half sister Nell said she thought you might be looking for a new assistant today.”
“Nell Bravo, you mean?”
“That’s the one.”
He frowned, considering. “That was enterprising of Nell.”
Elise could easily lose patience with this guy. “Do you need a new assistant or not?”
Was that a smirk on his face? “Fair enough then, Elise.” The smirk vanished to be replaced by an expression of utter boredom. And then he said in a tone that commanded and dismissed her simultaneously, “Let’s see what you can do.”
He really did piss her off—not that that was a bad thing. Her irritation made her determined to show him he’d be an idiot not to hire her. Because Nellie was right. She was a damn fine typist. But more important, she was a Bravo and a Bravo didn’t let some big, grouchy butthead intimidate her.
“This way.” He turned on his heel and started walking.
She went where he led her, through a fabulous three-story great room, down a hall at the back to a two-story home office with a breathtaking view of the mountains and one entire floor-to-ceiling wall filled with books. The opposite wall was padded, covered in burlap, had a number of bull’s-eye targets hanging from it and was scarily studded with what appeared to be stab marks.
Okay, so maybe he played darts. But stab marks? Surely not...
“Sit here.” He pulled back the high-end leather desk chair in front of a computer with a screen the size of Cleveland.
Her heart pounding wildly, she sat.
He stood way too close behind her. She swallowed hard and pressed her lips together to keep from ordering him to back off. When he reached over her shoulder, she had to steel herself not to flinch as she felt the heat of his big body.
So close, she could smell him. He smelled really good—like cinnamon. She stared at the ropy tendons in his muscled forearm, at the silky brown hair that dusted his tanned skin, at the sheer size of his big hand as he tapped on the keyboard.
A document popped onto the screen.
He withdrew his hand and backed off, moving over so that he stood in her line of sight. “Start a new paragraph.” As the cursor blinked tauntingly at her, he explained, “I’ll use your name as the signal to start and stop. When you hear ‘Elise,’ you will type the next word I say and keep typing every word I utter until I speak your name again. And so on. Are we clear?”
“Crystal.”
He made a grunting sound, as though he doubted that. “Do not speak. Not one word.” He paused, as if expecting her to say something and thus prove she was incapable of following instructions. Fat chance, buddy. When she only waited, he added, “Fake the punctuation. We’ll clean it up in edits. Elise.”
Did he think she wouldn’t be ready? Ha.
He began, “It was a day for killing underlings.” She typed each word as it fell from his mouth. “A day without mercy, the sky a gray wolf, crouched on the land, hungry and unforgiving. The man in the watch cap was waiting for him at the station as agreed Elise.” He said her name so softly, without even a hint of a pause to signal it was coming.
But she was ready. She punched in a period after the word agreed and stopped typing. The room was suddenly totally silent. A strange, hot little shiver raced beneath her skin as she waited, fingers poised on the keyboard, for the sound of her name.
Finally, almost in a whisper, he said, “Not bad, Elise.” And they were off and running again. “The man thought he was safe, thought he understood his place and his function. He assumed he would come through this in one piece as long as he did his job. But no one was safe. It was the nature of the game they played. Jack didn’t want to kill the man. And maybe, if things went as planned, he wouldn’t have to. Too bad things so rarely proceeded as planned...”
Jed went on, his deep voice rising and falling.
Breathing slowly and evenly, Elise had found that calm space she’d learned to inhabit back in Mrs. Clemo’s second period keyboarding class. So few people took keyboarding, even back then. But Elise had, because you never knew when it might come in handy to actually be good at something so basic, something most people nowadays just fumbled their way through.
Elise let his words wash into her, through her, and then pushed them out her fingers as he kept on.
And on. Sometimes his voice was eerily soft—and sometimes he shouted.
She tuned out his unnerving changes in volume and tone and stayed with her task, typing the words as he spoke them, throwing in punctuation wherever his pace and phrasing seemed to indicate it, stopping when she heard her name, and then waiting—calm, ready, silent—until he said her name again.
There was something about typing that just worked for her, that was as effortless as drawing her next breath.
Not that she’d ever want to type for a living. Uh-uh. Too much sitting. For the long haul, she needed a job with variety, a job where she didn’t have to spend all day on her butt.
But Nellie had mentioned a looming deadline, hadn’t she? How long did he have? A few months at the most? Elise could be a typist for three months. If the money was good enough.
About twenty minutes after he started dictating, Jed said her name yet again—and after that, he was silent.
She cast him a quick, questioning glance.
With one big arm across his chest and the other elbow braced on it, he stroked the scruff of beard on his square jaw, a calculating gleam in his eyes. Finally, he spoke. “The typing test is over. Swivel that chair around.” She turned her chair to face him. “Can you go on like that for hours?”
She took a minute to consider the question.
It was a minute too long, apparently, because he muttered impatiently, “You may speak now.”
“Thank you,” she replied with a sarcasm he either didn’t notice or chose to ignore. “I would need a five-minute break every two hours, long enough to stand up and walk around a little.”
“I can accept that.”
“An hour for lunch.”
He scowled as he continued to stroke his rocklike jaw. Apparently, in his world, typists shouldn’t be allowed to waste precious time on food. But then he conceded, “All right. An hour. But you’ll need to be flexible as to which hour. If the story’s flowing, you might have to wait a while to eat.”
“Even with regular five-minute breaks, there have to be limits. No more than five hours at a stretch without an hour-long break.”
A grunt of disapproval escaped him. But then he agreed, “Five hours. All right. The work will be intense and you’ll need to roll with that. I have to get a book out fast and I’ll need you when I need you—which will be ten to twelve hours a day. You will have to live here and you will work six days a week, with Sundays off.”
Live here in his house? God, it sounded awful. But in the end, it was all about
