…” He closed the album carefully and placed it gently back on the coffee table. Then he stood there not saying a word. Just thinking.
“So.” She cleared her throat. “Should we talk about how this is going to work? What you can do here for one hundred hours?”
His eyes bored into her and triggered a temperature spike. “I sense you’ve been giving it some thought?”
She crossed to the kitchen and took up the sheet of notepaper she’d prepared. “I made a list.”
His lips twisted. “Really—of what?”
“Of all the things wrong with the building. Things that you can fix in one hundred hours.”
The laundry. The elevator. The floors. The buzzer …
His eyebrows rose as he read down the page. “Long list.”
“It’s a bad building.”
His long lashes practically obscured his eyes, they narrowed so far. “So why do you live here?”
Her stomach shriveled into a prune under his scrutiny. “Because I can afford it. Because it’s close to the parks.” Not that she’d visited those in a long time. But it was why she’d chosen this building originally.
He continued reading the list. “Just one problem.”
“Why did I know there’d be a ‘just’?”
He ignored her. “The judge’s decree is firm on me not outsourcing any of this service. It has to be by my own hand. Most of this list calls for tradesmen.”
She stared at him. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d actually follow the order. You struck me as a corner-cutter.”
“Not at all.”
She matched his glare. “The front-door buzzer’s still faulty.”
“That’s not about cutting corners—or costs,” he said just as she was about to accuse him of precisely that.
“What is it, then?”
He folded his arms across his chest, highlighting its vast breadth. “It’s asset strategy.”
Her snort was unladylike in the extreme. “Is your strategy to let the building and everyone in it crumble to dust? If so, then you’re right on target.”
Was that the tiniest hint of color at his collar? He laid the list down on the table. “I’ve accepted the terms of the order. I’ll see it through. My way.”
“So what can you do? What do you do?”
His grunt was immediate. “I do a lot of paperwork. I sign things. Spend money.”
“Just not here.”
He ignored that. “I’m in the information industry.”
Tori threw her hands up. “Well, what’s that going to be useful for?”
It took the flare of his pupils to remind her how offensive he might find that. And then she wondered why she cared all about offending him. “I mean, here … in my apartment.”
“Actually, I have an idea. It relates to your birds.”
“The falcons?”
“Urban raptors are a big deal on Manhattan. There are a number of webcams set up across the city, beaming out live images to the rest of the world. Kind of a virtual ecotourism. For those who are interested.”
The way he said it made it perfectly clear of how little interest they were to him.
“I guess. I was just doing it for me.” And in some ways she’d enjoyed keeping the peregrine falcon pair a special thing. A private thing. Which was probably selfish. The whole world should be able to see the beauty of nature. Wasn’t that what her photography was all about? “A webcam, you think?”
“And a website. One’s pointless without the other.”
Flutters fizzed up inside her like champagne and the strangeness of it only made her realize how long it had been since something had really excited her. A website full of her images, full of her beautiful birds. For everyone to see. She knew about the other falcon locations in New York but hadn’t thought for a moment she might ever be able to do something similar in Morningside.
“You can design a website?”
His expression darkened. “Sanmore’s mailboy can design a simple website. As can half the fifth graders on Manhattan. It’s no big deal.”
Not for him, maybe. She turned her mind to the ledge. “I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to set a camera up on the ledge, focused on the nest box. If anything of interest happens, it’ll probably happen there.”
“How can you be sure they’ll use the box?” he asked.
“I can’t. But I’m encouraging them down every day. So I’m optimistic.”
His eyes narrowed. “Encouraging?”
Might as well tell it as it was. “Luring. They’re usually pigeon eaters, but mice are easier to trap. This building has no shortage.”
His lips thinned. “All buildings have vermin.”
Her laugh was raw. “Not this many.”
He stared at her, considering. “Excuse me a moment.” Then he stepped into her small kitchen and spoke in quiet tones into the cell phone she’d held for him the week before. When he returned, his expression was impassive. “You may need to find a new source of bird bait.”
She frowned. “What did you just do?”
“I took care of the vermin problem.”
“With one phone call?”
“I have good staff.”
One phone call. It could have been solved so long before this. “Good staff but not residential agents, I’d say. We’ve been reporting the mice for eighteen months.”
He thought about that. “I trust our agent to take care of code issues.”
“This is the same agent you trusted with my door selection?”
His eyes shifted back to the hideously inappropriate door and she felt a mini rush of satisfaction that she’d finally scored a point. But snarking at him wasn’t going to be a fun way to spend the next hundred hours. And as much as she’d like to make him suffer just a little bit for the torn carpet and clunky pipes and glacially slow elevator, she had to endure it, too. And she had a feeling he would give as good as he got.
“Anyway,” she said. “I’m sure raw meat will suffice in the unlikely event I run out of fresh food.”
“Then
