What's A Housekeeper To Do? / Tipping the Waitress with Diamonds. Nina Harrington
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She would be in charge of his mobile phone during the hours he was writing, take messages and make the decision as to whether to interrupt him or not depending on what messages came through from his Sydney business.
There were a few lines about how to deal with the work crew, but he mostly wanted to handle that for himself.
‘That all seems very reasonable.’ Lally glanced up.
‘I may ask for other duties as time progresses. Once the crew begins to get the apartments up to speed, I may send you in to clean them ready for occupation.’
‘I’ll be glad to do that.’ Lally wanted to work hard for him. ‘I like to keep busy. The task doesn’t matter, just so long as I’m occupied.’
Had she made herself sound boring?
Why would it matter if you had, Latitia? You’re his housekeeper. You don’t have to be interesting, just productive and helpful.
‘I’m good at multi-tasking through phone calls.’ Lally’s phone usually ran hot with calls and text messages. Yet, in the beaded bag at her feet, her phone was still and silent. The contact from her family had all but stopped since Lally had realised she was going to have to go outside normal channels to look for a job.
A man in a hard hat strode across the courtyard towards them. He stopped just short of their table. ‘Morning, Mr Travers. Sorry to interrupt, but I’m ready to discuss these plans any time you are.’ He gestured to the clipboard in his other hand. ‘The crew should be in this morning to start the work to get that swimming pool up to speed too. They’ll have to drain it, to do the work to turn it into a heated pool, but the water’s too far gone to fix by shocking it with chlorine and balancing agents, so you’re not losing anything on that score.’
Cam glanced towards the building. ‘What other plans are on for today?’
‘Makes the most sense to strip all the apartments at once, so that’s what we’ll be doing.’ The man’s gaze shifted to Lally and lingered. ‘We, eh, you don’t need any of the other apartments until all the work is done, so this’ll streamline the process.’
‘Thank you.’ The words emerged in a deeper than usual cadence. Cam frowned and then said, ‘Let me introduce you. Jordan Hayes, this is my housekeeper, Lally Douglas. Lally, meet my site manager.’
The man stuck out a hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’ Lally shook his hand, reclaimed her own, and got to her feet. ‘I’ll leave you both to your discussion. I’d like to get started on my workload.’ Her gaze shifted to the breakfast table. ‘I’ll clear this away once I’ve settled my belongings inside.’
Lally slipped away before Cam could think of anything to say in response, and then the site manager spoke and Cam forced his thoughts onto the work here.
Cam didn’t want to examine the tight feeling that had invaded his chest when Lally had slipped her hand into the other man’s grip. If that reaction had been possessive, Cam had no right to it. His mouth tightened. He did his best to relax his expression as he spoke to the manager. ‘We’ll go into my office and talk there. It will be a bit quieter.’
Perhaps if he tucked himself away in there after this talk—focused on the property development, checked in with his Sydney office for the morning and then attacked his writing—he would get his thoughts off fixating on a certain brand-new, temporarily employed housekeeper.
For the truth was she had looked far too good when she’d arrived this morning, pulling a bunch of suitcases along behind her while her hips swayed and her legs ate up the ground beneath her feet in long strides. Cam had noticed how good she looked, far too much.
It was one thing to do such minor and insignificant things as notice the shape of her hands, he told himself, but that noticing had to stop.
Cam led the way into his office, the site manager behind him.
He would put Lally Douglas right out of his mind and not think about her again until lunchtime.
It wasn’t as though he couldn’t control his mild attraction to her. How ridiculous would that be?
CHAPTER THREE
‘YOU’RE quite sure you’re okay, Aunt Edie?’ Lally had her mobile phone jammed between her shoulder and her ear. It felt right there, and so it should. Usually she spent a lot of her day with a phone in that exact position, talking with one relative or another while she went about her work and various family members checked in with her.
Today she’d had to phone Auntie herself; she had only received a couple of text messages all morning, mostly from two of her teenage cousins who’d recently got their first-ever mobile phones.
Of course, she’d been kept busy with calls and a few text messages coming in to Cam’s mobile. It felt a little intimate to take all his calls and messages. What if a woman phoned?
And what if the phone he gave her was purely for business and he had another one for his social life? Lots of people did that.
Right. Why was Lally fixating on Cam’s social life, anyway? She should be fixating on her family’s silence. Lally had kept so close to all her family in the past. It felt unsettling now not to hear from them much.
‘You’re working an outside job,’ she muttered. ‘They probably don’t want to call and disturb that.’
‘Beg pardon, dear?’
‘Oh, sorry, Auntie. It was nothing; I was just talking to myself.’ She was talking to Auntie, who seemed quite happy to talk, so what was Lally worrying about anyway?
Lally whisked eggs in a bowl and quickly poured the results over a selection of cooked vegetables in a heated pan on the stove. ‘Promise me you’re well, Auntie. You’re taking all your meds? You’ve got Nova coming over to sort them out for you for the start of each day? Because I could drive over at night during my time off.’
‘I’m fine, Lally. Nova comes every day, but even if she didn’t I could cope. You just enjoy your work out there in the world where you might meet—’ Her aunt coughed. ‘We all think you’ll do a very good job, just as you always do, dear.’
‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’ And Lally did. She was being quite silly to feel displaced. For heaven’s sake, she’d only been at the new job for half a day. By the end of the week she might be getting so many calls and messages from her family that her new boss would be quite angry with her, if he didn’t see that she always kept working throughout those calls and messages, hard and at speed.
And, of course, she would put answering his mobile first.
Lally had learned a long time ago to multitask. Cameron seemed to live that way too. It was something they had in common.
What you have in common is that he’s the boss and you’re the employee, Lally. Try to remember that!
‘Shouldn’t you be focusing on your new job this morning, Lally?’ Auntie asked the words into the silence, almost as though she’d read Lally’s mind.
‘I am.’ Lally glanced around the kitchen. Cam had left no mess, so it had been easy to give the whole area a deep clean. Now Lally sprinkled fresh, chopped herbs into the frittata and turned it down to heat through.
With a light salad, that would take care of their lunch, and this afternoon she’d see about their dinner. So far she’d cleaned most of the rooms, settled her things into the room across the small hall from Cameron’s bedroom, looked over the pantry supplies, made a list of things she would need to buy soon and organised this meal.
And had taken Cameron’s messages. None of them had sounded unbearably urgent, though the content of many of them from his Sydney office had brought it home to Lally that Cameron truly dealt in big dollars.
Lally prepared the salad with cherry tomatoes, lettuce, mushroom slices and slivers of avocado mixed with a tangy dressing; that job was