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.”

Jefferson remembered how even the lock on his office had not stopped her. “She stood outside my office while mopping the floor and polishing the door handle, chattering about her Sam. Husband. Mickey and Dorian. Children. Sylvester and Tweety. Bird and cat.”

Suddenly it occurred to Jefferson, he was being the chatty one. This stranger standing at his door—whom he had absolutely no intention of hiring—certainly did not need all of this information.

Maybe it was a sign of too much time alone—three failed housekeepers not withstanding—that he just kept talking.

“I barricaded myself inside my office for three days, but Clem showed no sign of moving on to other parts of the house. To avoid discussion, I finally shot a generous check and a nice note about how I really didn’t need her anymore under the door. It achieved exactly what I hoped—blessed silence.”

He had managed to stop talking before he revealed Clementine’s real fatal flaw. She had one divorced stepdaughter and three single nieces, all of whom she thought he should meet.

Brook’s lips twitched. That hint of a smile deepened Jefferson’s awareness of her as what he wanted least in his house: the distraction of an attractive woman. But that tentative smile also made him aware of the fine lines of tension in her—around her shoulders and neck, around her eyes, around her lips.

“It must have been hard to fire a friend of your grandmother’s.”