Читать книгу Saved by the Fireman - Allie Pleiter - Страница 13

Chapter Five

Jesse watched Charlotte wiggle her fingers into the work gloves Mom had sent along. If they weren’t so perfect for Charlotte, he’d have never agreed to something so unprofessional as a gift of fussy work gloves. Only these fit Charlotte’s personality to a tee. Mom had won them in some social club raffle, and they were far too small for her arthritic hands, anyway. With a pang, Jesse wondered if Mom had been saving them for Randy’s wife. Randy’s ex-wife.

He’d wanted Constance and Randy to succeed, but even he could see she wasn’t the sort of spouse who would continue to endure the kind of hours Randy kept. Jesse wanted his work to be a passion, surely, but not an obsession. That was part of why he loved the firehouse—it served as a constant reminder that there was more to life than a paycheck. There was a certain poetic justice in spending his work hours constructing when so much of the firefighting battled destruction.

Charlotte’s wide-spread and wiggling floral fingers pulled his thoughts back to the present. He should have remembered pulling the bathtub would be a tight squeeze in this narrow bathroom—he was so close to her he could smell the flowers in whatever lotion she wore. Something sweet but with just a bit of zing, like her personality. Jesse held out the clunky safety glasses. “Time to accessorize.”

He hadn’t counted on her looking so adorable, standing there like an enthusiastic fish with those big brown eyes filling the gogglelike lenses. Her smile was beyond distracting, and she looked so utterly happy. He’d been grumpy for days after he “lost” the cottage—for that matter he got grumpy when he lost a basketball game at the firehouse—but she managed to keep her bounce even when losing her job, not to mention her beloved grandmother. What about her made that kind of resilience possible?

He straddled the antiquated pipes that ran up one side of the bathtub, pulling a wrench from his tool belt to detach them from the floor. Best to get to work right away before the urge to stare at her made him do something stupid. Well, stupider than presenting her with fussy gloves and a baby crowbar. “Pry up that flange while I pull from here.”

“Flange?”

Yep, stupider. More every minute. “The circle thing around the bottom of the pipe. Wedge the crowbar into the waxy stuff holding it to the tile and yank it free.”

She was a parade of different emotions as she got down on her knees and thrust the crowbar under the seal. Anxiety, determination, excitement, worry—they seemed to flash across her face in split-second succession. He liked that she was so emotionally invested in the place, but it bugged him how transparent her feelings seemed to him. “Go on,” he encouraged, charmed by the way she bit her lip and the “ready or not” look in her wide eyes. “You can do this.”

Charlotte gave the fixtures a determined glare, then got down on her knees and thrust the crowbar under the seal. The yelp of victory she gave when the suction gave way and the ring sprang up off the tile to clatter against the pipe was—and he was going to have to find a way to stop using this word—adorable. She brandished the crowbar as she sat back on her haunches and watched him go through the process of unhooking the bathtub from its plumbing. He could have done this alone more quickly—maybe even more easily—but this was too much fun. Getting this porcelain behemoth down the stairs to his truck would be the exact opposite of fun, but he’d called in a few guys from the firehouse to help with that, even though they wouldn’t add to the scenery the way Charlotte’s grin currently did.

She ran a hand along the lip of the deep tub. “Mima would have loved this tub. You were smart to talk me into saving it.”

The expensive Jacuzzi model she’d had her eye on seemed like a ridiculous indulgence he would have talked anyone out of buying. Especially when this one could be so easily repaired. “Tell me about her.” The question seemed to jump from his mouth, surprising her as much as it did him.

Her eyes lit up with affection. “Mima? She was ‘a piece of work,’ Grandpa always used to say. Her real name was Naomi Charlotte Dunning, but when I was little I couldn’t quite say Naomi, so I just said ‘Mi’ at first. Then it became ‘Mima’ and that stuck. I’m named after her. She was a great woman. Grandpa had Alzheimer’s like Melba’s dad, and Mima was a hero in how she took care of him. When he died, I know she grieved and was scared to go on without him, but she found her courage. So much so that she decided to scatter some of his ashes all over the world. And I mean all over the world. She’d been on almost every continent, and left a little bit of Grandpa everywhere she went.” She shrugged. “It’s hopelessly romantic, isn’t it?”