gym. Do you know any around here?"
"As it happens, I do. Tell you what, you come on over when you're finished up for the day. I'll take you to see the gym, then we'll have dinner."
"Maybe."
"You're not the coy type. 'Maybe' means...?"
"It depends on when I finish up."
"Gym's open twenty-four/seven."
"Seriously?" She flicked him a glance, then worked her way down the board with her nail gun. "That's handy. I'll adjust the maybe to probably."
"Fair enough. On the dinner end, are you vegetarian or fruititarian or some other 'tarian that requires restrictions on the menu?"
Laughing, she sat back on her heels. "I'm an eatitarian. I'll eat pretty much what you put in front of me."
"Good to know. Mind if I take a look inside, see what all the banging and sawing's about? It'll also give me the chance to rag on Matt about whatever comes to mind."
"Go ahead. I'd give you the tour, but my boss is a bitch about unscheduled breaks."
"Mine's a pushover." He stepped up, then bent down, sniffed at her. "First time I ever realized the smell of sawdust was sexy."
He stepped inside and said, "Holy shit."
He'd expected a certain amount of chaos, activity and mess. He hadn't expected what struck him as a kind of maniacal destruction. There had to be a purpose behind it all, he thought, as Cilla struck him as firmly sane, but he couldn't see it.
Tools scattered over the floor in what hit his organized soul with dismay. How did anyone find anything? Cords snaked and coiled. Bare bulbs dangled. Sections of wall gaped where for reasons that escaped him someone had cut or hacked them out. The wide planks of the floor were patchworked with stained cloths and cardboard.
Baffled, and slightly horrified, he wandered through, observing the same sort of mad bombarding in every room.
He found Matt in one of them, curling blond hair under a red ball cap, tool belt slung, measuring tape at the ready. He gave Ford an easy smile, said, "Hey."
"You make this mess?"
"Pieces of it. Boss lady's got ideas. Good ones. That's a woman who knows what she's doing."
"If you say so. How's Josie?"
"Doing good. We got a picture of the Beast."
Ford knew the Beast was the baby Josie was currently carrying. Their two-year-old son had been the Belly.
He took the sonogram shot Matt pulled out of his pocket, studied it, turned it and finally found the form. Legs, arms, body, head. "He looks like the other one did. Midget alien from Planet Womb."
"She. We just found out. It's a girl."
"Yeah?" Ford glanced up at his friend's huge grin, found his own spreading. "One of each species. Nice going."
"She's not dating till she's thirty." Matt took the picture back, looked at it with love, then slipped it back into his pocket. "So, you up for poker night at Bri's?"
Ford thought he'd rather face a root canal than poker night. But he, Matt and Brian had been friends just about all their lives. "If there's absolutely no escape."
"Good. I need the money. Hold that end of the tape a minute."
"You know better than that."
"Right." Matt set the tape himself. "If you touch it, it's likely to explode in my hand. I could lose a finger. Have you been through the place yet?"
"I just started."
"Take a look around. It's going to be a hell of a thing."
"It already looks like hell."
Unable to resist, he backtracked, went upstairs. It didn't get any better. What had been a bathroom was now a bare box with stripped walls and skeletal pipes, with raw holes in the floor and ceiling. Two bedrooms stood doorless, their windows still bearing the stickers of the manufacturer, their floors covered with ratty carpet.
But when he opened the door to the next bedroom, astonishment clicked up to temper. What the hell was she thinking? An air mattress and sleeping bag, cardboard boxes and an old card table?
"I take back the sane," he muttered, and headed back down.
He found her standing in front of the newly planked veranda guzzling water from a bottle. The warming temperatures and the labor combined to lay a dark sweat line down the center of the white T-shirt she wore with the jeans. It only added to his annoyance that he found a sweaty, possibly unstable woman so damned appealing.
"Are you crazy or just stupid?" he demanded.
Slowly, she lowered the bottle. And slowly, she tipped her head down until those glacial blue eyes met his. "What?"
"Who lives like that?" He jerked a thumb back