Love in a Nutshell - Janet Evanovich [70]
Matt looked shocked. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want sorry. I just want my job.”
“Kate, I have to do this,” he said. “Yes, you survived this just wet and scared, but you said it earlier—this attack was aimed straight at you. I can’t keep placing you in harm’s way.”
“I know all that, but you’re forgetting one crucial thing. I can’t eat, repair The Nutshell, or begin to plan for the future without money. And I need the bonus to stop the villain who plans to take my house if I can’t get current on my mortgage by Thanksgiving.”
“How about if I keep paying you? You can have the bonus money, the whole thing.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to let you pay me for doing nothing.”
“Why not?” Matt asked. “Apparently, I do it for Jerry all the time.”
“With you or without you, I need to find out who did this, or I’m never going to be able to put what happened in the brewhouse behind me. And what about you? You need this thing solved as much as I do. We must be getting closer if the creep’s pushed it this far.”
Matt started to speak a couple of times, but cut himself off. She waited.
“Okay. Work here,” he finally said. “But understand that means you’re going to be with me twenty-four/seven.”
She smiled. “I think they have employment laws against those sorts of hours.”
He gave her another frustrated look. “You know what I’m saying, and you know why. Someone is after you, and that person isn’t messing around. So, when we’re here, you’re with me, and when we’re not, you’re in my house.”
She wanted to say he was exaggerating the situation, except that she’d just been treated like a beer additive.
“And at the risk of sounding even more like I’m trying to run your life, did you get the locks changed out at your place this week, Kate?”
“Actually, no.” She’d been in a haze of poodle contentment and had forgotten Matt’s suggestion.
“So anyone can walk in and hide until they’re ready to come out. Does that sound about right?”
“Yes,” Kate admitted.
“And do you have any walls or floors or a bathroom?”
“Jeesh. I have some walls and floors. And the bees are practically all gone.”
“You like living with ‘some’ bees in a gutted house with no locks on an isolated stretch of the lake with a psycho after you?”
Kate kicked at the floor and looked at her shoe. “It’s not gutted, it’s decorator-ready. And, besides, every house has ‘some’ bees.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “Then it’s settled. I’ll come with you while you pack. You and your poodle will stay with me until an arrest is made and your house is renovated and one hundred percent bee free.”
“That could be a very long time.”
Matt shrugged. “True.”
He’d sounded almost happy, and secretly, Kate was, too.
“And you know that we’ll probably end up wanting to kill each other,” she said.
He smiled. “Old news.”
“And that people are going to talk.”
“They always do.”
But what was gossip mere seconds ago now would be true. She, Matt Culhane, a fussy poodle, and a three-legged dog were going to be shacking up. The circus had just come to town.
SIXTEEN
Matt thought his house was pretty cool. He’d put a good couple of years into harvesting the timber from his property and then building the place. Because it had been designed to suit his needs, he’d never thought too much about how others might view it. Until now.
Kate climbed out of her Jeep, then scooped up Stella, who’d hopped into the driver’s seat as soon as it had been vacated. That was close to their actual dog/woman relationship. To be totally accurate, Stella should have been driving the car.
Kate checked out his house. “I take it you had a thing for Lincoln Logs when you were a kid. This is one very impressive adult version thereof.”
“You know what they say … The bigger the boys, the bigger—”
“We’ll probably do better if we don’t talk about the size of anything, especially your toys,” she said, lingering by her vehicle. “This seemed a lot more sensible in the abstract than in reality. You … me … under one roof…”
He smiled. “I like it. A lot.”
“That