Home Sweet Home (A Southern Comfort Novel) (3 page)

G
race held out for almost two weeks before she called Jake. Jane and Dev helped get her moved in, despite Priya’s best efforts to distract them with cuteness. There was a freezer full of homemade food from Dev’s mother, who had absolutely no confidence in Grace’s ability to feed herself, which was fine with Grace. Her books were still in boxes until she painted, her clothes were mostly in the closet, and she finally found her favorite moisturizer after a week of going without. She met with the head of the English Department, got a university-issued laptop, and set up her office in the creaky old brick building in the middle of Pembroke’s campus. She rode her bike into town for coffee, for lunch, for library books.

She was especially impressed with the Willow Springs Public Library. It was small and dark, but it had an amazing stained glass window that took up almost the entire south wall of the building. It was an abstract design, a jumble of colors and shapes that shouldn’t make sense, but did. It kind of reminded Grace of a Jackson Pollock painting—it looked haphazard and easy, but there was an unconscious order to the madness that drew her in. The Library Window, as it was cleverly called, was impressive, and so was the library’s collection of DIY books. Grace had a pretty good selection checked out:
How to Maximize Small Spaces
,
The Modern Chick’s Guide to Home Improvement
,
You Don’t Need a Man, You Need a Hammer
, and, just for fun,
The Greek Tycoon’s Virgin Secretary
.

She had used the books to guide her through fixing a wonky kitchen cabinet. She found instructions on how to replace her broken toilet seat, which made her very proud, even if she almost snapped her cheap-o wrench trying to get the rusted old bolts off. The process for replacing a loose top piece for the newel post on her banister seemed too complicated, so she just glued it, which seemed to work.

But none of the books, not even her new home-repair confidence, was helping. She sat at her kitchen table, her panicked gaze switching between the pages of
The Home Plumber’s Guide to Home Plumbing
and her misbehaving kitchen sink. She was working up the courage to identify the source of the leak, which would entail turning the water back on. If she turned the water back on, her kitchen would flood again. She wasn’t sure if the checkerboard linoleum could handle another rush of misbehaving kitchen water.

But the plumbing book made no sense to her. There were diagrams and pictures and words, and those three things had gotten her through other projects. But anxiety made the augers and pivot balls and bibs swim before her eyes. Plus, she needed a pipe wrench. All she had were pliers.

They didn’t work. She’d tried.

And when she called Jane to freak out and maybe get her much-more-practical-and-handy sister to come down and fix her sink, Jane told her that the two things she never messed with were plumbing and wiring. Because only idiots messed with plumbing and wiring when they didn’t know what they were doing.

“But you know who does know what he’s doing?”

Grace hung up before Jane could tell her to call Handsome Jake.

So, instead of calling someone who would help her out, Grace sat at her kitchen table with her legs crossed (no water meant no toilet, she soon realized) and risked a glance at her refrigerator, where Jane had tacked Mary Beth’s card with Jake’s number on the back.

She shouldn’t ask him for help. She should just call a regular plumber. She could just get a recommendation. But the only person in town she knew well enough to call so early in the morning was Mary Beth, and if she did that, Mary Beth would just send her brother over. That would save Grace the trouble of calling Jake herself, which would limit her exposure to his patronizing tone. But then Jake would know she was, too—what was she, annoyed? Intimidated? Chicken?

Yes.

But she was going to have to be able to use her kitchen and bathroom eventually.

Letting out the kind of heavy, self-pitying sigh that she only indulged in when she was alone, Grace got up from the table and plodded miserably to the refrigerator. She pulled the horse magnet, which apparently came with the house, off the clean, white surface. She held the card to the fridge with one finger.

“Grace Williams, you are being ridiculous,” she told herself. Out loud. Because she’d rather start talking to herself out loud than call a perfectly competent person who was sort-of-willing to help. She bopped her head on the refrigerator door once, then once more, then she peeled off Jake’s number and started to dial.

Jake’s head was buzzing.

He shook himself awake, but it still took him a second to recognize where he was. Brown plaid couch, neon beer signs on the wall. Kyle’s house.

