Stacking the Deck (A Betting on Romance Novel Book 2) (12 page)

His uncle gave him a long, quiet stare before he finally let go of the handles and stood, a slight grimace the only indication his back was still giving him trouble. “You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”

“The bacon and herbed cheese are the best. I highly recommend them.”

His uncle shook his head and bent to pick up a trowel from the grass nearby. He looked at it a moment then stuck it point first into the mortar in the wheelbarrow. “You were a lot cuter when you were little,” he said as he walked away around the side of the house.

“Love you, too, Pop!”

Carter watched his uncle walk away, his chest tight, then backed the load of mortar through the kitchen door.

“Don’t mind me, ladies. Just carry on. You’ll hardly know I’m here.” Carter wheeled by the dining room where Grams and her friends were getting ready to play cards. Whenever they played at Grams he made a point of stopping by, because Grams was a firm believer that wherever two or more are gathered, there should be food.

Grams stepped into his path and smacked his chest with a potholder. “Stop! You can’t roll that thing through my house as if it were some construction zone! You’ll track dirt all over. It’s bad enough the whole yard is torn up fixing the septic system.” She ended on a near whisper, presumably because septic systems were a subject polite ladies didn’t speak about.

Claire Walker, Liz Beacon’s great-aunt, sat at the table sipping a mixed drink from a tumbler and picked up her poker hand one card at a time. With her deadpan expression, chin-length gray hair and hideous bowling shirt, Carter was tempted to hand Claire a cigar to complete the picture. “That reminds me,” Claire announced, “Lydia wants to know if she should withhold fluids. I told her you had plenty of bushes outside if she was desperate to go.” She winked at him.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Ruth said we can still use the bathrooms.” June Hastings, another of Grams’ friends, gave Claire a reproving look. “Why do you say things like that? You know how gullible Lydia is.”

Claire’s lips twitched. “That’s what makes it fun.”

Carter lifted the wheelbarrow handles again, but hesitated, torn between making his escape before his mortar set up and trying to wheedle one of the hot hors d’oeuvre thingies Grams had just set on the table.

“Lydia? Are you coming?” Grams called. “Claire’s dealt already! Now, about you,” she said, turning toward Carter again, “I want you to do a nice job for the Beacons. They’re old friends.”

“But, not too nice,” Claire said, fanning out her cards. “Keep your pants on.”

“What?”
Carter said.

Claire took a sip from her tumbler. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re about, young man. You’ve got that same look as your father. Liz used to be a little plump but she’s slimmed down now and filled out rather nicely, if you know what I mean. Boys like you always have one thing on their minds when they see an attractive girl. Just sayin’.”

Carter met his grandmother’s eyes pleadingly. She wasn’t helping.

“Why am I getting a lecture here? What have I even
done
?”

“You’ve eaten dinner there. You put out a grease fire and you
saved her cat,
and we all know what
that
means.” Claire enumerated her points as if they were charges against the accused instead of acts of friendly goodwill.

“You saved her cat?” June asked.

“He got loose. I caught him. Who told you that, anyway?”

“Lydia and I let the cat out by accident when we went to visit Elizabeth yesterday. He’s a sprinter, that one. Shot out like a rocket.” Claire eyed him. “Anyway, we heard the whole story. If you’re around enough to be putting out grease fires and saving cats, then you’re around enough for other things, too, by my way of thinking.”

“I’m just putting in a patio.”

“See,” said Grams, finally coming to his rescue. “No nefarious intent involved.”

“Exactly,” Carter said, breathing again. “She’s a nice enough person and we knew each other in school, but she’s not my type.”

An eye-watering cloud of perfume entered the room moments before the visual assault of Lydia Sweet’s Technicolor caftan. “I have a situation,” Lydia pouted. She held up an empty maraschino jar. “I’m out of cherries.
Again!”

Grams and June glared at Claire—who just rolled her eyes. “Fine. I had a couple. If she didn’t take so long to get going, I wouldn’t have been standing there nibbling. I could have blood sugar issues, you know. Maybe I
needed
to eat them.”

“Grams, if you want these steps laid—” Carter began, but Grams held up a hand in his face and wagged a finger at Claire as if directing traffic. “The Lord’s watching you, Claire Walker. And, everyone knows you’re healthy as a horse.”

“The Almighty’s got better things to do than strike me down for eating a few cherries,” Claire grumbled.

Carter made his escape while he had the chance. He’d snitch a pastry later.

He pushed the wheelbarrow to the breezeway entry, selected a stone, mixed the mortar he’d left to slake in the wheelbarrow and contemplated the job at hand. Grams’ shadow appeared in the doorway above him.

“What makes her not your type?” she demanded as if the conversation wasn’t over.

Carter let out a long-suffering sigh. No sense pretending he didn’t know who she was talking about. “So, first you guys want me to like her, then you want me to stay away from her and now you want me to like her again? Make up my mind.”

“I want to know why you won’t consider her.”

“I’m taking her to our class reunion. Clearly I’ve considered her.”

“You know what I mean. I mean
seriously
consider.”

Carter raised a dark brow and shook his head. “Seriously consider? She’s in town for what? Two weeks? What’s to seriously consider? Besides, she’s a Vice President or something now. A big shot. Like I said, she’s not my type.” He got up to grab another stone, but his grandmother’s hand stopped him.

“Don’t you dare,” she whispered fiercely. “You’re a hard worker, Carter. You’ll be taking over your uncle’s business soon. Don’t you dare think you’re not good enough for the Elizabeth Beacons of this world. When are you going to give yourself the credit you deserve?”

He couldn’t meet her eyes. He knew they’d be filled with love and compassion. It was the fierce mama-bear look she’d always given him when she thought he wasn’t living up to his potential. And it made him feel eight years old again.

