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My heart plummeted into the pit of my stomach. Leaning there in my doorway with his perfectly chiseled arm resting two feet above my head against the frame…was none other than the tan, blue-eyed hottie I had run into at the coffee shop.
“It’s you,” I mumbled. “What…What are you doing here?”
“You called us,” he replied, not looking the least bit amused.
I was paralyzed for a moment, not really sure if I understood exactly what he meant or what was going on. My brain wasn’t functioning at the speed it needed to. But since I couldn’t formulate an excuse or reason to turn him away, I resigned, stepping aside to show him in.
7
DEREK
I felt just as stunned as the woman looked, but I suspected it was for different reasons. I blinked a few times, just to make sure I was seeing things right. But when my eyes opened for the third time, it was clear.
This was the same woman who spilled coffee on me yesterday, no doubt. But the time since then had transformed her into a hot mess.
Her hair was a matted mess, she had makeup smudged all around her eyes, and…well, she looked hungover. It was not a good look for her.
I stammered for a moment, as did she; neither of us knew what to say. We were stuck.
“I’m Keith Mullins,” my brother interjected, pushing past me to shake her hand. “This here is my brother Derek. You called about us coming to give an estimate on fixing up the house?” He checked the form he had filled out from her phone call again. “Did we misunderstand something? I have this day and time written down right here. I thought…”
“No, no,” she rasped. “Hi, come in. My name is Melody. You got the time right. I just…I’m kind of out of sorts here lately, and I overslept. I’m sorry.” She showed us in and crossed over to the kitchen, smoothing her fingers from the bridge of her nose over her forehead, then started massaging her temple.
“I’ll make some coffee. Would either of you like a cup? I know I sure need it.”
Ordinarily, I would have cracked a joke warning her not to spill it on me this time, but she did not look like she was in a joking mood.
“No thanks,” Keith waved. “We’ll get started, but we’ll let you know if we have any questions as we take a look around.”
“O-okay, but I’m afraid I won’t be of much help there,” she frowned. “This is the first time I’ve ever been here, honestly. I don’t really know anything about the place. I have a folder of information from my mother’s attorney. Would that help you?”
I shot my brother a look but kept my thoughts to myself as we investigated the place. This was her mother’s house. How had she never been to it before now? It seemed odd to me.
“No, ma’am. That’s fine. I’ll let you know if we think we need to take a look at that information you have, but I imagine we can piece most of it together ourselves,” he replied.
We left her alone to brew her coffee. I still couldn’t believe how much her looks had crumbled since yesterday. What the hell happened to her last night?
The more we looked around, I could see past the off-putting first impression of disrepair. I could tell someone had done a little cleaning, but just barely. The dust and cobwebs I would have expected to see from how long it had been closed up were mostly gone, but things were still cluttered and out of place.
Despite all that, it was a nice old house with lots of antique finishes and details. I noticed some of the crown moldings in one room looked like it dates back to the 1930s, maybe even older. I whistled when we walked across the wood flooring in another room that needed some refinishing, but was otherwise in pristine condition.
“This place could be on the historic registry,” Keith commented, reading my mind.
“Not that she’d ever care enough to follow through with something like that,” I huffed, bobbing my head in the direction of the kitchen where we could still hear her shuffling around. He shot me a cross look that made me feel bad for saying it. “But fine, we’ll mention it to her. Then you can see for yourself how she responds.”
After our initial walk-through, we dug in a little deeper with our tools to test some of the weak spots in the flooring, the un-sturdiness of the windows and doors. We climbed up on the roof to see if the whole thing needed to be redone or if it could just do with some patchwork.
The more we inspected everything, it became apparent that before the house was left unattended for so long, someone had put a lot of care into it. Its problems didn’t date back more than a few years, which was about how long it had been since my neighbor or I had seen its lights shining out across the lake at night.
It was a shame that Melody’s mother had obviously once put a lot of time and work into the place, only to let time slip and all of that go down the drain.
Once we were finished, we headed back into the kitchen to find Melody. She was just coming down the stairs and had managed to clean herself up a little. The makeup around her eyes was gone, and her hair was straightened back into a neat ponytail again.
She didn’t look as good as she had yesterday, but it was a major improvement. That coffee also seemed to be helping her some.
I stood back and let Keith go over all the numbers with her, along with the timeline. I could tell her head must have been aching from whatever she got into the night before, but she smiled and nodded to everything as he explained it all.
“When can you start?” she asked, turning to the fridge for a glass of water.
