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“Good.”
The lone word hung in midair between them like a damp curtain.
He’d never had a housekeeper before. As a matter of fact, he’d never interviewed anyone for any sort of position before and hadn’t the slightest idea how to go about it now without sounding like a complete novice. Or worse, a complete idiot. The image didn’t please him.
Clearing his throat again, Philippe pushed on. “Then you know there won’t be much work involved.”
The woman smiled as if she was sharing some secret joke with herself. She had a nice smile. Otherwise, he might have taken offense.
“No disrespect, Mr. Zabelle,” she said as she appeared to slowly take stock of his living room and what she could see beyond it, “but I’ll be the judge of that.” She turned to face him. “Once you tell me exactly what it is you have in mind.”
He had no idea why that would cause him to almost swallow his tongue. Maybe it was the way she looked at him or, more likely, the way she’d uttered that phrase. She certainly didn’t remind him of any housekeeper he’d ever come across while living at his mother’s house.
“Have you done this before?” he asked. In his experience, housekeepers were usually older women, more likely than not somewhat maternal looking. This one was neither and if there was one thing he wanted, it was someone experienced. But he was a fair man and willing to be convinced.
She looked at him as if he’d just insulted her. “Yes,” she replied with more than a little feeling. “I have references. I can show them to you once we finish talking about the basics here.”
He nodded at the information, although when he’d find the time to check her references was beyond him. Maybe he could get Alain or Remy to do it for him. Both had more free time than he did.
She was obviously waiting for him to define the requirements. He gave it his best shot. “Well, I won’t be asking you to do anything you haven’t done before.”
That didn’t come out quite right, he realized the minute he’d said it.
The blonde reinforced his impression. Blinking, she asked, “Excuse me?”
He must have said something wrong but hadn’t the slightest idea what. There was no clue forthcoming from the woman’s daughter either. Kelli seemed amused by the whole exchange. Maybe she wasn’t a little girl after all, just a very short adult. Her face was certainly expressive enough to qualify.
Philippe tried again. “I mean, it’ll be the usual. Some light dusting.” He shrugged, thinking. “Shopping once a week.”
The woman’s mouth dropped open. And still managed to look damn sensual. It belatedly occurred to him that he still didn’t even know her name. “I don’t—”
“Do windows?” he completed her sentence. “That’s okay, I have a service that comes by twice a year to wash my windows.” There was no way he could reach the upper portion of some of them even if he did have the time, which he didn’t. “I just need someone to clean up—nothing major,” he assured her quickly, “because most of the time, I’m holed up in my office.” He jerked a thumb toward the rear of the house. “And I’d rather you didn’t come in there.”
The woman shook her head, as if put off. “Mr. Zabelle, I think there’s been some mistake.”
He didn’t want there to be some mistake. He wanted her to take the job. He couldn’t see himself going through this process over and over again.
Philippe took a stab at the reason for her comment. “You’re full-time, right?”
“When I work, yes.”
Philippe paused, thinking. “I really don’t need anyone fulltime.”
“I think what you need is an interpreter.” Her response confused him, but before he could tell her as much, she was saying, “When I start a job, Mr. Zabelle, I finish it.”
Well, that was a good trait, he thought, but he still wasn’t going to hire her full-time. “That’s very admirable, but like I said, I’m only going to need someone once a week.”
Rather than accept that, he saw her put her hands on her waist. “And why is that?”
Maybe this was a mistake after all. He could have gone to the store and back in the amount of time he’d spent verbally dancing around with this woman. “Because there won’t be enough to keep you occupied,” he told her tersely. “I’m pretty neat.”
She shook her head as if to clear it. “What does your being neat have to do with it?”
“I realize you probably charge the same whether you’re working for a slob or someone who’s relatively neat—”
She cut him off before he could finish. “I charge according to what the client requests, Mr. Zabelle, not based on whether they’re sloppy or neat.”
That sounded a hell of a lot more personal than just cleaning his house.
Their eyes met and Philippe watched her for a long moment. The more he did, the less she looked like a housekeeper. Just what section had his ad landed in? And if it was what he was thinking, what was she doing bringing her daughter along on this so-called job interview?
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Did you get my number from the personals?”
He watched as her mouth formed as close to a perfect O as he had ever seen. He saw her hand tightened around Kelli’s.
“Mommy, you’re squishing my fingers,” the little girl protested.
“Sorry,” she murmured, never taking her eyes off his face. She was looking at him as if she thought that perhaps she should be backing away. Quickly. “I got your number from my machine, Mr. Zabelle,” she told him, her voice both angry and distant now.
