The Dirty Secret (4 page)

And now, two stairs behind her, he bit his tongue to keep from yelling “What have you done to me?” at her. But he screamed even louder at himself, because what was he thinking, hiring someone who knew nothing about the way things had to be handled, and how had she gotten it painted already without him submitting a job ticket—

He rounded the corner and stopped, half a pace behind her, and looked at the lion’s head knocker on the washroom door. “That’s funny.”

Donna Edith’s voice whispered like a devil on his shoulder,
Let her surprise you
. Vessa opened the door, and the air was sucked out of his chest.

She’d turned the lavatory—which two days ago had not been more than a bathroom stall—into a powder room, or a ladies’ apothecary. The cabinet sink had been replaced with an old-fashioned barbershop basin, no bigger than a water fountain, and narrow enough to make room for a garden chair. A matching cushion sat on the closed commode. The walls were painted a robin’s egg blue with gold and copper accents, with washes of color over the raised sculpted details that Seth’s crew could not have managed.

“You did all this? By yourself?” He was gobsmacked by the room, a
finished
room, in the house he’d begun with a single pencil stroke.

“Is that okay? You didn’t ask to see my portfolio or examples of my work, so this seemed the best way to show you. A bit more practical than a one-inch scale model.”

He turned a knob on the tiny sink. Both the faucet and the drain worked.

“If you don’t like it, it’s easy to put back. The old stuff is still in the garage. And that’s just crown molding around the mirror. The size difference of the sinks made it seem a bit off-center, so it’s shifted to the side.” She touched a sculptural leaf motif on the wall. “There’s a lot of detail, but a bathroom seemed like good place to explain a design. Everyone checks out the loo when they go visit a house. But they’re small, so going overboard with the decoration doesn’t cost too much time or money.”

“The light?” he asked.

“It’s the original fixture, just with some faux patina. The shades are somewhat vintage, but you only need the wiring base to be to building code, right?”

He nodded, then bent to look at the pictures hanging below the decorative dado railing that divided the wall’s two colors. Three frames held advertisements for throat pastilles, rose water and laudanum, all with curling words and women with flowing hair. “Why are these so far down on the wall?”

She pointed to the commode. “Sit.”

He sat, and the prints were now at eye height.

“If you had requested a urinal,” she said, her face deadpan serious, “they’d be up higher.”

Was she teasing him? He ran his fingertip over the curling lily design stenciled in gold leaf on the wall, a single petal wrapped around the base of a thrusting shaft.

“Art Nouveau never lets you forget flowers are reproductive organs, does it?” she asked. “You said you wanted sexy.”

“I did,” he said. Killian stood and peered at the wood cabinet on the wall, made of antique carved cherry, minute bubbles in the glass and a tarnished brass knob. Inside were pharmacy jars, some with glass lids, some with silver. All had old-fashioned labels: Aspirin, Ladies Hygiene Products and Stomach Remedies. He opened a small tin box marked French Letters. It was full of foil packets. “Condoms?” he asked.

Her smile was wicked. “You’ve never had a spontaneous fuck over the sink in a strange bathroom?”

Killian closed his mouth, teeth clicking, thrown for a moment back to frustrated teenage fumblings denied consummation because he hadn’t had protection. He glanced up at the mirror, to the reflection of the woman in the doorway behind him. She met his gaze in the glass. He clenched his jaw but the laughter leaked from his mouth, and his face grew hot. He replaced the tin box in the cabinet, and traced the edge of a raised leaf. “This is what you do?” he asked.

Her eyes followed his fingertips stroking the flower. “It’s an example. If you’d like me to redo it in another style, that’s not a problem.”

Was she joking? When he turned around, she was gone. He stepped into the hall, reluctant to leave the one finished room in the house. The door next to it was open, and the light in the utility room was left on. Stacked on a low shelf were cans of paint marked Lav-upper and Lav-lower and two containers, like the kind used to pack pudding in a little kid’s lunch, each filled with deeper colors marked the same. A spare glass floral lampshade sat next to the cans. He turned back, but Vessa wasn’t in the hall, or the living room. Or the kitchen. Had she left?

The ceiling squeaked, and he went up the stairs two at a time. She was putting a jacket on, dress stretched taut over her breasts.

“Do you need to go?” he asked. He’d signed out an extra fifteen minutes at lunch, just to have a little more time with her.