Kyle had been on call all weekend, and, in solidarity, Jake had behaved himself. He was gone so much with work that he couldn’t join the Willow Springs volunteer firefighters, but he could do his part by commiserating with his best friend who was, frankly, a drama queen. Of course, no fireman wants a house to catch on fire on account of lives endangered and property damaged. But Kyle was an adrenaline junkie and a rowdy, and being on call meant he had to stay close to home and sober. He used to spend his weekends on call with the other guys and gals at the fire station, but the captain had begged Jake to have mercy on all of them and babysit.

So Jake was doing his part for the citizens of Willow Springs.

Kyle was particularly grumpy because while he was on call, sitting around and not drinking like a normal red-blooded American man, Missy was out at the bars with her girlfriends. Kyle and Missy had only been dating for a few weeks this time, but they had dated for a couple of weeks on and off since high school. Jake wasn’t sure why, if they drove each other so crazy, they couldn’t just quit it. He liked Missy well enough, but he really couldn’t see going out with someone who drove him as crazy as she drove Kyle. He asked Kyle about it once, and Kyle had slugged him. So they didn’t talk about feelings anymore.

Missy was out and Kyle was home, and he’d been a beast all weekend, torturing himself with the kinds of trouble Missy was getting into without him. She wasn’t helping, sending pictures of herself doing shots, hugging the bartender. If Jake didn’t know Missy so well, he would’ve said she was being cruel. Well, she was being cruel, but Jake knew she was just giving Kyle hell. And Kyle had moped and whined, and Jake finally had to hide his car keys so Kyle didn’t go out and chase Missy down.

So on Monday, no longer on call, Kyle staked out the hospital where Missy worked, finagled her into the car when she was done with her shift, and Jake didn’t hear from either of them until Tuesday afternoon. By then, Kyle was feeling tied down and claustrophobic, and Missy was sick of his crap, so Jake invited himself over to Kyle’s house where they basically did what they’d done all weekend, but this time with beer.

Jake had spent more nights than was probably healthy on Kyle’s couch. He had even gone out and bought his own pillow to keep in Kyle’s linen closet. It was the only remotely linen thing in there. But last night Jake had had too much whiskey on top of his beer, and he’d made do with the scratchy throw pillows and his sweatshirt.

Which was now buzzing on his cheek.

He dug around the mess until he found the pocket, then pulled out his cell phone. He didn’t recognize the number, which usually meant he shouldn’t pick up. But he was tired and hungover and wanted to take it out on someone, so he picked up.

“H’lo?”

“Hi, is this Jake?”

A woman. He squinted across the room at the neon Schlitz clock. It was awfully early for him to be staring at neon, let alone for a strange woman to be calling.

“Hello?” the woman asked.

Jake grunted in response.

“Hi, this is Grace Williams. Um, your sister sold me that house?”

Right. The professor who lived in that money pit. He thought he was off the hook with that obligation. If she needed him to hang her cat pictures, he was going to be pissed.

“Yeah, hi. What’s up?” he said in the most uninterested way possible.

“Sorry, did I wake you?”

Years of maintaining relationships with difficult clients had taught Jake to politely deny when he was being inconvenienced, no matter how big a lie it was.

“Yeah,” he replied. He wanted her to know that she was inconvenient.

“Oh. Sorry. Like I said.”

“What do you want, Professor?”

“Um. You know what? Never mind. I’m fine.”

He heard her hesitation, and he knew she wasn’t fine.

“What do you need, Grace?” It did not, in fact, kill him to be a little bit nice.

“I told you, I’m—”

“I promised my sister I’d help you out, and if she finds out you need help and I wasn’t there for you, I’ll have to pay big time. So do me a favor and tell me what’s wrong.”

He heard her dramatic sigh loud and clear.

“What do you know about plumbing?”

Jake thought briefly about all of the bathrooms he’d upgraded or built from scratch, but he didn’t like the way that Grace asked. It sounded as if she assumed he didn’t know anything.

“Enough,” he told her.

