sensed his presence a moment before she retired the sledgehammer. Every single muscle in her body ached from exhaustion. One more swing and she would have dropped the hammer. Her hands couldn’t hold on to the handle for another second.
She glanced up in his direction just as she wiped more perspiration from her brow with the back of her wrist. He was looking at the rubble.
“Pretty awful, isn’t it?” she commented, guessing at what had to be going through his brain. Right about now, Zabelle probably couldn’t envision that this chaos would, in the end, give way to something really nice.
Philippe nodded. “Yeah, that’s why I’m here.”
She didn’t follow him and wondered if eccentricity ran in the family. His mother had all but commandeered her last week when they’d first met, absorbing much of her afternoon. The woman seemed absolutely taken with her daughter and since both Kelli and Lily shared a love of art, she had seen that as a good thing.
But there was no denying that Lily Moreau was not your ordinary woman by any stretch of the imagination. She took getting used to. And indulging.
She wouldn’t have said that about Philippe, but then, she really didn’t know him that well. One prolonged shopping trip did not exactly make her privy to his soul.
“All right,” Janice replied, drawing out the words and hoping that Philippe would fill in the blanks.
He picked up a kitchen towel that was tossed on the table. Rather than offer it to her, he wiped away the line of perspiration that had plastered her hair to her forehead.
His hand moved in short, sure strokes along her forehead.
Their eyes met. He took a breath, realizing that his brain had vacated the premises. “I think I made a mistake.”
“On your work?” she guessed. Having him this close was scrambling her insides. Either that or there was a sudden lack of air in the room.
He moved his head slowly from side to side, still gazing into her eyes. They were almost a hypnotic blue, he thought. “On yours.”
“You might find you need to write in code, but talking in it is wasted on me. You’re going to have to explain what you just said.”
He seemed surprised. Belatedly, he dropped his hand and the towel to his side. “You know about binary code?”
She didn’t see what the big deal was. After all, it wasn’t as if she’d just solved the space/time continuum problem.
“I’ve got three-quarters of a B.A.,” she reminded him, although she really didn’t expect him to remember. Her educational background had been on her résumé and references.
To her surprise, Philippe did remember. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how does someone get just three-quarters of a degree?”
That was a sore point for her, but one she needed to face. “You do it by dropping out in your senior year before taking any tests.”
So near and yet so far, he thought, shaking his head. “If you were that close, why didn’t you stay?” It made no sense to him. He went to lean against a counter and stopped himself just in time. Another second and he would have been sitting on the floor—beside the rubble she had created.
“Because I was going to be that big.” Fingers almost touching, she held them out as far as she could before her very thin, very flat stomach. “I was pregnant at the time with Kelli.”
“Why didn’t you go back once she was born?”
She managed to hold at bay the sadness that always came whenever she thought of that period of her life. “Because by then, I was a widow and Kelli needed to live somewhere other than inside a cardboard box.” She took a breath. This didn’t have anything to do with the reason she was hired. She had no idea why she was playing true confessions with this man.
“Still, I think you should go back and get your degree.”
“I intend to one day, when life gets a little more comfortable.”
He wondered at her definition of comfortable. Philippe reminded himself of the reason he’d come in search of her and scanned the gutted room. From where he stood, it looked close to hopeless. “How much longer?”
She took off her gloves and flexed her hands. Her palms still ached from gripping the sledgehammer. “Until what?”
Philippe turned back to look at her. “Until you’re done.”
“With the kitchen?” She refrained from reminding him that everything had already been spelled out in the contract, including dates. She watched him shifting his weight from foot to foot. He seemed restless.
That made two of them.
“No, done done,” he emphasized. “With everything,” he added when she didn’t answer.
Because she loved her job, Janice worked fast but there was only so much she could do alone. Besides, the job was dependent on other people as well, people who had to get back to her with the necessary items she ordered, like the rock quarry that was going to be delivering the granite slab Philippe had ordered. She couldn’t move ahead and install the sink until the counter arrived. As for the maple cabinets she’d ordered for him, they were due at the beginning of next week. She crossed her fingers mentally, hoping he would approve of them.
“Well, barring any mishaps, if all conditions are a go, I’d say you could have your house back in as little as six to eight weeks.”
Philippe shook his head. “That’s not going to work.”
Uh-oh, here comes trouble. Well, nothing in her life had ever been easy, why start now? She drew herself up and challenged, “Why?”
“Because I can’t work with all this noise. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
A lot of times, people moved into a hotel when she worked on their house. But he looked unreceptive when she made the suggestion. “You could try ear plugs,” she told him. “Or you could try working when I knock off for the day.”
So far, she’d arrived each morning at seven and left by three-thirty. He wasn’t about to set his alarm for three in the morning to work before she arrived and then start again after she left.
He shook his head. “I do my best in the morning.” Janice smiled. So they had that in common. “So do I.”
Philippe thought for a moment. “Can’t you work any faster?”
“I could. If I were twins.” She paused, thinking. There was a way, but it involved a complication. “I could get my brother to work with me.”
As he recalled, she used her brother as a babysitter. “Does he do this kind of thing?”
“Yes.” It was probably his imagination, but she seemed to answer the question a little too quickly, as if she didn’t want to give herself any time to think about it.
“Then get him.” He saw a hesitant look pass over her face. “What? If it’s a matter of more money, I’m sure we can arrive at a figure that’s mutually satisfying.”
“No, it’s not that.” She’d quoted a price and she was going to stand by it. With Gordon helping, the job would get done faster so that balanced things out. “Gordon’s my babysitter. If he’s working here with me, I’m going to have to bring Kelli along as well, at least until I can find someone else.”
It was a little unusual, but then, nothing about J. D. Wyatt was usual. “So?”
She looked at him for a long moment, trying to discern if he was pulling her leg. “You wouldn’t mind?”
“No. She seemed like a nice enough, quiet little girl.” He thought of Kelli’s love for painting. “We could set something up for her in the family room—the part that hasn’t been invaded