Boss On Notice
She and Josh didn’t talk at all on the ride back to the apartment. That was actually something Mickie was very grateful for. She was exhausted and worried and seemed to be constantly on the edge of tears. She needed to get settled and get some sleep and regroup. She’d be fine. She needed a moment.
“Hey,” he said.
She jumped at the soft whisper and the gentle touch on her arm. The seat belt tightened against her. Damn. She’d fallen asleep? In a strange car? With a strange man? And her baby in the back? She twisted to look over her shoulder. Ian was still asleep. Josh had driven across the grass and had backed the SUV up to her front door.
“Wow,” she said. “Oh, my God. Sorry. Must be my naptime, too.”
She blew out a breath, got herself together. Wow.
Then she climbed out and got the car seat unhooked, not even bothering to take out Ian. She manhandled the entire thing out of the SUV with him in it. Josh was there and he took it in one hand. “I’ve got it. Open the door and you can get him settled. I’ll bring all the stuff in for you.”
“You don’t have to. I can get it. I’ll let you know when I’m done and you can move the car back.”
He stayed on the front porch, leaning in to put the car seat inside the front door. “Now, that isn’t going to happen. But if you don’t want me inside, I’ll move things to the porch and you can take them from there.”
She opened to her mouth to protest. Stop it. Stop it, Mickie. He’s being a normal nice guy. Stop treating everyone like the enemy. “I’m sorry to be so...” So what? She didn’t know. Scared? Bitchy? Suspicious?
“Cautious? Don’t worry about it. I understand.”
He walked off and opened the hatch. Mickie watched for a moment the way that the muscles of his back shifted against the fabric of his T-shirt, how his biceps flexed as he lifted boxes. A flutter of warm appreciation for a gorgeous male body tried to come to life deep in her belly. She turned to Ian, snorting out a hard laugh at her stupidity. Because a man would make all this better. Right. That’s what got you into this mess, Mickie. A good-looking, sweet-talking, nice-acting man.
JOSH MOVED THE boxes to the porch and let Mickie carry them deeper into the apartment. Most of the boxes looked old, like they’d been used and reused and kept together with duct tape. She was cagey about letting him in and he could understand that. She was a young mother. Living alone, it seemed. Well, alone except for Ian. Which had to make it even more difficult. There was nothing he could do or say to put her more at ease other than try not to make it worse.
As he set the last of the boxes down inside the door, she came over and pushed it out of the way with her foot. He glanced inside. She’d moved them all into the empty living room. His eyes went back to her. She leaned against the door frame with one hand on the doorknob. Her khaki shorts and black T-shirt were streaked with dust. She pushed a hand through blond hair that looked like a fall of silk and looked up at him with ice-blue eyes. She was very pretty. And very young. And had a kid.
“Thank you for letting me help you,” he said. “This means I’m all caught up on my good deeds for at least a week.”
She smiled and he felt something within him warm at the sight. “Thank you for insisting. I’m sorry if I was treating you like you were a creep or something.”
“Understandable.” He stuck his hands in his back pockets as he searched for something else to say. He wanted to keep looking into those eyes, wanted to ask about those distant shield maiden genes. Where was she from, where was she going? Then, he noticed the dark smudges beneath those eyes. She’d fallen asleep on the short ride home. Tired, right. She was exhausted, and he could respect that. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he said.
Back in his own place, Josh powered up the laptop. He could still hear her moving around. Strange that he’d never noticed the sounds of the previous tenant. She was clinking glassware, opening and closing cabinets and making other assorted unpacking thumps and bumps. She seemed to be alone, not only living alone with the little guy, but also alone in the city. She’s not alone, dude, she has a baby. You know, those miniature humans that you don’t have any contact with? He shook his head. Get it together, man.
He had a lot to do tomorrow. There were three interviews for new Crew members, two client interviews and four actual cleanings to do. He skimmed through the calendar. Good. All regular cleanings, all in apartments, so that should be easy. It was a straightforward business model: hot guys cleaning house. It had worked for Sadie down in Charleston and he was here to make it happen a second time, in the state capital. He loaded the addresses into his phone and Googled them to look at the map and get a sense of the locations. His phone rang and Sadie’s name popped up on the screen.
“Did you save your damsel in distress?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“How you doing up there?”
“Good.” He gave her a brief rundown of Crew business.
“I meant with you, Josh,” she said when he finished. “How are you doing?”
“Good. Starting to not feel lost every place I go. I found a yoga studio that seems like it isn’t just a place to go look pretty. Still looking for a dojo.”
He sat back and rubbed a hand through his curly hair. And a barbershop. He needed to find one of those. Yoga and meditation were akin to breathing. He couldn’t go without, not for long. Not if he wanted to stay himself, the self he could stand. And while he was perfectly able to practice at home, there was something about being in a class, about being pushed past his limits, that he needed. The dojo? Well, he’d been studying martial arts since he was twenty. Yoga for peace of mind and karate for discipline—the two things that kept him sane. That kept him functional.