“Okay. Mary Beth said you were handy, but I didn’t know if that would apply to plumbing.”

Mary Beth had said he was
handy
? That’s the last time he fixes her garbage disposal.

“Or do you know a plumber I can call? Someone with a good reputation who won’t charge me too much.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s my sink,” she said.

He waited for her to give him a little more information.

She didn’t.

“What’s wrong with your sink?”

“It sort of exploded all over my kitchen floor.”

Great. Of course that house would have leaky pipes.

He heaved himself off the couch and gave his own dramatic sigh. “Do you know how to turn the water off?”

“I’m not an idiot, Jake.”

Whoa. Sassy. “I didn’t say you were.”

“No, but your tone implied it. Mary Beth showed me the water shut-off and the breakers before I bought the house. So I do know enough not to kill myself, thanks. But I’d really like someone to come take a look at this so I can go to the bathroom sometime before the end of the week.”

Well, this should be fun, he thought, sliding his feet into his shoes. “I’ll be over in a minute. Just let me stop at home and get some tools.”

“Oh, you’re not at home?”

He thought she sounded surprised, which offended him. He was a single, red-blooded man. Why should he sleep at home every night? Then he thought there was some judgment in her surprise, which offended him even more. He was going over there to fix her plumbing for free and now she was judging him?

He also blamed her for causing his intense overreaction. Normal women didn’t push his buttons the way the professor did.

Jake put his hand over his phone, just enough so the sound was muffled, but she could still hear. “I’ll call you later,” he said in the loudest whisper he could muster.

“Okay, Professor, see you in a minute,” he said into the phone.

She didn’t say anything. Well, she might have, but Jake hung up before he could hear it.

“Who are you talking to?”

Jake looked up to see Missy, in one of Kyle’s oversized T-shirts, coming down the stairs. When had Missy gotten here?

“I gotta go fix a sink,” he told her, trying not to notice that the shirt was the only thing she was wearing.

“Oh, for that new girl?”

Jake stared. At her face. Only at her face.

“Mary Beth told me. She said she was nice. Really funny.”

“That’s not my impression of her.”

“Yeah, MB told me she was kind of a b when she first moved in.”

“Kind of?”

“Please, Jake, like you’re never a jerk when you’re cranky.”

Jake just grunted. He wasn’t cranky, dammit.

“Okay, well, have fun. I’m going to make pancakes if you want to come back when you’re done.”

Missy made the best pancakes. If it wasn’t for the professor, he could hang out, not look at Missy’s legs, and enjoy pancakes. There would probably be bacon and everything.

“Of course, Kyle will probably eat them all. And I’m trying not to fight with him, so I don’t want to make him save any for you. So I guess there’s no point in your coming back.”

“Thanks, Miss. You know how to make a guy feel wanted.”

“Hey, you know who wants you? That cute professor with the broke-down house. Go on. Go on and be her knight in shining armor.”

Jake snorted.

“You know you love it. ’Bye, Jake,” she said, shoving him out the door.

This professor better really need him.

G
race saw Jake sitting on her porch swing as she pedaled up to the house. His hair was shoved under a baseball cap and his face looked as scruffy and disheveled as the rest of him. He did not look happy.

But he still looked handsome.

“Sorry,” she said, jumping off her bike and hauling it up to the porch. “I had to pee.”

Now he looked unhappy and confused.

“No water,” she reminded him. “So I rode to the Daily Drip, which is a terrible name for a coffee shop, by the way.”

He didn’t laugh. “Let’s look at this so-called plumbing problem.”

She unlocked the front door and led him into the kitchen. “It’s not a so-called problem. When I turn on the tap, the water comes out everywhere but the tap.”

“Did you turn the water back on?”

“No. Because of the ‘water comes out everywhere but the tap’ problem.”

“Let me turn it on and then we’ll see what’s really going on.”

He was talking like he didn’t believe she really had a plumbing situation. But she could not imagine why he thought she would call his grumpy butt, not to mention bike into town to use the bathroom, if she didn’t really have a problem. She started to lead him to the water main in the basement, but he held a hand up to stop her.