“Soon.” She grabbed an envelope from her bag and held it out. The front had a running total with neat handwriting. “Here are the receipts. The card is inside.”

“Five hundred and two dollars?” The sink and the spigots alone should have cost that much. He folded it in half, trying to make sense of what had just happened, disliking her black jacket and its buttons shaped like acorns, because it meant she was leaving. “What about your time?” he asked, forcing his jaw to move. “You must have put a shitload of hours in on all that.”

She’d done it on her own in two days. It had taken three weeks for Seth’s crew to get to the tile after he’d submitted the job ticket. She wasn’t real.

“Only twenty or so. It was fun to do. Do you want me to keep going?”

“Fuck.” Her head came up, stardust eyes wide, and he closed his own before he lost his head. “
Yes.
I love it. It’s beyond anything I could have hoped for. It’s perfect for the house and the feel I was after in the designs—old and new, sexy and funny, and very female.”

Her smile was very female, and made him feel male down to his bones.

“You did this really fast, too. Normally a decorator submits proposals, and after the architect approves them, the firm issues a job voucher to the contractor who orders the materials and schedules the labor.”

“That’s the way it works in theatre with designers and directors. It’s also where the process gets slowed down.”

“You saved a ton of time. I’m not complaining.” His words got tangled in his throat.

“What would you like me to do next?” Her hands moved to the jacket buttons.

He was unable to look away from her fingers pushing the acorns into their buttonholes. He wanted her to do the whole house. He wanted to slide the little black coat off her arms to the floor, and her dress, too. He wanted to peel the crazy tights off her legs, and—

Killian waved his hand. “Pick a room.”

Her eyes lit up like diamonds, and he grinned, knowing he’d been the one to give her something that made her smile like that, surprised and happy and so sexy. She slid past him, and he forced his hands to stay at his sides. Once more he followed her as she raced down the stairs.

“What kind of space should this be?” she asked from the small room off the hall. “How would your target client use it?”

“Do you live alone?” he asked, the words out of his mouth before he could stop them.

She nodded, her face upturned, staring at the ceiling. “In an apartment. A loft, really. Two rooms, but they’re a nice size.”

Satisfaction slid up his spine. “What would you do with a room like this, if the house were yours?”

“Do you want it furnished?” she asked. “This is a model house, right? It’s for show, so that a customer will purchase the plans and the same house will be built somewhere else?”

“Yes.”

“So it would be good if you could give a lot of ideas for how the space could be actively used, and not just a dormant room waiting for guests—” Her face cracked open in a huge yawn. She slapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry.”

Killian clenched his jaw to keep from yawning in sympathy. He reached into his back pocket. “This is all the stuff the firm gives to outside designers.”

She took the envelope from him. “Do you want me to do like you said? Give you sketches and then have the painters come and do it? You’d need to give me a feel for how long the administrative stuff takes.”

“Not unless you want to. I don’t think our usual people do the fancy finishes, though. Or the color washes.”

“Probably faster to do it myself, honestly.” She shook her head and ran her palm down the surface of the wall, primed in base flat white.

He imagined her touching him like that, her hand flat on his skin. “Keep track of your hours, then.”

“Donna Edith had me put a time clock app on my phone. It sends my hours straight to her.”

“When do you want to meet again?”

She glanced at him then looked away, pink rising to her cheeks. “Next week sometime?”

“Okay.” She was maybe a foot shorter than he was, the top of her head coming to just under his chin. He’d have to bend his head to—

“My stuff is upstairs,” she said. He listened to her tread on the steps, and the upstairs floor flexing under her feet. She came back down with her books, then fetched a drink can from the fridge.

He opened the front door for her. She walked to her car, a nondescript sedan that looked like it belonged to a grandmother, not the girl in the tights with flowers on her legs.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed. His call went to voice mail and he groaned. “Seth, this is Killian. I need Deb to check a plumbing mod, and some of your guys need to come fix the squeak in my upstairs floor. It sounds like a herd of elephants is having a damned orgy up there.”

Killian walked back to the lavatory in the hallway, where the phrase
spontaneous fuck
still resonated off the freshly painted walls like the scent of her, paint and shampoo and girl. Hope warmed his chest for the first time that he might have a chance to pull this off, that he could take the opportunity of a lifetime and make it his. It was all keyed on this woman, this lightning bolt of color and humor, and fuck, she was sexy. If he were Bengt, she’d be in his bed already—but he wasn’t Bengt, with all the time in the world to seduce a girl. And Killian didn’t even own a bed.

