Two
As Joshua followed Danielle down the hall, he regretted not having a live-in housekeeper. An elderly British woman would come in handy at a time like this. She would probably find Danielle and her baby to be absolutely delightful. He, on the other hand, did not.
No, on the contrary, he felt invaded. Which was stupid. Because he had signed on for this. Though, he had signed on for it only after he had seen his father’s ad. After he had decided the old man needed to be taught a lesson once and for all about meddling in Joshua’s life.
It didn’t matter that his father had a soft heart or that he was coming from a good place. No, what mattered was the fact that Joshua was tired of being hounded every holiday, every time he went to dinner with his parents, about the possibility of him starting a family.
It wasn’t going to happen.
At one time, he’d thought that would be his future. Had been looking forward to it. But the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all clearly hadn’t caused the loss.
He was happy enough now to be alone. And when he didn’t want to be alone, he called a woman, had her come spend a few hours in his bed—or in the back of his truck, he wasn’t particular. Love was not on his agenda.
“This is a big house,” she said.
Danielle sounded vaguely judgmental, which seemed wrong, all things considered. Sure, he was the guy who had paid a woman to pose as his temporary fiancée. And sure, he was the man who lived in a house that had more square footage than he generally walked through in a day, but she was the one who had responded to an ad placed by a complete stranger looking for a temporary fiancée. So, all things considered, he didn’t feel like she had a lot of room to judge.
“Yes, it is.”
“Why? I mean, you live here alone, right?”
“Because size matters,” he said, ignoring the shifting, whimpering sound of the baby in her arms.
“Right,” she said, her tone dry. “I’ve lived in apartment buildings that were smaller than this.”
He stopped walking, then he turned to face her. “Am I supposed to feel something about that? Feel sorry for you? Feel bad about the fact that I live in a big house? Because trust me, I started humbly enough. I choose to live differently than my parents. Because I can. Because I earned it.”
“Oh, I see. In that case, I suppose I earned my dire straits.”
“I don’t know your life, Danielle. More important, I don’t want to know it.” He realized that was the first time he had used her first name. He didn’t much care.
“Great. Same goes. Except I’m going to be living in your house, so I’m going to definitely...infer some things about your life. And that might give rise to conversations like this one. And if you’re going to be assuming things about me, then you should be prepared for me to respond in kind.”
“I don’t have to do any such thing. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the employer, you’re the employee. That means if I want to talk to you about the emotional scars of my childhood, you had better lie back on my couch and listen. Conversely, if I do not want to hear about any of the scars of yours, I don’t have to. All I have to do is throw money at you until you stop talking.”
“Wow. It’s seriously the job offer I’ve been waiting for my entire life. Talking I’m pretty good at. And I don’t do a great job of shutting up. That means I would be getting money thrown at me for a long, long time.”
“Don’t test me, Ms. Kelly,” he said, reverting back to her last name, because he really didn’t want to know about her childhood or what brought her here. Didn’t want to wonder about her past. Didn’t want to wonder about her adulthood either. Who the father of her baby was. What kind of situation she was in. It wasn’t his business, and he didn’t care.
“Don’t test me, Ms. Kelly,” she said, in what he assumed was supposed to be a facsimile of his voice.
“Really?” he asked.
“What? You can’t honestly expect to operate at this level of extreme douchiness and not get called to the carpet on it.”
“I expect that I can do whatever I want, since I’m paying you to be here.”
“You don’t want me to dress up as a teddy bear and vacuum, do you?”
“What?”
She shifted her weight, moving the baby over to one hip and spreading the other arm wide. “Hey, man, some people are into that. They like stuffed animals. Or rather, they like people dressed as stuffed animals.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s a relief.”
“I like women,” he said. “Dressed as women. Or rather, undressed, generally.”
“I’m not judging. Your dad put an ad in the paper for some reason. Clearly he really wants you to be married.”
“Yes. Well, he doesn’t understand that not everybody needs to live the life that he does. He was happy with a family and a farmhouse. But none of the rest of us feel that way, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“So none of you are married?”
“One of us is. The only brother that actually wanted a farmhouse too.” He paused in front of the door at the end of the hall. He was glad he had decided to set this room aside for the woman who answered the ad. He hadn’t known she would come with a baby in tow, but the fact that she had meant he really, really wanted her out of earshot.
“Is this it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, pushing the door open.
When she looked inside the bedroom, her jaw dropped, and Joshua couldn’t deny that he took a small amount of satisfaction in her reaction. She looked... Well, she looked amazed. Like somebody standing in front of a great work of art. Except it was just a bedroom. Rather a grand one, he had to admit, down to the details.
There was a large bed fashioned out of natural, twisted pieces of wood with polished support beams that ran from floor to ceiling and retained the natural shape they’d had in the woods but glowed from the stain that had been applied to them. The bed made the whole room look like a magical forest. A little bit fanciful for him. His own bedroom had been left more Spartan. But, clearly, Danielle was enchanted.
And he shouldn’t care.
“I’ve definitely lived in apartments that were smaller than this room,” she said, wrapping both arms around the baby and turning in a circle. “This is... Is that a loft? Like a reading loft?” She was gazing up at the mezzanine designed to look as though it was nestled in the tree branches.
“I don’t know.” He figured it was probably more of a sex loft. But then, if he slept in a room with a loft, obviously he would have sex in it. That was what creative surfaces were for, in his opinion.
“It reminds me of something we had when I was in first grade.” A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “I mean, not me as in at our house, but in my first-grade classroom at school. The teacher really loved books. And she liked for us all to read. So we were able to lie around the classroom anywhere we wanted with a book and—” She abruptly stopped talking, as though she realized exactly what she was doing. “Never mind. You think it’s boring. Anyway, I’m going to use it for a reading loft.”
