“Enough.” Fiona held up a hand. “I don’t need convincing, Vivien. I hired you to executemyvision, not to pushyours.”
Vivien felt the words hit like a slap. She understood, she really did—this wasFiona’shome, after all. But what Fiona was asking for wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. It was a gutting of everything that made this house special.
She thought about every time she had bitten her tongue to keep the peace, every time she had let someone else’s voice drown out her own. It was instinctual at this point. But this time? This time, she couldn’t do it.
She straightened her spine. “If I’m going to redesign this entire house, I am going to preserve its character. I can make it modern and contemporary, but I don’t want it to look like an asylum and neither do you.”
Fiona’s brows lifted, and for a brief moment, there was silence.
“Well. That’s a shame.” She rubbed her hands together as if suddenly she was as stressed as Vivien. “I would really prefer if you followed my direction. It would make this much easier. You don’t want me to find a different designer, do you?”
Vivien’s stomach clenched at the threat, and she remembered there was a fine line between having a backbone and being…out of a job. “I’ll do some research and get back to you with new ideas.”
Fiona walked past her, heading toward the front door. “Now, the other problem is in the kitchen.”
Vivien followed, thinking of the array of selections she’d left for Fiona to consider. “You don’t like the countertops, backsplash, paint, or flooring.”
“The paint will be white. Pure white, like all the walls. The flooring will be white tile, the quartz is fine, but the backsplash? No blue curves in this kitchen. Is that clear?” Sweeping into the room, she pointed to the tables, the samples obviously untouched. “Because this is…awful.”
She made it sound like Vivien had formed the porcelain with her own hands. “Let me guess. White?”
“Carry the quartz up the wall,” she said.
Vivien nodded. “I love that idea, but it’s very expensive. Would you consider a dark blue cabinet color then? Just to bring some dimension into the room.”
Fiona sighed, long enough that Vivien thought she might have made headway. “No,” she said. “I’ll stick with white.”
Of course she would. Vivien wanted to argue, to plead her case, but she knew it wouldn’t matter. She was skating on some seriously thin ice, and it was as cold and unforgiving as this woman and her sterile, one-dimensional asylum.
“Now, I don’t have any more time,” Fiona announced, swooping up her phone from the counter. “I have a video call scheduled. Danny’s upstairs, so if you want him to rip out that heinous wood, he can. Well, he can try.”
Danny was…upstairs? Like, in her bedroom? That washiscar in front of the house? Not the wheels of any handyman she knew.
Fiona flipped over the phone and checked the time. “I have two minutes until this call. I’ll be in my office, and I do not want to be disturbed.” She waved the phone at the table. “Get these eyesore samples out of here.”
Before she could respond, Fiona turned on her heel and walked to the front of the house, closing the door of the first-floor office with a thud.
Vivien huffed out a breath, alone with her “eyesore” samples and a sick, sick feeling.
She had tried to stand up to the woman, but Fiona Buckman was a living, breathing bulldozer and even someone with a spine as strong as that quartz couldn’t fight the woman.
Tear out the molding?
She gave a whimper and walked back out to the staircase, glancing at the closed door to the study, hearing Fiona’s voice on the other side. Kneeling down, she ran a finger over the wood and wondered if she could just paint it the same color as the wall—that oh-so-vibrant pure white. Then it would just blend?—
“That’s a ridiculous amount of money.”
She froze at the man’s voice, glancing up to where she heard it, and heavy footsteps crossing the open hallway.
It was Hapless Handy…talking about money.
“I’m not going to do that to her,” Danny said, lowering his voice as if he thought someone—maybe the woman he was currently swindling—might hear him.
Vivien stepped back, out of his line of vision if he came to the top of the stairs.
“Fifty grand and not a penny more,” he said. “I know she doesn’t pay attention to her cash flow, but we’ll get caught short if we go any higher.”
Caught…doing what? Emptying her account? And did he have a partner in this con?
