Stonehill series collect.., p.90
Stonehill Series Collection, page 90
The man turned the valve that Jenna had tightened in her attempt to stop the water, then tested the faucet. It worked. And the dripping still didn’t start.
She set the mop aside and hesitated before joining him in observing the now-dry pipe.
“This turns off the faucet,” he said. “That”—he pointed to the other valve—“turns off the water to the faucet.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
He nodded. “You’re welcome.”
She looked him over as he wiped his hands down his dirty jeans. Just like her denim, his had absorbed a fair share of freezing water. “You’re soaked.”
“I’m okay. I can change.”
“Where?” she asked, surprising even herself. “I mean…where were you headed?”
He didn’t answer.
“For the last few weeks, whenever I’ve gone out to the alley, I felt like I was being watched.”
“Is that why your brother put on that deadbolt that you don’t use?”
Wow. He sounded just like her brother.
“Yeah. That’s why.” Her amusement faded, and she furrowed her brow at him. “How did you know my brother did that?”
His only response was, “You should use it.”
“Maybe I’ll start.” She tilted her head. “So you’re…hanging out in the alley?”
He glanced toward the sink. “You shouldn’t have any more problems with that pipe.”
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked as he started for the door.
He stopped. “No thanks. I’d be up all night.”
“Maybe something to eat? Something…warm?”
Facing her, he took a moment to look her over. “Your lips are purple now. Go warm up before you get sick.”
Jenna opened her mouth, but he disappeared through the door leading to the alley. Glancing around the kitchen, she decided she’d mopped up enough of the flood she’d caused and pushed the bucket to the back door. She paid more attention to the shadows, looking for the stranger, than to dumping the water. Her pulse quickened as she began to wonder if she was right—was there was a homeless man living in her alley? The thought put her on edge, even if he had swooped in to save her.
She went back into the kitchen and started to shut the door, but realized that would be the same as telling him she didn’t trust him now that she knew he was there. That seemed rude after the way he’d helped her.
She hesitated one more moment before tugging it closed behind her, but stopped short at turning the recently installed deadbolt that he’d mentioned. After gathering up the wet towels, she dropped them in a pile to be washed the next morning—no way in hell was she dealing with that tonight—and set the tools on the shelf where Marcus liked to keep them.
Keys in hand, she turned off the lights and headed for the back door. Her heart rate picked up again. He was probably out there. Watching her. The voyeuristic homeless plumber. Going into the dimly lit alley made her uneasy, and not for the first time. If her sixth sense was correct, he’d been living out there for about five weeks now. Or at least that was when she’d first started wondering if she were being watched as she headed up the metal stairs that led to her still-under-construction second-floor apartment.
She’d tolerated the feeling for a week before mentioning it to Marcus. He’d taken a look around, but didn’t find anything suspicious. No cardboard houses or piles of clothes, nothing to indicate someone was living in her alley. But she was certain now that someone was.
Jenna couldn’t imagine. As soon as she’d worked up the courage to leave the fancy city loft where Peter liked to keep her, she’d never worried about not having a place to go. She’d come back to Stonehill with nothing but the clothes she could fit in a suitcase—and she was lucky to have those by the time Peter’s lawyer got done with her.
Her big brother had been determined to help her start her life over. And as Jenna tended to do, she let someone else take control. She let someone else determine what she needed and how she’d get it. And even though she wasn’t prepared—emotionally or financially—she let Marcus convince her she was ready to tackle her starry-eyed dream of owning a restaurant. Peter had promised her that as well, but she’d never quite managed to jump through all the hoops he required for her to get there. He had a chain of fancy restaurants in the city. The kind that served two olives and a crouton as a meal.
He’d done a guest lecture at the culinary institute when Jenna had been a student and she’d been awestruck by him. When he offered to take her under his wing and give her hands-on training, she transitioned to mesmerized. By the time he convinced her to drop out of school and become his glorified secretary—or as she liked to call herself, his wife—she was in over her head.
Several years passed before she started to realize her dreams were fading away because she spent all her time focusing on his. Whenever she reminded him that she had ambitions, too, he’d remind her that there was no room in San Francisco for the kind of home-style cooking she loved. The kind he said was the reason she’d had to lose twenty pounds before he’d agreed to a wedding date.
Apparently, city folk didn’t need real food. Apparently, they needed more carrot roulades and toasted brioche with goat cheese on fancy platters with upmarket names only the most elite could pronounce.
And Peter needed a thinner, more contemporary version of Jenna than the one he’d asked to marry him. True to Jenna’s style, she’d complied. She’d bent and wavered and lost herself in his life until she couldn’t bend and waver any longer.
She’d had a dream. One Peter had promised to help her fulfill. One that was forever just out of reach because his restaurants always came first. His career always came first.
Marcus, however, delivered after one night of sipping wine at his house while complaining about how their lives hadn’t quite gone as planned. Marcus had fallen head over heels for his boss, Annie, and knew she’d never return his affections as long as he worked for her, but he couldn’t imagine not working for her. Jenna told him how she was an afterthought even before she and Peter had exchanged vows. How she’d never own a restaurant since she’d dropped out of culinary school and spent the last ten years building Peter up. She’d given him everything and received nothing.
