Saved by the Fireman Read online

  “Actually, it’ll be more like a crowbar to the feet of your bathtub. Since you agreed to re-enamel it, I’m pulling it out today. Are you ready to start talking about color?”

  Charlotte felt as if she’d been waiting a decade to pick the color of something, even though that was far from true. Colors—and how they went together—were a wondrous obsession for her, and part of the lure of the textile industry. Still, this choice felt new and exciting, in a way she couldn’t quite define. She snatched the top issue from a pile of home decor magazines that were sitting next to the teapot. “I already have one picked out.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Jesse walked up the last of the stairs. “Let’s see.”

  She thumbed through the magazine to the dog-eared page, then held it up to Jesse to see. “That sink? The buttercream color with the brass fixtures? That’s it, right there.”

  Jesse took the magazine. “Good choice. For a minute there I thought you were going to show me something purple or zebra striped. The guy who does the re-enameling work is good, but he’s not a magician.”

  For a moment, Charlotte tried to imagine a zebra-striped claw-footed bathtub. Such a thing should never exist. “I have much better taste than animal prints for bathroom fixtures. He can do the sink to match, can’t he?”

  Jesse peered closer at the photograph. “It won’t matter. You’ll need a new sink no matter what—the newer fixtures won’t fit on a sink like you’ve got. I’ll bring you some catalogues with sinks that come in a color close to that tomorrow. When you pick the style and finish, Jack will make sure the bathtub matches perfectly.” He looked up at her. “You’re going to want one of those old-fashioned circle shower curtains, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely. And in the brass finish. Not that cheap nickel finish.”

  “That brass finish is exactly that—not cheap. Are you sure?”

  Parts of her were completely sure. Other parts—the edges of her chest that turned dark and trembling when she allowed herself to think of how her perfect life plan had been upended—balked at the extra price. Still, how many times in life did a girl get to pick out bathroom fixtures? Ones that would last for decades? A woman’s bathroom was her sanctuary, her private escape from life’s tensions. Hers had to be just right—especially when nothing else in life was. She nodded. Did he find that charming or annoying? His expression was unreadable, and she was growing a little nervous knot in her stomach. “I’ve even got the shower curtain and window treatment fabric picked out.”

  “You’re going to be fun to work with, you know that?”

  “I hope so.” She really did. There was something so immensely satisfying about bringing the cottage back to life. As if the house had been waiting for her, holding its structural breath for her to come and pour her ideas inside. Charlotte had engineered some major achievements at Monarch, but those hadn’t given her any security, had they? This cottage offered security, right down to the soul-nurturing buttercream color of her soon-to-be-reborn bathtub.

  Jesse returned to his bag, making all kinds of rattling noises until he straightened back up with a crowbar, a pair of safety glasses and the daintiest pair of work gloves Charlotte had ever seen. Her astonishment must have shown all over her face, because Jesse waved the gloves and admitted, “These are from my mother. Don’t ask.”

  She wanted to. The gloves were adorable, white canvas with a vintage-looking print of bright pink roses. They looked like garden gloves from a 1950s issue of Better Homes and Gardens. “I love them.” Then, because she couldn’t hold the curiosity in any longer, “Your mother sent these?”

  He ran his hands down his face, but it didn’t hide the flush she saw creep across his cheeks. “I said don’t ask.”

  Charlotte pulled her knees up onto the chair and hugged them to her chest, utterly amused. “Do all your customers get adorable work gloves on their first day?” Jesse’s mix of amusement and embarrassment was just too much fun to watch.

  “Was there something about ‘don’t ask’ that wasn’t clear here? Or do you want me to take away your crowbar and just have at the bathtub on my own?”

  “No!” she cried, leaping off her chair. The thought of starting, of finally getting this project underway, whizzed through her like electricity. She lunged for the gloves and the crowbar, but Jesse dodged her easily.

  “Wait a minute, Ms. Taylor. If we’re going to demo together, there are some rules. I can’t have customers getting hurt on the job or letting their enthusiasm run away with their good sense.”

