Intermission

“Has that money from Narissa come in yet?” Paige asked, knocking on the door to Harrison’s bedroom.

He came out and shut the door behind him. “Yep. She finally transferred it.”

“What took her so long? Didn’t she know that we spent all our money on stuff for the house and we’ve been eating cardboard boxes?”

Harrison rolled up a piece of paper he was holding and whacked Paige in the forehead with it.

“Hey!”

“Don’t talk about Narissa like that. I’m sure it just took her a while to arrange things with her buyer, or maybe she needed to find a new buyer.” 

Paige rolled her eyes. Harrison’s outburst was only the tip of the Narissa iceberg. When the power tools were silent he spoke of her endlessly. “You know what’s great about Narissa…”, “Narissa makes the best…”, or Paige’s favorite, “Let’s call Narissa. I bet she knows how we can solve this.” Paige knew Harrison didn’t mean to be tiresome. Actually, he wanted to keep his affection for Narissa quiet, since she was a married woman, but he failed miserably. Part of the problem was that Harrison wasn’t used to having his every word listened to. He was used to being alone and saying whatever was on his mind out loud. The other thing was that having Keziah as his in-town love interest was clearly part of his public image, but he never talked about her. He didn’t complain about the way Keziah got under his skin or act as though he missed her. It was obvious to Paige that even though Harrison didn’t want to go public with his feelings—Narissa was the one in his heart.

Paige got that easily enough. Narissa was willowy and very, very, very, blonde. Plus, she had this slightly lost look to her that just screamed to any nearby man that she needed protection. It was very natural for Harrison to respond to her that way. 

To Paige, it seemed very different from the way he responded to her, the woman living in his house.

Paige rolled one shoulder. She was probably sitting somewhere between subordinate and friend in Harrison’s books. That was fine… for now. She knew the exact moment she wouldn’t be fine with it anymore. That would be the moment when he found someone he really loved. A man could own a woman and marry a different woman at the same time. 

That time might never come. After all, Narissa was owned by Wystan as well as being married to him. Harrison didn’t have a single reason to hope he would ever get together with Narissa.

Take Twenty-one

Harrison came into the kitchen. “What’s that wretched smell?”

Paige was jabbing at the sink with a skewering stick and clearly losing her mind to panic. “How am I supposed to know? I didn’t do anything. It backed up on its own.”

“What are you doing to it?” Harrison said, looking over her shoulder.

“Well, what else am I supposed to do? The guck won’t stop coming out.”

“You could try a plunger.”

“A what?” Paige gasped. The water level in the sink was rising.

“Step aside, Rose Red. I’ve got this.”

Paige jumped back and Harrison jammed the plunger into the sink, completely saving Paige’s day. She came up behind him and looked sideways into the sink. It was bubbling and the water was draining.

“Thanks,” Paige said, grateful he had known what to do.

“What have you been running down the sink anyway?” he asked, but the look on his face was good-natured. 

Paige smiled and put her hand on his shoulder. “Who are you blaming for what? I just got here. The question should be: what have you been running down the sink?”

“Whatever. Use this the next time it happens,” Harrison said, turning away from her to rinse off the plunger. 

It wasn’t very much like a knight wiping blood off his sword, but Paige was just as grateful.

Take Twenty-three

“We should get the wrought iron patio set,” Paige argued.

“But the table is so small,” Harrison argued back.

“Yes, but we could put it in the gazebo in the summer,” Paige whispered in his ear.

Harrison perked up. “Huh,” he said, squashing his shivering ear into his shoulder. “I hadn’t thought too much about the gazebo. If we’re going to do that we should make an effort to make the garden better. How’s your green thumb?”

“I don’t have three thumbs,” Paige replied.

“Never gardened before?”

“Well, I never hung wallpaper before and I did it. I never refinished furniture before and I did it. That isn’t what bothers me. I honestly wouldn’t mind gardening, if only it weren’t so cold outside. I’m not used to it.”

Harrison seemed to rethink his suggestion. “Actually, forget it. I want you to be in charge of the kitchen when we have guests. We’ll start by offering muffins and sandwiches and stuff like that. You take care of that and I’ll take care of the yard.”

Paige paused. “Does that mean that we can have the iron set?” she asked quietly, pointing to the picture on the screen.

“Sure, Rose Red. Order it!”

Take Twenty-nine

“This one, this one, this one, and two of these.”

Harrison followed Paige around the superstore with a shopping cart. It was the first time he had brought her to the city since he had purchased her. It was just a day trip to buy kitchen wares, and she was having a ball.

“Wait. Wait. Wait. What’s that?” Harrison asked, halting her one-person party.

“Which one?”

“That,” he said, lifting out a yellow floppy rubbery thing.

“A muffin tin.”

