One Day Like This: A feel-good summer romance Read online

  Their website’s photo gallery of completed jobs featured a Victorian mansion with beautiful bay windows and stained-glass door panels, a historic brownstone, and a series of smaller homes and businesses. “Reasonable rates and first-class service!” gushed the latest client. “A professional who understood both my budget and my needs,” proclaimed another.

  A quick email later, and a contractor from the firm would be onsite first thing Monday morning. Tessa arranged to leave a spare key hidden for him, since she would be running late that morning—one last trip in the hotdog mobile before she turned in the keys and her resignation.

  * * *

  The handyman’s work truck was parked outside the building when Tessa arrived the day of the appointment. At least, she surmised as much from the truck bed, which was packed to the gills with a collection that might have been at home in someone’s great-grandparent’s attic. Splintered wood, ornate brass, and tarnished pewter peeked out from layers of plaster dust and old tarps.

  An antique headboard; a gilded frame from a broken mirror. A gothic cast iron fireplace insert, and a broken carousel horse of all things, its blue and gold paint badly cracked and peeling away from the elaborate carvings beneath. Were these part of the contractor’s work or was he just a traveling packrat? Tessa drew herself away from the shabby artifacts and put her key in the lock.

  Pushing open the red front door, she stepped inside the foyer. Straight ahead of her was the front room with its faded green and gold flecked wallpaper, and a scarred, carved oak mantel seated proudly against the wall, its white paint flaking away in places; then the badly peeling painted spiral stairs leading to the landing above, where the stained glass glowed in the sunlight.

  She climbed the stairs, feeling her anticipation mount despite the dust under her fingers and the smell of mildew reaching her nostrils. Shabby but real—this was the place where her dream was coming true. At the top of these stairs was her future office, where she would dream up amazing details for weddings that would impress clients to speechlessness… that would become memories preserved in photo albums and scrapbooks, just as she had always hoped, ever since she began saving pages torn from magazines—even down to the sample invitations from stationery companies.

  Never mind the fact that it was technically Stefan whose creations would be dazzling their clients. At this moment, the downside of her dream turning into reality was less important than the reality itself.

  This is really happening. It’s amazing. I am finally a wedding planner with my own business, and it’s all just beginning. She felt a rush of pride and utter happiness—and surprise as she turned to her right on the landing and encountered a tall ladder in the alcove, and a man standing atop it, prying back the trim beneath an ornate dormer window.

  “Hey! Wait!” said Tessa. “What are you doing?” He wasn’t hired yet, and, more importantly, he was working on something that looked nonessential to the building’s list of code demands from the inspector.

  The masculine figure in denim and flannel, with broad shoulders and chestnut brown hair that seemed slightly untamed, turned and looked down, a pair of rich blue eyes meeting hers. His well-sculpted cheekbones and jawline sported a few days’ worth of stubble, Tessa noticed.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “I said ‘stop.’ Please,” she added this time. “I’m Tessa Miller. You’re the contractor, I trust?” A truly ridiculous question, since he wasn’t likely to be a stranger off the streets come to check her building for sound structure and good wiring.

  “That’s me,” he replied. “Blake Ellingham.” He came down the ladder and extended a hand to shake hers. “I have to admit, I was excited when I got your email.”

  Excited? “You were?”

  “Absolutely,” he repeated, with the dawning of a faint smile at this answer, which gave light to his whole expression. It looked exactly the way Tessa felt inside; the way she thought her enthusiasm would look on the outside.

  Maybe it was the light in his eyes, but to her surprise something about his reaction both bewildered Tessa and took her breath away for a split-second. Breathless—she hadn’t experienced that in a long time, not even when Stefan had texted “yes” to her offer to share a wedding planner partnership. The heady rush of this new experience must be affecting her brain, even when it came to talking with strangers.

  “I guess I didn’t expect that reply from anybody,” she said.

  “The historic old town? The shabby but chic quarter looking for new life in this city? Are you kidding?” he answered. “I haven’t had the opportunity to work on one of these buildings, and I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to do it. Nice brickwork with a little sandstone, modeled on some of the best brownstone architecture.”

  “Really?” she said. He had a pleasant voice, with a warmth that stirred again those same feelings inside her as when she had climbed the steps to her future workspace. A strange comparison, a strange reaction—maybe there were some chemicals in this old building that were having an impact on her system.

  “There’s a hundred and fifty years of history in this place—you can sense it the moment you walk through the doors,” he said.

  He must really like this place. Tessa’s spirits rose with this idea. Maybe he would be kind and give them a decent break on his fees. “So, you’ve been getting acquainted with the building,” she said, glancing around them, at the dusty walls and the decorative window with its cracked lower pane of pink glass. “What do you think?”

  He released a breath that resembled a sigh. One that diminished his nice warmth somewhat—in the sense that Tessa knew his words would bring no good news for her pocketbook.

  “Dry rot,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s only the beginning. There’s water damage in some of the rooms. This hall probably has a leak around the windowsill. It’s possible dry rot has set in, depending on how long it’s been there. The material around it will have to come out.”

