Page 38 of Catch a Kiwi
Roman
She didn’t answer straight away, but took a bite of curry first. I’d swear she was thinner than she’d been last week. How hard had she been working? After she’d swallowed her bite, she said, “Funny. That’s what I was about to say toyou.Or more like—where do you get off?”
“Really,” I said. “You don’t think you need to tell me why you decided to take another job when you’re meant to be spending a full day cleaning my house?”
“What?” She blinked at me. “You’re kidding.”
“No,” I said. “Not. I employed you to clean my place, not to?—”
She set her fork down, put her palms on the bar top, and said, “Let’s get this straight. I agreed to clean out your house and your garden, and to get any damage repaired that I couldn’t manage myself. You have every right to tell me how to do that. You have no right to tell me whether I can work for somebody else when I’mnotdoing that. Did I miss the exclusivity clause in my nonexistent contract? I worked eight hours at your house today and eight hours yesterday before I came here. Delilah will have made dinner for you, too. If you want me to send you a time accounting, I will.”
I said, “I’m not?—”
Did she rush in to take back any of that, like you’d expect from a cheerful, caring sort of person? She did not. She said, “At least wait to see how far we’ve progressed on the house before you decide that I’m, what? Shirking? I’ll tell you how far. As far as it’s possible to progress, that’s how far. And I was planning on working on it tomorrow and Sunday, too, because you don’t get weekends off on paying for your accommodation, but you may just have discouraged me. If you want forty hours, I’ll give you forty hours and stop. So if what you wanted was to get it done slower, congratulations.”
I sighed. “Eat your curry.”
“I will when I want to.” I stared at her, and she said, “All right, I want to,” and did.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. She looked at me, clearly disbelieving. “Right,” I went on. “I’ll explain. I don’t think you should be working this hard when you’ve been injured, and it drives me mad to think about it. I said three weeks. Why the hell can’t you take three weeks and heal?”
“You’re yelling,” she said.
“I’m not yelling. I never yell. I’m forceful.”
“Loudly forceful,” she muttered, and kept working on her salmon.
“Look,” I said, in a … less forceful tone, “if you need me to pay you a wage so you can afford to stay at the house and still pay me for the ute, tell me. In fact, I should be doing that anyway. D’you know what I’d be paying anybody else? Do I need to mention again that I’m a pretty well-off fella?”
“I will kill Delilah,” she said. “Tell me all this isn’t coming from her. This wasn’t just chance, was it, your stopping in here? You felt you needed to come in yourself and … and stake your claim, or something bizarre like that. Wow. You’re obviously not unhealthily possessive at all. For the record—not OK with me. Absolutely not.” She forked up another bite of salmon and looked much too composed for my liking. The woman had been around the block. She might look delicate, but there was steel under the skin. Unfortunately, I was a fan of steel.
“Or there could be nothing unhealthy about it,” I said. “Could be that I’m a decent bloke, and I wanted you and Delilah to have a chance to heal after you got hurt on my section. And not working God knows how long on top of what you’re putting in for me.”
“Four hours, five days a week,” she said. “Delivering plates of food to lovely people. Not exactly onerous. And you’re not fooling me at all with that ‘decent bloke’ thing. You keep saying that you owe me something because we rolled our van down your hill, as if I don’t know it’s exactly the opposite. You haven’t made that much money being stupid.”
“Right,” I said. “It can’t be kindness. What’s my motive, then?”
She sighed. “If I say it’s because you want to sleep with me, I sound full of myself. But I can’t think of any other reason. I keep forgetting I’m not that attractive now. All right. You’re weirdly kind, but the possessive thing is still a hard no.Which is why you’re not paying me, not when we’re staying there for free.”
“You’re not that attractive? You’re joking. And me? Kind? Here’s a thought foryou.Women normally want to sleep withme.”
First time she hadn’t looked stroppy tonight. In fact, she laughed. “Well, here we are, then. Both immune.”
“Yeh,” I said. “Here we are.”Drop it,I told myself, knowing I probably wouldn’t, even though she was the wrong woman. Too prickly, too guarded, and all wrong for a fling, because despite all those walls, I knew I’d never get enough. Just too many … parts of her to discover. Too many facets, so you’d keep wanting to turn her to see all of them.
Which wasn’t sexual, except, yes, you’d want to keep turning her there, too. Touching her. Getting through that reserve and finding out what was beneath it, because I had a feeling there was heaps beneath it, and I wanted to see and know it all.
But if she was wrong for a fling, she was obviously wrong for more than that, because she didn’t want a relationship and neither did I. I took another swallow of beer and reminded myself of that.
Summer
Still way too intense here, and I couldn’t figure out why. Why my heart was beating like this. Why my cheeks were getting hotter. It wasn’t anything he’d said, not really. It was the way he looked at me, the power that came off him even when he was being casual. I was so off-balance.
“Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace,” I told him, and possibly myself. “That’s the DalaiLama. I figured Quote Wars were next, so I got my entry in early.”
“Got me there,” he said. “You realize you’re stroppy, right?”
“I am not stroppy. That means angry, and I’m not angry. I’m focusing on the positive these days, haven’t you noticed? It also means argumentative, and I’m not argumentative, either.”
