Housekeeper Under The Mistletoe

“Yes, that.”

He gave her another long look, apparently contemplating her suitability for the position. She tried for her most housekeeperly expression.

“Especially nope to that,” he said.

When the door began to whisper shut, again, it was pure desperation that made Angie put one foot in to stop it.

The man—good God, was he Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights—glanced down at her foot with astonished irritation. And then he gave her a look so icily reserved it should have made her withdraw her foot and touch her forelock immediately. But it did not. Angie held her ground.

The master of the mansion glared back down at her foot with deep annoyance, but she refused to retreat. She couldn’t!

After a moment, he sighed again, and once more she felt the sensuous heat of his breath whisper across her cheek.

Then he opened the door wide and leaned the breadth of one of those amazing shoulders against the jamb, the seeming casualness of his stance not fooling her. Every fiber of his being was practically vibrating with displeasure. He folded his arms over the immenseness of his chest and tilted his head at her, waiting for an explanation for her audacity.

Really, all that icy remoteness should not have made him more attractive. But the impatient frown tugging at the edges of those too-stern lips made her think renegade thoughts of what was beyond the ice and what it would be like to know that.

These were crazy thoughts. This man was making her think crazy thoughts. She was a woman who had suffered so completely at the hands of love.

First, her Harry had decided all their dreams together were decidedly stodgy and had replaced her with insulting quickness with someone far more exotic and exciting.

And then, a coworker, Winston, had taken total advantage of her brokenhearted vulnerability. She had caved to his constant requests. Angie had said yes instead of no to a single cup of coffee. He had used that yes to force his way into her life.

With that kind of track record, it made her thoroughly annoyed with herself for even noticing what the master of the Stone House looked like. And what his voice sounded like. And what he smelled like. And what his breath had felt like grazing the tenderness of her cheek.

If she had a choice, she would have cut and run. But she was desperate. She had absolutely no choice.

With her foot against the door he was too polite to slam, she said, determined, “I need this job.”

He contemplated that, and her, in silence.

“Really,” she clarified when it seemed as if he was not going to say anything at all.

“Well, you don’t qualify.” His determination seemed to match her own. Or exceed it.

“In what way?”

“You’re obviously not mature.”

“I guess that would depend how you defined mature,” she said.

“Old.”

“How old?” she pressed. “Fifty? Sixty? Seventy? Eighty?” She hoped she was pointing out how ridiculous he was being. Old was not necessarily a great qualification in a housekeeper.

For a moment he said nothing, and then one corner of that sinfully sexy mouth lifted, but not in a nice way. “Older than you.”

“I’m sure the human rights commission would have quite a bit to say about not being considered for a job—for which I’m perfectly qualified—because of my age,” she said.

The smile deepened, tickling across his lips—cool, unfriendly, dangerous—and then he doused it and lowered the slash of his brows at her. “Are you threatening me?”

It occurred to her that annoying him would be the worst possible way to wiggle her way into this job position.

“No, not at all. I’m just suggesting that you might have attracted a better response to your posting for an available position if you had said you needed someone highly organized and hardworking and honest.”

“All of which I’m presuming you are?” he said drily.

She took it as very hopeful that he had not tried to physically shove her foot out the door and slam it on her.

Not that he looked like a man who ever had to get physical to get what he wanted. That look he was giving her was daunting. Anyone less desperate would have backed down long before now.

“I’m desperate.” There she had admitted it to him.

“Your desperation is not my con—”

“I’m willing to guess you haven’t had a single response to that ad,” she plowed on. “Who would answer an ad like that?”

“Apparently, you would.”

“I’m not just desperate.”

“How very nice for you,” he said, his tone so sardonic it had a knife’s edge to it.

“I’m also highly organized and hardworking and honest.”

“You’re too young.”

“Humph. I think youth could be a great advantage for this position.”

He didn’t answer, so she rushed on.

“I will be terrific at this job. You’ll love me.”

He looked insultingly dubious about that.

How could she have said that? That he would love her? You did not want to even think a word like that in front of a man like this—who could make you feel as if he had kissed you by simply sighing in your direction.

“I’ll work for free for one day. If you’re not impressed, you haven’t lost anything.”

He frowned at her. “Look, Miss—”

“Nelson,” she filled in, using the name of the town she had just come through. “Brook Nelson.” There. A new name. She had used part of the city of Cranbrook that she had passed through on this wild ride, and part of the town of Nelson.

She held her breath, knowing from the tension she felt while she waited that she needed the new existence her new name promised her.

CHAPTER THREE

JEFFERSON STONE REGARDED his unwanted visitor. Something shivered along his spine when she said her name. He knew she was lying.

And she wasn’t very good at lying, either. In fact, she was terrible at it.