  Charlotte planted her hands on her hips and squared off against Jesse, even though he had a good six inches on her five-six frame. She raised her chin in defiance. “I never let my enthusiasm run away with my good sense.”

  The irony of that played out in Jesse’s eyes the same moment her brain caught on to the idiocy of that statement made by an unemployed woman about to launch a major renovation project. He just raised one eyebrow, the corner of his mouth turning up in an unspoken, “Really?”

  Charlotte used the distraction to pluck the crowbar from Jesse’s hand. “Until now,” she said, turning toward the door that led into what would be the dining room.

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  Chapter Five

  Jesse watched Charlotte wiggle her fingers into the work gloves Mom had sent along. If they weren’t so perfect for Charlotte, he’d have never agreed to something so unprofessional as a gift of fussy work gloves. Only these fit Charlotte’s personality to a tee. Mom had won them in some social club raffle, and they were far too small for her arthritic hands, anyway. With a pang, Jesse wondered if Mom had been saving them for Randy’s wife. Randy’s ex-wife.

  He’d wanted Constance and Randy to succeed, but even he could see she wasn’t the sort of spouse who would continue to endure the kind of hours Randy kept. Jesse wanted his work to be a passion, surely, but not an obsession. That was part of why he loved the firehouse—it served as a constant reminder that there was more to life than a paycheck. There was a certain poetic justice in spending his work hours constructing when so much of the firefighting battled destruction.

  Charlotte’s wide-spread and wiggling floral fingers pulled his thoughts back to the present. He should have remembered pulling the bathtub would be a tight squeeze in this narrow bathroom—he was so close to her he could smell the flowers in whatever lotion she wore. Something sweet but with just a bit of zing, like her personality. Jesse held out the clunky safety glasses. “Time to accessorize.”

  He hadn’t counted on her looking so adorable, standing there like an enthusiastic fish with those big brown eyes filling the gogglelike lenses. Her smile was beyond distracting, and she looked so utterly happy. He’d been grumpy for days after he “lost” the cottage—for that matter he got grumpy when he lost a basketball game at the firehouse—but she managed to keep her bounce even when losing her job, not to mention her beloved grandmother. What about her made that kind of resilience possible?

  He straddled the antiquated pipes that ran up one side of the bathtub, pulling a wrench from his tool belt to detach them from the floor. Best to get to work right away before the urge to stare at her made him do something stupid. Well, stupider than presenting her with fussy gloves and a baby crowbar. “Pry up that flange while I pull from here.”

  “Flange?”

  Yep, stupider. More every minute. “The circle thing around the bottom of the pipe. Wedge the crowbar into the waxy stuff holding it to the tile and yank it free.”

  She was a parade of different emotions as she got down on her knees and thrust the crowbar under the seal. Anxiety, determination, excitement, worry—they seemed to flash across her face in split-second succession. He liked that she was so emotionally invested in the place, but it bugged him how transparent her feelings seemed to him. “Go on,” he encouraged, charmed by the way she bi
t her lip and the “ready or not” look in her wide eyes. “You can do this.”

  Charlotte gave the fixtures a determined glare, then got down on her knees and thrust the crowbar under the seal. The yelp of victory she gave when the suction gave way and the ring sprang up off the tile to clatter against the pipe was—and he was going to have to find a way to stop using this word—adorable. She brandished the crowbar as she sat back on her haunches and watched him go through the process of unhooking the bathtub from its plumbing. He could have done this alone more quickly—maybe even more easily—but this was too much fun. Getting this porcelain behemoth down the stairs to his truck would be the exact opposite of fun, but he’d called in a few guys from the firehouse to help with that, even though they wouldn’t add to the scenery the way Charlotte’s grin currently did.

  She ran a hand along the lip of the deep tub. “Mima would have loved this tub. You were smart to talk me into saving it.”

  The expensive Jacuzzi model she’d had her eye on seemed like a ridiculous indulgence he would have talked anyone out of buying. Especially when this one could be so easily repaired. “Tell me about her.” The question seemed to jump from his mouth, surprising her as much as it did him.