The calla lilies on the bathroom wall beckoned to him, impudent and suggestive. Vessa had made the closet-sized washroom look like a bordello lounge. Killian couldn’t wait to see what she would do with the rest of the house.

Chapter Four

A Den of Dragons

Vessa woke with a start, blinking his inquisitive eyes from her still-dreaming brain. She lay on top of her covers, sweaty, in her dress and tights and jacket. The open blinds let in light from the streetlamps.

“Oh no,” she said, fumbling in her bag for her phone. She had four missed calls. She hit Call Back without listening to the messages.

“Tess, it’s ten minutes from closing!” her manager yelled. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling since five o’clock.”

“Asleep,” Vessa said. “My phone was in my bag.”

“Are you sick?”

“Maybe.” She tried an experimental cough.

“I’m taking you off the schedule this weekend. Don’t be bringing the flu into my restaurant.” Docked hours was the usual punishment for the first no-show offense, as she’d been told her first day. “Be here on Tuesday. Early.”

The phone went dead.

Vessa swore as she dropped her phone back into her bag. She’d not only lost tonight’s shift, she’d lost two more, and weekend patrons usually tipped the best. At this rate she wouldn’t be able to buy a coat for winter, much less afford her adorable loft on her own. She deleted the call history from her phone—it was a futile action, she knew—the calls from the Vermont area code would still show up on the bill, should her number ever be investigated for transgressions.

The buildings across the street filled her window, a nightlife backdrop for a situation comedy. The lawyer’s doorway was marked with a brass plaque, and a palm-shaped sign lined with symbols hung above the psychic’s tearoom. A red neon dragon snarled in the front of the Chinese take-out place.

She walked across the street and ordered two spring rolls and a wonton soup. The restaurant was noisy with customers waiting in chairs, the cooks clanging on woks. A family at a table in the back took the strings out of pea pods, their language full of musical syllables. Vessa sat in a corner, reading the zodiac printed on the paper menu.

She wasn’t as upset as she should have been about losing the hours at the Pizza Piazza. She would have more time to work on Killian’s house. The red flickering light bounced on her skin with the memory of his deep voice saying how much he liked the work she’d done.

He was an enigma, face always the opposite of what she expected, brows twisting together as he gave her compliments, laughing when she’d done the wrong thing. She was nervous around him and his questioning eyes. He never asked, though, and that drew her closer, curious to know how his body would feel against her skin, and how soft his hair would be tangled around her fingers. She had no filter when she was near him. He made her manic, hypersexual, stupidly aware of his proximity, caught up in the creative impulse in his charming little house.

The condoms, in retrospect, might have been a mistake, but the label on the antique tin was too fun to resist. When she’d made the crack about a bathroom sink fuck, his look of disbelief had been priceless, but then he’d blushed, and his broody looks turned boyish and cute.

He’d asked her when she wanted to meet again. She’d nearly blurted “Every day.”

She had an impulse to shock him again. More than his praise, more than the money, more than even the work—the layering of light and shadow and pure color—that brief expression of astonishment, the reconsideration when he’d underestimated her, she wanted that. She’d even dreamed of it. She remembered, just barely, the image slipping away the way dreams did, but the look was real, not a midnight fantasy.

The cook called her name, and she took her bag of food. She ate one roll on the way back up to her apartment, licking the grease off her fingers. The soup was even better.

Sleep didn’t come, even after a shower. At one in the morning she threw some jeans on with her pajama top and swiped a finger of kohl on her eyes, black glitter for a neon night. She drove the ten minutes to the new subdivision, her damp hair curling around her ears.

The lights were on and the door was unlocked. A pair of worn-out sneakers sat in the foyer, man-sized, the laces still tied. The floor in front of the fireplace was covered with building printouts, like newspapers spread for an untrained puppy.

Water trickled somewhere inside the house. “Hello,” she called, and a toilet flushed.

Killian came up the hallway, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. His feet were bare. He pulled a pair of black-rimmed glasses from his face when he saw her. “Hi.”

“Um...” Vessa looked away, acutely aware that she had nothing on under her top, that the room was cold and he was anything but. She held up the tailor’s measuring tape she kept in her bag. “Might be helpful to have the room dimensions.”

