Playboy Bachelors: Remodelling the Bachelor

“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 with groceries, dishes and small appliances,” he qualified.

“All right, then—” Janice began to pivot on her heel.

“But I’m just curious about one thing.”

She stopped in her tracks, waiting for the shoe to drop. “Go ahead.”

“Why isn’t she in preschool, or nursery school, or whatever it is that they call it these days?”

Janice had her own philosophy about that. She believed that the first few years of life should be spent around the people who love you. She’d been farmed out when she was Kelli’s age. Her father couldn’t deal with raising children so she and Gordon had been sent off to day care and left with people before and after school. She’d always promised herself that her own child would be raised differently, that her daughter would never waste a single moment of her life wondering if her parents loved her.

“Kelli’s going into kindergarten this fall. I just wanted to keep her around for as long as possible. She has friends on the block and there’s nothing she could learn in preschool that I can’t cover.”

He nodded, getting the feeling that he’d intruded. “Fair enough.” He regrouped. “All right then, why don’t you knock it off for today and then come back tomorrow with reinforcements?”

“You’re the boss.” The tone she used had him sincerely doubting she believed that. “You going to go back in there and work now?” she guessed.

It was getting close to noon. “After I go out to get something to eat since you’ve taken away my stove.” He looked at the barren area where his stove had once stood. She hadn’t asked him for help, the way he’d assumed she would. “How did you manage that, anyway?”

“I used a dolly and a ramp and I walked it across the floor.”

“How?”

She grinned. “You move each side one at a time. First right, then left, then right and so on until you’re across the room.”

He and his brothers had always subscribed to the brute force method. “How did you get it on the truck?” he asked.