He allowed himself to study her more closely. Brook Nelson—or whoever the hell she really was—was cute as a button. She was dressed in a brightly patterned summer blouse and white shorts. She was a little bit of a thing, slender and not very tall. It looked as if a good wind would pick her up and toss her.

And yet when her hands had been pressed into his chest, he had been aware of something substantial about her. That little bit of a thing had set off a tingle in him—an awareness—that had been as unwelcome as she was.

Hard not to be aware of her, when those shorts ended midthigh and showed off quite a bit of her legs.

Annoyed with himself, Jefferson shook off the thought and continued his study of his housekeeper candidate.

It just underscored what he already knew: she would not do.

She had light hair, a few shades darker than blond, but not brown. Golden, like sand he had seen on Kaiteriteri Beach in New Zealand. That hair was cut short, he suspected in a largely unsuccessful effort to make those plump curls behave themselves. They weren’t. They were corkscrewing around her head in a most unruly manner.

Her eyes were hazel, leaning toward the gold side of that autumn-like combination of golds and greens and browns. She had delicate features and it was probably that scattering of freckles across her nose that made her seem so wholesome, even though she was lying about who she was.

There was something earnest about her. Despite her youth, and despite the shortness of those shorts, she seemed faintly prim, as if she would be easily shocked by bad words. Which, of course, was part of the reason she would be a very bad fit for him as a housekeeper.

Because of her size, Jefferson had assumed she was young. But on closer inspection, she looked as if she was in her midtwenties. Still, she was exactly the type you would expect to be peddling cookies for a good cause or wanting to change the world for the better or encouraging attendance at the annual Anslow high school performance of Grease, which would be dreadful.

And he should know. Because a long time ago, in a different life, he had been cast as the renegade in that very high school play.

Jefferson shook it off. He did not like reminders of his past life.

Besides, Brook wasn’t anything like the ideal person he had in his head for this job, which was gray haired, motherly but not chatty, and someone willing to stay out of his way and keep schtum about his life.

Brook Nelson, in spite of the wholesome exterior and her claims of honesty, was lying about who she was. He needed her gone.

“Look, Miss, um, Nelson, I’ve gone through three housekeepers in three weeks—”

“Somebody answered that ad?” she asked disbelievingly.

“Not exactly,” he had to admit. “That ad was a result of the other failures.”

The failure was that he had mentioned to Maggie, at the Anslow Emporium, that he was going to need someone.

He hadn’t anticipated that telling Maggie—whom he had known since he was six—that he needed some help at his house would be like creating a posting in a lonely hearts club rag.

“Tell me about my three predecessors.”

He frowned at that. She was a cheeky little thing, wasn’t she? What part of no could she not get? But, since she was immune to slamming doors, why not give her anecdotal evidence of her unsuitability for this position?

“Okay, the first one was not mature. Mandy, showed up in flip-flops, and had a most irritating way of popping her gum, except when she was texting on her cell phone, which seemed to require her jaw to stop moving. When she had been here approximately three hours, she knocked on my office door to complain that the internet signal was weak from the deck. And then she acted insulted when I suggested I didn’t need her services any longer.”

Jefferson did not mention that Mandy had told him that she was prepared to overlook the vast difference in their ages if he wanted to give it a try.

He had escorted her to the door with a sense of urgency almost unparalleled in his life—and before finding out exactly what “it” meant.

“The second one was also not mature. She had on too much mascara and her skirt was too short, and she seemed way too interested—”

He stopped.

“In you?” Brook asked quietly.

He didn’t want to get into that. He was a small-town boy who had left here, made good of himself and then come home with a wife. He should have figured out, before he took his request to Maggie, that now that Hailey had been dead over three years, he would be perceived, by the good and simple people of his hometown, as a rather tragic figure. Which was nothing new. He’d come to live with his grandparents when he was six, after his parents had died. He sometimes wondered why he had come back here, to this place where he had been and always would be the little orphan.

And now a widower, seen by one and all as much more in need of a new wife than a housekeeper.

“You don’t have to worry about that with me,” Brook piped up. “I have no romantic inclinations at all. None.”

Brook seemed too young to have developed a truly jaundiced attitude toward romance, and Jefferson remembered housekeeper number two’s rather frightening avarice.

He focused on her work performance flaws instead of telling Brook the full truth. “She also said youse instead of you. Do youse want the toilet seat left up or down?”

“You don’t have to worry about that with me, either,” Brook rushed to assure him. “There are few things I love as much as the English language and its correct usage.”

“Hmm. That is not adding up to housekeeper, really. A true housekeeper might have been more concerned about the toilet seat and its correct usage.”

A delicate blush crept up her cheeks.

“I’m a student,” she said, “desperate for a summer job.”

The desperate part was true enough, he could see that. But her eyes had done a slow slide to the right when she had said she was a student.