“With that? Hang on.” He stepped past her, so close she could smell him, male heat and laundry soap. He went into the garage and reappeared seconds later with a carpenter’s tape measure.

“What are you working on?” she asked, staring down at the schematics on the floor.

“Network cabling for Bergman’s monstrosity of a courthouse addition. The man still sketches pipe for gaslight. I’m behind on it.” He pulled the metal rule from its silver case and let it rewind with a snap. “It’s quiet here, and I can work without bothering anyone.”

He didn’t live alone, then. How cruel of Donna Edith, to dangle someone so sexy, yet unavailable, in front of her. Not that she needed a guy complicating her life, with the eventual questions she couldn’t answer. Even if he was long and lean and had a shadow of stubble on his jaw that she itched to touch.

She faked a smile. “Big family at home?”

“No. By
anyone
, I mean my roommate and whomever he’s hooking up with. And by
room
, I mean couch and a sleeping bag. I want to get my own place, but that would involve taking time off to go look for an apartment, and, yeah, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.” He flicked the tape measure again, then jerked his head toward the hall. “C’mon, I’ll help you measure. It’s supposed to be eleven by twelve, but let’s check.”

He was single. Thank you, Donna Edith.

Vessa held the end of the tape while he read the feet and inches. His arms were as lengthy as the rest of him, and surprisingly muscular. He was so
close
,
close enough that she could feel the warmth from his body. She jotted the numbers down on a sticky note, her handwriting even messier than usual. The silence grew thick in the little room.

“What do you do besides work?” she asked.

“Sleep, when I get caught up. Eat. Drink beer on Wednesday nights. I’ll play a couple games of pickup basketball at the gym a few nights a week. That’s about it. What about you?”

“Um.” She swallowed, and made a vague motion around the room with her hand. “This is about it.” He did not need to know she was a table jockey at a pizza joint. Successful designers shouldn’t have to bust their rump fetching Cokes and yet more dipping sauce.

“I guess it must be, as fast as you work,” he said. “Let me know if it gets to be too much.”

“It’s fine.” The silence stretched in the room, wound tight like the metal tape in his hand.

He cleared his throat. “What will you do in here?”

“Paint. The floor needs a rug.” She turned in a slow circle. “It could be a sitting room, maybe. A place for guests to sleep, but not like a spare bedroom. More of a place to curl up with a dirty romance novel and drink tea.”

“Not an art studio?” He was watching her, his head cocked to the side.

“No. That would be upstairs, where the light is so pretty, coming in at all angles. The bathroom is right there, where it’s easy to wash out brushes. Not that this room isn’t pretty,” she said, though it wasn’t, almost square with stark walls and the generic fixture and naked bulb.

“The window may have been a bad idea,” he said.

“Why?” She looked out, but the glass reflected the room. She was a blot of pink, her pajama top with the beckoning lucky cats, with him behind her, hands over his head, fingertips hanging on to the doorjamb.

“The edge of the plot runs thirty-six inches past the outside wall, which means if a house goes up, six feet away you have a nice view of brick—or worse, another window.”

“So no dancing around the house in your underwear,” she said, peering to see past the reflection.

In the glass, his arms came down, one hand rubbing over his mouth. “Probably not.” The words were muffled.

“We’d better have curtains, then.” When she turned around, the doorway was empty. She found him sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, surrounded by his work, a clipboard in his lap. He didn’t look up.

“Did you get everything you need?” His voice was rough in the empty room.

“Yes, thank you,” she said. She took a deep breath, trying to comprehend his sudden change of mood. “There’s some furniture at this cool store, Arts and Crafts period, that would work well. A bed.”

“Buy whatever you want. Just save the receipts so I can turn them in.”

Vessa wanted to retort with something sharp, to make him look up from his work and see her. They’d had a moment, something shared after midnight, intimate, and now he was ignoring her. She stepped through the door, and as she pulled it closed, his low voice murmured, “Be safe.”

She drove home with prickly skin, off-kilter and refusing to be self-conscious that he’d seen her with wet hair, in her pajama top and no bra. Back in her apartment, she slid out of her jeans, crawled under the covers, and slept another eight hours until the muffled ring of her phone at the bottom of her backpack woke her.

