Nobody Is Flirting With the Contractor

Dana Ruiz has a plan.

Renovate the kitchen she has hated for eleven years.

That’s it.

At forty-one, Dana has built a life that works exactly the way she wants it to. She owns her house, handles her own problems, and has spent three years proving—to herself and everyone else—that she doesn’t need anyone to fix things for her.

Then Alex Bennett shows up with a tool belt, a coffee, and an irritating habit of remembering exactly how Dana takes it.

Alex is calm, capable, funny, and very good at her job. She’s also apparently determined to make Dana’s renovation as painless as possible, whether that means solving appliance disasters, installing a temporary sink, or finding increasingly questionable reasons to stay after the crew goes home.

Dana’s friends insist Alex is flirting.

Dana has explanations.

The coffee is customer service. The Saturday trip to the salvage store is a professional errand. Lunch is logistical. The unnecessary shelf absolutely needed to be installed.

And nobody is flirting with the contractor.

Probably.

But as Dana’s terrible old kitchen disappears and something better takes its place, she begins to wonder whether independence has to mean doing everything alone—and whether wanting someone might be entirely different from needing them.

Nobody Is Flirting With the Contractor is a warm, witty LGBTQ+ romantic comedy about competence, home renovation, inconvenient attraction, friends who know what’s happening long before you do, and discovering that sometimes the best changes are the ones you never put on the schedule.

The Best Laid Plans novels are complete standalone romantic comedies and can be read in any order.