Boss On Notice. Janet Lee Nye

sweet, to the point. Get out of here before he offers you a ride. She pushed the stroller but he met her at the sidewalk. He squatted to look at Ian.

      “Hey, little man. What big adventure are you off to today? Going to break into a few more houses?”

      “Go! Go! Go!” Ian shouted back.

      “Sounds like a plan.”

      “Sorry,” she said. “Shouting seems to be the only volume he has these days.”

      He stood and smiled at her. “You guys always seem to be on the go.”

      “Yep. That’s us. Busy, busy, busy.”

      He looked at her. Then at the duffels. Then at the street. He rubbed his jaw, the stubble there making a faint scratching noise that went straight through her. She squared her shoulders.

      “Yeah. I should get back to work.”

      Work. Whoa. Wait. What was it that lady had told her on the phone? He was here setting up a cleaning business. She could clean.

      “You’re hiring?”

      He gave her a look. A half smile. “Yeah, but...”

      “Can I apply? I don’t have any experience other than cleaning my own house. But I’m a fast learner. And I’m not afraid of hard work—”

      “Mickie,” he said, cutting off her babble.

      “What?”

      “We are an all-male cleaning company. That’s our gimmick. Good-looking guys cleaning your house.”

      “Oh.” She was too disappointed to say anything else.

      “Sorry.”

      “It’s okay. Nothing ventured and all. Well, I should get going.”

      She could feel him watching her as she navigated down the sidewalk to the street. All male. Weren’t there, like, discrimination laws about stuff like that? She tried to get angry about it but she couldn’t seem to think around the echoes of the scrape of his fingers against the stubble. Her own fingers twitched on the stroller handles. She’d like to run a finger over that stubble.

      “Oh, for the love of Pete. Stop it,” she said to herself. She took a deep breath, held her eyes shut for a second and told herself to let it go. You’ve got way bigger things to think about. Shut it down.

      “Momma?” Ian was staring up at her with that curious look in his eyes. Down the street, there was the traffic, always the sound of people coming and going, on their way to work, to school, off to keep the world running. She needed to get back to being a part of that. But why, exactly?

      Oh, yeah. Money. Bills. Being the grown-up.

      She laughed and leaned over to look down into Ian’s dark eyes. “Your momma is crazy, baby man, you know this?”

      “Go! Go! Go!”

      Yeah, we’re going. Going and going and going. I hope we get there eventually.

      * * *

      ANOTHER DAY PASSED, and there she was again. That was the thing about living right next door to someone. Sometimes, they blended into the background. Other times...hmm. Well, Josh was still figuring that out.

      He watched as Mickie pushed the stroller down the sidewalk. Yesterday he’d been about to tell her that he had a washer-dryer combo in his apartment but her back-off vibe had been so strong he thought it best to wait. Besides, he had two more applicants coming in for Cleaning Crew interviews and then he had to do three actual cleanings this afternoon by himself. One of the Charleston guys, Aaron, was coming down two days a week to help with the heavy days, but he needed to get some local, full-time help—and fast. He couldn’t keep up with the cleanings and the processing of all the new clients for too much longer. Not all on his own, at least.

      He pulled up the next interview’s application. Problem was, most of the guys were thinking the job was a shortcut to getting laid. Sadie had warned him that there would be ten crap applications for every one good possibility. And, as well, there were the applications that frankly startled him. One of the guys had finished law school. Another cited boatloads of business management experience. He wondered what their stories were there. As much as he understood the need to work, he also had to take the business into consideration. You wanted someone who’d stay with the company long enough to at least get good at it. Employee turnover was expensive. That was why Sadie invested so much in providing a quality work environment for her people. Hire the right people and then treat them right. That’s return on investment.

      His phone vibrated on the tabletop. Speaking of... “Hey, boss,” he answered.

      “I’m sending you a present,” Sadie said.

      “Oh?”

      “Indeed. It should be there in a few minutes.”

      He glanced at the front door. “Care to enlighten me any further?”

      “Nope.”

      She ended the call and he stared at the phone. “Huh.” Who was this woman with Sadie’s voice and what had she done with Sadie? Or, rather, what had Wyatt Anderson done to his hard-as-nails boss? Wyatt. He wondered how he was doing these days. That had been a time, finding out who he was and what he was up to. But he’d made things right, and Josh had to give him credit for that. He returned to the applications.

      Not five minutes later, he rose to answer a knock on his front door. It was a pretty distinct knock. Firm, confident. An I’m-here-to-get-it-done kind of knock. Josh knew who owned that knock. “DeShawn!”

      “Josh,” he said. The two of them bumped fists before DeShawn said, “Come on, man, give it up,” and went in for the hug. Just a quick old-friends-who-share-a-story kind of hug. They were good like that.

      “Shut the hell up. Are you my present? I thought you were heading to the army.”

      DeShawn had been a part of Sadie’s Crew in Charleston almost as long as they’d been the Crew. His laid-back, amiable personality had made him a client favorite. His attention to detail and ability to hustle had made him a Sadie favorite.

      “I am, but I’m not insane. I’m not doing basic and officer training in Georgia in the summer. I’m yours, full-time, until the end of September.”

      “Hallelujah.” Josh pulled DeShawn in for another one-armed, back-smacking hug. “This is perfect. I’ve reached a tipping point here.”

      “Just tell me what you need.”

      The two men sat at the dining room table that passed as Josh’s office. “I’ve got twenty clients, fifteen of which are weekly cleans. I have Aaron coming up on the weeks we’ve got all twenty due. I’m doing the every-other-week cleans by myself but it’s not leaving me enough time to screen applicants quickly enough. And I’m getting behind on my client interviews.”

      “Okay. You hired anyone yet?”

      “I’ve got two I think are going to do well. I don’t know how I’m going to train them.”

      DeShawn leaned back. “I guess this is where I come in. Run me through the clients and I can start training as soon as they are hired.”

      “Ah, man, I gotta thank Sadie. This solves all my problems. I’ll get these guys on the payroll. You can take one, I’ll take the other. That’ll free me up for interviews. I don’t know how Sadie did all this.”

      “She had you. Now you got me.”

      * * *

      JOSH ENDED THE day feeling much less stressed than he had been that morning. He’d gotten the two best applicants hired. He and DeShawn had gone through the cleanings in half the time it would have taken him if he’d done it alone. Finally, some of the crushing anxiety lifted off him. He could almost see it float up into the air and pop like a bubble. Boom, done. Maybe he wouldn’t