  That sounded nasty and kind of expensive to fix. Tessa hoped it hadn’t gotten bad enough for him to actually think of ripping out part of the wall, or something dramatic like that. All she could see was a little graying beneath the trim he’d started to remove.

  She attempted positive confidence. “The realtor seemed to think it was in pretty good shape for an old building. He told me it housed a couple of stores recently, so it’s not as if it’s been abandoned forever.”

  “Abandoned, no. Neglected is probably a better word for it.” He descended the stairs, and Tessa had no choice but to follow. “That fireplace—original. Most of the carving, molding, and trim are authentic, too. But the rest—a lot of original fixtures have been torn out. This place is a Frankenstein’s monster when it comes to repair carpentry over the years, and most of it’s shoddy. Take this staircase: probably added about a century ago when this place changed hands, and a totally different style and craftsmanship than the rest.”

  “I like this staircase,” protested Tessa. They had reached the main foyer again, where the carpenter rapped on the walls.

  “Pretty solid down here, but we’ve got problems upstairs. I may have to take out some of the walls. Those two little rooms on the end by the bath are supposed to be one, anyway.”

  Take out the walls? Actual walls? “I like the walls, too,” said Tessa quickly. “Let’s leave them. In fact, let’s leave as much as we can, because I’m really pretty attached to things as they are.” She touched the wallpaper and grime came off on her fingers. She slipped her hand behind her, and smiled again. “What about the overall structure? It’s solid, right?” she asked hopefully.

  The handyman had turned his attention to the fireplace and was crouching in front of it, running a hand across the brick inlay, where some coals and ash still remained. “The original surround is gone from its exterior,” he said. “Cast iron, early Victorian. I could probably find you something pretty close, maybe with the old torch motif. The mantel’s oak needs som
e help—three coats of paint to cover the original finish, but we can fix that too. If you want corbels for it, I could probably find those too.”

  Tessa had no idea what corbels were, but they sounded unnecessary when it came to getting an “open” sign hung on the building’s door.

  “Maybe when I hunt up the stuff for the windows,” he continued. “Leaded glass isn’t always easy to find, but I can probably match it if I visit a couple of specialty vendors I know. It won’t be cheap, but nobody will know it’s not original when they look at it, which is exactly what you want with a building this old. But first we need to talk about the walls.”

  Expensive and hard-to-find leaded glass also sounded nonessential. Wasn’t lead dangerous, anyway? Hazardous to one’s health and the environment? “Hopefully it’s nothing a little paint and wallpaper won’t fix,” Tessa suggested. Inside, her confidence had begun to waver. She was counting on a little wall color and creativity to transform this place, not expensive antiques and a massive demolition of its interior.

  “It’s rough. Really rough. It needs a lot of work and a lot of capital,” he said, looking around him. “I know it’s pretty daunting at this point and you must be thinking ‘maybe we should just tear it down,’ but it’ll be worth it in the end.”

  Tear it down? Tessa’s high spirits had completely sunk. No bargain bin hardware paint was going to fix this place in the contractor’s eyes. These were statements that implied the whole building was about to fall down from rot—plans for gutting rooms, ripping out whole walls, and turning the building into a skeleton of itself were already turning themselves over in his head, clearly.

  How could they possibly pay for any of that? She had been cherishing the impossible hope that they would spend only a few thousand at most to fix up this place—and only a few hundred on decor. He needed to understand this fact. Forget antique corbels, or whatever they were—forget leaded glass and knocking out whole walls, so long as there was a chance they would continue to stand on their own for years.

  The handyman was oblivious to her thoughts as he wiped his hand on a rag to remove the traces of soot from the fireplace, then pushed up his sleeves as if in preparation for getting to work. He had strong-looking hands and well-defined biceps, she noticed. Not that it mattered, so long as he was strong enough to hammer a few pieces of plasterboard over some holes.

  “As for light fixtures—”

  Here, Tessa decided, was the perfect point to stop him.

  “We’re mostly interested in the basics right now,” said Tessa. “You know, electrical problems, holes in the floor and roof… that kind of thing. I mean, how many repairs will it take until you can turn on a light and not burn the building down?” She made it sound like a joke, although it was an honest question.

  “You’ll need a master electrician and a plumber to answer that,” he said. “But I’ve had a little training in electrics, and I did see part of your wiring through the hole upstairs.”

  “Rough?” Tessa knew the answer before he even said it.

  “We’ll get to your priorities, don’t worry,” he said to her. “I can work on the big stuff like reconstruction while I take care of the smaller stuff, like putting the fixtures and trim back the way they should be.”

  “Maybe I should have explained things better in the email,” she began. “I don’t mean I want you to tell me the basics as a starting point. I mean, just tell me the basics. Because that’s all I’m interested in hiring you to fix right now. Not antique light fixtures or missing corbels, whatever they are. Just the basics.”

  The handyman’s smile dimmed noticeably. “The staircase is fine the way it is,” she said. “I like it. I don’t care if not every fixture is perfect. Truthfully, we can only afford the essentials. We have a small budget, me and my partners, so if it’s not necessary to bring us up to code… well, you get the picture.”

