Page 49 of Forty and Fighting Dirty
I turned to face him. “What do you mean? You don’t want to sell?”
“Oh, I want to sell,” he said, scoffing. “But we might be able to flip it.”
My heart dropped. “I’m not turning this place into a sad gray box.”
“Nobody said anything about a sad gray box.”
“You want to flip this place. You’ll probably put cheap laminate flooring down and rip all the soul out of it.”
He spread his hands. “Do you think so little of me?”
“No,” I said darkly. “My opinion of you is much worse.”
He laughed, the jerk. For a moment, I was caught by his beauty—and he was a beautiful man. When he laughed like that—reallylaughed, not the polite chuckles I’d seen him dish out to anyone and everyone—it lit his face from within. It softened the harsh, rough-hewn edges of him, made him seem like there might be parts of his personality that he’d kept hidden. Parts I’d like to know.
Then his laugh faded, and an amused, almost tender look flashed across his face. My guard went back up, and I cursed myself for being taken in by his charm, even temporarily. The man was a danger.
Gripping the counter with his hands near his hips, Rhett leaned back and shook his head. “I’m proposing we work together, Piper. You know, like we do at the office?”
“I do that because you pay me.”
“You’d be getting paid for this too, once we sell it. We’d split the profits.”
“So, what, I come up with the design, you do the work?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
My eyes narrowed. “And the money—how would that work?” He had deeper pockets than I did. Would he try to box me out of most of the profits? He pretended like he was a good guy, but no one was as successful in business as Rhett Baldwin without being a shark behind boardroom doors.
“I’ll put up the cash for the upgrades,” Rhett said. “We’ll both put in the sweat equity, to make it fair. And we’ll split the profits, fifty-fifty.”
My heart began to thump. He was offering me a good deal. A really good deal. He could easily ask for a bigger share of the profits, since he was the one with the money. But splitting the profits down the middle—assuming we could get a good sale price—meant that I might actually have enough for a down payment on another place in town.
I might get my stability, after all.
Mind whirling, I tried to figure out his angle. He wouldn’t just give me that generous a deal out of the goodness of his heart…would he? I wasn’t convinced he actually had a heart—and if he did, I wasn’t convinced it was actually good.
“You’ve gone quiet,” he noted.
“I’m trying to figure out your angle.”
There was a short silence, and then Rhett sighed. “There’s no angle, Piper. I’m trying to come up with the best possible solution for both of us. We won a house. We should be happy about it, not fighting over it.”
Disquiet rippled through me; his words were an echo of my own thoughts from earlier, when I’d been alone. I nodded, then dipped my head toward the hallway. “Should we do a walkthrough, figure out what we want to do with the place?”
Rhett pushed himself off the counter, and once again he seemed to loom over me. He was big and broad and strong, and I couldn’t quite help the shiver of nervousness and excitement his size sent through me. Turning on my heels, I marched down the hallway to the front door, one ear listening to the echo of his footsteps behind me.
I flung open the front door and stood in the opening. “The porch,” I started.
“Rip it down,” Rhett announced.
I whirled. “What?”
He looked at me like I’d grown another nose. “The thingwould blow over with a strong gust of wind. I’m not sure it’ll last another winter. Look at the dip in the roofline.”
“The porch isamazing.” I marched outside and pointed to the space just under the living room windows. Okay, it wasn’t amazingnow, but it had so much potential! “A little seating area here, with some pots, some greenery. Imagine sitting here in the evening while the sun goes down.”
“Try putting a pot plant on those planks of wood, and it’ll fall right through to disturb the family of raccoons living under the porch.”