“My third housekeeper was Clementine.” Clementine had been sent after he’d gone back down to the Emporium and read Maggie the riot act.

“She was certainly more suitable in the mature department. She’d actually been a friend of my grandmother’s. But Clementine started talking the second she got in the door and did not stop, ever.”

Jefferson remembered how even the lock on his office had not stopped her. “She stood outside my office while mopping the floor and polishing the door handle, chattering about her Sam. Husband. Mickey and Dorian. Children. Sylvester and Tweety. Bird and cat.”

Suddenly it occurred to Jefferson, he was being the chatty one. This stranger standing at his door—whom he had absolutely no intention of hiring—certainly did not need all of this information.

Maybe it was a sign of too much time alone—three failed housekeepers not withstanding—that he just kept talking.

“I barricaded myself inside my office for three days, but Clem showed no sign of moving on to other parts of the house. To avoid discussion, I finally shot a generous check and a nice note about how I really didn’t need her anymore under the door. It achieved exactly what I hoped—blessed silence.”

He had managed to stop talking before he revealed Clementine’s real fatal flaw. She had one divorced stepdaughter and three single nieces, all of whom she thought he should meet.

Brook’s lips twitched. That hint of a smile deepened Jefferson’s awareness of her as what he wanted least in his house: the distraction of an attractive woman. But that tentative smile also made him aware of the fine lines of tension in her—around her shoulders and neck, around her eyes, around her lips.

“It must have been hard to fire a friend of your grandmother’s.”

“You have no idea,” he said.

But, looking at her, he had the uneasy feeling she did have an idea.

“Why the sudden search for a housekeeper? Are you replacing a housekeeper you were quite satisfied with?”

He scowled at her. Who was interviewing whom, here?

“No, I’ve never felt the need of one before.”

“And now?”

He sighed. “In a moment of weakness, I agreed to allow an architectural magazine to photograph the house.”

She glanced past him. “A moment of weakness? The house is extraordinary. You must be very honored at their interest.”

“I may have been when it was all just an idea. But as soon as a date was set, I realized the house would need attention, which, six weeks later, I am no closer to giving it.”

“When is the photo session scheduled?”

“Two weeks.” He was aware he was engaging with her, and it didn’t seem to be bringing him any closer to getting rid of her.

“I can have your place completely ready for a photo shoot in two weeks. I promise.”

Jefferson contemplated that. It was a weakness to contemplate it. But he did need someone to get the place ready, and the date of the photo shoot was creeping up far more rapidly than he could have believed. And he suspected, from the lack of applicants now, that word had spread far and wide through this tight-knit region of the Kootenays that he was impossible to work for.

So, the young woman in front of him could be considered a godsend, if one was inclined to think that way, which Jefferson Stone most definitely was not.

No, Nelson Brook, or Brook Nelson, or whatever her name was, just wasn’t going to work out, despite the fact no one else had responded to his blunt posting that had laid out exactly what he needed. He would just have to postpone Architecture Now indefinitely. He was aware of feeling relieved at that possibility.

He reached for the door. He was going to gently shove on it until she moved her foot.

But then a crow cawed loudly and raucously in the tree the prospective housekeeper had parked her car under. It dropped a pinecone out of its beak onto the roof of her car, and both sounds, the cawing and the sharp plunk of the cone on her car roof, were loud and unexpected in the drowsy quiet of the afternoon.

She gasped and jumped forward, and she smashed against him. For the second time, in the space of just a few minutes, she was touching him.

Only this time, it wasn’t her hands splayed across his chest, which had been disconcerting enough. This time he could feel the press of the entire length of her body against his, and he was acutely aware of the sweet softness of her. He was acutely aware of hesitating a fraction of a second too long before putting her away from him.

“I’m so sorry,” she stammered, but he caught the look on her face as she swiveled her head and glanced over her shoulder. It was the frantic look of a deer being startled by wolves. When she turned back to him, despite the fact she was trying hard to school her features, he could see the pulse pounding in the hollow of her throat.

Tension trembled in the air around her, and her muscles had gone taut. It made him notice there were shadows under her eyes and an edginess about her that was far from normal.

Her car door, he noticed, looking beyond her, was open, as if she had planned what to do if she needed to make a quick getaway.

Brook Nelson, or whoever she was, was terrified of something.

What shocked Jefferson was how her fear pierced the armor around his heart. It was as if a little sliver of light found its way to a place that had been in total darkness.

Inside himself was some nearly forgotten sense of decency, some sense of being connected to a human family he’d managed to ignore for three whole years, much to the dismay of the people of Anslow.

Jefferson stood very still. For a moment, he thought of the grandparents who had raised him, in a house not far from here. They had been old-fashioned people, who were decent to the core and kind to a fault. They would have never turned someone in need from their door, and no one had benefited from their generosity of spirit more than him. He could almost imagine the look of disapproval on both their faces if he shut the door now.

