Page 7 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

CHARLIE

M aren has clearly watched one too many movies in which a couple of people with hammers build an entire home in a day’s time. And despite her earnest promises about helping me, she’s probably never even changed a lightbulb.

She emerges from the kitchen with that same optimism.

“The stove works,” she concludes. “And the refrigerator could use a good cleaning, but it’s running.” My mother had so much faith in my return that she didn’t bother shutting off the power. Not her wisest move.

“Excellent. So I’ll still spend millions rehabbing this house, but we can hang onto the appliances from 1970. That’s great news.”

“It won’t be millions,” she argues, heading to the laundry room to my left. “And some things matter more than money.”

This is the kind of thing the Fischer girls with their trust funds say quite often. “You know who says that? People with a lot of money.”

She blows out a weary breath. “You’re so cranky today. Is this because you’ve had to go twenty-four hours without alcohol or because you’ve had to go twenty-four hours without sex?”

I glance at my watch. “It’s actually only been sixteen hours for one, and eight hours for the other. So no. And I’m not cranky. I’m just trying to provide a counterpoint to the lack of logic coming from your side. Mare, this is not happening.”

“We’ll see what the engineer says,” Maren tells me cheerfully, opening the washing machine door as a truck rumbles over the gravel in front.

I stride toward the heavy wood door. “This isn’t a negotiation.”

“We’ll see,” she replies as if it is a negotiation, one in which she holds all the cards.

A lifetime of being hot has created this problem.

She’s so accustomed to getting her way that she can’t hear the word no .

And there’s a weak part of me that has always struggled with saying it to her myself—she’s gotten her way with every-fucking-thing she’s ever asked of me, but crashing in my apartment for a weekend and saving a centuries-old house are incredibly different requests, and one of them requires a year of my life and at least a million dollars.

So I’m gonna have to get better at saying no. Fast.

When I reach the porch, the engineer is getting a bag out of the cab of his truck. I’m half inclined to tell him he doesn’t need to look around at all, and then he turns toward me and?—

The guy who’s my height and has the build of a college quarterback is the same skinny kid I worked with here for an entire summer. “ Elijah? ”

His eyes crinkle. “Long time no see, Charlie. You got old, man.”

I laugh, shaking the hand he’s extended. “So did you. How are things? I had no idea Oak Bluff Construction and Engineering was you. ”

“Yep, it’s me,” he replies. “Sorry about your mom. I just heard.”

Yeah, you and me both . “Thanks.”

Elijah’s eyes widen when Maren steps up beside me, which is a pretty standard reaction when Maren steps up anywhere.

There are lots of women who look better in magazines and TV than they do in real life.

Maren is the opposite—the sort of beautiful you can stare straight at yet not quite believe is real.

Her eyes are bluer than Photoshop could make them, her skin creamier, her hair shinier.

You want to take a second look, a third, just to figure out the trick.

“Elijah,” he says, extending his hand. “I worked here with Charlie one summer. You must be Charlie’s…” He glances at the massive rock on her finger.

“Sister. Hi, I’m Maren. And are you trying to tell me that Charles Dalton actually did good, honest work at one point in his life?”

“I’m not sure how good it was,” Elijah says with a laugh, putting his boot down hard on a joist, watching the boards sag in response. “And I’m pretty sure he was here under duress—you’d gotten a DUI or something, right?”

I throw a hand over Maren’s mouth, anticipating the motherly scolding she’s about to offer. “Before you start, I got a DUI on a golf cart , which I didn’t even know was a thing. You can apparently also get a DUI while on a bike or horseback.”

Maren pushes my hand away. “These are things only Charlie would know,” she says to Elijah. “You must have learned so much from him that summer.”

“I aged about a decade over three months,” he says, “but that was mostly due to Charlie’s haphazard building skills.”

He’s grinning; Maren’s laughing. She’s already doing it—making everyone fall in love with her. This place is actively falling in on itself and she’ll soon have him claiming it just needs a fresh coat of paint .

It’s irritating. And cute. It irritates me that I find it cute.

“Okay, let’s take a look,” he says. “I’m sure you’re aware this place already needs a new porch and a new roof. Hopefully that’s the worst of it.”

“Clearly you haven’t seen the interior, then,” I reply, and Maren elbows me.

