CHAPTER THREE

      JEFFERSON STONE REGARDED his unwanted visitor. Something shivered along his spine when she said her name. He knew she was lying.

      And she wasn’t very good at lying, either. In fact, she was terrible at it.

      He allowed himself to study her more closely. Brook Nelson—or whoever the hell she really was—was cute as a button. She was dressed in a brightly patterned summer blouse and white shorts. She was a little bit of a thing, slender and not very tall. It looked as if a good wind would pick her up and toss her.

      And yet when her hands had been pressed into his chest, he had been aware of something substantial about her. That little bit of a thing had set off a tingle in him—an awareness—that had been as unwelcome as she was.

      Hard not to be aware of her, when those shorts ended midthigh and showed off quite a bit of her legs.

      Annoyed with himself, Jefferson shook off the thought and continued his study of his housekeeper candidate.

      It just underscored what he already knew: she would not do.

      She had light hair, a few shades darker than blond, but not brown. Golden, like sand he had seen on Kaiteriteri Beach in New Zealand. That hair was cut short, he suspected in a largely unsuccessful effort to make those plump curls behave themselves. They weren’t. They were corkscrewing around her head in a most unruly manner.

      Her eyes were hazel, leaning toward the gold side of that autumn-like combination of golds and greens and browns. She had delicate features and it was probably that scattering of freckles across her nose that made her seem so wholesome, even though she was lying about who she was.

      There was something earnest about her. Despite her youth, and despite the shortness of those shorts, she seemed faintly prim, as if she would be easily shocked by bad words. Which, of course, was part of the reason she would be a very bad fit for him as a housekeeper.

      Because of her size, Jefferson had assumed she was young. But on closer inspection, she looked as if she was in her midtwenties. Still, she was exactly the type you would expect to be peddling cookies for a good cause or wanting to change the world for the better or encouraging attendance at the annual Anslow high school performance of Grease, which would be dreadful.

       And he should know. Because a long time ago, in a different life, he had been cast as the renegade in that very high school play.

      Jefferson shook it off. He did not like reminders of his past life.

      Besides, Brook wasn’t anything like the ideal person he had in his head for this job, which was gray haired, motherly but not chatty, and someone willing to stay out of his way and keep schtum about his life.

      Brook Nelson, in spite of the wholesome exterior and her claims of honesty, was lying about who she was. He needed her gone.

      “Look, Miss, um, Nelson, I’ve gone through three housekeepers in three weeks—”

      “Somebody answered that ad?” she asked disbelievingly.

      “Not exactly,” he had to admit. “That ad was a result of the other failures.”

      The failure was that he had mentioned to Maggie, at the Anslow Emporium, that he was going to need someone.

      He hadn’t anticipated that telling Maggie—whom he had known since he was six—that he needed some help at his house would be like creating a posting in a lonely hearts club rag.

      “Tell me about my three predecessors.”

      He frowned at that. She was a cheeky little thing, wasn’t she? What part of no could she not get? But, since she was immune to slamming doors, why not give her anecdotal evidence of her unsuitability for this position?

      “Okay, the first one was not mature. Mandy, showed up in flip-flops, and had a most irritating way of popping her gum, except when she was texting on her cell phone, which seemed to require her jaw to stop moving. When she had been here approximately three hours, she knocked on my office door to complain that the internet signal was weak from the deck. And then she acted insulted when I suggested I didn’t need her services any longer.”

      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.”