“Hullo?” Vessa’s mouth tasted like she’d been sucking on a grapefruit rind.

“How are you, sweetheart? Is the condo working out for you?”

“Daddy.” She dragged herself from the bed, glaring at all the open packing boxes marked Kitchen—Fragile! none of which held her coffee maker.

“Did I wake you? I always forget the time zone difference.”

She filled a mug with water and set it in the microwave. “I’m not in California, Dad.” She unwrapped the teabag from the packet containing soy sauce and a fortune cookie that came with her take-out last night. “I’m here. In Burlington. To stay.”

She hoped, anyway, blinking at the morning sunshine streaming through the huge windows that looked out over the little city. In the distance was the bright shimmer of Lake Champlain. Her apartment was perfect, light and space and
hers
.

“Really?” The delight in her father’s voice warmed Vessa to her bones.

“Yes. I couldn’t get work out there. And I wanted to be closer to Nana and Grampa.”

“Oh, honey, that’s terrific. We could go out and visit them together. Sometime soon.”

Soon meant July. He was still playing by the rules. “I might go earlier than that.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “You do that.” He spoke to someone on his end, a polite exchange, before asking, “So where are you?”

Vessa told him about her apartment, and Manny’s store. “I sublet the condo in L.A. It costs the same,” she said. “I’m not making any money on the deal or anything.” She was at least obeying the letter of the arrangement, if not the intent.

“That deal is between you and Celeste,” he said. “I have no dog in that fight.”

“No, it’s between her and my mother. And I am the dog in the fight.” The microwave beeped, and she dropped the teabag into the cup. The water hissed and bubbled as it swallowed the sachet, a cruder brew than Donna Edith’s elegant potions.

“You know how I feel about all of this, sweetheart. I will back you up, whatever you decide to do.”

“Well, I got a job. Two of them. Pizza Piazza—” She waited while he expressed his approval for their calzones. “And I’m decorating a guy’s house.”

“A guy?”

She dipped the bag up and down, watching the water grow russet brown. “He’s an architect.”

“What firm?”

“Bergman and Bjorg, or something like that.”

“Bjorn? Bergman and Bjorn? Jesus, Vess.”

“You know of them?” She mashed the swollen teabag against the side of her cup with the spoon.

“Yes. I do. They do work all over the state.” He had moved to another room, where his voice echoed differently. “Are you working for them directly, or just for this guy?”

“Just for him. He’s new there, so it’s a small house and he needs it done fast. You should see the place. The roof is going to look amazing when it snows.”

Her phone fell silent. “Hello?” she prodded.

“Have you met anyone else that works there?” her father asked.

“Daaad. He’s fine. It’s legit. I got the job through an agency. He’s very professional.” And ridiculously handsome, with hair that made her fingertips itch to smooth it into place, and eyes that followed her when she moved around a room. And confusing, like with the sudden about-face when he went back to work and ignored her. She blew across the tea, making ripples in the liquid. “How’s Grampa?”

“He’s doing better every day.” A woman’s voice called her father’s name. “I should go,” he said. “I love you, honey.”

“I know. I love you, too.” She hung up and sipped her tea. It was smooth and smoky and went perfectly with the fortune cookie. She ate it all before reading the little scrap of paper.

Love can turn a hut into a golden palace.

Vessa wondered what effect lust would have.

* * *

Bergman droned on about the importance of the trust of the community in the firm’s brand, a counterpoint to Mara Bjorn’s speech about modernizing the mission statement, and Killian shifted in his chair, cracking his spine.

His back ached after being bent over plans for hours of adjusting walls in minute detail and transferring the changes into AutoCAD on his laptop—seven years of higher education reduced to mindless data entry. His ass hurt, too. Only the titular bosses got the comfortable chairs, one on each end, padded leather and adjustable. He slouched over the table, too tall, a high school kid at an elementary desk.

And his balls ached. He’d worked most of the weekend on the living room floor of the house, hoping she would show up again in the middle of the night. She’d been dressed in her sleep shirt and nothing underneath, hair piled on her head, eyes messy and dark and...and...and
sultry
, as if a bed was too boring to hold her. She’d smelled like the shower he needed, talking about dancing in her underwear and reading erotica, and him with an obscenely hard erection, in sweatpants. He’d had to leave and cover his lap with his work like a schoolboy hiding a classroom boner with a textbook.