Excerpt from The Fixer Upper       "So, it’s marble," she said to Ned’s feet.       He slithered out from under the hearth’s opening and gazed up at her from the floor. "Dark green, with lots of veins. Want to have a look?"       Dark green? What would she do with a dark green marble mantel?       The same as she did with a painted white mantel—display on it the cut-crystal vase she’d got from her cousin Sarah for her wedding, a framed baby photo of Reva and a few other tchochkes, and dust it every six months if she remembered. She’d dusted it earlier that evening, of course, so Ned wouldn’t think she was quite as lackadaisical a housekeeper as she actually was.       Dark green would actually look lovely, she thought. Bold and vivid. As if she could afford to pay Ned what stripping and refinishing the entire mantel would cost.       "Come here." He beckoned her to the hearth, and she carefully dropped to her knees next to him. "Gotta get in a little closer," he said, casually arching his arm around her shoulders and guiding her head inside the fireplace. She tried not to lean back into him, even though she found maintaining her balance difficult without using his chest as a backrest. She admonished herself not to act as though leaning against him was a sin. He probably flung his arm around the shoulders of all his marble-fireplace clients. She ought to be as blasé about it as he was.       He turned on his penlight, and its small circle of white guided her gaze up toward the underside of the mantel. "There. See?" She saw dark green, with lots of veins. "Wow," she said, because she felt some comment was called for.       "Of course, this is what’s under the shelf." He ran the penlight the length of the mantel. "The vertical trim appears darker—" he used the pen light to direct her attention to an area along the side edge of the fireplace, where a small patch of dark poked through the thick white paint "—but it might be more of the green marble. Hard to tell without stripping all the paint off and buffing it up. The top of the mantel feels like it’s got a veneer of wood attached to it."       "Why?" she asked, feeling the heat of his body surrounding her. Did they really have to have this conversation stuffed inside her fireplace? He was much too close. His chin was a millimeter from her ear, and given the proximity of his hips to her tush, he could easily discern how thirty-five years of gravity and a pregnancy had redistributed the fat in her body.       "Beats me. Someone stupid enough to cover a marble mantel with paint is stupid enough to glue a slat of wood onto the marble, too. Maybe they thought it would hold the paint better." He shimmied out of the fireplace and she scrambled out as well, eager for light and space and the chance to put some distance between Ned and herself. She wasn’t sure how old he was, but gravity hadn’t done a damn thing to his body. He was so solid. And warm. And male.       She slid further back on the floor and reminded herself that he was here as a carpenter, an expert, someone passionately devoted to fireplaces. His hips had no interest whatsoever in her tush.       He rose to his feet, leaned over and snagged her hand to help her up. Even his hand was solid and warm and male, the palm smooth and hard with callus, the fingers thick and blunt. As soon as she was standing, she eased her hand free and he smiled. "You want me to strip it?"       Strip what? The mantel, she reminded herself.

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