Marcus asked if she still wanted to open a restaurant. She’d smiled and said she’d love to own a little diner, just a little place to dish up some home-style meals. The next day, he walked her through this building, telling her how they could fix it up and how she could renovate the second and third floors to be living space.
Sure, it had sounded good. It had sounded great. The fantasy played out well. The reality sucked.
She needed Marcus much more than either had anticipated when he handed her the keys to this old building. He fixed things almost every time he came to visit. He ate at the diner and tipped far more than he should have. He even helped her keep her budget on track since she no longer had Peter’s accountants to do that for her.
For a while, Marcus didn’t seem to mind. He said it made him feel useful. And one day, he let her know he finally accepted her advice and got a new job. His boss, Annie, was furious, but she came around quickly. Once they were no longer working together, they were free to date and headed for a much-deserved happily-ever-after.
But then tragedy struck and Annie nearly lost her life. Marcus spent all of his time helping her recover, and, once they were married, building a life together. Jenna didn’t begrudge that. That was how marriage should have been—not like hers. She’d been treated as a burden instead of an equal. She was truly happy for her brother. But with Marcus focused on Annie, Jenna suddenly realized how ill-equipped she was to be an adult all on her own. She owned a business. But only because Marcus had backed her. She owned this run-down building. But only because Marcus had helped her buy it. She had big plans to fix it up and make it amazing. But only because Marcus had the skills to help her.
While he helped Annie, Jenna was proving how right her husband had been about her incompetence.
Jenna sniffed and shook the echo of her husband’s voice from her mind.
No. She could do this. She could definitely do this.
And that cocky bastard was her ex-husband.
Peter didn’t have a bit of control over her anymore, and she needed to stop letting him. She needed to focus on the here and now.
And right now, she needed to take that strange man’s advice and get out of the cold, wet clothes that were clinging to her like a second skin. A warm shower would get the chill from her bones and a good night’s sleep would help her wake up with a fresh outlook.
As she stepped out into the alley and locked the door behind her, she glanced around. Not out of fear this time, but out of guilt. Here she’d been cursing her luck over a leaking pipe and the man who helped her didn’t even own a box to sleep in.
You are so selfish, Jen.
Or so Peter had told her countless times.
“Get out of my head,” she muttered as she started up the stairs, determined to focus instead on how she could properly thank the man who’d come to her rescue.
Daniel didn’t take kindly to charity. Never had. But when he woke to a to-go cup of coffee and a Styrofoam container sitting by the dumpster with Thank you! scribbled across the top, he didn’t turn away from the gift. Sinking down in the shadows, he looked at the café door and lifted the top off the cup. Sipping the hot brew, he closed his eyes and silently thanked the woman he assumed was responsible.
He’d heard people call her Jenna. He’d started to call her that last night when he heard her screams and assumed the worst. He’d barged in to find her on her knees wrestling with a pipe and immediately knew she’d turned off the wrong valve.
He grinned as he remembered the curses spewing from her as she did her best to stop the water from drenching her. He’d turned off the main valve and asked if she were okay, probably scaring a dozen or so years off her life in the process. He would have apologized, but in doing so, he’d started to say her name and stopped himself. She seemed startled enough without worrying that he was stalking her.
He was in a sense. He knew her schedule. But only because he’d moved into her alley weeks before. He knew when to expect food to be dumped there. And what. Today was Tuesday. The special would be meatloaf. He really liked Jenna’s meatloaf. She didn’t fill it with chunks of bread that soaked up the grease and turned gummy. She used breadcrumbs. Like his mom used to do when he was a kid.
Daniel opened the container and found fresh eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. He hadn’t had a real breakfast for a while now. He smiled as his stomach also thanked Jenna. After scarfing down the hot meal, he gathered his sleeping bag into his go-bag and left the alley.
If today was Jenna’s meatloaf day, it was also open-door day at the community center.
They welcomed anyone local, and Daniel took advantage of that. Per his routine, he signed in to the center with a fake address and headed right for the showers. After washing away several days’ worth of grime, he put on shorts and a T-shirt and headed to the workout room.
As he gripped the pull-up bar, he replayed the night before through his mind. He’d watched Jenna from the shadows for weeks, but last night was the first time he’d seen her up close. Her brown eyes had widened when she’d looked up at him and she’d fallen back. Dark hair clung to her pale skin as her full lips parted. And her T-shirt…
Daniel chuckled at the image of a shaggy-haired Barry Manilow clinging to her ample chest and slight pooch of a stomach.
She’d sat there, staring up at him, and it’d taken all he had to look her in the eye. She was beautiful, and he wanted to memorize every inch of her. But he didn’t have to think too much about how intimidating he’d been standing over her. If he’d given in to the urge to stare at her ’70s-pop-star-clad breasts, she probably would have screamed for an entirely different reason.
After pushing through his workout, he showered again and put on what was left of his clean clothes, then headed to the room where the center offered free juice and donuts.
