Harlequin - Jennifer Greene by Hot Touch (read full novel txt) 📕

only house she could swing had to be a major fixer-upper. The location was unbeatable, three blocks off Main Street, so it was an easy walk for customers. The structure was a basic two-story saltbox built in the sixties. There were balconies on both floors and no termites—those were the positives.

Then came the fixer-upper part. The windows hadn’t been caulked in a decade; the drive could have starred in a jungle movie, and the yard resembled a wildlife sanctuary. When she tried selling her neighbors the sanctuary theory, though, someone loaned her a lawn mower. Pretty clear what the neighborhood standard was, and weedy wasn’t it.

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The neighbors were more fascinated by what she did with the inside. From the beginning she realized the house was going to suck in millions to make it habitable—only she didn’t have millions. Cripes, she didn’t even have furniture. So she’d headed for Home Depot and bought paint. Lots of paint.

The kitchen cabinets were mint green, the walls a bright blue. Beyond the kitchen was a dining room she’d turned into an office, and painted those walls a light lavender. An arched doorway led into a long narrow vanilla-yellow living room. All in all, the downstairs pretty much covered every possible ice cream cone color.

In some rooms, she even had furniture now.

In the back of the house, where Barb hustled the breakfasters, was her business. Customers—usually moms—entered from the back door.

A bathroom and curtained-off changing area took up the north wall; the massage center dominated the room’s center. The counters, sink, stand-alone tub and massage tables were all white—not shiny, in-your-face white, but an ultrasoft clean white.

All, that is, except for one corner, where dusty bags of cement, heaped stacks of stones and long boxes of plumbing parts looked as out of place as mud in a hospital. Further, the sledgehammer in front of it at all was almost bigger than she was. She may have overbought there, just a tad.

“What in God’s name have you gotten yourself into, girl?” Gary questioned, hands on hips.

Phoebe was still carrying her bowl of grapefruit. It was impossible to explain that once she’d cleaned the place stem to stern—even the windows—she still couldn’t get her mind off the damn man. He was hurting, she just knew it. Not letting anyone help him, she knew that, too. But it wasn’t her problem—and wasn’t going to be her problem—so she’d searched for a project that would force her to think about something else.

“I’m going to build a waterfall,” she told the group.

“A waterfall,” Barb repeated. “Honey, you barely have a pot to pee in, and you give away half of what you do have. And you’re going to build a waterfall? Inside the house?”

“Now wait. Just wait. It’s not as impossible as it sounds. I saw it in a magazine…” And then she mentally pictured it. The south corner of this room really had nothing in it, so there’s where she wanted it—a sensual, warm, indoor waterfall at shower height, leading to a small pool surrounded by tropical plants. “If I used tile inside, stone outside, it would look almost like the real thing. And I could use it with the babies, either by sitting in there by myself, or just have the parent sit with their little one. It wouldn’t be too different from a hot tub, just more…sensual. And natural. And restful.”

Gary and Fred took one look at the bags of cement and piles of stones and started guffawing.

“Hey. It can’t be that hard to find a mason who can show me how to mortar in the stones. And I figured the pipes for the sink are already here, so there has to be some way to tap into them for the water source. I mean, I know it’ll take some work—”

“Some work?” Gary hooted. “You’re going to need a crew of fifty to pull this off!”

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“So, it’ll take a lot of work. But I really think it’s a practical idea—” Since that sent Gary and Barb into new gales of laughter, she appealed to Fred. “Don’t you think it’d be beautiful?”

“I think you’re the prettiest thing this neighborhood has seen in decades, sugar. And if you want to build yourself a waterfall, then that’s what you should do.”

But then he caught Gary’s eye, and the two of them started cackling all over again.

At that precise moment she spotted the man in the doorway—notany man, but Fergus. Her Fergus Lockwood. He had his arm raised in a fist, as if he’d been knocking and was going to try yet again to gain someone’s attention.

The pups spotted him first and beelined straight for the newcomer. Her neighbors all spun around and gaped, then gaped back at Phoebe, then offered hellos and we’re just Phoebe’s neighbors and everybody was just leaving—although no one left.

Phoebe dropped her bowl of grapefruit. The bowl cracked. The grapefruit skittered across the tile floor, leaving seeds and grapefruit juice in its wake. Obviously the world as she knew it hadn’t suddenly ended, yet, for just a few seconds she couldn’t seem to move. Her heart went woosh, the way it had a nasty tendency to do around Fox the other two times she’d been near him—only it was worse this time.

It was all his fault she’d come up with this ridiculously impossible waterfall idea. All his fault she’d cleaned house. It was the woosh thing. His brothers were adorable, so at least if they caused that thigh-clenching heart-thumping response, she’d have understood it. She recognized those guys as hot, but not a problem.

Whydid she only feel that woosh and zing for the wrong guys? And, darn it, one short glance at his long, lean bones and her hormones were all a dazzle. Where was the fairness in life? The justice?

“Phoebe? I didn’t mean to barge in, but the bell didn’t seem to work, and no one seemed to hear me knocking. When I