He laughed. “Oh! No, don’t worry about them, you can just leave your dishes there. The housekeeper comes on Monday morning, she’ll take care of that.”
She was suddenly wide-awake. “Let me get this straight. It’s Friday night. And your plan is to let your dirty dishes sit there, all weekend, waiting for someone to clean them up for you, because you don’t know how to wash dishes, or even load a dishwasher?”
He glared at her, the same way he had the day she’d gotten there, but it didn’t bother her anymore.
“I know HOW to wash dishes. But why do it, when I pay someone else to do it?”
She pursed her lips. “Oh really? You know how to do it? When’s the last time you washed a dish?”
He looked even madder. “That’s not the point. The point is—”
Laughter exploded from her at the look on his face, the pure rage that he obviously had no memory of ever washing a dish. She laughed so hard she had to put her own dishes down on the sideboard so she wouldn’t drop them.
“You’re laughing at me,” Beau said, after watching her for a while.
She nodded, still giggling. “I absolutely am. ‘That’s not the point.’” She let out another cackle. “Incredible. Just amazing.” She pointed to the coffee table. “Get the dishes. I’m going to teach you how to load a dishwasher, Beau Towers.”
He was still trying to glare at her, but she could see the smile peeking through.
“It’s not that I don’t know how to load a dishwasher.” He walked over to the coffee table and piled his dishes on the tray, and then added her dishes on his way back. “I’ve seen people do it. Plenty of times. I’ve just never, exactly, done it myself.”
“Great,” she said on the way to the kitchen. “There’s a first time for everything.”
They stood in front of the dishwasher.
“Open that up,” Izzy said.
Beau let out a long dramatic sigh, but he set the tray full of dishes down and opened the dishwasher. Then he picked up the dishes and tossed them all inside. “There. Done.”
Izzy shook her head. “Bless your heart, but no, that’s not how you do it.” She gestured to the dishes inside the dishwasher. “First, you have to rinse the dishes.”
He stared at her. “Rinse them?”
She almost laughed at him again. “Yes, rinse them. Put them under the faucet and run hot water on them.”
“But why do I have to do that if the dishwasher is just going to clean them anyway?”
Izzy took a plate out of the dishwasher and held it up. “Look at all this cheese and tomato sauce caked on. Only the best dishwashers will get that food off, and this dishwasher, while fine, isn’t top-of-the-line like your television. We see where your priorities were.”
He growled something at her, but he took the dishes back out of the dishwasher and rinsed them while she watched.
“Second,” she said. “There’s an art to loading a dishwasher. This was my job at home for most of my life, so you’re lucky to have someone like me to teach you how to do it.”
“Lucky isn’t exactly the word I would use right now,” he said to the sink.
“Excuse me?” she asked him. “What was that?” She beamed at him. This was even more entertaining than the show had been. “Oh, nothing? That’s what I thought. Now, the plates should go there—down in the bottom, you see, where there’s plenty of room. The bowls should go there. The wineglasses you want to be careful with; they can easily break in dishwashers if you don’t put them carefully in the top rack. And finally, the flatware all goes in that little container—no, no, no, don’t just jam it all together like that! Separate the forks from the knives from the spoons! That way, when you unload it, you just have to grab a handful and put it in the right place in the drawer.”
“When I unload it, she says,” Beau said to a spoon. “Is she going to make me do that, too?”
Izzy ignored that. “Look, now we’re all done! Isn’t that better? Wasn’t that fun?”
Beau looked at her as he dried his hands. “You think writing is fun, you think cleaning the kitchen is fun…. Isabelle Marlowe, I’m starting to think you need a new understanding of the word fun.”
She just laughed at him as she left the kitchen.
Late Saturday morning, Izzy went out to the pool with coffee and some of the coffee cake that had been in the kitchen that morning—Michaela had obviously left them well stocked for the weekend. She’d wanted to go to the pool since the day she’d arrived—she’d even stopped and looked at it a few times on her stupid little walks around the gardens—but she hadn’t quite felt comfortable enough to just sit there, on one of those tempting lounge chairs, and relax.
But today was Saturday, and the morning fog had cleared, so it was bright and warm and sunny. And she somehow felt more at home in this house than before. Like she was welcome here now. So she put on one of her cotton sundresses, grabbed her e-reader, and went outside.
She sat down in a lounge chair with her book, kicked her flats off, and closed her eyes. The sun was gloriously warm, she had a whole day and a half before she had to deal with Marta, she had three whole more weeks before she had to go back to New York, and she had a romance novel on her e-reader that she’d started in the bathtub last night. She should read a manuscript while she was out here, she knew she should. But she’d already read three of them this week, after working all day, then working with Beau in the afternoons, and she needed to read something that didn’t feel like homework.
She checked the weather in New York—twenty-four degrees, cloudy—then texted Priya a picture of her bare feet in the sun with the pool in the background and laughed at Priya’s expletive-laden response. She settled back in the lounge chair and started reading.
She was deep into the book when she heard a splash. And then another. She looked up. And saw Beau, in the pool. Swimming.
He was doing the butterfly, a stroke she’d never learned how to do but had always admired every four years when she watched the Olympics. It always seemed so hard, that big burst of energy as the swimmers almost leaped across the pool. All she could see were his back and shoulders. His incredibly powerful back and shoulders.
He probably hadn’t even noticed her. Should she get up to leave? No, that would be silly. They were…friendly now, after all. After working together all week in the library, and dinner and everything last night. They could coexist, with her in a lounge chair, reading, and him swimming laps in the pool. With those arms. And…shoulders.
She just couldn’t look at him doing it. That’s all. She looked back down at her book.
But that was worse! She couldn’t sit here, with him doing…that…and read a romance novel! This was the wrong book to be reading right now. That’s probably why she was thinking about Beau like that! It was all the book’s fault!
Suddenly, the splashing stopped, and she looked up again. To find Beau, at the shallow end of the pool, looking straight at her.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
She could see more of him now, from the chest up. She could hear Priya’s voice in her head. Those big, brawny guys. Yes, that described Beau well. He didn’t look like a weight lifter or a model or anything like that, but he was big, solid. He looked bigger than he had in the old pictures she’d seen of him taken around Hollywood. It suited him.
Why did he look so good? He’d apparently been locked away here for like a year; shouldn’t he be, like, pale and pasty and awkward looking? Of course not. He’d been locked away in a mansion with gardens and a pool—that’s why he was a nice even light brown, with that broad chest and wide shoulders and thank God she couldn’t see anything else. She was very grateful she was wearing sunglasses, so he couldn’t tell she was staring.
“Having a good day?” he asked.
She nodded. “Um, yeah. Just trying to get some…reading done. A manuscript. For work.” She picked up her coffee cup. “And drinking coffee. It’s, um, beautiful weather today.”
He grinned at her. “Not like last Saturday.”
She laughed. Could anyone blame her for being so outraged that it had rained then, when she was used to the weather being like this? “No, not like last Saturday.”
He turned to take a sip out of his water bottle, and then lifted his arms and threw himself back into the water.
She watched him as he swam the whole length of the pool. She couldn’t help herself. He flipped at the deep end and flew back toward the shallow end. She tore her eyes away from him right before he got there and turned back to her book.
Oh, the hell with it. Fine, she’d read a manuscript. Romance novels made you get too many ideas, everyone knew that. Made you think unreasonable, impossible, unlikely, totally implausible things. She needed to stop that, right away.