“I know where it is. I’m the one who showed Mary Beth,” he said as he stomped down the stairs.

“Okay, Smarty,” she said under her breath to his retreating back. She pretended she didn’t see his shoulders shake in a laugh. She also pretended not to notice how nicely those scruffy jeans fit.

In no time at all, Jake was back and sliding under the kitchen sink while Grace propped the swinging door open with her hip, ready to make a run for it.

She told herself she was standing in the doorway so she could revel in her victory when he discovered she was right about the plumbing. She told herself she was not standing in the doorway because of the way his long legs stretched out across her kitchen floor, or the way his shirt rode up a little, revealing a taught, tanned stomach. Or the way the muscles in his legs played against his jeans when he moved.

It was just so she could prove herself right.

Although she should probably not drool.

“Okay, turn the faucet on,” he called from under the sink.

“Are you sure?” Grace asked. “Because last time . . .”

Jake edged out from under the sink and gave her a look she was becoming familiar with: the Why-do-you-think-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing? look. She should give him the benefit of the doubt, even though all her recent experience with the kitchen sink told her that what he was asking her to do was also asking for disaster.

Fine, she told herself. If he fancies himself the expert, I’ll follow his instructions. The worst that can happen is that he’ll be right and I’ll get my sink fixed. So she scurried over to the sink (all the while reminding herself never to scurry again), and pulled the faucet handle up.

And jumped back as water shot out of the pipes under the sink.

Right onto Jake.

And his shirt.

Which was now sticking to his chest.

She was so distracted by the wet shirt and the chest that she didn’t hear Jake yelling at her to turn the water off, but she did register him scrambling to his feet and lunging over the sink. She also registered him whirling on her, his eyes on fire, his shirt dripping. She tried not to swoon.

Because she hated this guy. And he had just proved her right, that she needed a professional to do this job, not some guy who was trying to prove how manly he was by throwing his tools around. She was right. Therefore, he did not deserve the swoon.

Although, standing in front of her, dripping and seething, he looked pretty damn manly.

Jake continued to stare, and she continued to will her knees not to buckle. Then he reached down and tore his shirt over his head and she was pretty sure she was going to die.

I hate this guy, she reminded herself as she counted . . . yup, that’s a six-pack.

She peeled her eyes away from those abs and, holy crap, that chest, to meet Jake’s eyes. They were still dark, and he still looked peeved. She’d never appreciated how expressive brown eyes could be, but these were really quite fine. She would hate to have to rethink . . .

“Can I have a towel?” he growled.

She shook off the fine eyes and scurried (no more scurrying, she reminded herself) toward the linen closet. He was arrogant and rude and he had seriously just growled at her. No amount of physical beauty could overcome that personality. She ventured one glance behind her. Well, probably not.

Jake caught the towel Grace tossed at him. He noticed that she was no longer meeting his eyes. Good, he thought. He knew he was being childish, but he was glad that she was embarrassed. He was embarrassed, dammit. That was a rookie mistake, blasting the water through the pipes to see where the leak was. Still, he had just turned the water on. It shouldn’t have had time to build up that much pressure. He shouldn’t be standing in Grace’s kitchen, sopping wet and pissed off.

He’d been fixing up houses since he was in high school. Heck, before that, even. His earliest memories involved following his dad around their old farmhouse, handing him tools whether he needed them or not.

That was before his dad screwed everything up and moved into the apartment above his mechanic shop. It didn’t matter that his mom was deliriously happy with Will, or that it really was all his dad’s fault. Or that Jake was now living in an apartment above Mary Beth and Todd’s garage. There was no parallel; that was Jake’s choice. Jake knew the housing market hadn’t recovered enough for him to start flipping houses again, so he didn’t. There was no sense in losing money on a mortgage for a house he couldn’t sell, not when he could live off his plentiful savings and pick up odd jobs now and then just to stay out of trouble.

