It's Got To Be Perfect

Jake was fussy when it came to buying a house. Far too fussy, according to Kay!

KAY walked up to the front door with a bounce in her step.

This house ticked all the boxes. It had two double bedrooms, off-road parking, a separate diningroom, was in a quiet road and was also only two minutes’ walk from the train station. This could be the One.

The commission could come in very handy this month, too, and let’s be honest, she’d earned it. This was the fourteenth or fifteenth house she’d shown Jake Cooper.

Five minutes later, they were standing in the master bedroom. Jake was frowning and she was gritting her teeth. Clearly the house didn’t tick all the boxes at all.

Or to be more accurate, Jake had just invented another box she hadn’t known about. He had a habit of doing that.

“What is it?” she asked, trying to keep her voice cheery.

Maybe it would be something that could be fixed. Like the dado rail being at the wrong height or something. She’d had a client recently who found that a deal breaker.

“I’m not struck on looking out over a builder’s yard,” he said, pulling back a curtain and wrinkling his handsome nose.

“Right,” she said, joining him and seeing that there was a yard or some kind of shed and storage area at the foot of the garden that backed on to his. “I don’t think it’s commercial.”

“It’s an eyesore,” he said.

She resisted the urge to tell him that maybe a little patience and tolerance were called for. Unless you wanted to live in the middle of nowhere – which Jake didn’t. He wanted to live close to a train station, but not overlooking the actual railway itself.

“Sorry,” Jake said. She obviously wasn’t hiding her feelings as well as she’d thought. He narrowed his eyes. “We had high hopes of this one, didn’t we?”