Okay, he was officially lost. “Your machine?” That made no sense to him. “I called the newspaper this morning.”
She cocked her head, as if that could help her make sense of all this somehow. “About?”
“The ad,” he said, annoyed. Had she lost the thread of the conversation already? What kind of an attention span did she have?
“What ad?” she demanded. She sounded like someone on the verge of losing her temper.
Taking a breath, Philippe enunciated each word slowly, carefully, the way he would if he were talking to someone who was mentally challenged. “The…one…you’re…here…about.”
Her voice went up several levels. “I’m not here about any ad.”
Suddenly, something unlocked in a distant part of his brain. Her voice was very familiar. He’d heard it before. Recently.
Philippe held up his hand, stopping her. “Hold it. Back up.” He peered at her face intently, trying to jog his memory. Nothing. “Who are you, lady?”
A loud huff of air preceded the reply. When she spoke, it was through gritted teeth. “I’m J. D. Wyatt. You called me about remodeling your bathrooms.”
And then it hit him. Like a ton of bricks. He knew where he’d heard that voice before—on the phone, last night. “You’re J. D. Wyatt?”
J.D. drew herself up. He had the impression she’d been through this kind of thing before—and had no patience with it. “Yes.”
He wanted to be perfectly clear in his understanding of the situation. “You’re not here about the housekeeping job?”
“The housekeep—” Oh God, now it made sense. The weekly shopping, the cleaning. He’d made a natural mistake—and one that irked her. “No, I’m not here about the housekeeping job. I’m a contractor.”
He thought back to what Vincent had said when he’d given him the card. “I thought I was calling a handyman.”
J.D. shrugged. She’d lived in a man’s world all of her life and spent most of her time struggling to gain acceptance. “A handy-person,” she corrected.
The discomfort he’d been feeling grew. It was bad enough not being handy and feeling inferior to another man. Aesthetically speaking, all men might have been created equal, but not when it came to wielding a hacksaw. Feeling inferior to a woman with a tool belt? Well, that was a whole different matter. He wasn’t sure he could handle it.
It felt like he’d been deceived. “What does the J.D. stand for?”
She eyed him for a long moment, as if debating whether or not to tell him. And then she did. “Janice Diane.”
“So why didn’t you just put that down on the card?” he asked. “You realize that’s false advertising.”
“My mama’s not false!” Kelli piped up indignantly, moving between her mother and him.
“Kelli, hush,” J.D. soothed. “It’s okay.” And then she looked at him and her sunny expression faded. “There’s nothing false about it. Those are my initials.”
“You know what I mean. By using them, you make people think that they’re hiring a man.”
That was the whole point, she thought. This man might look drop-dead gorgeous, but he was as dumb as a shoe—and probably had the soul to match. She spelled it out for him.
“People do not call someone named Janice Diane to fix their running toilets or renovate their flagstone fireplaces. They do, however, call someone named J.D. to do the same work. This world runs on preconceived notions, Mr. Zabelle. One of those notions is that men are handy, women are not. Your reaction just proved my point. You thought I was here to clean your house, not to renovate it.”
She was right and he didn’t like it, but he couldn’t come up with a face-saving rebuttal. “Well, I—”
It wouldn’t have mattered if he had, she wouldn’t let him finish.
“I’ve been around tools all my life and I know what to do with them.” She folded her arms before her. “Now, are you going to let your prejudice keep you from hiring the best handy-person you’re ever going to come across in your life—at any price—or are you going to be a modern man and show me what exactly you need done around here?” It was a challenge, pure and simple. One she hoped he would rise to.
Out of the corner of her eye, Janice saw Kelli mimic her actions perfectly, folding her small arms before her.
Mother and daughter stood united, waiting for a reply.
Chapter Three (#ulink_4d542fbb-847b-58bb-9673-d4897bb3c090)
For what felt like an endless moment, two different reactions warred within Philippe, each striving for the upper hand.
Ever since he could remember, he’d had it drummed into his head—and had come to truly believe—that the only difference between men and women were that women had softer skin. Usually. His mother had enthusiastically maintained over and over again that women could do anything a man could except go to the bathroom standing up. And even there, she had declared smugly, women had the better method. At the very least, it was neater.
But there was another, equally strong reaction that beat within his chest. It was based on the deep-seated philosophy that men were the doers, the protectors in this dance of life. This notion had evolved very early in his life and had come from the fact that he’d been the responsible one in the family, the steadfast one. His mother flittered in and out of relationships, fell in and out of love, while he held down the fort, making sure that his brothers stayed out of trouble and went to school. And occasionally, when there was a need for it, his was the shoulder on which his mother would cry or vent.
