The Icing on the Cake (Otter Bluff #1) - Linda Seed Page 0,1

by the name alone.

“But I have this afternoon off,” Cassie protested.

“I know that, and I’m sorry, but the incoming renters want to arrive early, and now that the Taylors have left, there’s no reason they can’t—except that the house hasn’t been cleaned yet.”

Cassie had forgotten to turn off the mixer, and it was still whirring away in the background.

“What’s that sound?” Elliot wanted to know.

Cassie switched off the machine. “Oh … it’s a mixer. I’m baking a cake.”

“Weren’t you just complaining yesterday that your mixer is broken?”

Oh, shit. Yes, she’d done that.

“I … got a new one.” She closed her eyes tightly and prayed silently for forgiveness of her misdeeds.

“Ah. Well. Be that as it may.” It was Elliot’s favorite phrase: Be that as it may. She’d heard it from him so many times that it ceased to have any meaning—if it ever had meaning in the first place.

“It’s my afternoon off, Elliot,” she said again. Not that it would do any good. Elliot didn’t respect days off, and he didn’t respect people’s personal lives. Come to think of it, he didn’t seem to respect Cassie, either.

“If I have to call Rebecca in, I might just let her continue on full-time.”

And there it was. The threat. Rebecca was their backup housecleaner, and she’d been wanting to take over Cassie’s job for months.

Cassie spent a happy moment imagining herself pushing Elliot down a flight of stairs, or perhaps off a cliff.

“Okay. I’ll do it,” she said.

“Wonderful. I’ve already told the new tenants they can check in at four.”

Cassie looked at the time. It was just past one p.m. She could finish the batter, put it in the refrigerator, then go over to Seaclift Estates and clean Dolphin Dreams in time to get back here and finish baking the cake. She’d freeze the layers and begin decorating tomorrow. She still had three days until the wedding.

Irritated, she told Elliot, “You could at least thank me.”

“I would think your paycheck is reward enough,” Elliot said, and hung up.

Brian Cavanaugh peered into the hole that had been cut into the drywall in his master bathroom, already certain that nothing inside there was going to be good. His black lab, Thor, sat at his side and whined in sympathy.

“See that?” Ray, his contractor, pointed a finger into the hole, his hand roughened by manual labor. “You’ve got a mold problem.”

Brian squinted through his thick-framed glasses at the black substance that had been growing within his walls. “That doesn’t look good.”

“It’s not. You want to know what else isn’t good? You’ve also got termites.”

“I do?”

Ray drew a cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up a photo of a wooden beam full of long, ragged holes. “I took this in the crawl space under your house. I figured you wouldn’t want to go down there to see for yourself.”

“Very thoughtful.”

Brian had hired Ray to do some renovations in his bathroom because he was planning to sell the house, and his Realtor said he’d be leaving money on the table if he didn’t fix it up a little. That was the Realtor’s exact phrase: leaving money on the table.

Brian was getting the sense that he might have neither money nor a table when all of this played out.

“I assume neither of those things is going to be cheap,” Brian said.

“You assume right,” Ray said, then laughed. The bastard actually laughed.

At least somebody here was having a good time.

By the time Ray left, Brian had the general outline of his situation. Not only were the repairs on his house going to be expensive, they were also going to take time. The place would have to be tented, the termite-damaged beams would have to be replaced, the leaky pipe that had caused the mold would have to be fixed, and it was likely the mold couldn’t just be cleaned away—Ray would have to cut out and replace drywall, studs, and flooring.

Add to that the fact that Ray wasn’t going to be able to start the job for another two weeks.

“Oh, my goodness, no. You can’t just sell the house as is.” Barbara, Brian’s Realtor, scoffed at the very thought when he called and told her about Ray’s findings. “Any offer that’s made on your house is going to rescinded when they get the inspection. And I’ll tell you something else: You can’t stay there in the meantime. Black mold is no joke.”

Yeah, Ray had said. So now Brian and Thor were facing temporary homelessness on top of the