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“You don’t sound happy about it.”
Dillon shrugged. “I don’t really want to work in New York again.”
“Too much crime?”
“Too dull. But the job was a step up, USA Bureau chief for NCN, Northeastern Cable News. So I told ’em I’d give it a try for one year.”
“And then?”
Dillon shrugged, knowing the management experience there was going to be worth its weight in gold to him later. “If I don’t like it, I’ll head back to the Middle East.”
“You sound like you think you won’t like it,” Hayley said, her brow arching in disapproval.
Dillon wasn’t about to apologize for his lack of domesticity or his love of adventure. “I’m going to give it my best shot.” He frowned. “It’s the house that I let my sister talk me into buying that I’m really uneasy about. It needs a hell of a lot of work to make it habitable, or so I’ve been told. I haven’t actually seen anything but pictures to date.”
Jade eyes sparkling, Hayley grinned and shook her head in silent bemusement. “Sight unseen, hmm?”
“Yep.”
“So why’d you buy it?”
“The investment, of course.”
“Of course,” Hayley said dryly.
“I’m planning to resell it at the end of a year’s time, when my assignment is up, and make a killing.”
“So where is this house?” she asked.
“Connecticut.”
“Connecticut,” she murmured wistfully. “I’ve always wanted to live there.”
Something about her expression, kind of like a kid with no money looking hungrily through the glass at the candy counter, got to him. It made him—he told himself firmly it was for Hank’s sake only he was feeling this way—want to make it possible for her to get exactly what she wanted. “Say,” Dillon said casually. “You wouldn’t be interested in the job as my housekeeper, would you?”
She merely rolled her eyes at the suggestion. “Thanks, but there’s no way I could commute back and forth from the city every day.”
Dillon shrugged, not so willing to be dismissed, even if his idea was a little crazy. “So you and the baby could live in,” he persisted. “Think about it. You’d have another entire year to get your future sorted out.”
She laughed, a rich melodious sound. “You’re kidding. Right?”
“No,” Dillon said. “You need a job, preferably one that will allow you a lot of time to spend with your baby, which mine will, and a nice safe place to live. You’re handy with a wrench. You seem to have a fair amount of decorating skill. At least I like what you’ve done with this place, sans moving boxes, anyway. You’re just what I need to make my house habitable. And my house is just the kind of place you need to raise your baby in and regroup.”
“Thanks, but I’m not interested in being anyone’s maid. I have enough trouble just cleaning up my own messes.”
“Hey, I’m not that messy,” Dillon protested automatically. Her delicate brow arched. He continued, “Besides, you’d be a lot more. You’d be decorating, organizing all my stuff, creating order out of chaos, making a home for me.” He grinned mischievously. “Or at least enough of one to get my sister off my back.”
“Your sister?” Hayley blinked.
“Marge.” Dillon’s mouth curved fondly at the thought of the sister he loved. “She thinks I’ve ruined my life, and she wants me to settle down for at least a year and try to have a real life, one that includes more than just my work.”
Hayley wrinkled her nose. “It sounds like what she really thinks you need is a wife.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Only thing is I’m not interested in getting married.”
“Well,” Hayley said pragmatically with a sigh, “that makes two of us.”
“So how about the job?” Dillon tried to imagine what it would be like to have a woman as beautiful as Hayley working as his housekeeper. Bringing him his paper in the morning, making him breakfast… Maybe he’d even get a glimpse of her in some sort of negligee and robe, if they were under the same roof.
“Think about the time it would give you with Christine,” he said persuasively. He figured he could handle a good-looking woman with a baby under his roof a lot better than he could handle the mustached, overweight, drill sergeant of a housekeeper his sister was pushing him to hire. Employing Hayley would ease his own guilt over Hank considerably. Even if he found her incredibly desirable, he wouldn’t act on that desire because of his past friendship with Hank.
“Dillon, listen to me,” she said with weary tolerance. “I know you think you’re trying to help, but my schedule is erratic at best these days. I sleep when the baby sleeps. I’m awake when she’s awake, even if that’s from three in the morning until dawn. I don’t know if I could have dinner on the table precisely at eight every night. Or even be awake enough to cook for you if you decided to have a dinner party.”
“I never give dinner parties,” he said flatly. “I only go to them. And as for schedules, my hours are erratic at best, too. Some nights I probably won’t show up for dinner at all.”
“Well, then I would be ticked off. If I went to all the trouble to cook the damned meal, I’d expect you to eat it.”
He grinned at her feisty tone, liking the warm flush of color that had come into her cheeks. “I knew there was something I liked about you,” he drawled.
They stared at each other in contemplative silence.
“What about salary?”