He grew up believing that there were certain things that men did. They might be partners with women on a daily basis, but in times of crisis, the partnership tended to go from fifty-fifty to seventy-thirty, with the man taking up the slack.
And under that heading, but in a much looser sense, came the concept of being handy. Women weren’t supposed to be handy, at least, not handier than the men of the species. Women were not the guardians of the tool belt, they were the nurturers.
Right now, as he vacillated between giving in to his pride and being fair, Philippe could almost hear his mother whispering in his ear.
“Damn it, Philippe, I raised you better than this. Give the girl a chance. She has a child, for heaven’s sake. Besides, she’s very easy on the eye. Not a bad little number to have around.”
At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to have J.D. give him an estimate. If he didn’t like it, that would be the end of that. Mentally, he crossed his fingers.
With a barely suppressed sigh, he nodded. “All right. Let me show you the bathroom.”
Philippe began leading the way to the rear of the house, past the kitchen. Somehow, Kelli managed to wiggle in front of him just as they came to the bathroom that had begun it all, the one with the cracked sink.
Hands on either side of the doorjamb, Kelli peered into the room before her mother could stop her, then declared in a very adult, very disappointed voice, “Oh, it’s not pretty.” Turning around, she looked up at him with a smile that promised everything was going to be all right. “But don’t worry, Mama can make it pretty for you. She’s very good.”
Philippe raised an eyebrow. “She your press agent?” he asked, amused despite himself as he nodded toward the little girl.
For the first time, he saw the woman in the well-fitting faded jeans smile. Janice ruffled her daughter’s silky blond hair with pure affection. “More like my own personal cheering section.”
An identical smile was mirrored on Kelli’s lips. The resemblance was uncanny.
Stepping back to grab her mother’s hand, Kelli proceeded to tug her into the small rectangular slightly musty room. “C’mon, Mommy, tell him what you’re gonna do to make it look pretty.”
Janice glanced over her shoulder toward the man she hoped was going to hire her and allow her to make this month’s mortgage payment. “I don’t think pretty is what Mr. Zabelle has in mind, honey.”
Kelli pursed her lips together, clearly mulling over her mother’s words. And then she raised her bright blue eyes up to look at his face, studying him intently as if she was trying to decide just what sort of creature he was.
“Everyone likes pretty,” she finally declared with the firm conviction of the very young.
Philippe’s experience with children was extremely limited. It really didn’t go beyond his own rather adult childhood and the brothers he’d all but raised. All of that now residing in the distant past.
Too distant for him to really recall with any amount of clarity.
But since Kelli made decrees like a short adult, he treated her as such and said, “That all depends on what you mean by pretty.”
The smile on the rosebud mouth was back, spreading along it generously and banishing her momentary serious expression. This time, she looked up at her mother and giggled. “He’s funny, Mommy.”
Janice slipped her hand around Kelli’s shoulders, stooping down to do so. “He’s the client, Kel, and we don’t talk about him as if he’s not in the room when he’s standing right beside us.”
“Good rule to remember,” Philippe approved, then decided to ask a question of his own. “You always bring your daughter along on interviews?”
Interviews. Janice had gotten to dislike the word. It made her feel as if she was being scrutinized. As if someone was passing judgment on her. There had been more than enough of that when she’d been growing up. Her father was always judging her—and finding her lacking. Besides, she took exception to Zabelle’s question. It wasn’t any of his business if Kelli came along or not as long as everything else was conducted professionally.
Without meaning to, she squared her shoulders. “My sitter had a date.”
Philippe supposed that was a reasonable excuse, although the woman could have rescheduled. “Good for her.”
“Him,” she corrected. “Good for him,” she added when he looked at her quizzically. “My sitter’s my brother, Gordon.”
Mentally, Philippe came to an abrupt halt. He was getting far more information than he either needed or wanted. If he did wind up hiring this woman to tinker and fix the couple of things that needed fixing, he wanted to keep their exchanges strictly to a business level.
But that wasn’t going to be easy, he realized in the next moment when the little girl took his hand in hers and brightly informed him, “I don’t have a brother. Do you have one?”
He expected Kelli’s mother to step in and admonish the little girl for talking so freely to a stranger. But there was nothing forthcoming from J.D. and Kelli was apparently waiting for him to give her an answer.
“Yes,” he finally said. “Two.”
“Do they live here, too?” Kelli asked. She seemed ready to go off in search of them.
He shifted his eyes toward the so-called handy-person. “Don’t you think you should teach her not to be so friendly with strangers?”
Janice had never liked being told what to do. She struggled now to keep her annoyance out of her voice. The man probably meant well and he was, after all, a potential client.
