Free Single Mom Seeks... by TERESA HILL Page B

ladder.
    “No, the big one,” Nick yelled back, and Jake disappeared, ladder in tow. “So,” Nick said to her, “the way I see it, I have a lot to make up for. And Jake and I owe your daughter a tree house.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “Yeah, we do. I’m the one who promised her one. Oh, hell, I don’t even know if you want her to have one,” he admitted.
    “I don’t mind her having one, I’m just not sure if I trust myself to build her one that’s safe.”
    He shrugged, grinned ever so slightly, like he knew he was pushing. “Well, then…there is something I can do to make this up to you. What do you say? We could make a project of it. You, me, the girls and Jake?”
    “I’m sure you have better things to do than build a tree house this weekend,” Lily said.
    He shook his head. “Well, I could start going through massive amounts of paperwork having to do with my sister and her husband’s estate to try to get it settled. I could try to figure out how much money’s going to be left for the boys. Hopefully, they can get through college on it, but I’m not sure yet. I could start getting used to the idea that all that’s left of my sister and her husband’s lives is a house full of stuff, a bank account here and there, bills left to be paid, forms to fill out, a sum of some money, and three boys…. Believe me, I’d much rather build a little girl a tree house.”
    “Okay, but you have to let me pay you and Jake.”
    “No way. I’m not going to take money from you for building a tree house, especially when I’m the one who told your daughter I’d make sure she got one.”
    “I will pay you for your time,” Lily insisted.
    “How about we take it out in trade? Jake and I have had take-out three nights in a row. It’s getting old really fast.”
    Lily knew that would make Jake happy, and she’d just double what she was making for herself and the girls. “Okay. Deal.”
     
    Lily hadn’t quite known what she was getting into.
    Her daughter wanted something akin to a kiddie mansion in a tree. A lavender and pink kiddie mansion.
    But they soon figured out that as long as it was lavender and pink, with some scalloped trim along the roofline and a balcony, Brittany would be happy.
    “Balcony?” Nick whispered in disbelief to Lily as they stood perusing shades of lavender at the paint store later that night.
    “So she can play princess,” Lily explained. “Little girls go through a phase where they still want to play princess on a balcony with the prince down below, begging for their hand.”
    Jake stood back from the overwhelming rows of paint shades, close enough to Lily and Nick to hear, and said, “You’re kidding, right?”
    “I wish I was,” Lily admitted.
    “But…like…most houses don’t even have balconies, right? I mean, how’s a guy supposed to do that, if the girl doesn’t even have a balcony?” Jake looked really confused, then turned to Nick. “You never did the balcony thing, did you?”
    “No way,” Nick said.
    Jake looked mightily relieved. “Whew.”
    Brittany came back with a paint strip with a horribly bright purple on it and held it up to Nick. “I like this one.”
    “Well…that’s…an interesting color.” Nick took it from her, then went two colors down on the paint strip, to something decidedly less bright “But the thing is, you’ve already picked a really bright color for the trim. The pink. And I think your mother, as a decorator, will tell you that colors with a lot of contrast look best together.”
    “Contest?” Brittany asked. “The colors are gonna have a contest?”
    “No, contrast. More like…different. Really different,” Nick tried. “And one way to make the colors really different is to use a bright color for one and a lighter color for the other. So if we did the bright pink, like this one, for the trim, we should probably go with a lighter purple. Like this.”
    He put Brittany’s bright pink next to a lavender that was almost