Fixer-Upper Read online

  Fixer-Upper

  The Russo Sisters, Book 3

  Linda Seed

  Contents

  Get a Linda Seed short story free

  Copyright

  By Linda Seed

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

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  Claim the story here.

  This is a work of fiction. Any characters, organizations, places, or events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  FIXER-UPPER

  Copyright © 2019 by Linda Seed

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  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  The author is available for book signings, book club discussions, conferences, and other appearances.

  Linda Seed may be contacted via e-mail at [email protected] or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LindaSeedAuthor. Learn more about Linda Seed’s novels at www.lindaseed.com.

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  Cover design by Teaberry Creative.

  By Linda Seed

  The Main Street Merchants

  Moonstone Beach

  Cambria Sky

  Nearly Wild

  Fire and Glass

  * * *

  The Delaneys of Cambria

  A Long, Cool Rain

  The Promise of Lightning

  Loving the Storm

  Searching for Sunshine

  * * *

  The Russo Sisters

  Saving Sofia

  First Crush

  Fixer-Upper

  1

  “Ooh. Look at this bear claw.” Benedetta Russo waved a sugary, buttery pastry in front of her sister Martina, taunting her. “You know you want one. Smell it. Cinnamon and brown sugar! Oh, the soft, wholesome goodness.”

  “There’s nothing wholesome about refined sugar.” Martina smiled serenely. “But if you want to put momentary gratification over your health—”

  “I do. I really do.” Benny took a bite of the pastry and moaned with pleasure. “Oh, God. This is amazing.”

  The four Russo sisters didn’t usually make time to have breakfast together, even though three of them lived in the same house. Most mornings, they all scrambled to make coffee, grab whatever nourishment was handy, and get out the door to their various jobs.

  But Sofia’s wedding was just four months away, and a lot still needed to be done. That called for a family meeting. Through a series of phone calls, texts, and in-person conversations, they’d determined that the only time they could all be available was on a Tuesday morning at seven a.m.

  So here they were, in the big living room of the renovated log cabin that Sofia, Martina, and Benny shared. Bianca, as the one sister who didn’t live there and who, therefore, had to be out in her car anyway, had brought a box of bear claws and croissants from the French Corner Bakery.

  Benny had made a big pot of coffee, and three of the sisters were sitting on the sofa with steaming, fragrant mugs of French roast, plates of pastries balanced on their laps.

  Martina, as usual, was sipping a mug of herbal tea in place of the coffee. Instead of a pastry, she was eating a breakfast of Greek yogurt, homemade granola, and organic pears she’d bought at the farmer’s market.

  “Speaking of health.” Sofia eyed the coffee mug sitting on the table in front of Bianca, who was six months pregnant and whose midsection bulged beneath her T-shirt. “Should you be drinking that?”

  “I’m a doctor.” Bianca eyed her sister sternly. “Are you giving me medical advice?”

  “Well …”

  “There is no credible evidence—none—showing that one cup of coffee a day is detrimental to a developing fetus. I’m bloated, I can’t drink alcohol, my clothes don’t fit anymore, and I’m not sleeping because I have to get up twice a night to pee. I need this coffee. It’s the one thing saving my sanity. Do you want to take my sanity away, Sofia? Do you?”

  Bianca stared down her sister, who put up her hands in surrender. “No. Of course not. Drink up.”

  “You know, there are some herbal blends I can recommend that will help with sleep. And with mood,” Martina said.

  “My mood’s fine!” Bianca snapped. Then her shoulders fell. “Well, okay, maybe it isn’t. Aside from the lack of sleep, I’ve got heartburn, and my ankles are the size of tree trunks.”

  “You know, they really are.” Benny peered down at Bianca’s feet.

  “How’s TJ holding up?” Sofia asked. Bianca’s husband, so far, had been a model of manly support.

  “He’s doing his best to deal with my hormones,” Bianca said. “Last night, I cried because he cut my sandwich in half down the middle instead of diagonally.”

  “Owen must be excited though, right?” Sofia asked. Owen was TJ’s teenage son from a previous marriage.

  Bianca smiled fondly. “Yeah. He’s already bought a gift for the baby. A stuffed bunny. He’s so sweet. He can’t wait to be a big brother.”

  They chatted a little longer about this and that, and then Martina said, “Okay, should we get to it?”