All of this was management’s attempt at bringing in new paying clients, but Daniel had yet to be told he wasn’t welcome, so he showed up every Tuesday and went through the same shower-workout-shower-eat routine.
Today, however, thanks to the breakfast Jenna had left for him, he wrapped his donut in a napkin to save for later. His stomach was full enough for now. He did down a cup of cold apple juice, though. Hiking his pack high on his back, he smiled and thanked the lady working the desk—the one who surely knew by now that he’d never sign up for a membership—and headed to the library.
Inside the cool silence, he sat at a table and looked through the help-wanted ads. He wouldn’t apply for a job. But he liked to pretend that he would.
The first—and second and third—job he’d had since coming home from Afghanistan hadn’t gone well.
Sadly, spending years in a war zone had left him with a few issues—issues that made it difficult to keep a job. Which made it impossible to keep his apartment. He’d get back on his feet. Somehow. Someday. He just had to get his head together first. Maybe hiding in an alley and digging in the local café’s dumpster wasn’t the best way to go about that, but it was what he had and he wasn’t going to complain. A lot of guys had it a lot worse.
A sense of defeat washed over him, and he folded the paper. Instead of staying at the library most of the day, as he usually did on Tuesdays, Daniel headed to the laundromat. He’d found enough coins over the weekend to wash his clothes and he needed to clean the jeans he’d gotten wet and dirty while fixing Jenna’s pipes.
Laundry was usually his Wednesday routine, but he didn’t think routine mattered when the only thing he had to answer to was a dumpster in an alley.
Chapter 2
Jenna rubbed her hands together as yet another round of guilt tightened her gut. This time because she was lying to Marcus and she hated that. More than that, though, she’d hate the lecture he’d give her for allowing a stranger into her kitchen while no one was around to make sure she was safe. Marcus was spending far too much time examining the work the homeless man had done. Surely he was onto her by now. He must have realized someone else had done the work.
He stood up and gave her a wide smile like a proud papa seeing his kid take the first step toward adulthood. Marcus still tended to see her as the little sister he’d left behind when he headed out to see the world. Helping her find her footing after her disaster of a marriage hadn’t helped squelch that image. “Nice work, Jen.” He wiped his hands on a towel and then gave her a one-armed hug. “Before you know it, you’ll be rewiring the outlets.”
Jenna snorted. “Let’s not get crazy.”
He laughed softly before releasing her. Leaning against the counter, he tossed the towel aside. “I’ll find time to fix that switch. Soon.”
“I told you, I’ll take care of it.”
“I will—”
“I know. But you don’t have to spend every free moment you have taking care of me.”
“Maybe I want to.”
“But you shouldn’t have to. You have a wife now. I doubt she appreciates you spending so much time with me.”
“Annie can survive without me. Trust me. She tells me that all the damn time.”
Jenna imagined Annie did tell Marcus that all the time. Annie had been the epitome of independence before becoming disabled. And somehow, it seemed like she still managed to be more self-sufficient than Jenna most days. Annie might not have been able to drive, or have complete use of her hands, and it didn’t take much to distract her, but she was still brilliant and Jenna had no doubt she would have known which valve to turn off before taking the pipes apart.
“Listen, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think we’ll have to replace those pipes sooner than we anticipated,” Marcus said, pulling her back to reality.
She sank physically and emotionally. “That isn’t in my budget for this quarter.”
“We’ll look over your finances again. We need to find the money. If you don’t have it—”
“I’m not taking money from you.”
“Jen.” He gave her that I-know-what-is-best look. “We can’t keep putting duct tape on things. We need to start really fixing them. Before you get shut down.”
She opened her mouth but didn’t argue. She couldn’t. Hard to run a restaurant with no running water. Finally she nodded. “Okay. I’ll bring the books over as soon as I make sure things are okay here. You can take a look while I cook dinner.”
“You don’t have to—”
She shook her head to silence him. If he was going to continue to guide her through life, the least she could do was feed him and his wife. “I’ll keep it simple so Annie can help.”
He smiled. “She likes helping.”
“I know.”
Marcus kissed her head. “We’ll figure it out, okay?”
“Okay. Go home. I’m sure Annie is waiting for you.”
As soon as he disappeared through the swinging doors that led to the dining room, she let her forced smile fall. She’d set aside a bit of money to do some cosmetic work on the building. She’d done everything she could to not touch that money, but now she could see it slipping through her fingers and into the wallet of a plumber.
Damn it.
She grabbed the disinfecting spray, passed through the doors Marcus had left swinging, spritzed a table, and wiped it clean. Given that it was midafternoon on a workday, there was a lull in business, but she smiled at the regulars who sat at their usual tables. Bless those who came in day after day, even if they did fill tables for far longer than their meager bills and tips balanced out. Seeing their appreciative smiles made Jenna feel she was doing something right.
Never mind they were customers she had inherited when she bought out the previous owners. The little things kept her going, so she clung to them.
She stopped scrubbing a table when she realized the gunk she was trying to wash away was actually a scratch on the surface. Her frown deepened as she skimmed over the cracked vinyl booth. Most of the tables were starting to show the same wear. And the money she’d planned to use to fix them was going to end up going to new pipes.
