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“Stop.”
“Did you have a question?”
“No historical commentary,” he said.
“What?” I gasped.
His face was firm, dark eyes unyielding. For a moment, I could easily imagine him on a football field. Bearing down on a quarterback, hell-bent on knocking him over. Burke must have been a terrifying sight.
“If I have questions, I will ask,” he said. “But I don’t need to know whether that windowpane was made with a hand plow owned by George Washington.”
“I mean, Washington lived over a hundred years before this house was built, but sure ... I can avoid making those types of comments.”
Dick.
Burke narrowed his eyes as if I’d said it out loud, but he did nothing more than sigh and redirect his attention to the soaring entryway. In the middle of the peeling paint on the ceiling, there was a sad length of exposed wire.
I had to chomp down on my tongue to keep from telling him about which rooms we were in, what they were used for when the house was built, and what they could be used for now.
When he briefly touched his fingertips to the carved fireplace in the first sitting room—originally set up as a library, where Mr.Campbell liked to greet guests—I wanted to tell him that there were six fireplaces in the house. The emerald-green tiles around it were chipped, and a few were missing, which meant the entire thing would need to be redone. There was no chance of finding anything that would match it.
His eyes tracked around the drawing room, settling on the massive holes in the plaster and the missing pieces of crown molding.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“Botched construction, unfortunately.” It still gutted me to see it. “The last owners started—and never continued—their plans. It was somewhat of a pet project to them, so they were slow at first. But then he left her, and the divorce stretched out for years. She refused to let him have it, so the work didn’t continue while they fought over ...everything, really. That’s why you can see portions of a wall taken out by that butler’s pantry and into the dining room.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to open it up anyway? It sure would look better.”
Don’t do it.
Don’t do it.
I blew out a breath through puffed cheeks. He eyed me cautiously.
“Just say it,” he said.
The words came out on a rushed exhale. “It would never be historically appropriate to knock down walls. You could kiss the historical certification goodbye if you did. They structured the rooms like this because it was easier to keep them warm.”
He grunted.
His knuckle tapped on the edge of one of the holes. “So this just needs new drywall?”
“Plaster,” I corrected. “It’s much more expensive, unfortunately. But it’s the only real option if you’re going to fix the damage they did.”
I didn’t even get a grunt this time.
We wandered through the butler’s pantry, the small kitchen tucked at the back of the house, and he looked curiously at the smaller second staircase that led up to the bedrooms.
Honestly, I deserved an award for keeping my mouth shut.
“Bedrooms?”
“Six of them, three on each side of the staircase,” I told him. “Two bathrooms upstairs and one powder room down here.”
“Let me guess—more damage up there too?”
I attempted a smile. “Worse, actually.”