“A muffin tin? How so? It looks like a tent tarp that melted in the sun.

“You’re so negative!” Paige exclaimed. “Look, you take this little tool and you can reshape the cup. So, you can make muffins in the shape of squares, diamonds, or hearts.”

“How about circles?” Harrison asked dryly.

“It does that too! Isn’t it amazing?”

Harrison yawned. He thought it was adorable that she was so excited over heart-shaped muffins, but he had to keep that to himself. He’d never seen a woman so easily pleased. If someone showed that contraption to Keziah, she would have snorted her coffee up her nose and grouched saying it was a waste of time. Narissa would have smiled patiently and moved on. Unlike them, Paige was happy and the muffin mold didn’t cost much. Harrison hoped it worked well for her.

She tossed something that looked like a syringe in the cart and Harrison scooped it out to see what it was. Another doohickey for baking—for cookies this time.

Harrison looked into the cart. Everything, from the plates to the mixers was yellow. It rang a bell with him. Something else in their house was yellow.

“Paige,” Harrison said, grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her up to his chest so she had to look straight into his eyes. “I just noticed something about your shopping habits and I wanted to ask you a question.”

“Shoot,” Paige said, glancing at his hand curled around her upper arm.

“Did you buy all your kitchen-wares to match the power sander?”

Paige offered him a half-smile. “Either that or my coat.” 

Take Thirty-six

“So, Harrison,” Paige said, stretching her legs out over one of his as they sat on the window seat in the living room he had just finished. “Now that we’ve finished the living room and the kitchen, I was thinking about what you said about guests staying over. What room were you planning on renovating for them?”

“I wasn’t planning on renovating anything,” Harrison said, casually resting his hand on her stockinged foot. “I’ve been saving the carpet in the guest room forever. It just needs to be aired out. I suppose that if you desperately want to do something in there, you could take the leftover wallpaper that we used in here and do one of the walls.”

“But Harrison, I’ve stuck my head in there. Isn’t that the most boring room in the house? If you want this to be a memorable spot, we should redo the tower. If we let our guests stay up there, they will never want to leave.”

Harrison rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I hear what you’re saying and don’t think I don’t agree with you, but we can’t do it now. We’re out of money. As it stands, my first trip of the season is next week. It’s a couple who told me I should turn this place into a resort that serves coffee and snacks, so I know they’ll be here for that. After that, I’ve got enough ice field tours booked to keep the furnace running during the winter, but we need to earn extra money if we’re going to pay off your debt by the end of the year. So, stop thinking about renovations. I know it’s liberating to make this old hellhole look new again, but if we don’t pay that bill, the only renovation you’ll be doing is installing wheelchair ramps.”

Paige frowned uncomfortably. She didn’t know if he was joking about the debt collectors breaking his knees or not.

“I got a history of your bank statements,” Harrison said suddenly. “Do you want to look at it?”

“Wow,” Paige said cynically. “They sure took their sweet time getting it to us.”

Harrison took his phone out of his pocket and pulled up the statement. “It took them some time to find everything. Some of the records were very old. Apparently, they’ve already changed systems twice since then.”

Paige took the phone away from him and scanned through the dates until she found what she was looking for. Then she said, “Okay, this is the day before I lost my memory.”

Harrison peeked over her shoulder and commented, “And the next day someone deposited one-point-three million dollars into your account? Do you know what that was for? Do you mind me asking?”

“It shouldn’t bother you. I sold myself. The original contract was for ten months.”

Harrison whistled. “That’s a lot of money for ten months.”

Paige smiled and looked distant. “You know, at that time, the money meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn’t care about the money and yet I made the buyer raise the amount over and over and over again.” Paige absently withdrew her legs from Harrison’s knees and tucked them under her.

He let go of her and his chin lowered an inch.

“After that, I naturally didn’t spend any money at all until the contract was over ten months later. Then the withdrawal activity looks pretty normal. See? I was paying my bills, but because I earned so much interest in those nine months, I hardly touched the principle. Now as we get closer to the time that I sold myself to Sleeping Beauty Inc., it looks like I was traveling a lot, and my balance goes down accordingly.”

Harrison leaned in closer.

“Now,” Paige said, wetting her lower lip. “We get to the day before I had my memory wiped. I withdrew all my money, took my whole overdraft, and maxed all my credit cards! Why the heck did I do that? How much does it cost to have your memory wiped?”

Harrison shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, but I bet it doesn’t cost one-point-five million. I thought the price of getting your mind wiped was pretty equivalent to getting a face-lift.” 

Paige sighed. “We’ll have to research it.”

“Can you think of a logical reason why you got your brain wiped?”

She nodded.

“Does it have anything to do with the guy you sold yourself to?”

She looked down to evade Harrison’s gaze. “It has everything to do with the guy I sold myself to.”