breathed a silent sigh of relief. He wasn’t one of those tightwads who thought everything had to be haggled down.

      “Low overhead,” Janice quipped without hesitation. She ventured a little further. Once people got their feet wet, they usually decided they wanted something else done. She began with the logical choice. “Is this the only bathroom you want renovated?”

      “I didn’t even want this one renovated,” he informed her, then abruptly stopped. The quote she’d given him was more than reasonable, coming in far lower than he would have expected. He wasn’t up on the price of bathroom renovations, per se, but one of the people who marketed his software packages had just had a bathroom redone. The man had proudly given him a quote that had taken his breath away. Philippe remembered thinking that his maternal grandfather had paid less for his house when he’d bought it forty years ago than the man had paid to have his bathroom upgraded. “The other two are upstairs.”

      “You have three bathrooms?” Kelli asked gleefully, her eyes huge.

      He had no idea why the little girl would find that a source of wonder. “Yes.”

      “We only have two,” she confided, then leaned into him and added, “And Uncle Gordon is always in one.”

      Janice saw Zabelle raise his eyes and look at her quizzically. She didn’t want him thinking that Gordon was strange. “My brother is staying with us while he gets back on his feet.”

      Kelli’s silken blond curls fairly bounced as she turned her head around to face her. “Uncle Gordon gets on his feet every day, Mama.”

      It was an expression, but she didn’t feel like trying to explain that to Kelli right now. Instead, she stroked Kelli’s hair and said, “Only for short periods of time, baby.”

      Instinctively, Janice glanced at the man whose house they were in. She recognized curiosity when she saw it, even though she had her doubts that the man even knew the expression had registered on his face. She felt obligated to defend her brother against what she guessed this man had to be thinking.

      “My brother’s had a tough time of it lately.” Lately encompassed the period from his birth up to the present day, she added silently.

      Zabelle seemed to take the information in stride. “At least he has family.”

      The comment took her by surprise. Janice hadn’t expected the man to say that. It was by all accounts a sensitive observation.

      Maybe the man wasn’t half bad after all.

      “Yes,” she agreed with a note of enthusiasm in her voice as she came to the landing, “he does. By the way,” she said, leaning outside the bathroom wall and looking at him, “I noticed your kitchen.”

      This time, he thought, he was ready for her. Ready to put a firm lid on this before it escalated into something that necessitated his moving out of the house for several weeks. “And?”

      “Could stand to have a bit of a face-lift as well.”

      “This was about a cracked sink,” Philippe reminded her.

      It was never just about a cracked sink. By the time that stage was reached, other things were in need of fixing and replacing as well. “I thought that the oldest son of Lily Moreau would be more open to productive suggestions—even if they do come from a woman who owns a tool belt.” She saw the surprise in his eyes grow. “I have access to the Internet,” she pointed out glibly. “And I try to learn as much as I can about potential clients before I meet with them.”

      He noticed that she said the word potential as if it was to be discarded while the word client had a healthy amount of enthusiasm associated with it. The woman was obviously very sure of herself.

      Even so, he didn’t like having his mind made up for him.