No Ordinary Gentleman

“Are you even listening to me?”

Ah, heck.

I push the phone back up against my ear at the sound of my sister’s voice, my cheeks burning even though she’s not here to see them. “Yeah, I’m here. I think the call must’ve dropped out.” I’m not about to admit I was thinking about a naked Alexander again. Yeah, so I wasn’t going to call the number, but I did. And I almost swallowed my tongue when a masculine voice answered. For one crazy, heart-stopping minute, I thought it was him—that I was talking to Alexander—and that troublesome, non-beating muscle had floated to the very top of my chest cavity. And plummeted again when I came to realise I was speaking to his assistant.

He didn’t give me his number. He was done with me.

It’s probably for the best.

“I just don’t get where your reluctance is coming from,” Kennedy complains. Again.

“Because of who recommended me to the agency,” I say. Again. Alexander gave me the number. I spoke to his assistant. His assistant set up a meeting with a swanky employment agency. I was offered a job the same day. Suspicious? Just a little bit. How can I even consider it, given our history? Our very brief history, but still.

“So, you spent the night with the guy. Like you said, if the circumstances had been different, he’d still be too old for you.”

“That’s not exactly what I said.” Because, with age, comes experience. The kind of experience that can make a girl cross-eyed with delight.

“Besides, it’s not like he personally offered you a job.”

“If he had,” I murmur, flicking away a piece of lint from my hastily ironed interview skirt, “I would’ve told him where he could shove it.”

I couldn’t work for a man I’ve slept with. Another break up, and where the heck would I end up this time? Outer Mongolia, maybe.

“Sure, you would have,” she replies softly because my sister not only knows, but she held my hand through that clusterphuck. “But it’s not as if that has happened. For starters, you’re not in a relationship with him. Second, all he did was give you the number for an agency he thought might be able to help. And then, when you mentioned his name in the interview, it didn’t even register in so much as a raised eyebrow.”

“I know,” I say with a sigh, not that I could’ve mentioned his full name, anyway. Given I don’t know it. But I couldn’t resist the niggling thought that something hokey was going on, so at the end of the interview, while shaking hands with Sarah Houghton, my interviewer, I’d said something about being grateful to Alexander for putting us in touch. The woman’s expression barely rippled.

“Also,” my sister interjects, “I say again, it’s not even like you’ll be working for him.”

“Urgh!”

“A job is a job, Hols.”

“If that’s the case, I already have a job.” I don’t have to take this much better offer that doesn’t appear to come with strings. Which would make me an idiot, probably.

“Yes, you have a job. You also have a tiny bedroom in a shared apartment. With a shared bathroom.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Dede,” I reply, using her childhood name pointedly. Kick a girl while she’s down. Remind her she’d living in the equivalent of college dorms at the ripe old age of twenty-four.

“If you want to server, you might as well come back and work here.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

Back when the place belonged to our grandmother, I was pressganged into service enough then. I’m not stepping back into that town ever again. Not if I can help it. A familiar twinge of guilt flutters in my chest. I know in my heart that Kennedy doesn’t want to live in Mookatill any more than I do, even if she won’t admit it. I sometimes think I did her a disservice, signing over my share of Nana’s business. Like I’ve somehow damned her to a life there. At the time, it had soothed my conscience to think she had the rugrat to take care of, that I was doing her a favour. Not leaving her behind. I’d told myself that her gratitude was genuine. But mothering instincts do a number on a woman. Except where our mother was concerned. She seems to be pretty much guilt free around the topic of dumping us on her mother’s doorstep when her boyfriend didn’t want us around.

“It sounds like a pretty unique opportunity. And Scotland is another country to add to your list, little miss jet setter.”

Yep. I run around the world while she lives in the town we were born in and pretends not to ignore the nasty looks and the notoriety of our name.

The Harper girls? Why, they’re no better than their mother was. The older one went out to a fancy college and didn’t come back with a degree but with a baby in her belly. And the younger one? Her fiancé left her a week before their wedding. You can guess what for.