  The carpenter’s smile was now gone, Tessa noted, along with the light in his eyes. In its place was a touch of steel in his blue gaze. “So, holes in the walls, holes in the ceiling,” he said. “When you say, ‘Don’t burn the building down,’ you mean you want the bare minimum of work done to hold this place together. Is that it?”

  “Pretty much,” said Tessa. “So, I think we’re on the same page now.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a folder. “I brought the blueprints the realtor gave me. Show me the worst places that need to be fixed, and we’ll talk about the essentials.”

  “You’re the customer,” Blake replied, in a tone that seemed to imply that the customer was not always right. He actually sighed again, she thought, as he crouched down beside her on the floor while she spread the plans out, for lack of a table. Pencil in hand, the contractor made some notes about the condition of the upstairs—hazardous—and the downstairs—dismal—although he didn’t use those exact words to express himself to her.

  “But the worst problem is in the second story bathroom, where your tub plans to fall through the floor. I know you might not classify that as an ‘essential’ but if I were you, I would go ahead…”

  He had a certain authority when he spoke: not an obnoxious one, although it was slightly bossy, which was why she was arguing with him on some of these points. Or maybe there was some kind of opposing chemistry between them, working against the obvious rugged appeal and rough charisma of the carpenter that had struck her in those first seconds of meeting him.

  Not that he was her type. If she had a type at all, that is—and she hadn’t in a long time; thoughts of finding her ideal man had been swept away even before her dreams of being an event planner had been suspended. It was just the scent of paint thinner or something going to her head right now. Fumes from old buildings were bad for the brain’s normal processes.

  “Will it take long to get the estimate?” she asked.

  “I’ll need a few more days to assess the damage and come up with a ballpark number for expenses,” Blake replied. “Is that a problem for you?”

  “No,” said Tessa. “That’s great. If there’s nothing else, I’ll just go explore my future office.” And potential future home, she thought, remembering her backup plan to pay the bills by saving on rent—although she might feel a little like a squatter in an abandoned building if the renovations didn’t progress quickly.

  Nobody needed to know about that part of the plan yet, especially since her lease wouldn’t be up at Bluecrest Apartments for weeks.

  She rolled up the blueprints and let him keep them, then lifted her bag from the floor. The office to the right of the stairs on the second story landing would be hers and Stefan’s, with an adjoining door between them. His space would have the best window view, because Stefan claimed that his creativity would feel like it was caged without at least two windows through which it could “fly away in fantasy.”

  His words, not hers.

  Her half of the room needed some help, clearly, since the water stains on one side of the wall looked like a hideous malformed monster, and the wallpaper on the opposite side was sagging in a papery mess. It was nothing a little paint couldn’t fix, though. The carpenter would see she was right about that.

  Seven

  “Wedding Belles” was painted on the front window’s glass by Friday, which was when Tessa picked up the first batch of business cards and split them up among her partners, as well as distributing them to as many of her business contacts in town who would take one; from antiques shops, hairdressers and nail salons to fashion boutiques and jewelry stores, and everywhere in between. Any place, in fact, where Tessa imagined engaged people might be, even boldly leaving one at the tearoom where she’d worked before.

  She had also printed off several fliers to put up around town, and arranged for an ad in the next issue of Bellegrove Bridal, albeit a small one. Its receipt rested atop the big stack of grand opening notices in their box on her borrowed car’s passenger seat, as she ran errands all week in anticipation of the Wedding Belles officially moving in.

  Ste
fan didn’t object to the business’s name, she noticed—not that he had even been to see the building yet, except for a cursory visit on his way to another party. He had texted Tessa to say that he would be out of town for two weeks, along with an observation that their new digs had “great vibes” and he couldn’t wait to plan someone’s “dream-come-true wedding” with her. Totes ready to do this, he wrote in his message. Finally, I’ll have real creative freedom. Wedding Wonders had SUCH a dampening effect on me. We’ll talk paint colors soon. Love the office windows!!!!

  Finally, everything was coming together, Tessa told herself, as she drove to meet the others at their new headquarters. It still needed some work—she admitted this as she looked at a drooping wall lamp upstairs, dangling by a few wires—but it would be charming with a little more TLC. Chic, eccentric, and unique—that was their atmosphere. They would wear it like a distinctive style, and not a budget limitation.

  Natalie let out a low whistle when she walked into the foyer.

  “Look at this place,” she said. “Walnut paneling, a spiral staircase… a big mantel in the front room. This place was really something a hundred years ago.” She touched the old wallpaper, the dull gold and green that had probably been vibrant a few decades ago.

  “Wait until you see the upstairs,” said Tessa.

  She had been looking forward to showing her other two business partners the house for weeks now. Until this morning, however, neither of them had been able to coordinate their schedules with hers for a proper tour. Bursting with pride for its potential, she told Natalie, “Ama and I have already picked out the office space, and there’s a room just perfect for yours, with a huge old wardrobe for fabrics. Plus closets, extra space… this is going to be amazing once we have time to fix it up.”