  Her eyes lit up with affection. “Mima? She was ‘a piece of work,’ Grandpa always used to say. Her real name was Naomi Charlotte Dunning, but when I was little I couldn’t quite say Naomi, so I just said ‘Mi’ at first. Then it became ‘Mima’ and that stuck. I’m named after her. She was a great woman. Grandpa had Alzheimer’s like Melba’s dad, and Mima was a hero in how she took care of him. When he died, I know she grieved and was scared to go on without him, but she found her courage. So much so that she decided to scatter some of his ashes all over the world. And I mean all over the world. She’d been on almost every continent, and left a little bit of Grandpa everywhere she went.” She shrugged. “It’s hopelessly romantic, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.” He was pretty sure his parents had already purchased grave plots at the local cemetery and probably had a file somewhere with precise instructions as to what was going to go on their markers. Dad was a firm believer in advance planning, which was why he was so quick to categorize Jesse’s career as “unfocused.”

  Charlotte sighed. “I want to be just like that when I’m her age. I’d want to be just like that now, if I could.”

  Jesse couldn’t think of a single family member—not even Mom—he would praise like that. Family just didn’t spur that kind of adoration in his world. “Did you spend a lot of time with her?”

  “Tons. She took me on a few of her earlier, smaller trips. Now I get...well—” she swallowed hard “—I used to get postcards from her adventures.”

  He hardly even needed to ask. “And you kept them, didn’t you?”

  “I’m going to buy beautiful silver frames for all of them and fill the dining room wall.”

  She had plans—ambitious plans—for every room in the house. Jesse knew a thing or two about dreaming up plans. It made him wonder where he’d be right now if he had half the determination Charlotte had to put hers in play the way she did. “That will be nice.”

  Charlotte leaned in, pushing the safety goggles up on top of her head. “I loved her travels, but even when Mima wasn’t going anywhere, she was great. You know those teenage years, when you think your parents are the world’s worst? I would hang out at Mima’s house and declare my life a disaster, and she would just sit there in her rocking chair with her knitting and let me rant. That’s where I learned to knit—from Mima. She’d take me to the yarn store and buy me whatever I wanted—even crazy colors or wild novelty yarns—and then we’d go home and make something amazing with it together.”

  Jesse yanked the first of the two water pipes free and started on the second. “My grandmother taught me her beef stew recipe, but it wasn’t quite the warm, fuzzy experience you described.”

  She cocked her head, sending the glasses askew so that she had to catch them with her hand. “What do you mean?”

  “It was less of an ‘I’m passing down the family recipe’ thing and more of a ‘Don’t you mess this up and besmirch the Sykes family name’ thing. She had no granddaughters, so I think I was just a stand-in. My brother’s marriage didn’t last long enough to permit any recipe sharing with his wife, anyway.” He pointed to the claw foot of the tub nearest his foot. “Ready to pry that up?”

  “I won’t break it, will I?”

  “This is a two-hundred-pound hunk of coated metal. I doubt you could even chip it.”

  “But it’s cracked already.” She really had become attached to the thing. It was a bathroom fixture, for crying out loud, not a family heirloom.

  “You’ll be fine.” Because she looked so worried he added, “Just go slow and stop when I tell you.”

  That foot and the next came free easily, and Jesse was able to angle the tub out of the alcove where it sat and pry up the last two feet with no trouble at all. Once he’d turned the tub away from the wall, the offending crack could be seen. Charlotte ran her finger down the rusted crack, giving a little groan as if she was dressing a wound. “This can be fixed, can’t it?”

  Jesse made the mistake of hunching down beside her on the narrow floor. It put them too close. “I’m almost positive. The rust isn’t that bad and my guy is an artist.”

  She ran her hands along the top again. “You know, now I’m glad we’re saving her. It’d be a shame to ditch such a beautiful old thing just for a few hotshot Jacuzzi jets, don’t you think?”

