As for Carlie—God only knew what he’d do about her.
* * *
CARLIE WAS BONE weary. The past couple of nights she’d spent hours at the hospital with her father or talking with the doctors who attended him. Though Weldon Surrett had suffered a mild stroke, he would recover. His speech had already improved and he had partial use of his left hand and arm. He was frustrated and cranky, but if he changed his lifestyle, gave up high-cholesterol food, avoided cigarettes and kept active, the prognosis was encouraging.
However, he was stuck with months of physical therapy. He would eventually be released from the hospital, but he wouldn’t be able to work at any kind of strenuous labor for a long, long while.
He was too old to retrain for a desk job, and even if he were a younger man, he would never be happy cooped up inside, shuffling papers, filing and working with figures.
It looked as if he would have to retire early, as Thomas Fitzpatrick had suggested, and hope that whatever savings he and his wife had accumulated over the years would be enough to get them through. Thelma would still work of course, and Carlie intended to help out, though her father had been adamantly against the suggestion. Eventually, he’d collect Social Security, but those checks were still a few years away.
“We’ll manage,” he’d said from his hospital bed.
“But I can help—”
“This is my problem, Carlie, and I’ll handle it. Now don’t you say a word to your mother or go getting her upset. We’ve made it through rough times before, we can do it again.”
Reluctantly Carlie had dropped the argument when she’d seen the determined set of his jaw. Any further discussion would only have made him angrier and more upset and might have brought on another attack.
Now her stomach grumbled at her as she walked through the foyer to her apartment and noticed that the baseboards had been stripped from the walls. Mrs. Hunter, Carlie’s landlady, had told her that she was going to renovate the old place in hopes of selling out. She’d even approached Carlie about buying the old Victorian house on the hill.
At the time, Carlie hadn’t been sure she wanted to stay in Gold Creek; now, with her father ill, she’d decided to stay, at least for a while. She’d seen a lot of the world and was surprised at the feeling of coming home she’d experienced upon returning to this cozy little town, a town she’d once left without a backward glance.
“Well, hello there!” Mrs. Hunter opened the door to her apartment to walk into the vestibule. She was dressed in a raincoat and carried a floral umbrella of purple and pink. “I thought you were my ride down to the center,” she said, peering out one of the tall leaded-glass windows that flanked the front door. “Smorgasbord tonight, you know.”
“You’ll have a good time.”
“I hope so. Last time the food was overcooked, you know, tasted like shoe leather, but the company’s usually good. Let’s just hope Leo Phelps doesn’t drag out his harmonica. Why they let him play after dinner, when everyone else wants to get on with cards or bingo, I’ll never know.” She pulled a plastic bonnet from her behemoth of a bag and spread it over her newly permed gray curls. “Oh, here they are now. By the way, the workmen are still here, probably just finishing up, so if you run across a handsome man in your room...” She let the sentence trail off and laughed.
“I’ll know what to do,” Carlie teased as Mrs. Hunter walked onto the porch and closed the door behind her.
Still smiling to herself, Carlie gathered her mail and started up the stairs. She lived on the third floor, the “crow’s nest” Mrs. Hunter called it, and Carlie had come to love her apartment. The turret, where she kept her desk, had nearly a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, and the old wooden floors, and hand-carved window frames held a charm that she’d found lacking in more modern apartments. Running her fingers along the time-worn rail, she hiked her way up the steep stairs and told herself that the climb would keep her in shape. There were drawbacks to living here—the heating and cooling systems were ancient, the windows rattled and she’d seen more than one mouse sharing her living quarters, but she still loved her tiny rooms tucked high in the eaves of the old house.
On the landing, she stepped over an electrical
cord strung across the hall before it snaked through her front door. “Hello?” she called, not wanting to scare the workman as she entered.
Ben stood near one of the windows, his hip thrown out, his arms crossed over his chest.
Her heart missed a beat and she stopped dead in her tracks.
A tool belt was slung low over his hips and the sleeves of his work shirt were rolled over his forearms displaying tanned skin dusted with dark hair.
“Well, Carlie,” he said with a brazen smile that touched a dark corner of her heart. “I wondered when you’d show up.”
Chapter Seven
CARLIE COULDN’T BELIEVE her eyes. Ben? Ben was the contractor—the workman who was going to be walking in and out of the house, with his own set of keys, his own set of rules and his own damned swagger? She felt suddenly violated and insecure. The fact that he was in her apartment, her private sanctuary, made her blood boil. After the way he’d treated her, he was the last person she wanted prowling about her home. Let the windows rattle. Let the faucet drip. Let the damned roof leak, but for God’s sake, never let Ben Powell in here. “What’re you doing here?” she demanded as he placed a screwdriver to her window frame and played with the pulleys in the old casing.
“What does it look like?”
She ground her teeth in frustration. “I know about the work that has to be done, I just don’t understand why you had to do it!”
“I got the job.” He grimaced a little as the rope slid between his fingers and the window dropped suddenly. With a grunt, he shoved the old pane up again and tightened the screw.
“But you’re not living here, are you?” she asked, her world suddenly tilting as she remembered the empty studio apartment on the first floor that Mrs. Hunter had wanted to rent. Mrs. Hunter had mentioned that she might trade the rent for work around the house.... Oh, no! He couldn’t live here—no way, no how! This small set of rooms was her private place, her shelter! She wasn’t going to share it with the one man who had the ability to wound her.
“I’d be moving in tomorrow if your landlady had her way.” He shoved his screwdriver back into his tool belt and his eyes glinted a bit. “However, so far I’ve resisted.”