Ladies' Night by Andrews, Kay (popular books of all time .TXT) 📕

stood in the paint aisle at the hardware store on Friday morning, staring at the huge display and its thousands of one-inch color chips. What she wouldn’t do for her trusted paint fan-decks, with all the notes she’d scrawled on the backs of the cards and the yellow Post-it notes reminding her what paint strength and finish she favored for all her favorites. But the fan-deck, along with all her old files and design library, in fact, all her old life, were back at Sand Dollar Lane.

She knew she wanted the equivalent of either Farrow & Ball’s White Tie or Pointing, two very specific whites for the walls at Mandevilla. Farrow & Ball itself was out of the question. Imported from England, it was just too expensive. She liked Benjamin Moore, too, which was what she’d used at Sand Dollar Lane, mostly because the Benjamin Moore paint store in Sarasota was one of her blog sponsors. She had shelves and shelves of BM paint at her old house. Now, however, neither paint would work for her tiny budget on Mandevilla. She sighed. Cheap paint always just looked shoddy to her eye, and using it would require at least three coats, which would take up too much of her precious time.

She walked around to the clearance endcap and scanned the assorted cans of “oops” paint cramming the shelves.

There was a logical reason these cans were marked down; they were mistints, custom colors that had been rejected by the original customer. Most of the gallon cans were in shades she deemed either truly heinous—a neon bubble-gum pink, a muddy-looking taupe, a sickly green that reminded her of gangrene—or they were just unsuitable for a simple vernacular cottage like Mandevilla.

She did, however, find six gallons of an innocuous white in Benjamin Moore’s low-VOC paint, marked down to ten dollars a can. That she could afford. Grace pulled a can from the shelf and studied the dab of paint on the tin lid. This paint had been custom-tinted, so it didn’t have a color name or a formula. The shade was what she’d always thought of as a “dead white.” But maybe if she had it tinted?

The clerk at the paint counter was a middle-aged man in a red apron. Grace set the oops can on the counter. “Help you?” he asked.

She gave him her sweetest smile. “Hi there. I’m wondering if you can add a little something to this paint to brighten it up a bit?”

He looked puzzled. “Like what?”

“Well, I was thinking you could add a little black to tint it, to see if I like it better.”

The clerk took a closer look at the paint can. “Sorry. This is an oops paint. See, the sign says all paint is “as-is.” That means we don’t remix or add tint.”

Grace sighed dramatically. “Look, it just needs the teeniest amount of black paint. I’m trying to match it to Farrow and Ball’s Pointing shade. It wouldn’t take very much time, and I would be soooo grateful?”

This approach had always worked for her in the past—at furniture showrooms, fabric houses, plumbing-fixture showrooms. A sweet smile and a plea for mercy, especially with men, had always been a winning formula in the past.

The hardware store clerk, though, seemed immune to her charms. “Sorry. Store policy. Can’t help you.” He went back to working on a display of weed killer.

And Grace went back to the clearance counter, where she loaded up all six gallons of the dead white, along with a pint of black latex paint. She would just have to experiment with mixing her own paint. She added in two gallons of white latex enamel for the trim, a paint tray, a five-gallon plastic bucket, canvas drop cloth, and rollers and brushes, sighing, again, at the thought of her workshop back at Sand Dollar, where all of her painting equipment and tools were lined up neatly, ready for her next project. At the last minute she plucked six Benjamin Moore paint cards from the display, to give herself an idea of the shades she was trying to achieve.

When the cashier added up all her purchases and applied them to the account Arthur Cater had set up for her, she was shocked that she’d already managed to make a four-hundred-dollar dent in her five-thousand-dollar budget.

*   *   *

It was nearly nine by the time she pulled up to the new cottage. Wyatt’s pickup was parked out front, but he and Sweetie were walking around the yard, inspecting the property.

Grace’s heart skipped a little beat. She told herself it was because she was happy to see her dog. But maybe Wyatt Keeler had a little to do with it, too.

He was dressed in his khaki Jungle Jerry’s safari shirt, cargo shorts, and work boots, and he was bare-headed, stooped over, examining some kind of weedy shrub near the right edge of the porch. He had, Grace reflected, a fine-looking butt, tanned, muscular calves and thighs, and an admirable set of shoulders across a nice, broad chest.

“Sweetie!” Grace called. The dog turned and looked at her and, after a moment, came bounding over. She gave an excited little yip and jumped up into Grace’s outstretched arms.

Wyatt followed in her wake, but he did not jump into her arms. “I was just checking out the yard. Hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s a disaster,” Grace said, “like the inside of the house. If you’ve got any landscaping advice, I’d love to hear it. How’d Sweetie do last night? I hope she wasn’t too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I would have been here sooner this morning, but I had to bury a coyote.”

She raised an eyebrow. “A coyote? Around here?”

“In the park. My dad heard the parrots raising a ruckus last night. Turned out to be a coyote. By the time he got to the old amphitheater, where we have the aviaries, the damned thing had already finished off two of our parrots.”

“Oh no! Not Cookie. Please tell me the coyote didn’t get Cookie,” Grace