  She didn’t have to be anywhere for a while—she ran her interior design business out of her home, and she didn’t have any client meetings until ten. But the others were on tighter schedules. Bianca and Sofia had to open Bianca’s pediatrics office at nine, and Benny, a marine biologist, was teaching a class at the community college in San Luis Obispo at eight thirty. If they spent all morning talking about Bianca’s dietary habits and hormonal fluctuations, they wouldn’t get anything done.

  “Yes, let’s.” Sofia pulled out a thick three-ring binder, opened it to a page of notes about the wedding, and uncapped a pen. They’d all been assigned different tasks to prepare for the ceremony, the reception, and the various events surrounding them, and they hadn’t touched base in a while on where they all stood. “I need status reports. Flowers?”

  As Benny hunted around in her bag for the contract she’d signed for the floral arrangements, Martina tried to drum up some enthusiasm. It was going to be a beautiful wedding, and Sofia would be a stunning bride with her perfect figure, glossy hair, and olive-toned skin. Sofia’s fiancé, Patrick, was going to be struck speechless when she walked down the aisle.

  It had been hard to get Sofia to this point, to get her past her grief over their parents—or, at least, far enough past it that she could let herself be happy.

  There was no way Martina was going to ruin all of that progress by being jealous of Sofia’s happiness—or of Bianca’s.

  She was happy for her sisters, she really was. Despite Bianca’s complaints about her ankles and her hormones, she was glowing, not only with the anticipation of motherhood, but also with love for her new husband and stepson.

  Things were falling into place for Martina’s sisters. She just couldn’t help wondering when they would fall into place for her, too.

  Martina’s business, launched just a few years ago, was doing well in some ways. One of her projects had been featured on the cover of this month’s Central Coast Home magazine. But she’d suffered a setback when one of her clients had refused to make his final payment, claiming that a broken pipe in the kitchen—something Martina and her contractor had nothing to do with—had been her fault.

  Martina knew she could win in court, but the cost of a lawyer—not to mention the time she’d lose dealing with the whole mess—made her uncertain whether she wanted to deal with it.

  And that meant her goal of buying a fixer-upper for herself and turning it into the house of her dreams was that much further away.

  Martina loved living with her sisters in the house they’d inherited from their parents. The cabin, a former whorehouse that Aldo and Carmela had remodeled themselves, had been a lifeline for Martina when her parents had died. Everything about the house, from its h
eavy beams to its oak floors to its hand-carved doorknobs, brought back memories of her mother and father, making her feel that, in a way, they’d never really gone.

  That had been so important in the days and months after their deaths, when it had been all Martina could do to keep functioning, keep breathing. But the house was their vision, their labor of love, not hers. She had her own vision, one she finally felt she was ready to pursue—if she ever had the money.

  She hoped that when it finally happened, she’d have a family of her own to share it with.

  When Martina had moved back home to Cambria, California, to be with her sisters after her mother’s cancer and her father’s accident, she hadn’t realized how small the dating pool was here. The town only had about six thousand residents to begin with, and many were retirees. Sometimes she worried that Bianca and Sofia had snagged the last eligible men in their age range, leaving no one for her.

  Martina was still musing about all of that when she realized Sofia was talking to her.

  “ … bachelorette party. Martina?”

  Martina looked up. “What?”

  “What’s the status on the bachelorette party?” Sofia repeated.

  “Oh. Sorry. We’re going to have drinks at Ted’s. Pool, darts, et cetera. We’ll assign designated drivers to get everyone home. Which brings us to an important question. Strippers, or no strippers?”

  Christopher Mills didn’t want to fight with his girlfriend. In fact, he would have preferred to have his spleen pulled out through his ear. And yet, it seemed like fighting with Alexis took up most of his time since they’d moved to Cambria.

  Right now, they were fighting about the house. Cooper House, a twenty-two-room Victorian mansion built in the late 1800s by logging tycoon Eustace Cooper, was a disappointment to Chris’s girlfriend on many levels.

  The rooms were too dark. The downstairs was too cold, and the upstairs was too hot. The décor wasn’t modern enough. And the property, set back from the coast in the hills above Cambria, had an inadequate ocean view, in Alexis’s opinion. Yes, you could see the Pacific from the pool, but most of the living areas offered barely a glimpse of blue through the trees. What was the point of having a high-end home in a beach town if you didn’t have an unobstructed view of the coastline?

