Linda Jones - Come to Me

“Good morning,” she said as she rushed into his office with her toolbox and gigantic tub of putty and a roll of plastic. She was dressed for the job in an ancient pair of baggy jeans and an old tee that advertised a local bank. Both were paint splattered, revealing an array of colors she’d used in the past year. She was a walking advertisement for her own work.

Sam glanced up, took in her attire and smiled. “Did you manage to get any paint on the walls?”

“Very funny.” She carefully placed her things on the floor and surveyed the office, trying to decide where to start. The walls really were awful, with dings and dents and holes where pictures had once hung. Sam’s office wasn’t only dull, it was imperfect. It was seriously flawed. This she could fix.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked when Lizzie began to move the chairs on the east side of the room away from the wall.

“I’m paying for your investigative services,” she said, not bothering to look his way.

“You’re not moving furniture,” he insisted, and she could hear his chair scrape back as he stood.

“I am,” she said.

“You are not,” he replied.

Lizzie turned to stare at the stubborn man for a long moment. “Do you expect me to paint around the furniture?”

“I’ll move the furniture,” he said, almost, but not quite, clenching his teeth.

“It’s part of the job, part of my payment for your services. Geez, Sam, I work alone more often than not, and I’ve moved my fair share of furniture. It’s not like you have an armoire or a sleeper sofa. This I can handle.”

He stepped away from the desk. “Let me…”

“Am I going to have to ban you from your own office for the duration?”

He stopped short. “What duration? You’ll finish today, right?”

Lizzie grinned. “No way. I don’t just slap paint on a wall and call it done. This is at least a three-day job. Maybe four.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Five days minimum if you don’t let me get to work.”

He didn’t like the idea, but he did finally return to his desk, sit and grudgingly allow her to do what she’d come here to do. The east side of the room didn’t have a window, which made it a good place to start. She moved the furniture away from the wall—nothing heavy, just a small table with an artificial plant sitting on it and an uncomfortable-looking chair—and laid out her drop cloth. The putty she used wasn’t horribly messy, but sometimes she got carried away. Better safe than sorry. She tried to ignore the fact that Sam was in the room, but it wasn’t easy. She was going to have to tell him that he didn’t have to stay here and watch her the whole time. She liked to work alone. Usually she set up her portable CD player and popped in some music and got lost in her work. With Sam around, she couldn’t get lost in anything!

She took down the framed photograph of Sam and her dad after a long-ago fishing trip, as well as a generic landscape. When she started to remove the nails with the grooved end of her favorite hammer, he stopped her with a chilling question.

“What are you doing?”

Hammer in hand, she turned to face him. “I’m working. Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“You don’t paint with a hammer and I have nowhere else to be but right here.”

She curled her lip, slightly. “Must I explain myself step by step?”

“Apparently so.” He crossed his arms over his chest, and there was something about the stance he took that made Lizzie’s heart skip a beat. When it came to men, she wasn’t exactly a novice. She’d dated guys in the past, one or two fairly seriously. She knew quite a few boys, some as friends, some as more than friends—though she’d been without a more-than-friend for a while now. She’d had a few boyfriends, some serious and some not so. Sam was no guy and he was no boy. He was one hundred percent man, and he affected her differently than any other man or boy or guy she’d ever known. He made her stomach turn over and her mouth go dry. He made her tremble deep down and crave things she should not, could not crave. Suddenly she felt a little defensive, as if she needed to build a wall between her and Sam just to protect her sanity.

“If you don’t understand the importance of prep work then I’m not surprised that you don’t have a girlfriend.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, Lizzie felt a rush of heat in her cheeks. When was she going to learn to think before she spoke? That wasn’t exactly the kind of wall she had in mind.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

She tried to pretend she wasn’t embarrassed. Since she’d started the conversation, she might as well finish it. “Prep work, laying the foundation, building perfection, taking one’s time to make sure that a task is properly done. Detail, Sam, detail.”

“What does that have to do with me not having a girlfriend?” Frustration was clear on Sam’s face, and Lizzie wished once more that she’d kept her mouth shut. Keeping her mouth shut had never been easy for her.

“If you can’t figure it out for yourself I’m not going to tell you,” Lizzie said as she turned to face the wall before her. She slowly ran a hand across the surface, feeling every bump, every imperfection. Whoever had painted this wall last had simply slapped paint on over a dusty wall. “What trained monkey painted this office?”

Sam remained quiet, and Lizzie was forced to turn to look at him. He was all but steaming. “When we moved into this office building I painted the wall myself.”

“Oh,” Lizzie said, as she turned to resume her inspection. Yes, no wonder there was no girlfriend. A man who gave so little attention to detail would make a terrible lover. She glanced over her shoulder. Of course, there was nothing that said Sam couldn’t learn a thing or two about detail..

Prep work. No girlfriend. Trained monkey.

It didn’t take Sam long to figure out what Lizzie meant. Fortunately by the time it hit him she was facing the wall again, displaying an oddly sexy form in loose-fitting jeans and a T-shirt with paint splattered all over it. How exactly had she gotten paint on her back, anyway?

He’d show her prep work, dammit.

Sam had taken two steps from his desk before the force of his foolishness hit him. Lizzie was no longer a teenager with a crush, and the difference between twenty-four and thirty-two wasn’t impossible the way fourteen and twenty-two had been. But she was a client, and more important, she was Charlie’s little girl.

Charlie had wanted so much for his daughter. She’d deserved better than a mother who left without warning and a father who worked all the time. Maybe if Charlie had found a decent woman and married her, their lives would’ve been different. It wasn’t that he hadn’t met and dated any nice women, they just hadn’t lasted long. Burned badly by his wife’s desertion, Charlie had been unable to trust that what he saw in a good woman was real. The ones who were less than nice—at least they were honest. That had become his skewed way of looking at things.

Lizzie certainly deserved better than a private investigator who could never offer her a permanent relationship. Sam had given up on permanent the day his wife had walked out of his house and directly into another man’s arms. He’d given up on permanent when the citizens of the town he’d risked his life to protect had come out to picket the precinct after the shooting. He’d thought his marriage would last forever, that he would be a cop until retirement came along. But nothing was forever, he knew that now.

And kids? Forget it. Working child custody cases only made him glad that he wasn’t a father. He couldn’t imagine raising a child in this world.