“What’s fair?” Dillon volleyed back, mirroring her own pragmatic, let’s-get-down-to-brass-tacks tone. “Room, board and say…ten percent of the profit I make when I sell the house at the end of a year? It’s not as if you don’t know me,” he continued when she hesitated.
“True. Hank spoke of you often. He said you were a well-loved boss, respected by all who worked for you.”
Which made his own betrayal of Hank all the harder to bear, Dillon thought. He should’ve known better than to have sent Hank into the fray. But how could he have known the barracks would be hit by shrapnel from an exploding missile? Dillon sighed.
Hayley was silent. Whether she was blaming him or not, Dillon couldn’t tell. Finally she smiled. “I guess I can trust you.”
Dillon grinned back. “Now you’re talking.”
“Add a monthly stipend of four hundred dollars for my personal expenses and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Four hundred!” he echoed, stunned.
“Do we have a deal or don’t we?”
Damn but she was impulsive, he thought. Almost as impulsive as he was. And she drove a hard bargain. But what did it matter whether they thought about this for ten minutes or ten days, as long as it solved all their mutual problems, which it did. Dillon studied her with satisfaction, realizing it had been easier for him to take care of both his own guilt and Hank’s widow than he’d ever imagined it could be. “Okay, you’re hired.”
Chapter Two (#ulink_6d83b698-4ffe-5f69-b8ba-1adb1a1455f4)
“You forgot one thing, Dillon,” Hayley said, looking into his dark blue eyes and ruggedly handsome face with all the directness she could muster.
“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”
“You didn’t tell me I’d be moving into an absolute disaster,” Hayley said, early the following morning.
Dillon frowned at the red walls and red velvet furniture in the formal living room. “I didn’t know it was this bad,” he said grimly, looking no more pleased than she felt.
Hayley sent him a skeptical glance as they trudged through the adjacent kitchen, which was decorated in shades of avocado and lemon yellow. “How is that possible?” she asked disbelievingly. “After all, you bought this house.”
“No,” he said with a flash of white teeth, “my sister did.”
Hayley stopped him before he could head up the stairs to the second floor of the sprawling, white brick Colonial. “You bought this house without at least seeing a detailed report of everything it would need to make it livable?” she asked, incredulous.
“Right.” Dillon glanced thoughtfully up at the chandelier overhead, which was coated with several years’ worth of dust and spider webs.
Hayley kept her eyes trained on his face. He didn’t look like an idiot. He looked smart, strong and sexy. Too sexy, she thought, her eyes roving over his tall, solidly built frame and broad, powerful shoulders. She hadn’t been attracted to a man since Hank’s death, but she was attracted to Dillon. And she felt that sizzle of attraction with heart-stopping awareness every time she looked into his mesmerizing dark blue eyes. “Why?”
“Why not?” Dillon shrugged. He tested the wooden banister and found it as wobbly as it looked. His glance met hers again. “I had no interest in trotting through home after home. One place is as good as the next as far as I’m concerned, so I decided to let my sister, Marge, handle the actual selection. That way, I already had a place when I got back to the States. All I had to do was wait for my stuff to arrive, find someone to unpack it and move in. Then she found this place, said it needed redecorating. A hell of a lot of redecorating. But it was a great bargain. So, shrewd investor that I am, I figured I’d capitalize on the financial opportunity.”
“She didn’t tell you it looked like a highly disorganized white elephant sale inside?”
“No. She said nothing about it being furnished like a clearance sale at an outdoor flea market.” Dillon shoved a hand through the tousled, two-inch-long layers of his dark brown hair and shook his head. “In terms of redecorating, I figured I’d have to pick out new paint, wallpaper and carpet. Worst case, maybe even fix some of the plumbing. Which, of course, is why I hired you.”
“Because you didn’t want to mess with it,” Hayley assumed.
“Not in this lifetime.” Dillon affirmed her guess with a tantalizing grin.
So he hated decorating, Hayley thought. Most men did. He did pick out his clothes well. The brown Harris tweed jacket and dark brown trousers not only fit his muscular body well, they complemented his dark brown hair and suntan.
“But I have to admit, Hayley, this—” Dillon took a deep, bracing breath as he looked around him “—is just ridiculous, even for someone like me who really doesn’t care where they live. If you want to back out—”
Hayley wasn’t going to let him discourage her. It didn’t matter to her the house was wrecked or that he was close enough to her in age and ruggedly good-looking enough to give her pause. All that mattered to her was the eventual cut of the profits it would bring. With that, she could make herself and Christine a real home. “Dillon, we’ll fix it up.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
Hayley laughed softly. “Sure it is,” she persisted, her artist’s eye already seeing the potential beneath the disastrously decorated interior, even if he couldn’t begin to. Whether Dillon could see it or not, this was the kind of house in just the kind of place that Hayley had always dreamed of living in. If only this were hers, she would’ve really arrived. It irked her that Dillon took for granted what she wanted most. And it baffled her that he was so disinterested in this kind of life that he hadn’t even bothered to see the house he was buying.