“This place is amazing,” she gushes. “Obviously, you’ve been inside, so I don’t even have to tell you how stunning it is, but?—”

“Maren,” I growl. “Stop. Let him decide for himself.” Because the next words out of her mouth are definitely money’s no object or I’ll just die if we can’t fix it . And if he’s half as weak as me, he’ll find himself offering to take the job on for free just to make her smile.

On second thought, maybe I should let her talk.

Elijah walks through the house, knocking on walls, stomping on the floor, examining the windows, and flipping on light switches—Maren wants to believe this is all about tearing out some shitty carpet and replacing the wallpaper, but the cosmetic damage is the least of my concerns.

Half the floors in the house sag when you put any weight on them, and I don’t know much about construction, but I doubt that’s a good sign.

“There are problems,” Elijah says, “but the real issue will likely be the basement.”

I frown. “It has a basement?” This seems like something I’d have known.

“A house this old probably has a root cellar rather than a real basement. You’d access it from the outside.”

We go out back to a trap door that abuts the house, one I somehow never noticed during my few visits here.

Elijah climbs down a ladder in the darkness and turns on a flashlight for us.

“You don’t need to come down,” I tell Maren as I begin my descent. “It’s probably pretty creepy. ”

Her eyes light up. Creepy is apparently an enticing word for her, which perhaps explains how she wound up with Harvey.

I reach the basement—dirt floor, dirt walls with plant roots bursting through—and turn to follow Maren’s descent. Her shorts are riding up just enough to spy the curve of her ass. I cut a warning glance toward Elijah, and he politely looks away.

“Wow,” Maren whispers, taking it in.

“Until about 1920 or 1930, most homes didn’t have refrigerators. This was where they stored stuff to keep it cool. If you could afford it, you’d get a big block of ice delivered and keep it in sawdust to lower the temperature.”

“I can’t imagine, even with ice, that it got that cool,” says Maren.

Elijah shrugs. “Dairy and meat were mostly fresh or could survive a day down here. But other stuff would last a lot longer. Canned goods, vegetables ...”

“Bodies,” I add.

Maren’s head jerks from me to Elijah. “That was a joke, right?”

He shrugs. “Until a couple decades ago, it was sort of the norm around here to store a body in the house until burial.”

Maren’s eyes go wide. “And… did people die in this house?”

He glances from me back to her—a look that asks if he should tell the whole truth, to which I shrug. “I’d imagine so.”

This hasn’t diminished Maren’s enthusiasm for the house at all. Her eyes glow in the dim light. Everything that should send her screaming seems to have the opposite effect instead. Again, though...Harvey.

Elijah stays behind to finish examining the basement while Maren and I climb back up the ladder. When he rejoins us, he suggests, with a polite glance in Maren’s direction, that we stay put while he checks out the attic since he’s not sure how structurally sound it is.

“I don’t know if contractor porn is a thing,” she says with an appreciative purr once he’s out of earshot, “but if so, he could be making a lot more money doing something else.”

My teeth grind. “Maybe this would be a good time to remind you that you’re married.”

She laughs as she heads toward the covered back deck. “I’m married, not dead. I still have eyes.”

We sit side by side on the stairs, and she stretches her long legs in front of her. She has the smoothest skin I’ve ever seen, skin that begs you to glide a hand over it.

“I bet they had amazing parties here,” she says dreamily, looking over the grassy slope splayed out before us, which leads down to the water.

“ Who had amazing parties?”

“The family who lived here at the turn of the century,” she says.

She didn’t know shit about this house until an hour ago.

Now she’s the Oak Bluff historian, if historians are people who craft tales entirely from their own imaginations.

“I bet they had amazing parties and played croquet on this lawn, and the kids ran around catching fireflies.” She smiles as if she’s watching it happen.

“Maren, you don’t even know that a family owned it. Maybe it was some crotchety old confederate widow who remained pissed off until death that the North won the war. Maybe it was the KKK meeting house. Maybe it was a brothel.”

She exhales heavily. “It wasn’t a brothel.”

“And you know this how ?”

She hitches a shoulder. “Pure economics. You said there are only six rooms upstairs. They’d need more rooms than that to cover the mortgage.”

I laugh unwillingly. “It’s funny the way you go from saying things like ‘some things matter more than money’ to providing an accurate ratio of overhead-to-income when it suits you.”

She ignores me, leaning back on her palms, staring at the water with shining eyes. I think I finally know what Maren looks like when she’s in love. “I adore this house,” she whispers.

“I picked up on that.”