  “Alexis.” Chris rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, already weary even though the day had barely started. “I know you didn’t want to move here. I’m aware that you did it for me. But could you maybe try not to focus on the negative?”

  The fact was, he liked Cooper House. Liked its imposing silhouette, liked the solid sound the floors made when you walked on them, liked the echo of its ceilings and the mood of its dark-paneled library.

  He’d always liked it, even if there’d been a period of years when it had sat mostly empty and he’d barely made the time to stay here. He’d bought it as a weekend place, but with the demands of his work, those weekends had been more and more rare until he might have forgotten he owned the house if not for the regular reports from his caretaker.

  Now that he’d sold his company—raking in an obscene profit in the transaction—he finally could enjoy some free, unstructured time. And this was where he wanted to enjoy it.

  “I’m not focusing on the negative.” Alexis put emphasis on Chris’s own words as she spat them back at him. “I’m merely pointing out some very real issues that seem to have escaped you.” She allowed herself a small curve of her lips. “Not that I should be surprised. Men have such a poor sense of aesthetics.”

  Did they? He could have cited a long list of successful painters, sculptors, clothing designers, interior designers, and even hairstylists who, as men, could be said to have at least a rudimentary sense of aesthetics. But Alexis’s voice had softened, and, for a change, she wasn’t yelling at him, so he decided not to press the point.

  “If it bothers you that much, why not get somebody in? Redecorate?” One thing Chris had learned about Alexis was that she was rarely angry when she was busy spending money—preferably his. If turning over his credit card to her could buy him a little peace, a little harmony, it seemed like a bargain.

  “Really?” Her eyes widened in hope.

  “Sure. Why not?” He went to her, put an arm around her toned waist, and pressed a kiss to her temple. “If redoing the place is going to make you more comfortable here, then you should do it.”

  “Jean-Claude is booked months in advance, and I’m not sure it can wait that long.”

  Chris refrained from pointing out that Jean-Claude, who’d done the interior design of Chris’s condo in San Jose, was a man, and therefore disproved her theory about men and aesthetics.

  “Hmm.” Chris went to the coffee table in front of the sofa, picked up a magazine, and handed it to her. “Try her.” He pointed to the cover photo, which showed a sleek, modern living room with a wall of windows overlooking the ocean. The headline read, MARTINA RUSSO: ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF CENTRAL COAST DESIGN. He’d been leafing through the magazine the night before and had noticed the article.

  Alexis’s nose scrunched up as though she’d smelled something bad. “A local designer?” She said the word local as though it were synonymous with incompetent.

  “Sure, why not? She’s probably available sooner than Jean-Claude.”

  “Oh, well. But still …”

  “Just bring her in.” If Alexis was busy interviewing designers, it would give her that much less time to find fault with him. “If you don’t like her, you can still call Jean-Claude.”

  2

  Martina got a call from Alexis Sinclair’s assistant the following evening as she was looking through the refrigerator for something to make for dinner.

  “Ms. Sinclair is looking for a designer for Cooper House, and she would like to meet with you as soon as possible. You are familiar with Cooper House?” The woman’s voice was crisp and businesslike.

  Cooper House? Of course she was familiar with Cooper House. Everyone was. She’d been dying to see the inside of it for years. And now this mystery person was calling her about actually working on it? “Um … yes. Certainly. But—”

  “She has availability at ten a.m. tomorrow. Is that satisfactory?”

  Martina was certain she was being punked—someone she knew, possibly one of her sisters, had put someone up to this. Any minute, Sofia or Benny would pop her head around the corner and laugh, saying, You should have seen the look on your face!

  Lacking evidence of that, though, Martina said that she was, in fact, available tomorrow at ten.

  “Speak into the intercom at the security gate when you arrive, and someone will buzz you in,” the woman said, then ended the call.

  Who was Alexis Sinclair? Martina knew that dating app developer Christopher Mills owned Cooper House—everyone in Cambria knew that—but what did this Sinclair person have to do with him, and why did she want to see Martina?

  Was it possible that Martina really might be hired to redesign Cooper House? Surely not. A job of that magnitude would be so far beyond anything she’d done before that it would be like hiring an auto mechanic to work on a 747.

  “What’s with you?” Benny had just walked into the room wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and fuzzy pink slippers. Her dark hair was in two tight buns atop either side of her head, her blunt bangs falling just above her eyebrows.