“You’re mean when you haven’t had enough coffee,” she complained as they stepped over a log into a small thicket of briars and brambles. “Besides, I told you Bobby looked older than he was when he turned his hat around backward.”
“You and the backward-hat thing,” Dean groaned. “Ouch! Thorn!”
“It’s not a thing. I just happen to find cute guys in backward ball caps attractive.”
“And how old was Backward Hat Bobby again?” he pressed, feigning a faulty memory.
“Twenty-four.” A mere decade younger than herself. “And don’t even get started on the robbing-the-cradle bit. Men date younger women all the time. Besides, it was fun while it lasted.” Fun while it lasted applied to all of Maggie’s relationships. That particular one had lasted exactly as long as it had taken her to realize her cute California flirtation lived in his parents’ basement while he “figured out” what he wanted to do with his environmental science degree.
“I have no problem with you dating guys ten years younger…if you were fifty and they were employed and had their own place. And knew what dryer sheets are for.”
“I never should have told you about that,” she grumbled.
“You know what I think?”
“No. But that’s never stopped you from telling me before.”
He paused dramatically. “I don’t think you believe in love and romance and happily ever after.”
She eyed him. “Oh? And you do, pot?”
“Listen here, kettle. I am a jaded man. A realist. A cynic, if you will. You buy hovels like this and turn them into castles. You should believe in romance. You should be dating and falling in love and settling down and giving me weekends off.”
“Ah. Now I get where this is going. You’re Danny Kaye–ing me,” she said, referring to White Christmas, a holiday movie she’d tried to dislike over the years and never quite succeeded.
“I always thought of myself as more of a Bing Crosby than a Danny Kaye.” Dean sniffed.
“Listen, Bing, Danny, or whoever the hell you are, I’m not in one place long enough to even learn a guy’s favorite beer, let alone sexual position or 401（k） balance.”
“But you could be. You could take time off between houses. You could take a vacation and fall in love with your scuba instructor.”
“Or here’s a thought. I could renovate this house, make it beautiful, and we could make an obscene amount of money.” It’s what they did and how she earned the freedom and financial stability she’d always craved.
“You already have an obscene amount of money,” he pointed out.
“I think our definitions of obscene are pretty far apart.”
“Check your statements and get back to me. You’ve leveled up and haven’t noticed yet.”
“Do you want a raise? Because I’ll give you a raise if it stops you from whining all the time.”
“I don’t want more money—I mean, I wouldn’t say no to it. But I want more time. You should, too. What’s the point of making all this money and running your own business if it means you can’t enjoy it?”
“I do enjoy it,” she argued. “I love what I do.”
“Well, you better, because it’s going to take you six years to finish this place.”
“Three months,” she insisted. Then caught his skeptical look. “Fine. Four tops.”
“You pay me to be practical,” he reminded her as he carefully removed a briar that had attached itself to his sleeve. “It’s impractical that your only days off are the ones you take driving between houses. You can’t keep this up forever.”
“Practical concerns noted. In the meantime, you trust me to have vision,” she said, blazing a trail through underbrush toward the one thing that would shut him up.
“Vision. Not hallucinations.”
She said nothing and pointed to the rocky edge of the bluff.
His brown eyes widened. “Oh. Shit.”
“Yeah. Oh, shit.”
They stood shoulder to shoulder and looked across the rolling foothills and canyons spread out before them. The Payette River zigged and zagged below, green and fast with snowmelt. The town, compact and cozy, was tucked into a hard bend to the north. The lake beyond fed the river and the tourism that coaxed travelers off the beaten path, away from the jagged mountain peaks and ski resorts and into Western Idaho.
“Figured we’d open up the view a little bit,” she said, still looking out over miles and miles of rugged country. “Thin out the vegetation. Maybe take down a couple of the trees.”