  He shot her a look. “You realize you’re talking about a bathtub, right? You’re not gonna give it a name or anything. Are you?” Boats, pets and people got names—not bathtubs—but the way Charlotte was looking, he couldn’t be sure.

  The corner of her mouth turned up. “I’m not the crazy lady who names her plants and has a dozen cats. Not yet, at least. I do plan to own a cat in the near future, though, so you never know.”

  Jesse chose not to hide his grimace. “A cat?” Maybe he could talk her into holding off until the renovation was complete. Surely he could scour the internet for home construction cat dangers and tell a few horror stories to warn her off.

  Charlotte sat back against the wall and crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, if I didn’t already guess you to be a dog person, I now have conclusive proof.”

  “I always heard cats and yarn were a bad combination.” He began dismantling the hot and cold faucets from the end of the tub. “You know, jigsaw puzzle photos of kittens tangled up in yarn balls and all.”

  “I’ll take my chances. I’m too enamored of my shoe collection to risk the damage a puppy could do.” As if it had suddenly occurred to her, she asked, “How on earth are you going to get this thing down the stairs?”

  Jesse checked his watch. “A few of the guys from the firehouse will be here in twenty minutes. I should have all these fixtures removed in ten minutes, and then we can start on the sink. That we can just whack apart with a sledgehammer.”

  Her eyes popped. “You’re not really—”

  “No.” She really was too much fun to mess with. “Unless you want to?”

  It was the most amusing thing to watch. She was frightened of taking a hammer to her bathroom walls, but there was this corner of her eyes that lit up with the idea. The way that woman could run away with his practicality was going to be very dangerous, indeed. Keep your distance, Sykes—the last thing you need to do is mess this up.

  * * *

  “And then he took the sink out onto the driveway. I took that great big hammer, hoisted it over my head and split that sink into two pieces right there.” Charlotte felt the ear-to-ear grin return, just as it had every time she remembered the sensation of cracking that sink right down the middle. “I didn’t know I had it in me.”

  “I didn’t know you had it in you, either.” Melba laughed
. “Honestly, I can’t picture it. Sounds rather unsafe.”

  “No, Jesse brought me safety glasses and gloves and everything.” She leaned closer to the circle of wide-eyed women at the Gordon Falls Community Church knitting group. “But I think even he was a little shocked that I broke it in half on my first try. The firehouse guys, when they came to help drag the tub down the stairs and into Jesse’s truck? They were impressed. Guess all that upper-body work at the gym paid off. I’m telling you, it’s satisfying. Demolition therapy is seriously underutilized.”

  The women all looked shocked—all except for Violet Sharpton, an elderly woman with a sweet expression and a quirky personality. She looked almost envious. “What fun!”

  “It made me feel a little bit powerful.” In fact, it had made her feel like a momentary superhero, a great memory to pull out when the surges of panic came. “For a woman in a job search, a little confidence boost goes a long way.”

  “Speaking of a confidence boost,” said Melba, “show them your shawl, Charlotte. I want the ladies to see how really talented you are.”

  Charlotte reached into her knitting bag and produced a sky-blue shawl of mohair-silk lace. Stitched from a knitting pattern and yarn Mima had brought back from Ireland, Charlotte considered this shawl a personal masterpiece.

  “Wow. You weren’t kidding, Melba. That’s beautiful!” Tina, one of the older ladies of the group, ran her fingers across the intricate stitch work.

  “I told you, she’s talented,” Melba boasted. “Look at that lace work.”

  Charlotte held up the shawl. “It looks hard, but it’s really not that complicated.”

  Violet somehow managed a friendly frown. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to hush up and accept a compliment? It may be easy for you, but some of us would never make it through the first inch.” The older woman looked around the room to her fellow knitters. “Can you imagine how blessed someone’s going to be when they get even a basic shawl knit with that kind of talent?” The purpose of the group was to make prayer shawls, hand-knitted wraps that were prayed over and given to people in need of healing or comfort. Charlotte had sent supplies from Monarch when Melba first started the group. “Thanks to Charlotte,” Violet continued, “I think we’ve just taken things up a notch around here.”