Maggie Moves On(2)

“Speaking of, when are you announcing this new ‘guaranteed to bankrupt you and lose all of your followers’ project?” Dean asked, clomping down the steps.

In Maggie’s opinion, the man spent entirely too much time thinking about numbers. Budgets, YouTube subscribers—all 900,000+ of them—and advertising dollars. But that was why they worked so well together. Dean obsessed over numbers on the page while she turned disasters into dream homes.

She followed him around the side of the house to the uneven stone terrace. The whole thing needed to be relaid. “We’ve still got three episodes banked on the beach bungalow. But I’ll start teasing this place on Instagram.”

He tripped, stumbled, and then kicked at the offending stone that had caught his shoe.

“Wait until tomorrow when the place is ours and there’s insurance before you fall and break your face,” she advised.

“What the hell is that?” he demanded, gesturing toward a concrete monument.

Maggie grinned. “A fountain.”

Four nearly life-size stone horses stood in the center of the base. One pawing the air, the others frozen midgallop. “That looks like the four horses of the apocalypse guarding a communitywide West Nile virus infection waiting to happen,” he said, eyeing the foot of black, murky water and debris clogging the fountain’s pool.

Despite the snarky, uncaffeinated grump show, she could tell he was starting to thaw…marginally. Dean had a soft spot for the quirky. Which was why he’d tolerated Maggie for so many years.

“Tell me they piss water.”

“I’m sure it can be arranged,” she mused.

He grunted and continued across the terrace toward the backyard.

“That’s a sizable problem,” he observed, coming to a stop.

She ducked around him and eyed the fir tree that leaned lazily against the back of the house. That hadn’t been in the pictures.

“I can fix it,” she chirped, already picturing a bench or chair reclaimed from the wood.

And she would. Maggie Nichols had yet to meet a challenge that she couldn’t conquer. Her real estate picks had gotten progressively more dilapidated, and while they briefly gave Dean bouts of acid reflux, he always came around. Especially at closing, when keys were exchanged for big, fat checks.

“The whole budget’s gonna go to landscaping,” he complained.

“Dean, Dean, Dean.” She sighed. “When are you going to start trusting my vision?”

Identifying potential had never been in the man’s skill set. But she didn’t hold it against him…at least, not anymore.

“This is going to be the one, Magpie,” he insisted, nudging a damp fern with the toe of his boot.

She flashed him a smirk. “You think this place will be the one I can’t finish?”

“I am absolutely certain you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Eighteen rooms. I read the listing. There are outbuildings, which, judging by this wreck, are going to be hovels. There’s no way you can do this. And none of those rabid followers of yours are going to tune in to a project this big. It’ll be weeks of just hauling out god-awful carpet and scraping wallpaper. How the hell are you going to keep their attention?”

“You do realize you say that about every house, don’t you?” She nudged him in the direction of the bluff.

“Seriously. I have concerns about your decision-making. Are you having some kind of midlife crisis? Couldn’t you just buy a convertible and get a new haircut? Maybe date another guy who still lives with his mom?”

“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.”