“Is she pretty?”
“Huh?”
“Your new neighbor. Is she pretty?”
He laughed. “Now that you’re disgustingly happy in love, you want to hook up everyone you know?”
“You should try it. It’s awesomely fun.”
“She has a kid. A little kid. A baby-size kid.”
Sadie didn’t say anything but he could hear her breathe. She let out a slow sigh. “I wish I could hug you.”
“I don’t need a hug. I need some pointers on the behavior contract.”
Yeah, that. The behavior contract. The Cleaning Crew, as a business model, provided a superior cleaning service and nothing else. But Sadie had found that some clients’ understanding of this simple fact was at times fuzzy. Hot guys, right? It wasn’t surprising where some people’s minds went. A false allegation in the company’s early days had frightened her. Now she required clients and employees to sign a contract that essentially said “keep your hands to yourself.”
“What’s the problem? It’s pretty straightforward.”
“Some clients are taking it as condescending. Like we’re saying they won’t be able to control themselves around a good-looking guy or something.”
“Huh,” Sadie said. She paused for a moment. “There may be something to that. It’s not everyone, is it? Just a few here and there?”
“Yeah. I started being way more careful in how I explained it after that. It’s helped some.”
“All right. Keep me posted. If it gets to be a problem, I guess I could drive up and get them signed.”
“I guess.” But he didn’t want her to do that. If this was going to be his branch, his company to grow, then he had to find a way around this. He figured that it was the newness of the idea here in Columbia. In Charleston, the company had been established long enough that new clients knew about the contract, knew about the expectations Sadie had for them and the guys. It was still in the titillation phase here. A hot guy vacuuming your rugs? Giggle and drool. He heard Jules, Sadie’s fiancé’s niece, in the background, yelling for Sadie to come look at this right now. “I’ll figure it out. Go. Give Jules a hug from me.”
CHAPTER THREE
MICKIE STARTLED AWAKE on her blanket bed on the floor. Sunlight streamed through the windows. How long had she slept? She scrambled up to her feet. More importantly, why had Ian slept so late? He usually woke her at the butt crack of dawn. She crossed the hall and found him sitting quietly on his own blanket bed with a book. Naked. She followed her nose to the dirty diaper tossed on the rug. Awesome. She added a trip to the Laundromat to her chore list for the day.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she cooed.
Ian looked up at her and smiled that goofy baby smile that always melted her heart. He held up the book. “Pat! Pat bunny!”
“We’ll pat the bunny. But first, let’s get you cleaned up, little man.”
The second order of business, after bath, book and breakfast, was to find a job. While Ian ate, Mickie sipped coffee and browsed through the local listings. Nursing school wouldn’t start for two and a half months. She’d have to rely on her savings while she was in school, but right now? Right now, she needed to work. The job that she’d had lined up—a nurses’ aide at the hospital affiliated with the nursing school—had been perfect. The pay was good, the hours were good and there had been access to the onsite day care center and valuable experience to put on a résumé. But at the last minute, the day-shift position had been changed to a night-shift position. Which wouldn’t have been a problem except the day care wasn’t offered overnight.
“Square one,” she said to Ian. “Not like we haven’t been back here before, huh, buddy?”
“One!” he shouted. He handed her a Cheerio.
“Thank you.”
“Whelk!”
Tears burned at her eyes as she watched Ian return to his breakfast. What was she doing? Dragging him willy-nilly along while she tried to get her shit together. Jumping and running at every bump in the night. She took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in her throat. This was it. Hopefully their last stop. She had two years to go and then she’d have her nursing degree. Once she had that, she’d have financial security. Right? Then they could stop. The two of them, her and Ian, they could begin to put down some roots and find some sense of normal. But first, she needed a job. And affordable day care.
She shook her head. Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help a thing. Get to the Laundromat. Maybe there’d be some places along the way she could stop and put in applications.
An hour later, she was pushing the stroller out of the door, with duffel bags of laundry dangling from the handles. She had her backpack strapped on and an entirely too grumpy Ian strapped in the stroller. He didn’t want to go wash clothes. He wanted to read Pat the Bunny for the ten jillionth time. She paused to secure the swaying bags. The door of the apartment next to hers opened and a flicker of annoyance darted through her. Please don’t be Hot Guy offering to drive me again. She hated people offering to help her. It was stupid, she knew, but it made her scared. As if they could sense her vulnerability and weakness.
“All right, thanks for stopping by. I’ll let you know once the test results are back.”
