Page 177 of The Best Shot

“Give me the hammer.”

Her grip tightened on it. “No.”

I looked up at her. She looked down at me.

“Get off the ladder,” I repeated.

Her eyes narrowed, and I should have stopped there. Instead I reached up, got a hand around her waist, and lifted her down.

“I had it,” she said.

“You were beating trim with the face of a claw hammer. There’s a tool for that. Four of them, actually, and I own all four.”

“It was coming down.”

“So was half the ceiling. That plaster’s original. You can’t buy it.” I took the hammer from her hands.

She folded her arms. “I was figuring it out. Some people enjoy learning how to do things.”

“I can do it. Tell me how you want it and I’ll do it.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“Or we hire somebody. I know three men who do this for a living and two of them owe me.”

“That is even less the same thing.” She planted both hands on her hips. “You always do this.”

“Keep you from cracking your head open?”

“Take over.”

I set my palm flat against the ladder rail. “I stopped a bad idea before it got expensive.”

“Because you decided you could do it better.”

“I can do it better.”

“Again, not the point.”

“Then explain it before I guess wrong again.”

She waved a hand between us. “You decide how it gets done. You decide when to step in.”

“You were making it harder than it needed to be.”

“And there’s that.”

“What?”

She stepped back and studied me with one sweeping, unimpressed glance. “You’re smug about it.”

“I’m right about it. I’m not stopping you from learning. I’m stopping you from learning this particular lesson in the emergency room.”

Her mouth opened.

Closed.

Then she blurted, “I let you tie me up.”