Jared was staring at her with wide eyes. It was exactly the way he’d planned the remodel, even down to the sink position.
It took him a moment to recover. “How would you do it?”
“Softer,” she said. “Less invasive. Leave the kitchen alone except to put an island here. Take out the downstairs wall, and upstairs, take out the frame walls here and here.”
“And the exterior?”
“Leave it alone but add a room here. Dig down so it doesn’t block the upper windows, then put windows all along the south side. Door and stairs up into the garden here.”
She halted. The drawing was barely readable with all the marks on it. “That’s what I would do.”
Jared could only stare at her. If he’d fallen into a rut so deep that a student could predict what he was going to do, that was bad. But then this student was what he once was—and her design was better than his.
It ran through his mind that he should leave the island immediately, get away from this upstart girl who thought she was better than the famous Jared Montgomery.
In the next second, he leaned back in his chair and smiled.
Alix had seen the emotions pass across his face and for a moment she thought he was going to walk out of the restaurant and she’d never see him again.
“It’s yours,” he said, still smiling at her.
“What is?”
“The house. It’s yours to redesign.” He’d told his cousin he’d do the work for free but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “I’ll make sure you get credit for it and you can put it on your résumé.” He leaned toward her, his face serious. “Which I truly and sincerely hope that you’ll submit to my company when you apply for a job. It will have my personal endorsement on it and since I own the place, I’m quite sure that you’ll be employed b
y me.”
Alix just sat there blinking at him, not quite able to comprehend what he’d just said.
“If you start crying and embarrass me, I’ll take back my offer.”
“I won’t,” she said as she blinked faster.
Jared signaled to the waiter to come over and ordered two chocolate desserts and two rum and Cokes. “With double lime,” he added.
“Drunk and fat,” Alix murmured and started to pick up the napkin to wipe her eyes.
“You might need that later,” he said and handed her a clean one that he took off an empty table. He put the napkin with the jumbled drawing in his shirt pocket.
Leaning back in the booth, he watched Alix as she ate all her chocolate dessert and half of his. With his encouragement, she chattered about her childhood and what it had been like to grow up around two extraordinarily talented parents.
While she talked, he thought that maybe his designs had become predictable, that he had become a sort of trademark. Alix, new to the world of architecture, brought with her an energy that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
“You ready to go home?” he asked. “I have an overwhelming desire to look at some house plans I made over the winter. I think I need to change them. They’re too much like what I’ve already done. I don’t have a CAD system here, but maybe together we could—”
“Yes,” Alix said.
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“I don’t need a CAD or a computer. You had me at the word ‘together.’ ” She stood up. “You ready to leave?”
“I think I should pay the tab first, all right?” He was smiling.
Reluctantly, she nodded.
Chapter Nine
Jared wasn’t sure what woke him, but the first thing he saw was his grandfather hovering over him. Sunlight was flooding the room and going through his grandfather’s body. When Jared was little and his aunt was out of the room, he would run through his grandfather, then laugh hysterically. His mother, who couldn’t see Caleb, thought it was funny that when they visited Aunt Addy her son would run back and forth across the room and laugh so hard at something imaginary.