The Home They Built Read online

  Then Brady stopped so short Finn almost walked into him. “What the hell?”

  “Who is that?”

  Finn followed his gaze through the open walls and saw Anna standing in front of the kitchen window with her hands on her hips. It looked as if she was talking to herself, but he saw the little white earphone and realized she was probably on a call. Then he looked back at his friend and was surprised to see the back of Brady’s neck had a pink flush.

  That wasn’t okay. Not by a long shot. Not only was Brady off the market, but Finn had dibs. Nobody knew that but him, of course, but still. He didn’t want another guy, even—or maybe especially—his best friend having any kind of chemistry with her.

  “She’s the star of the show. Anna Beckett.” When Brady didn’t respond or even move, Finn nudged him with his elbow. “Earth to Brady, the guy with the hot new wife and the cutest baby boy in town.”

  He could get away with saying that because his own nephews didn’t actually live in Blackberry Bay.

  “She look familiar to you at all?” Brady muttered, still not taking his eyes off of Anna.

  “She’s on TV. She probably looks familiar to a lot of people.”

  “I guess.” Brady seemed to shake off whatever had made him freeze up, and he shrugged. “That makes sense, though I’d swear I’ve met her before. You know anything about her?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to,” he said easily, but it was enough to catch Brady’s attention. He didn’t need to call dibs because Brady was married to Reyna, whom he’d been in love with since first grade. And luckily, it seemed as if Brady had been struck by déjà vu and not attraction.

  “It’s like that, huh?”

  Finn shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

  “That’s a given, with Tess involved. What a freakin’ mess this is.” He snorted and shook his head. “Bayview Inn.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, actually.” The question had popped into his head a few times, but never when he could call Brady. “Why didn’t you call and tell me this was happening? Maybe I could have stopped her.”

  Brady held up his hands. “First, by the time I was involved, the papers were probably already signed. And the woman who called me about doing the job was rushed and she just gave me the address and asked my rate for old work—for doing remodel wiring—but she never mentioned this house being an inn. I recognized the address of course, but I was mostly just happy Tess had found a way to get some help with the place. I didn’t know about the inn part.”

  Finn knew he was right about the ink probably already being dry on the contracts, but it still got on his nerves that in a town where everybody seemed to know—and tell—everything, his grandmother had managed to sneak this one right past her family.

  “It’s still hard to believe she was able to get all the way through the preliminary process without my parents or me knowing about it. The one bit of gossip that actually mattered.”

  Brady nodded. “She’s a smart lady. And speaking of ladies, let’s go back to gossiping about the complicated situation between you and Anna. What’s stopping you?”

  “There’s the fact my family is conning her production company out of who even knows how much money.”

  “But are they really? The production company’s getting their episodes out of it and I’ve known your family my whole life. They’ll be entertaining episodes, for sure.”

  “Brady!” Gram called, and Finn had to fight not to roll his eyes when she took a couple of steps toward them before remembering to slow her pace and hunch over a little.

  “What is Tess wearing?” Brady murmured to him. “And did she hurt herself? Why is she walking like that?”

  “Don’t ask,” Finn said wearily. “Just go along with...everything.”

  * * *

  “Measure twice. Cut once.”

  Alice gave her husband a look that could have sliced through the Sheetrock they were arguing about, as if it was butter. “Spare me the construction platitudes handed down from your father...the car salesman.”

  Anna was doing her best to be invisible as the husband and wife did their thing. Couples like the Weavers were her favorite to work with, and it wasn’t the bickering alone. That made for good television, as long as it wasn’t mean bickering. Marital banter shored up by decades of affection, though—the viewers ate that up. And so did Anna.

  “When he wasn’t selling cars, my dad did a lot of projects at home. How do you think I learned how to do things around the house?”

  “Too bad he didn’t teach you how to finish them,” Alice said, and Anna tensed a little, but Joel just laughed.

  “If I finish my projects, you’ll have no reason to keep me around.” Then he hooked his arm around his wife’s face and pulled her close enough to plant a kiss on her temple.

  Besides enjoying Joel and Alice’s dynamic on a personal level—relationship goals, she thought—it was always a relief when the property owners and their friends and family filmed well. Especially on this project, but recognizing they were going to have a couple of great episodes of Relic Rehab went a long way toward easing the anxiety and guilt that selecting the Bayview Inn had saddled her with.

  “We’re losing the light,” Mike said, breaking into her thoughts. “It makes more sense to wrap for the day and let Frankie and Jim get in here.”

  He was right, so she nodded. They had plenty of footage of the Weaver family hanging Sheetrock. It was time to let the guys go in and knock out the rest. They wouldn’t get everything done before filming started again tomorrow, of course, but the Weavers could move on to the taping and mudding in the rooms they did finish.