“What do I deserve, Grams? You know I don’t do well with the straight and narrow. Never have. Heck, Liz Beacon
is
the straight and narrow. This is a pointless conversation. ”

“Maybe you’ve misjudged her. How come you quit the fire department?” The sudden change in topic threw him off balance, which was probably intentional. Carter closed his eyes. He’d been a volunteer firefighter ever since dropping out of college.

Until last week, that is.

“It took too much time.”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded, although her expression told him she didn’t buy it. “Well, maybe it’ll fit your schedule again in the future.”

“Maybe.” He scraped the mortar in the wheelbarrow.

“Carter.”

“Grams, some things just aren’t meant to be.”

“Are we talking about Liz or the department?”

“I don’t know. Both.”

“Then why are you taking her to the reunion?”

Carter shook his head in frustration wishing he were done so he could leave. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. It’s getting old. Doesn’t it feel like it’s getting old to you?
I
think it’s getting old…”

“Fine! Take her. But remember, she’s here to help her parents. She’s not here to have her heart broken because you can’t move beyond—”

“I’m not breaking any hearts, Grams—
sheesh!
—I’m putting in a patio! I promise not to do anything Liz doesn’t want me to, okay?”  Carter bent down to test the sizing of the stone he’d selected and set it aside.

“Don’t lift like that! Use your knees or you’ll end up like your uncle!”

He sat back on his heels with no small amount of exasperation. “Don’t you have a game to get to?”

“In a minute,” she waved a hand dismissively. “Lydia needed a bathroom break. For never having had children, that woman is amazingly poor at holding her fluids.” She stood watch like a garden gnome in a calico apron as he laid the paving stone in its mortar bed with a few hard raps of the trowel’s handle.

“So, I followed up on the fountain project. The specs will be out this week. It’s a short timeline, though, because they want it finished by Founders’ Day, so keep an eye out for it.”

Carter slopped a trowel full of mortar down for the next stone with more force than he’d intended. My God, the woman was like a terrier with a bone. Or a calico-printed battering ram. “Follow up on the fountain project, consider Liz, stay away from Liz, don’t break anyone’s heart and bend with the knees. Did I miss anything?”

“Don’t be snarky,” Grams sniffed, sitting down on the bench beside him despite the fact that he’d heard the downstairs toilet flush like two minutes ago. “And, yes, I know what that means. I’m just trying to be helpful. We all saw your last girlfriend. She had so many tattoos I wasn’t sure if she was a person or a billboard.”

“Marlena was colorful, I’ll grant you that,” Carter murmured. “But, she was also—”

“I don’t want to know!” Grams held up a palm in alarm. “But I do want to see you happy. Oh, honey, you’re not happy dating the women you’ve been dating. A grandmother can tell.”

“Is that so? I feel happy…”

“Well, you’re not. Those women are far too superficial for you.”

“Maybe I’m attracted to superficial.”

“No, you’re not. You only
choose
superficial because it seems safe, but these women don’t see the real you. And they won’t make you happy.”

An image of flexible, colorful Marlena flashed in his mind’s eye. “Actually—”

“You know,” Grams cut in, clearly not in listening mode, “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. You’re
exactly
like that Brian on
Happily Ever After!
” Carter choked on his surprise at being compared to the current bachelor on the matchmaking show. “Don’t you agree, girls?”

Unanimous sounds of agreement floated in from the next room as Carter dropped a glob of mortar on his boot. Good grief. He should have known they were all listening. “The stamp collector? Gee, thanks. The man was stupid enough to get rid of a chef
and
a masseuse.”

“He was a respected antiquities dealer, but that’s beside the point. Don’t you see? He was originally attracted to Amber and that Ellen girl, you know the ones with the big—? Anyway, but then that Julie Anne snuck under his radar and made him see himself differently. See?”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t see at all.

“What you need is an under-the-radar girl!” Grams announced.

“So I can see myself differently?”

“Exactly.”

“And who, pray tell, is radar girl?”

Grams wiggled her eyebrows.

“
Liz Beacon?
You think Liz is Radar Girl?” he whispered in disbelief.

“
Under-the-radar
girl,” she whispered back.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
____________________

“W
HAT DO YOU THINK you’re doing?”

Liz swiped at the sweat beading on her brow from the unusually warm spring sun and thanked the Fates the black flies had yet to make an appearance. She turned to her sister. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m tearing out the old deck.”

“You should be wearing a mask. Old pressure-treated lumber is full of arsenic.”

“It’s not asbestos, Trish. Arsenic leaches into the soil; it doesn’t float in the air. Besides, there’s not much left of it. I’m not even sure it was pressure-treated. Oh, yuck!” Liz jumped back from a rotten board as a handful of black ants scurried away.

“Are those carpenter ants? You’d better have the house sprayed while you’re here. Just last week I saw a show where this guy’s house was eaten right out from under him by termites. Literally, his La-Z-Boy fell right through to the basement
with him in it
.”

“Termites don’t live this far north.” Liz kicked the board aside with the others and grabbed her hammer and crowbar. It was Thursday morning. She’d been hard at work for two days, cleaning, scraping, weeding and raking and had no intention of adding a single item to her ‘to do’ list. “Once I get rid of this rotten wood,” she huffed, “the ants will leave.”

“I know a good exterminator.”

“Fine. Leave the number on the counter.”

“By the way,” Trish popped the baby over her shoulder and began patting her energetically. “I think I can convince Dad to gut the kitchen now that you’ve torched it. Just say the word. He’s still pretty loopy on painkillers. He’d agree to anything.”

“Mom and Dad can’t afford a remodel. And I don’t have time for one. I’ll just get some paint, cover it up, and get it on the market.”