Page 60 of The Homewreckers
She sighed. “That’s the dreamiest kitchen I’ve ever done. The rest of the remodel was pretty cut and dried. We made a downstairs master suite from what had been a den and the servants’ quarters, and then we took the four upstairs bedrooms and made them into three en suite bedrooms. There was an old carriage house on the property too. We converted the downstairs garage into a pool-house-slash-playroom, and made the upstairs a guest cottage.”
“I’m impressed,” Trae said. “And how did you make out, when you flipped it?”
“Not as well as we should have,” she said ruefully. “I did what Tug always accuses me of doing. I fell in love with the house and spent too much. We bought it for $235,000, and spent another $200,000 on the remodel, which at the time was the most we’d ever spent out of pocket on spec like that.”
“Doesn’t sound like that much to me. All in, around $435,000, right?”
“Not a lot to you, but it was for us. We probably could have made more if we’d installed the pool and backyard landscaping I’d designed, but Tug put his foot down, so we listed it at $779,000 and sold it for $750,000, and I was completely thrilled.”
“You nearly doubled your investment,” Trae said. “Well done.”
“Not as well done as the guy we sold it to,” Hattie admitted. “He put in the pool, probably spent around fifty thousand, and flipped it six months later for $1.2 million.”
She sighed. “Every time I drive by that house, I’m tempted to knock on the door and ask the new owners to give me a tour.”
“If you love your darlings, you have to let them go,” Trae said. “I agree with your father-in-law, by the way. Never fall in love with something that won’t love you back. It’s just a house. And there’s always another project, right around the corner.”
“Easy for a man to say,” Hattie said. “Not so easy for someone like me, with a tendency to fall too hard.”
He studied her face, illuminated by the candle lantern on the table. “I wouldn’t have guessed that about you. But it’s good to know.”
Trae clasped her hand in his, and this time she let him. He leaned across for another kiss.
“Ahem.”
Their server was back, with a plate containing a huge chocolate brownie topped with ice cream, fudge sauce, and whipped cream, which he placed on the table in front of Trae.
“We didn’t order that,” Trae said, clearly annoyed at the interruption.
“Compliments of your fans,” the server said, nodding in the direction of the table full of women, who were all watching gleefully, camera phones pointed.
Trae stood and did a half bow. “Thanks, ladies!” he called, amid a burst of camera flashes.
He took his seat and forked up a chunk of the confection. He aimedthe brownie, dripping with melting ice cream and fudge sauce, directly at Hattie’s lips.
“Open wide,” he commanded.
“But, I don’t want…” she protested, and then did as she was told.
More camera flashes.
Flustered, Hattie dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.
“You missed a spot,” Trae said. He touched his fingertip to her bottom lip and left it there for just a second longer than was absolutely necessary.
He looked up at their server, who was hovering nearby, enjoying the spectacle. “We’ll take the check now.”
“The ladies already took care of it,” the server said.
“If I’d known they were going to do that, I would have ordered a bottle of wine,” Trae told him. He waved at the women, took a tiny bite of the dessert, then laid aside his napkin.
“Let’s get out of here.”
28Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
“How about a nightcap?” Trae asked, as she slid into the front seat of his rented Lexus.
“It’s after nine,” Hattie pointed out. “Anyway, as far as I know the only place to get a drink at this time of night on Tybee is one of those tourist bars where they serve glow-in-the-dark frozen drinks.”