  Usually, to keep a project from falling behind, Anna would have the guys go in and do the more time-consuming work off camera, though she really preferred to stick to the DIY theme as closely as possible. She didn’t think having Frankie and Jim around was cheating, since most people had at least a couple of people in their lives who could help them out. And filming a purely do-it-yourself renovation in real time would kill the show, so she had the two laborers, and there was fine print in the credits acknowledging their part in the renovation. They’d be lucky if they could finish two episodes in a year, otherwise.

  “I think the others were doing the big paint color debate in the living room if you want to let them know,” Mike said.

  “We are not letting your mother choose the colors without us,” Alice told her husband. “Hurry up and finish this.”

  “I need a drink first,” Joel said. “And Finn’s probably with her, so she can’t go too rogue.”

  “I’ll check on them,” Anna said, since there was nothing left for her to do in this room.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the living room, but it gave Anna’s brain enough time to relax. And when her mind was left to its own devices, images of Finn immediately popped in to occupy her thoughts.

  It had been hard enough to concentrate on something besides Finn before. But now she had a new image—him lifting his T-shirt to reveal a taut stomach she immediately wanted to run her hands over—and she knew her imagination was going to have fun with that one.

  He’d seen her looking, too. She hadn’t been able to tear her gaze away before he dropped the hem of his shirt and looked up. It was going to take all of her self-control not to blush when she saw him again.

  “You can’t paint the walls salmon pink, Gram.”

  She heard him before she saw him, and the exasperation mingled with affection and humor in his voice made her smile.

  “I can do whatever I want,” Tess replied.

  Not wanting to interrupt and kill the flow of the scene, Anna leaned against the doorjamb to watch Finn run a hand through his hair. Tess must have been particularly stubborn over the last several hours, because his hair was standing up in all directions and his fingers had worked nearly all of the plaster
dust out.

  “First of all, Gram, the clapboards are salmon pink. Your exterior and your interior walls can’t be the same color. That would be weird.”

  “I prefer eccentric.”

  “And I feel like it would make all those guests you’re going to have feel sick to their stomachs.”

  When Tess’s eyes narrowed, Anna had to press her lips together to keep from chuckling, even as her stomach tightened with anxiety. Finn’s emphasis on the word guests had her wondering if he could be pushed far enough to blow up the entire scheme just to get out of it.

  She didn’t think he would. He knew the stakes for Tess and it was obvious he would do whatever he had to in order to get her out of this. But any man could only take so much.

  “The salmon pink on the outside doesn’t make them sick,” Tess shot back.

  “Because it’s outside, where it belongs. It would be too much in here, and it would probably do weird things to the lighting.” Then, even though she hadn’t moved, Anna must have popped up in Finn’s peripheral vision because he turned his head slightly and smiled at her.

  Anna was aware of Cody picking up his head and seeing her standing there. She saw the flash of his hand that signaled to Tess he’d stopped recording. But she was too busy looking into Finn’s eyes to care.

  She was in so much trouble.

  Whatever this pull was, he felt it, too. And it was so strong that she seriously doubted her ability to hide it for the duration of this renovation.

  “We’re wrapping it up for the day,” she said when she realized they were all looking at her and not just Finn. “It’s a little early, but we want to give the guys a head start on hanging the rest of the Sheetrock, and I’ve got some work I need to do back at the RV.”

  “We should go right now,” Tess said to her grandson. “If we beat your parents back to the house, we’ll have plenty of hot water.”

  “A good son would say scheming to use up my parents’ hot water before they get home is wrong,” he said. “But I think I’m going to need an entire hour in the shower. Let’s go.”

  Because an image of Finn naked in the shower was just what Anna needed today. “Maybe a pre-shower with a garden hose?”

  “I could use a cold shower right about now.”

  The way he said it—and the way his eyes crinkled with amusement—let her know he was saying exactly what she thought he was. And she was definitely going to need a cold shower of her own.

  He took a step toward her and she knew without a doubt that if they were alone, he would take more steps, until he closed the distance between them. She could practically feel his arm sliding around her waist. His other hand cupping the back of her neck. His mouth claiming hers.

  “Finn, let’s go.” Tess wasn’t kidding about beating Joel and Alice home, and when she tugged at Finn’s arm, he gave Anna one last sizzling look that promised all sorts of things if he could get her alone.

  Definitely a cold shower, she thought as they walked out the door. Maybe two. One with the RV’s outside shower and then another inside.

  Several hours and one cool shower later, Anna closed her notebook and rubbed the back of her neck. The RV was definitely nice, but it wasn’t the most ergonomically friendly of workplaces. She’d eaten a turkey sandwich and salad at the dinette, working on her voiceover scripts for previously shot footage, and she could only do that for so long before she needed a break.

  She knew Eryn was in the other, larger RV with the crew, reviewing what they’d shot that day, so she grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and went in search of company. As she neared the crew’s motor home, she could hear them laughing and assumed they were watching a funny scene with Joel and Alice, or maybe Tess being Tess.

  Until she opened the door and they not only stopped laughing, but looked guilty about being caught. There was throat clearing and a noticeable lack of eye contact.

