She tried wildly waving a hand to get a turn in. “I know I do, but I don’t need you boys!”
They stopped working abruptly, but both of them looked crushed. “Dad’s paying us, Ms. Campbell, so you don’t have to. And it’s either this or we have to clean the bathrooms and do the wash. I mean, come on. We really work good. I promise. And we can get here most afternoons by like three-fifteen or so. You wouldn’t fire us before you even gave us a chance, would you?”
For Pete’s sake. She’d like to throw up on the whole damn world, but how was she supposed to be mean to two motherless brats? “You two can’t possibly do this whole twenty acres and that’s that. You can work for an hour in the afternoon sometimes. IF you want to. When you want to. And only if it doesn’t interfere with your damned schoolwork, you hear me?”
Yup, they both heard her. They were both nodding like bobbing corks.
“And I never said ‘damned’ either!”
More exuberant nodding. Hell. It was all she could do not to slick down Sean’s cowlick and jog up to the house to bring cookies to the brats.
She stormed back to the cottage, thinking that this just wasn’t going to work. She knew it. But this was Pete’s doing, so the only way she could stop it was to go directly to Pete.
And that meant risking being near him-not that he’d want to kiss her again. Considering that he apparently thought of her as an unkempt, ugly, genderless nonwoman, it was astounding that he’d wanted to kiss her the first time. Nevertheless, once you’d been stung by a mosquito, you knew what the itch was like and obviously avoided it a second time if you could.
She could put up with the boys. For a while. Anything was better than risking getting too close to Pete again-at least until she figured out what the Sam Hill that kiss had been about.
Camille waited the dog out for three more days, but by Saturday afternoon, she’d had it. When the temperature climbed to a reasonably warm seventy-six degrees, she pulled on ragged shorts and a black tee, then carted outside a bucket, flea shampoo, rags and a hose.