She glanced over. Hot Neighbor Josh was shaking hands with a hot stranger dude. Hot Stranger Dude nodded. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
Mickie frowned at this exchange, then shook her head. None of your business. She tested the balance of the duffels and shifted the backpack.
“Hey, neighbor,” Josh called.
She tried not to look, but how could she not? He was too good-looking. That black curly hair and the blue eyes. His shoulders, his chest, his arms... He was built but he didn’t try to show it off by wearing a shirt two sizes too small for his body. She bit her bottom lip, felt it slip back into her mouth as she watched him. Those jeans. Levi’s. Straightforward workingman’s jeans. Nothing fancy. She felt warm in all the wrong places.
“Hi,” she said.
Short, 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 screw this up entirely. Maybe he could make this as successful as the Charleston location. He scrolled to the picture of Sadie scrunching up her nose at him on his phone and tapped the call icon.
“Did you like your present?”
“Yes. Thank you. It was perfect. I really appreciate you sending him my way.”
“Not a problem. You needed help. Your client base is growing, Josh. I can see it. A little more every day. This is happening, for real. You’re making it happen.”
“Yeah, it’s been crazy. I don’t know how you did it.”
“Easy. I had you, Josh. Don’t forget that. I didn’t build this alone. You were with me from the beginning. And it took us a year to reach the level you’ve reached in a month. Don’t be afraid to slow your client acceptance until you’ve got the employees trained to handle it. You are right on budget.”
“Except I’m not making a profit yet.”
“We didn’t expect that you would be. The losses aren’t crazy, though.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You know,” she said, and then laughed. The confident, caring laugh of someone who’d made it work, and was happy to help others do the same. “I actually have no idea. Lena told me. She said it’s good and not to worry. So I don’t worry. And I don’t want you to worry, either. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Well, if Princess Lena says it’s okay,” Josh said and let out a laugh of his own. It wasn’t quite laced with that same full-bodied confidence, but more of a laugh that said, “Okay, I’m getting there, but damn if I know how it’s happening.”
“Will you two give it a rest already?”
Josh laughed again. That sounded like the old Sadie and hearing that brought back the old Josh. Funny how that happened. The thing was, he didn’t really have a problem with Lena. She was Sadie’s best friend and accountant. He liked her well enough to have her manage his money. She hadn’t made him quite as rich as she’d made Sadie—hey, she’s the boss—but he was happy with his nest egg. The bickering was done more out of habit that any real animosity.
When he’d first met Sadie, she and Lena had been friends for several years. Josh was like the new baby in the family that takes the attention away from the middle child. Lena did not like sharing Sadie with him in the beginning, but they’d reached a détente of sorts over the years.
“I have something important to ask you,” Sadie said.
“What’s that?” Her pause was long enough to send a thread of worry winding through his gut. “Sades? Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I just don’t want to cry. But, okay. Here goes. Will you give me away at the wedding?”
“Give you away?” He echoed the words, stunned.
“Yeah, you know. Walk me down the aisle?” Her voice dropped and wavered with the tears she didn’t want to shed. “If Abuelito was still alive, I’d ask him. You know you’re the brother of my heart, Josh. There’s no one else.”
“Of course,” he said. He looked around the room and for a second, everything felt strange, unfamiliar. Wait, what was happening here? He shook his head and brought his attention back to the phone.
He wasn’t sure why the request had hit him like it had. It was no secret that neither he nor Sadie had any real family. They were both products of the foster-care system and had been turned out on the streets at eighteen. Sadie’s half brother had found her and she was slowly building a relationship with him. But Josh was her brother of choice. Just as he thought of her as his sister. His big sister. His fingers played over the keys of his laptop and a file opened.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” He forced a laugh. “It’s just so grown-up. Real. Family stuff. Things we thought we’d never have.”
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s a good thing, little brother. Our family is growing. Getting stronger. And you’ll always be my brother. Always.”
His throat closed painfully. “Always.”
After he ended the call, he opened the file. His little sister. The one he’d lost. She’d been adopted away from him. At two, she was young enough, cute enough and not as scarred by their ordeal as he was. The file was pathetically small. Lists of reunification websites. His own notes. Names of social workers he’d spoken to over the years. Random bits of memory. The memories of a five-year-old.
Her name was Kim. He’d called her Kimmie. Her birthday was in the summer. Her hair was dark and curly, same as his. But he couldn’t remember what color her eyes were. Strange the things he could remember, the things that he couldn’t. Memory was the strangest thing ever, the way certain things would just be there, for no reason, and other things he couldn’t find in his head no matter how hard he searched for them. She had called him “Yoss.” He remembered that.
He clicked open another file and stared at the artist’s sketch. He looked at the picture of his memory of his sister and tried to remember. Really remember. Was this truly how she looked? Or was it just some phantom his mind had created over the years? He closed the files. Put his hand to his chin and rubbed, trying to sort it all out.