  She closed the door behind her to keep the air conditioning in and decided to focus her attention on Cody, who was the weakest link when it came to hiding things from her. “How’s the footage from today?”

  “We got some great stuff,” Cody said. “What’s the MPAA rating for Relic Rehab again?”

  Anna frowned when they all made ridiculous noises in an effort to cover their snickers. “What are you talking about?”

  Mike gave Cody a look that should have set the younger cameraman on fire on the spot, but only made him squirm. “Nothing, boss.”

  If he was having to remind Cody and the others of who she was with such emphasis, something was definitely up. “Spill it.”

  “We should go over the sheet for tomorrow,” Eryn said, and Anna appreciated the effort, but it wasn’t going to work.

  “Cody,” she said in a very I’m-the-boss tone. “Let’s see it.”

  Mike sighed and waved a hand toward the screen. He was trying to look exasperated, but she’d known him too long to miss the amusement lurking in the lines of his face. They’d definitely been having a laugh at her expense before she stepped into the RV.

  Cody queued up the footage and Anna folded her arms across her chest as she identified the upstairs hallway. It had been tight for filming, so it had been just Finn working while Tess pretended she was helping him. The scenes between those two always made her smile because Finn’s love for his grandmother always came through loud and clear.

  Cody scrubbed through the video until Anna’s face appeared on the screen, and she felt heat spread over her skin all over again. Hopefully the dim light in the RV would hide it from the rest of the team, but watching Finn lift his shirt—exposing that taut stomach—to wipe his face had jacked up her temperature the first time, and the view was no less potent the second time. Then Cody repeated the clip, but this time he used the controls to zoom in on Anna’s face.

  The on-screen version of herself looked as though she was on day three of a no-carb diet and somebody had just set a bowl of baked macaroni and cheese in front of her.

  Oh no. But yes, she actually looked as if she desperately wanted to devour the dish in front of her. Unfortunately, the dish was Finn. And just in case the visual wasn’t enough, the microphone clearly picked up her needy sigh of desire that sounded as though it had sprung up from the very depths of her soul.

  And all three of them were staring at her—watching her watch herself very obviously mooning over Finn Weaver’s naked torso like a teenager.

  “I mean, look at those abs,” she finally said, trying to play it off as a totally normal reaction to the sight of smoothly muscled skin. “And you can delete that footage.”

  “Sure thing,” Cody said, but he picked up his soda can and took a long sip.

  “Oh no, I’m going to stand here and watch you do it,” Anna added in a firm voice. “Delete it.”

  As he went through the process of eradicating the evidence, she was a little sorry she didn’t have her own copy. Or at least a still picture. But when Cody gave her the thumbs-up to indicate it was gone, she knew it didn’t matter.

  It was going to be a long time before she forgot that view.

  Chapter Seven

  On Monday morning, Anna sent Eryn with the crew in the SUV to the Bayview Inn. She had a few phone calls to make—including one with the network suits—and rather than having her assistant hovering over her and checking her watch every thirty seconds, she told them she’d catch up when she was done.

  When that business was done, she found herself reluctant to drive straight to the Weaver house, though. She’d already been in Blackberry Bay for a couple of weeks and she hadn’t yet started looking for information about her birth mother. The risk she’d taken when she’d accepted Tess’s application would be for nothing if she left knowing nothing more about her mother than she had when she’d arrived.

  She needed to make a list and then start checking things off. The records at town hall. Maybe t
he school kept old copies of yearbooks. Property records. But she needed to come up with a way of framing requests that didn’t tip people off to the reason she was digging.

  On a whim, she parked the car in the municipal lot. After making sure the small notebook she used for personal notes was in her bag, she started walking toward a small café she’d seen on Cedar Street one time she and Eryn were driving through town.

  She could have a nice breakfast while coming up with a solid plan. At the very least she would be doing something.

  A woman about Alice Weaver’s age was walking toward her and glanced up from her phone as they got close. Then she frowned—a brief hesitation in her step—before she shook her head slightly and went back to her phone screen.

  It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but this time a new thought crept into her head. That reaction—the moment of confusion and then shaking it off—came from people that were all of a similar age group. An age group that would probably include Christine Smith. The people of Blackberry Bay weren’t feeling that sense of vague recognition because Anna was on TV.

  She looked like her mother.

  Throughout her childhood, she’d realized she didn’t look a lot like either of her parents, but genetics were weird and fickle. She always assumed—maybe with a little nudging from her parents—that she looked like a grandparent, even though she didn’t remember ever seeing photos of her dad’s parents, who had passed away.

  When she caught a funny look from another passing pedestrian, Anna realized she’d stopped walking and was simply standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

  She looked enough like Christine Smith to make people who’d known her do double takes. Her mother had to have lived in this town until at least close to adulthood for the citizens to have known her well enough to see the resemblance a twenty-seven-year-old stranger held to her.