He’d flipped his first house the summer after he graduated from high school. He’d used the money he got for graduation and a loan from his dad to buy one of the falling-down houses right off Main Street. Then he fixed it up, Mary Beth sold it, and Jake was able to pay his dad back with enough left over to put a big down payment on his next flip. Sometimes he took his business further out of town—the closer he got to the big cities, the more lucrative the sale. He did most of the work himself, or he got Kyle and some other buddies involved. He was banking on his good reputation to keep him going while the market recovered. His reputation was everything, and he made sure he earned it. He never did shoddy work, and he had the clientele and the experience to back that claim up.

Which was why he was so pissed off at being sopping wet in Grace’s kitchen. He had made a fool of himself. This damn sink should have been an easy fix. But Grace had been standing there, watching him work, and that made him just want to get out of the house as quickly as possible.

He couldn’t leave a job half-done. And this job wasn’t even close to half-done. He picked up his shirt and wrung it out in the sink. Then he tossed it on the counter and got himself back under the sink.

“Can you hand me the pipe wrench?” he asked, sitting up just enough to see whether Grace was still in the room. Of course she was. She was probably going to make sure he didn’t break anything else with his cloddish workingman’s hands.

“This claw-looking one?” She held up the pipe wrench, which looked nothing like a claw.

He rolled his eyes and held out his hand for it. Maybe it was a little claw-like, but he refused to be charmed.

After some tightening and re-tightening, he asked Grace to run the water again, slowly. He braced himself to jump out from under the sink, even though he didn’t see how, at this point, getting wetter would make a difference. But it didn’t matter. There was no leak.

Jake wasn’t really sure what had been broken, but it looked like he’d fixed it.

He heard Grace kneel down next to him. “Is it leaking?”

He scooted over so she could see for herself. She hesitated—surely he didn’t smell bad after that impromptu shower—but then her head joined his under the sink. The water was running into the drain above them, and through the pipes so smoothly it was like music. Grace was close enough that some of the hair that had come loose from her ponytail tickled his chin. Close enough that he could see that her hair wasn’t just brown, but had hints of red in it, too. Close enough that he could tell she smelled like citrus.

Jake was having a moment with the professor.

“It’s staying in the pipes!”

And the moment was gone.

Her lack of faith in him was really getting on his nerves.

“That’s what pipes are for,” he said, disentangling himself from her citrus-smelling hair and sitting up.

“Well, it wasn’t doing that before. What did you do?”

He shrugged. “No big deal. You just have to know what you’re looking for.”

“Can you show me? That way I can fix it if it happens again.”

He appreciated her initiative, and he would’ve liked to make her more independent—that way she wouldn’t have to call him again. But he really had no idea what he’d done. He’d just tightened a joint that wasn’t loose to begin with, and it was fixed.

And he’d taken his shirt off. He’d taken his shirt off and tightened something.

Well, it could be interesting to show Grace his new method of home repair. She was wearing another one of those horrible cat sweatshirts again, this one featuring an orange cat with rhinestone earrings. It was truly appalling. It was, Jake thought, a shirt made for tearing off.

“Like I said, you have to know what you’re looking for. It shouldn’t happen again.” He hoped.

She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Well, thanks. I really appreciate it. Can I pay you something? I know Mary Beth said—”

“You don’t have to pay me. Mary Beth is making me do you a favor.”

“I know, but that doesn’t seem right.”

“Well, I gave her my word, so it’s as right as it’s going to get.”

“But still, if you need the money—”

Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa. She thought he needed her money? That he was some charity case? That
she
was doing
him
a favor by being incapable of finding a plumber on her own?

“Forget it, Professor. On the house.” He stalked toward the door, then turned back to grab his shirt off the counter. It was still soaking, but he wrestled himself into it anyway. It clung to his armpits and his shoulder blades, but, dammit, he was working on a dramatic exit.

She started to say something, but he didn’t want to hear it. Shirt half-on and all wet, he stalked out the front door, got in his truck, and prepared to drive away from Grace and her arrogance forever. As he pulled out of the driveway, he caught a glimpse of her in the doorway, her arms crossed over her cat sweatshirt. She caught him looking, and she slammed the door.

Good, he thought. Good riddance.