Pamela Browning - The Treasure Man

“You don’t have to—”

“Hey,” he said. “I can’t stand to watch a woman starve. No big deal.” He brushed past her up the stairs, carrying the can of insecticide, and she heard him humming tunelessly to himself as he went from room to room, anointing each one in turn.

Since there were eight bedrooms, each with its own bath, this took quite a while, during which Chloe inspected the dining room and removed the covers from the big mahogany dining-room table and chairs. The breakfront was devoid of its usual heirloom silver trays and goblets, which made the room seem bare, and Chloe recalled Gwynne’s telling her that she’d put them in storage. The elegant bone china was still there, and so was the antique crystal, all under the surveillance of numerous saturnine Timberlake ancestors glaring down from ornate gilt frames.

When she’d finishing in the dining room, Chloe retreated to the kitchen and munched gloomily on Ben’s cracker. The inn was a disappointment. True, her memories were based on idealized moments from past vacations. She hadn’t been prepared for the general disrepair of the place, but she definitely couldn’t go back to Texas. Her grandmother, with whom she’d lived for the past five years, had sold her house and moved to an assisted-living facility.

During the years with Grandma Nell, Chloe had saved her money in order to give herself a chance to do what she did best—design jewelry. Her cousin’s offer to let her live here had been a godsend. But Chloe’s work would suffer if she was forced to spend all her time cleaning and repairing the Frangipani Inn, not to mention that she didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

When Ben returned, she wordlessly handed a can of warm cola up to him. He popped the top, sat down on a chair beside hers and drank, his throat working as he swallowed. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked him suddenly.

He lifted a brow. “Cute. Red hair. Gwynne’s cousin.”

“Well, thanks for the cute, anyway,” she said wryly.

“It was a long time ago. You were how old? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” she told him, remembering the pain of longing for a guy who hadn’t recognized her existence. He’d called her Carrots because of her red hair, and she’d hated that nickname.

“I was twenty-one and in my first season of diving for Sea Search, Inc.”

“You seemed much older to me.”

He snorted. “Honey, that summer I was getting older by the minute.” His curt laughter didn’t convey humor.

She got up to plug in the refrigerator. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“Oh?” His eyebrows shot up.

“About your request to stay here. I wasn’t anticipating sharing the place with anyone else because I have work to do, but if you’d help with repairs in exchange for rent, you could live in the annex. You’d have your own entrance and everything, and—”

“Hold it,” he said. “You don’t have to talk me into it. I have nowhere else to go, and I’m a decent handyman.”

“That’s good, because I don’t know one screw from another.”

He blinked at her, and she realized what he must be thinking. She felt her neck coloring. “We could give it a trial,” she said quickly to cover her embarrassment. “Maybe a week or two?”

“That suits me, since I’m waiting for a job to come through and money is tight.”

“You don’t work with Sea Search anymore?”

“I haven’t been employed there for over a year.” Ben drained the can in one easy motion and stood up, crumpling it in his hand. “The rain has let up enough so that I can retrieve the food from your car,” he said before tossing the can into the trash bin beside the door.

Chloe, her cheeks still flushed from her gaffe, handed over her car keys and watched from the window as Ben loped through the curtain of rain. He soon returned carrying bags of groceries that she’d bought before leaving Texas, sprinkling wet droplets around the kitchen as he shook water from his eyes.

“I spotted your cat. He’s sitting under the porch steps.”

“Butch will be okay on his own. He loves it here.” She set a box of cat crunchies out on the counter for later and started to stash the rest of the food in the pantry.

“Would you like a sandwich?” she asked.

“No, I’d rather inspect my new digs.”

“You’ll have to plug in the refrigerator in there, and I’m not sure the hot-water heater works. Gwynne mentioned something about it.”

“I’ll check everything.” He rose, and she found herself staring point-blank at his bare damp torso, exposed when his shirt had come unbuttoned. His physique, even though he was older than when she saw him last, was close to spectacular. Wide shoulders tapered to a narrow waist, and his legs were muscular and nicely formed.

“I’d better call Butch one more time,” she said, mostly for something to do besides stare at the line of hair pointing toward his navel.

She stood and went to the door as Ben disappeared into the annex. Butch didn’t appear when she called. Since she wasn’t interested in flailing around beneath the porch in the hope of chasing him out, she went back inside and opened the can of tuna.

After her solitary meal, she climbed the stairs to her room and stripped off her wet clothes, noticing that the stream of water from her bathroom sink ran nonstop, a knob was missing from the vanity and the hook from the closet door lay on the floor. Thank goodness Ben Derrick had shown up. With him to help her, she might be able to make her ambitious plans for the summer work after all.

She was brushing her teeth when she heard a door open downstairs. “Chloe?”

“Uh-huh,” she said through a mouthful of toothpaste. She grabbed a glass of water, rinsed her mouth and spit; the water here had a foul sulfur taste, but the water softener would take care of that.

“You’re right. The hot-water heater isn’t working.”

She wrapped her robe tightly around her and went to the top of the stairs. Ben was standing in the foyer below.

“I’ll look at it tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” Chloe said, her heart sinking. She didn’t have extra money to pay for major repairs, and anyway, she wasn’t sure whose responsibility they would be, hers or Gwynne’s.

“I figured I’d better report it.”

“Thanks. I think. Hey, you’ll be needing a hot shower, won’t you?”

“That would be nice, but I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“The bathrooms up here are all supplied by the water heater under the attic stairs,” she said, inclining her head in that direction. “It’s working fine. I have personal knowledge of this.”

“If you wouldn’t mind—” Ben began, but she shushed him by holding up a hand.

“Use the bathroom off the master suite to my right. You won’t be in my way.”

“Cool,” Ben said, and for a moment she could have sworn that he was ogling her bare legs below her short terry-cloth robe.

“No, hot,” she said, referring to the water, but as he raised his eyebrows, she realized that he thought she was making a flirtatious comment about him.

“Good night,” she mumbled in embarrassment, turning on her heel and fleeing to her own room, knowing that she hadn’t mistaken the humorous glint in his eyes.

“Good night, Chloe,” he replied, a hint of laughter in his voice.

Her room was filled with the sound of the rain on the roof and Ben taking his shower on the other side of the wall, which divided her room from the master bath. She couldn’t stop visualizing Ben standing under the shower spray, soaping himself all over. The more she tried to banish him from her mind, the more vividly her imagination embellished his image.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered as she fluffed her pillow for the fourth time. “I’m not here to get involved with a guy.”