Mills & Boon Christmas Set. Кейт Хьюит

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      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.

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