“Dress like a teddy bear in it, for all I care,” he responded.
“That’s your thing, not mine.”
“Do you have any bags in the car that I can get for you?”
She looked genuinely stunned. “You don’t have to get anything for me.”
It struck him that she thought he was being nice. He didn’t consider the offer particularly nice. It was just what his father had drilled into him from the time he was a boy. If there was a woman and she had a heavy thing to transport, you were no kind of man if you didn’t offer to do the transporting.
“I don’t mind.”
“It’s just one bag,” she said.
That shocked him. She was a woman. A woman with a baby. He was pretty sure most mothers traveled with enough luggage to fill a caravan. “Just one bag.” He had to confirm that.
“Yes,” she returned. “Baggage is another thing entirely. But in terms of bags, yeah, we travel light.”
“Let me get it.” He turned and walked out of the room, frustrated when he heard her footsteps behind him. “I said I would get it.”
“You don’t need to,” she said, following him persistently down the stairs and out toward the front door.
“My car is locked,” she added, and he ignored her as he continued to walk across the driveway to the maroon monstrosity parked there.
He shot her a sideways glance, then looked down at the car door. It hung a little bit crooked, and he lifted up on it hard enough to push it straight, then he jerked it open. “Not well.”
“You’re the worst,” she said, scowling.
He reached into the back seat and saw one threadbare duffel bag, which had to be the bag she was talking about. The fabric strap was dingy, and he had a feeling it used to be powder blue. The zipper was broken and there were four safety pins holding the end of the bulging bag together. All in all, it looked completely impractical.
“Empty all the contents out of this tonight. In the morning, I’m going to use it to fuel a bonfire.”
“It’s the only bag I have.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
“It better be in addition to the fee that I’m getting,” she said, her expression stubborn. “I mean it. If I incur a loss because of you, you better cover it.”
“You have my word that if anything needs to be purchased in order for you to fit in with your surroundings, or in order for me to avoid contracting scabies, it will be bankrolled by me.”
“I don’t have scabies,” she said, looking fierce.
“I didn’t say you did. I implied that your gym bag might.”
“Well,” she said, her cheeks turning red, “it doesn’t. It’s clean. I’m clean.”
He heaved the bag over his shoulder and led the way back to the house, Danielle trailing behind him like an angry wood nymph. That was what she reminded him of, he decided. All pointed angles and spiky intensity. And a supernaturally wicked glare that he could feel boring into the center of his back. Right between his shoulder blades.
This was not a woman who intimidated easily, if at all.
He supposed that was signal enough that he should make an attempt to handle her with care. Not because she needed it, but because clearly nobody had ever made the attempt before. But he didn’t know how. And he was paying her an awful lot to put up with him as he was.
And she had brought a baby into his house.
“You’re going to need some supplies,” he said, frowning. Because he abruptly realized what it meant that she had brought a baby into his house. The bedroom he had installed her in was only meant for one. And there was no way—barring the unlikely reality that she was related to Mary Poppins in some way—that her ratty old bag contained the supplies required to keep both a baby and herself in the kind of comfort that normal human beings expected.
“What kind of supplies?”
He moved quickly through the house, and she scurried behind him, attempting to match his steps. They walked back into the bedroom and he flung the bag on the ground.
“A bed for the baby. Beyond that, I don’t know what they require.”
She shot him a deadly glare, then bent down and unzipped the bag, pulling out a bottle and a can of formula. She tossed both onto the bed, then reached back into the bag and grabbed a blanket. She spread it out on the floor, then set the baby in the center of it.
Then she straightened, spreading her arms wide and slapping her hands back down on her thighs. “Well, this is more than we’ve had for a long time. And yeah, I guess it would be nice to have nursery stuff. But I’ve never had it. Riley and I have been doing just fine on our own.” She looked down, picking at some dirt beneath her fingernail. “Or I guess we haven’t been fine. If we had, I wouldn’t have responded to your ad. But I don’t need more than what I have. Not now. Once you pay me? Well, I’m going to buy a house. I’m going to change things for us. But until then, it doesn’t matter.”
He frowned. “What about Riley’s father? Surely he should be paying you some kind of support.”
“Right. Like I have any idea who he is.” He must have made some kind of facial expression that seemed judgmental, because her face colored and her eyebrows lowered. “I mean, I don’t know how to get in touch with him. It’s not like he left contact details. And I sincerely doubt he left his real name.”
“I’ll call our office assistant, Poppy. She’ll probably know what you need.” Technically, Poppy was his brother Isaiah’s assistant, but she often handled whatever Joshua or Faith needed, as well. Poppy would arrange it so that various supplies were overnighted to the house.
“Seriously. Don’t do anything... You don’t need to do anything.”
“I’m supposed to convince my parents that I’m marrying you,” he said, his tone hard. “I don’t think they’re going to believe I’m allowing my fiancée to live out of one duffel bag. No. Everything will have to be outfitted so that it looks legitimate. Consider it a bonus to your salary.”
She tilted her chin upward, her eyes glittering. “Okay, I will.”
He had halfway expected her to argue, but he wasn’t sure why. She was here for her own material gain. Why would she reduce it? “Good.” He nodded once. “You probably won’t see much of me. I’ll be working a lot. We are going to have dinner with my parents in a couple of days. Until then, the house and the property are yours to explore. This is your house too. For the time being.”
He wasn’t being particularly generous. It was just that he didn’t want to answer questions, or deal with her being tentative about where she might and might not be allowed to go. He just wanted to install her and the baby in this room and forget about them until he needed them as convenient props.
“Really?” Her natural suspicion was shining through again.
“I’m a very busy man, Ms. Kelly,” he said. “I’m not going to be babysitting. Either the child or you.”
And with that, he turned and left her alone.