She knew if she’d seen the pictures of the exterior of the majestic two-story Colonial on the serene, tree-lined drive she would’ve broken land speed records getting here! And to know it was hers…all hers. That would be heaven.
Well, Dillon might not care much for this kind of well-to-do suburban life-style, but she did. And she was going to enjoy every second she was here. Just as she would use the profits they made on the sale of the house for the down payment on a home for herself and Christine.
It wouldn’t be nearly as grand as Dillon’s home, of course. But it would be theirs. And it would be loved and cared for, by both herself and Christine.
“You’ll feel differently about this house once it’s cleaned up and redecorated,” Hayley promised as Dillon continued to scowl at their surroundings. She could envision it now—with plush carpeting and freshly painted walls, plenty of sunlight pouring in…
“Don’t try and humor me, Hayley,” Dillon retorted, unappeased. “This place ranks with some of the tackiest places in the eastern hemisphere. And I oughta know—for the last twenty years I lived in them.”
“Hello!” a chirpy voice called. A tall slim woman with cropped dark brown hair stepped through the door.
“Hayley, meet my sister, Marge. The genius who selected this place.”
Marge strode forward to give him a quick hug. “I knew you’d be overwhelmed,” she said, smoothing down the fabric of her green plaid skirt and coordinating turtleneck sweater. “Which is precisely why I didn’t send you any pictures except of the outside.”
Which Hayley admitted to herself didn’t look too bad. The exterior had already been painted a gleaming white, with dark pine green shutters and a glossy black front door.
“What in blazes happened here?” Dillon demanded.
“Look, Dillon, this place does have its advantages,” Hayley interjected.
“Such as?”
“An excellent floor plan, spacious rooms, a large yard with plenty of trees and beds for flowers in a wonderful neighborhood.” It was a great place to raise Christine.
Marge smiled at Hayley, pleased someone had seen what she had in the place. “Hey, thanks.” She paused as the sound of a baby’s soft nonsensical chatter echoed through the first floor.
“Oh, that’s my baby, Christine. She’s in the stroller in the next room. She fell asleep while Dillon was showing me around, and we left her in there so as not to disturb her with our chatter.
Marge smiled. “How old is she?”
“Eleven months, last week.”
“Would you mind if I went in to see her?”
“Actually, you could do me a favor and wheel her in here.”
Dillon and Hayley picked up where they left off. “If the mess bothers you, why didn’t you demand they at least clean it up first?” Hayley asked Dillon.
“Marge said I should take it as is and get another five percent off the already low purchase price, rather than pay the bank to oversee the cleaning of it. At the time the decision made sense.” Dillon grimaced. “Now I don’t know.”
“Marge was right,” Hayley agreed. She looked at the sofa and saw how sturdily it was built. The crushed red velvet could be removed. So could the black tassel fringe. “This way you can sort through everything yourself, figure out what’s usable.”
“For what? Starting a bonfire?”
Hayley grinned. “You’d be surprised what recovering a sofa can do. Besides, you’re going to need plenty of furniture. This place is huge.”
“Forty-five hundred square feet,” Dillon remarked proudly.
“And don’t worry about the decor,” she assured him as they continued to walk around shoulder-to-shoulder. “That too, can be fixed.” Hayley stopped and turned to face him. She had to tilt her head back to see his face. Both his height and their closeness were disconcerting to her. As was her potent reaction to his attractiveness. Every time she was near him, her heart beat a little faster, her senses got a little sharper, the loneliness she’d felt since Hank’s death became more acute. “Not much of a visionary, are you?” she teased, wishing all the while he weren’t quite so handsome and intelligent and kind.
“Not when it comes to domestic stuff,” Dillon admitted.
Deciding she’d looked into his dark blue eyes quite long enough, Hayley turned away from Dillon once again. “Well, at least it’s got the most important feature built-in,” she remarked as she checked out the heavy, moth-eaten drapes.
“Indoor heating?” Dillon hazarded a droll guess.
“Two master bedroom suites with their own bathrooms. That’ll give us both maximum privacy. We won’t have to see each other running around in our pajamas.”
Briefly Dillon felt disappointed. “Well, as long as you’re sure I haven’t made the biggest mistake of my life investing my life savings in this dump,” he said dryly, “I guess all’s well.”
“It’s not as bad as you think it is,” Hayley said.
“Come on, Hayley, don’t patronize me.” Dillon stopped in front of the fieldstone hearth in the living room. “Even I know a little paint and elbow grease can’t fix this place.”
Hayley grinned, not disagreeing. “So we’ll start from scratch.”
