Housekeeper Under The Mistletoe. Cara Colter

were outside of yourself.

      Jefferson wondered if his new housekeeper would feel quite so eager to seek shelter here if she knew how colossally he had failed the one other woman, his wife, who had expected protection from him.

      Meals. He hadn’t really even considered a housekeeper providing meals. His search for a housekeeper had been motivated strictly by getting the house ready for the magazine photo shoot. He considered telling her meals would not be part of their agreement but found himself oddly reluctant to do so. He had not had a home-cooked meal in longer than he could remember, and his mouth was watering. His weakness annoyed him.

      “Look,” he told Brook sternly. “Against my better judgment, I’m giving you a chance, but be warned, if you chatter, you’re out of here.”

      She looked as if she might say something. But then she pursed her lips, brought her fingers up, locked and put the imaginary key in her pocket. But before he could even be properly relieved, she reached into that imaginary pocket, took out the key and unlocked her lips.

      “Maybe just before we begin our vow of silence, I should get you to show me around and you can tell me what you’d like to see prioritized. I’ll make a list of what each room needs.”

      It was a reasonable request, and he knew he could not really refuse it.

      “Let’s begin here,” she coaxed, when he was silent.

      “This room is the great room,” he said. “I noticed the windows are rain spotted.”

      “The windows would be a priority,” she agreed. “But I should probably leave them until right before the photo shoot so they just sparkle that day, right?”

      “Right,” he said, though of course he had not thought of that.

      “Dusting.” She looked up at the high vault of the ceiling. “You have a ladder somewhere? I see cobwebs up there.”

      He frowned up at where she was looking. He did not like spiders. Before he answered, she went and slapped the couch, and a cloud of dust flew up from it. “Vacuuming. If the weather stays nice, I might even put the furniture outside for a bit to air it out.”

      He couldn’t really imagine she was going to get all that furniture outside by herself. The sectional was huge. And apparently she was going to need a ladder. Actually, he was not going to let her up on a ladder, so there was no point in finding one. He needed to make it clear he was not going to be roped into interaction with her. He was going to protest, but then she went on.

      “It smells faintly stale in here. I think a good airing of the furniture will change that.”

      It smelled stale in his house?

      “For the photo shoot,” she said, a little pensively, “it might be nice to make it look lived in. You don’t use this room much, do you?”

      “Not really.” She was proving to be uncomfortably astute.

      “What would you think if we set it up a bit?”

       We?

      “We could just add a bit of color. Maybe a bright throw over the couch, a few glossy magazines on display, a vase of flowers.”

      “Don’t you think the photographer will do that?”

      “Well, if he doesn’t think to bring a vase of flowers with him, you’d be out of luck, since the nearest vase of fresh flowers would be quite a distance away. I could make the throw. I’ll snoop around and see what you have.”

      He must have looked unconvinced because she rushed on, “You’d be surprised what you can make things out of. And I’m pretty handy with a needle and thread. I made this blouse.”

      That made him stare at the blouse for an uncomfortable second.

      Thankfully, she had moved on. “It’s just that this room—the house—is so beautiful, but it doesn’t look very homey. It would make me happy to help it look its very best.”

      He stared at her. She already appeared much happier than she had when she first arrived, that little furrow of worry easing on her brow.

      “I’ll leave it up to you to spruce it up however you see fit. If you need to buy a few things, let me know,” he said, and was annoyed that he felt he was giving in to her in some subtle but irreversible way. “Stay out of my office. And my bedroom.”

      The fact that he did not want her in his bedroom, that most intimate of spaces, alerted him to the fact she—this little mite of a woman in her homemade blouse with her wayward curls—was threatening him in some way that he had not allowed himself to be threatened in, in a very long time. If ever.

      “But surely they’ll want to photograph those rooms, too?”

      “I’m quite capable of getting two rooms ready.” His tone was curt and did not invite any more discussion, but he was aware that she had to bite her lip to keep herself from discussing it.

      “I’ll show you the kitchen,” he said stiffly, leading her through to that room.

      “Whoa,” she said, following him, “now this is a room you use.”

      She didn’t say it as if it was a good thing.

      He looked at the kitchen through her eyes. The sink was full of dishes. She didn’t know yet, but so was the oven. His mail was sliding off the kitchen table, and there were several envelopes on the floor. The counter by the coffeemaker was littered with grounds and sticky spoons. He often tromped up from the beach, wet, across the deck and through the kitchen. His bare footprints were outlined against the dark hardwood of a floor he’d allowed to become distinctly grimy.

      Instead of looking daunted by the mess, she gave him a smile. “You need me way more than you thought you did.”

      He looked at her. In this room, as in the living room, it felt as if her presence had made the light come on.

      He had the terrible feeling that maybe he did need her more than he had thought he did. His life had become a gray wash of work and isolation.

      And damn it, he told himself, he liked it that way. What he didn’t like was that Brook had been in his domain for only a few minutes, and he already was seeing things about himself that he had managed to avoid for a long, long time.

      “Look, I have work to do,” he said. “I’m going to let you poke around the rest of the place by yourself. I’m sure it will become very quickly apparent to you what needs to be done.”

      He could have left then, but he watched as she wandered over to where the mail had fallen on the floor.

      “This one is marked Urgent,” she said. She came across the distance that separated them and held out the envelope. He reached for it.

      For just a moment, their hands brushed. Something tingled along his spine, an electrical awareness of her. She might have felt something, too, because she spun away from him and went to the kitchen counter. It had a long, sleek window that overlooked the lake. But she did not look out the window. She opened up a cupboard.

      “Is this what you’re eating?” she asked him, holding up a soup can, and then setting that down and holding up a stew can.

      He folded his arms over his chest, uninviting.

      She ignored that. “Canned food is very high in sodium,” she told him. “At your age, you have to watch things like that.”

      “My age?” he sputtered.

      And then she laughed. It was a tinkling sound, as refreshing as a brook finding its way over pebbles.

      “Do you have any fresh food?”

      “Not really. There might be a few things in the freezer.”

      “That’s not fresh. What do you eat?”

      He thought of the stacks of microwavable meals in