Page 29 of The Playboy's Most Unexpected Baby

Maybe Olivia was right, and his aunt had suspected there was someone he was keeping hidden — maybe that was the reason she’d done all this.

Anyway, he would never know now.

But it occurred to him that if it hadn’t been for Marge’s strange stipulation in her will, he would never have been here with Olivia right now. And this conversation, he thought, was one of the most eye-opening he had ever had in his life.

Marriage or not, he was grateful for Olivia. He was grateful for her presence in his life, and he was glad that he knew her.

If nothing else, he could thank Aunt Marge for that. And he would always be able to remember the fact that her final act had been to give him this unexpected new friendship.

He smiled at Olivia. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s break for lunch. After that, we can tackle the upstairs bedrooms.”

“Sounds good to me,” Olivia said, and followed him into the kitchen.

CHAPTER11

OLIVIA

“That’s the last of that,” Charlie said, crumpling up a strip of wallpaper in his hands. “And thank goodness.”

Olivia laughed. “If I never see another cherry in my life, it’ll be too soon. I’m sure your aunt was a lovely woman, but this wallpaper…”

“Yeah, I always hated it,” Charlie agreed. “Once, when I was a kid, I came in here with my crayons?—”

“Wait, you drew on it?”

“No, she caught me before I could, and she set up an art easel for me,” Charlie recalled with a smile. “But I wanted to. I had it in my head that I could make the place look better by adding more pictures to it, so it wasn’t just wall-to-wall cherries. Of course, that would have made it look a whole lot worse.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Olivia said. “Maybe it would have convinced her that it was time to get rid of the wallpaper.Thatwould have been an improvement.”

“You’ve got a point there,” Charlie agreed.

“Your aunt had interesting taste, I’ll give her that,” Olivia said. “Cherries in this room, lemons in the master bedroom… what’s with all the fruit?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I think it made her happy. She did always love brightly colored things. You saw that painting she has downstairs in the living room.”

The painting was an abstract one, lots of bold-colored paint on an enormous canvas. Olivia didn’t like it, but taste in art was subjective. “What are you going to do with that thing?

“I don’t know,” Charlie said again. “It doesn’t feel right to throw it out, but how could we possibly hope to sell it?”

“We could do an estate sale,” Olivia suggested. “I can set the whole thing up online, if you’d like me to, and we can list everything in the house that you don’t want to keep or that we don’t want to include when we put it up for sale.”

“No one is going to want that painting, surely.”

“You’d be surprised. Your aunt wanted it, didn’t she? Someone else will. It’s just a question of whether or not we find that person, but I think there’s every chance in the world that we will. And in the meantime, you’ll earn some extra money, which I know is something you’re very concerned about.”

She was teasing him, and he responded well to it. It had been a risk. She never knew how he would take jokes about financial matters. “Yes, I can always use the money,” he agreed. “All right, you’re on. Let me know what I can do to help.”

“I’ll just need a list of everything you want to sell,” Olivia said. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”

“I have it half-done in my head already.”

“Anyway, it’s time to paint,” Olivia said. “Can you bring the stuff in?”

They’d already covered everything important in the room with plastic, so they got right to work. Olivia filled a tray with paint and handed Charlie a roller. “You can do this, since you’re taller,” she said. “I’ll take the brush and do the detail work around the trim.”

“Cool. I’ve never used one of these before.” Charlie rolled it experimentally along the wall.

“It helps if you get paint on it first,” Olivia teased him. She had come to enjoy the gaps in his knowledge and experience. He was a very smart person who had done a lot of living, but something as basic as painting a room was brand-new to him and had the potential to bring up a sense of childlike wonder that she found frankly charming.

---