Cathy Gillen - Honeymoon For Hire

“Thanks, but I’m not interested in being anyone’s maid. I have enough trouble just cleaning up my own messes.”

“Hey, I’m not that messy,” Dillon protested automatically. Her delicate brow arched. He continued, “Besides, you’d be a lot more. You’d be decorating, organizing all my stuff, creating order out of chaos, making a home for me.” He grinned mischievously. “Or at least enough of one to get my sister off my back.”

“Your sister?” Hayley blinked.

“Marge.” Dillon’s mouth curved fondly at the thought of the sister he loved. “She thinks I’ve ruined my life, and she wants me to settle down for at least a year and try to have a real life, one that includes more than just my work.”

Hayley wrinkled her nose. “It sounds like what she really thinks you need is a wife.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Only thing is I’m not interested in getting married.”

“Well,” Hayley said pragmatically with a sigh, “that makes two of us.”

“So how about the job?” Dillon tried to imagine what it would be like to have a woman as beautiful as Hayley working as his housekeeper. Bringing him his paper in the morning, making him breakfast… Maybe he’d even get a glimpse of her in some sort of negligee and robe, if they were under the same roof.

“Think about the time it would give you with Christine,” he said persuasively. He figured he could handle a good-looking woman with a baby under his roof a lot better than he could handle the mustached, overweight, drill sergeant of a housekeeper his sister was pushing him to hire. Employing Hayley would ease his own guilt over Hank considerably. Even if he found her incredibly desirable, he wouldn’t act on that desire because of his past friendship with Hank.

“Dillon, listen to me,” she said with weary tolerance. “I know you think you’re trying to help, but my schedule is erratic at best these days. I sleep when the baby sleeps. I’m awake when she’s awake, even if that’s from three in the morning until dawn. I don’t know if I could have dinner on the table precisely at eight every night. Or even be awake enough to cook for you if you decided to have a dinner party.”

“I never give dinner parties,” he said flatly. “I only go to them. And as for schedules, my hours are erratic at best, too. Some nights I probably won’t show up for dinner at all.”

“Well, then I would be ticked off. If I went to all the trouble to cook the damned meal, I’d expect you to eat it.”

He grinned at her feisty tone, liking the warm flush of color that had come into her cheeks. “I knew there was something I liked about you,” he drawled.

They stared at each other in contemplative silence.

“What about salary?”

“What’s fair?” Dillon volleyed back, mirroring her own pragmatic, let’s-get-down-to-brass-tacks tone. “Room, board and say…ten percent of the profit I make when I sell the house at the end of a year? It’s not as if you don’t know me,” he continued when she hesitated.

“True. Hank spoke of you often. He said you were a well-loved boss, respected by all who worked for you.”

Which made his own betrayal of Hank all the harder to bear, Dillon thought. He should’ve known better than to have sent Hank into the fray. But how could he have known the barracks would be hit by shrapnel from an exploding missile? Dillon sighed.

Hayley was silent. Whether she was blaming him or not, Dillon couldn’t tell. Finally she smiled. “I guess I can trust you.”

Dillon grinned back. “Now you’re talking.”

“Add a monthly stipend of four hundred dollars for my personal expenses and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“Four hundred!” he echoed, stunned.

“Do we have a deal or don’t we?”

Damn but she was impulsive, he thought. Almost as impulsive as he was. And she drove a hard bargain. But what did it matter whether they thought about this for ten minutes or ten days, as long as it solved all their mutual problems, which it did. Dillon studied her with satisfaction, realizing it had been easier for him to take care of both his own guilt and Hank’s widow than he’d ever imagined it could be. “Okay, you’re hired.”

Chapter Two

“You forgot one thing, Dillon,” Hayley said, looking into his dark blue eyes and ruggedly handsome face with all the directness she could muster.

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”

“You didn’t tell me I’d be moving into an absolute disaster,” Hayley said, early the following morning.

Dillon frowned at the red walls and red velvet furniture in the formal living room. “I didn’t know it was this bad,” he said grimly, looking no more pleased than she felt.

Hayley sent him a skeptical glance as they trudged through the adjacent kitchen, which was decorated in shades of avocado and lemon yellow. “How is that possible?” she asked disbelievingly. “After all, you bought this house.”

“No,” he said with a flash of white teeth, “my sister did.”

Hayley stopped him before he could head up the stairs to the second floor of the sprawling, white brick Colonial. “You bought this house without at least seeing a detailed report of everything it would need to make it livable?” she asked, incredulous.

“Right.” Dillon glanced thoughtfully up at the chandelier overhead, which was coated with several years’ worth of dust and spider webs.

Hayley kept her eyes trained on his face. He didn’t look like an idiot. He looked smart, strong and sexy. Too sexy, she thought, her eyes roving over his tall, solidly built frame and broad, powerful shoulders. She hadn’t been attracted to a man since Hank’s death, but she was attracted to Dillon. And she felt that sizzle of attraction with heart-stopping awareness every time she looked into his mesmerizing dark blue eyes. “Why?”

“Why not?” Dillon shrugged. He tested the wooden banister and found it as wobbly as it looked. His glance met hers again. “I had no interest in trotting through home after home. One place is as good as the next as far as I’m concerned, so I decided to let my sister, Marge, handle the actual selection. That way, I already had a place when I got back to the States. All I had to do was wait for my stuff to arrive, find someone to unpack it and move in. Then she found this place, said it needed redecorating. A hell of a lot of redecorating. But it was a great bargain. So, shrewd investor that I am, I figured I’d capitalize on the financial opportunity.”

“She didn’t tell you it looked like a highly disorganized white elephant sale inside?”

“No. She said nothing about it being furnished like a clearance sale at an outdoor flea market.” Dillon shoved a hand through the tousled, two-inch-long layers of his dark brown hair and shook his head. “In terms of redecorating, I figured I’d have to pick out new paint, wallpaper and carpet. Worst case, maybe even fix some of the plumbing. Which, of course, is why I hired you.”

“Because you didn’t want to mess with it,” Hayley assumed.

“Not in this lifetime.” Dillon affirmed her guess with a tantalizing grin.

So he hated decorating, Hayley thought. Most men did. He did pick out his clothes well. The brown Harris tweed jacket and dark brown trousers not only fit his muscular body well, they complemented his dark brown hair and suntan.

“But I have to admit, Hayley, this—” Dillon took a deep, bracing breath as he looked around him “—is just ridiculous, even for someone like me who really doesn’t care where they live. If you want to back out—”

Hayley wasn’t going to let him discourage her. It didn’t matter to her the house was wrecked or that he was close enough to her in age and ruggedly good-looking enough to give her pause. All that mattered to her was the eventual cut of the profits it would bring. With that, she could make herself and Christine a real home. “Dillon, we’ll fix it up.”