Good Girl (Love Unexpectedly 2)

Her eyes flick over me, cool and disinterested. “And you are…?”

“Noah Maxwell,” I say, deliberately not going forward to shake her hand. “The caretaker.”

She wrinkles her nose and looks back at Vaughn in confusion.

Vaughn is staring at me in confusion.

“Problem?” I say before he can open his fat mouth and ruin my little game.

Jenny lifts her shoulders. “I guess I just assumed the Eddingtons would still live in the caretaker’s cottage. Foolish, I suppose. They were elderly ten years ago. Have they…are they passed?”

No idea. Who the hell are the Eddingtons?

A quick call to my father’s attorney had confirmed that there was in fact a property in my father’s name, but there’d been next to no information.

“They’re in a retirement home,” Vaughn says smoothly, apparently deciding to play along, although I don’t know why. “The family pays for it, of course.”

She smiles prettily at him, although the smile slips when her gaze slides back to me. “And Mr. Maxwell here is the replacement?”

“Truth be told, I’ve just hired him,” Vaughn says, giving me a cool, appraising look as though deciding whether I’m worthy of the right to be on my own property. How did I not know the guy was such a good actor? “But he seems competent enough.”

“Wonderful,” she says. “But the dog can’t stay.”

I blink. “I’m sorry?”

“The dog.” She gestures with her chin at Ranger, who’s settled down, but barely. “Dolly will be staying here with me, which means your dog needs to go.”

“He’ll be kept on a leash,” Finn says before I can reply. He steps forward, apparently deciding that he too wants in on the game.

“Okay, but—”

“I’m Finn Reed. The electrician. Came out to fix a couple of wiring problems,” he says, extending a hand to her.

Electrician? That’s new.

Jenny shifts the cotton ball to her left arm and shakes Finn’s hand, either unaware of the way he’s checking her out or so accustomed to it that she knows not to show a reaction.

“Are the wiring problems all fixed?”

“Yes,” Vaughn says nervously, shooting me a quick glance. “But Ms. Dawson, I need to make it clear what bad shape the house is in. Worse than I realized when we first emailed, and—”

“It’s all right,” she says quietly. “As long as the walls stay standing upright, it’ll be perfect.”

She gazes up at the house with a faraway smile on her face. The guys glance at me, and I roll my eyes and shrug.

“I know you think I’m crazy,” she says, not looking at us. “But I wrote my first song here, and it felt magical.”

She turns back and looks at Vaughn. “I’m sorry to hear about your father. I never met him in person, but the fact that he opened up this beautiful space to young musicians without charging them a dime…he must have loved music.”

Vaughn’s smile is strained, and when Jenny looks away he gives me a what the hell shrug.

I don’t respond.

The truth was, my dad didn’t love music. I mean, sure, he’d go to the odd concert or have music playing on the car radio when he wasn’t barking on the phone, but he didn’t love music.

No, but he had loved Caleb, and Caleb had loved music. No doubt my father had hoped that one of his charity cases, someone like Jenny Dawson, might carry on with Caleb’s legacy in a way that I couldn’t.

Jenny was walking around the side of the house, a happy smile on her face despite the fact that all I could see was weeds and chipped paint.