Jefferson took a deep breath and looked into the pleading eyes of the woman who had landed, uninvited, on his doorstep.

Was this who he had become? So embittered by the death of his wife, Hailey, that he could turn a woman, so obviously terrified, away from his door?

“Jeez,” Jefferson muttered under his breath. He was a man who made decisions every day. That was what he did for a living. The decisions he made altered the courses of entire cities, impacted huge companies and global corporations. His decisions often had millions of dollars and the livelihoods of thousands of people riding on them.

And yet, this decision, this split-second decision, about what kind of man he would be, felt bigger than all of those.

Jefferson Stone stepped back marginally from his door.

It was all Brook Nelson needed. She catapulted over his threshold and into his house.

Into his life, he told himself grimly.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

“Nothing has been decided,” he told her gruffly, though somehow he knew it had been. And she knew it, too. She was beaming at him.

“It’s not going to be a walk in the park,” he said. He was already annoyed that his decision had been based on a moment of pure emotion, not rationale. He had to get things back on track and make sure she was aware this was a professional arrangement. “The finer aspects of housekeeping have been neglected for a long time.”

He fully intended to tell her that if she didn’t put them right he would not tolerate her presence any longer than he had her predecessors. But she spoke before he could get the grim warning out.

“I could tell that from this door that things have been slightly neglected,” she said, tapping the front door. “It needs polishing. You probably use something special for it, do you?”

“I have no idea. That’s your job, not mine.” He was trying to make up for his moment of weakness in letting her in, but she didn’t seem to notice uninviting his tone.

“Do you have an internet connection here?”

“Not one that housekeeper number one, Mandy, approved of, but my career is dependent on being connected.”

“I’ll just look up online what to use on a door like that one. Is it stainless steel, like kitchen appliances?”

He considered her question. She was focusing on the job at hand and not asking any personal questions about his career. Hopefully, that indicated a lack of nosiness. Hopefully, that indicated his impulsive decision to let her in was not going to lead to complete disaster. “Yes.”

“I know I just use a few drops of vegetable oil on mine. At home.”

So, there was a home, somewhere, and presumably a fairly nice one if it had stainless steel appliances in it.

Despite his intention to keep everything professional, he smelled man problems in his new housekeeper’s personal life. She had already claimed she had no romantic notions, which basically meant burned by love. It would be nothing but good for him if she was sour on the whole relationship thing. It could be almost as good protection as mature and silent. And, despite the fact he had his own history that had turned his heart to the same stone as his name, he sensed a need to keep up his defenses and to demonstrate the same lack of nosiness that she was showing!

Still, she wasn’t just having man problems. She was terrified.

CHAPTER FOUR

JEFFERSON CONTEMPLATED HOW Brook’s obvious terror stirred an emotion in him that he did not feel ready to identify and, in fact, felt a need to distance himself from.

He’d been living—despite the efforts of the townspeople—without the complication of untidy emotions for some time.

He’d give this woman—Brook Nelson, or whoever she was—a break. That didn’t mean he had to involve himself in her drama in any way. The house was ridiculously large. With the slightest effort, during the day he wouldn’t even know she was here.

Though that might pose some challenges, because she was in his living room now, and despite the fact the windows let in all kinds of light, it was as if sunshine had poured into the room with her. She flounced into his living room, hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, lips pursed.

“Wow,” she said.

He thought she was referring to the architecture, which generally inspired awe, but she turned disapproving eyes to him. “Good grief, I can see neither Mandy nor Clementine got to this room. You mustn’t have allergies. How long since this has been dusted?”

“A while,” he admitted, instead of never.

“And I take it, it would have gone a while longer if it weren’t for the photo shoot?”

“That’s correct.”

“You are a true bachelor, aren’t you? Why live in such a beautiful house if you aren’t going to take care of it?” she wailed with genuine frustration.

“I’m a widower,” he said tersely.

He was not sure why he had imparted that little piece of information. He hoped it wasn’t because he thought that would make her more sympathetic to his slovenliness than being a bachelor would.

But, as soon as he saw the sympathy blaze in her eyes, he realized he did not want her sympathy. Arriving in Anslow as an orphan, losing his wife, Jefferson Stone had experienced enough sympathy to last him a lifetime. He did not want any more challenges to his armor. He realized he needed to be much more vigilant in his separation of the professional and personal.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a low whisper that could make a man long for a bit of softness in his life.

But he had had softness, Jefferson reminded himself, and had proved himself entirely unworthy of it.

He lifted a shoulder in defense against the sympathy that blazed in her eyes. “My wife was the architect who designed the house.”

“Ah, that explains a lot.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her.

“You don’t really seem like the type of person who would be amenable to having your home photographed. You are honoring her. That’s nice.”