now I have four. Four is very bad.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, not knowing how else to reply to his crisp stating of facts.
“Don’t be. I’m counting on you to solve three of those four problems for me. You understand this is a live-in position?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. My first problem is the yard. Marion tells me you used to have the prettiest yard in the Mill Creek.”
“I…” What did one say to that? She settled for, “People seemed to like it.”
“She gave me the address. I drove by yesterday to take a look. It was very nice. Not too fussy, not too…regimented. Big, lush, greening up already, even this time of year. You could do something like that, here?”
“Of course. But you should know, I don’t have any formal training in landscaping—”
“I don’t care,” he said, extending a hand in the direction of the front yard, and Audrey took off in that direction with him following her. “I’ve hired three landscape architects so far. I haven’t liked any plan they’ve shown me, and they’ve wasted a great deal of my time. You planned and planted the yard at your former home? And maintained it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I want something like that. Something…normal looking. Not regimented. Not odd. Normal and green. Now, I want us to work together like this. I don’t want to be bothered with details. I want you to handle problems on their own as they come up. Give me a plan to look at, a budget to approve, and then do whatever it takes to make it happen. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said, trying not to sound scared out of her mind at the fact that three landscape architects hadn’t been able to please him and yet he expected her to do so, without any of the formal training they had.
And at the way the man issued orders.
Not in a mean way, just…as if he assumed every word would be obeyed, every expectation met without question.
They made it to the front yard, and he moved quickly, almost soundlessly in front of her, grabbing her by the arms to steady her when her own momentum would have propelled her forward.
“Sorry,” he said, giving her an exasperated smile, letting her go and stepping back immediately.
Up that close, she thought he definitely wasn’t old.
There’d been a flash of an impression of power and the firm, muscular build that few men had once they hit middle age.
And the eyes, with those little, crinkly lines at their corners…Maybe they’d led her to believe he was older than he actually was.
Was he even forty?
Audrey looked up at him, feeling every one of her thirty-nine years and wishing all the more that he was sixty and balding.
She wasn’t doing this again, wasn’t throwing herself at a man, thinking it was the way to forget all her problems, to solve them, to make everything right again.
He looked nearly as taken aback as she felt and went still for a second once he’d let go of her, as if he might have actually lost track of the orders he was firing off for a moment.
“Sorry,” he said again, recovering before she did. “I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself.”
He looked down toward her feet. There, mere inches in front of her, was a narrow, deep hole dug into his front lawn.
“This is my second problem,” he said.
“A hole in the ground?” She was lost.
“A number of them, all over the place. You really have to be careful walking out here. I don’t want you to break a bone. The last landscaper did. He’s trying to sue me right now. One more thing I have no time for.”
“Oh,” Audrey said. “I’ll be careful. You have some kind of…animal problem?”
“A dog,” he said, as if the mere word implied something vile. “It digs.”
Audrey worked to keep a straight face.
A mere dog could get the best of this perfectly controlled, very powerful man?
So he was human, after all.
He looked as if he knew she was thinking of laughing in his face and didn’t believe for a minute she’d actually do it, that anyone would.
Audrey wiped every trace of amusement from her face, and then watched in amazement as his own mouth started to twitch; he shook his head and swore so softly she wasn’t sure she could even make out the words.
“Yes, I know, bested by a dog. I realize how ridiculous that is. Nevertheless, this is the state in which I find myself. I despise the dog. The dog despises me. We have been waging war for weeks, and the dog is winning. You have no idea how much it pains me to admit this—”
“Oh, I think I do,” Audrey said.
Once again, the ends of his mouth threatened to curl upward a bit. She could almost feel him battling the impulse, before tamping it down and banishing it completely.
He cleared his throat and went on. “Marion also said you had a very well-behaved dog.”
“We had a wonderful dog. She died two years ago.”
“She didn’t dig up things in your very well-designed yard?” he asked.
“She had a small corner of it where she was allowed to bury her bones. Would that be acceptable? One small, out-of-the-way spot where such things are allowed?”
He sighed. “If it’s absolutely necessary.”
“I think it probably is,” Audrey said.
“Fine,” he said, as if he’d just agreed to millions of dollars in concessions on a contract he was negotiating. “The dog belongs to my daughter, Peyton. She loves the dog, much more than she loves me at the moment. I’m not proud of it, but I’ll admit, I tried to buy her affections with the dog and to some extent it worked. She’s very happy to come here now. The problem is her mother only allows her to come for a weekend here and there, and the dog is here all the time. Because Peyton’s mother decreed that the dog could not go to her house with Peyton. I think just to torment me even more than my ex-wife already has, and if that’s the case, she’s succeeded beautifully because the dog has wreaked havoc on my entire home life.”
“I’m so sorry,” Audrey said, surprised he’d admitted to so many of his own weaknesses—the child he indulged and the ex-wife who’s needling still got to him—so forthrightly. Most men wouldn’t have, would have relished seeming invincible. And there was something in his manner that Audrey imagined could be thoroughly intimidating but she found oddly amusing.
And there was something else. The distinct impression that while the situation at hand was annoying, he knew he would triumph in the end. As if it was a secret he knew, one that kept him calm and able to deal
