“Nonsense.” She shook her head. “You’re not clumsy. You have strong, graceful hands, and you know how to use them.”
“What if I’m weak—or lazy?”
“Give me a break. With those muscles? You forget, I know exactly how strong you are. Strong enough to catch a falling woman in midair and never miss a beat.”
He smiled, but his expression sobered almost instantly. “Then what about my character? You’re inviting me to live in your home without any proof I’m not a liar or a thief or a crazed serial killer. What about references? What about my past?”
“I’ll call your references if you want me to. But I make my best decisions when I simply follow my instincts. I can’t help it. My grandfather used to say ‘Granvilles always go with their gut’ and he was right. In fact, the only really bad choices I’ve ever made were when I ignored my instincts.”
She thought about Bart. She’d known from the start that a loveless marriage was a terrible idea. But she’d allowed other people to persuade her that twenty million dollars could be awfully darn lovable. Even her grandfather, on his deathbed, had recommended Bart as the answer.
But in her heart she’d known all along it would be a disaster. Breaking the engagement was the best decision she’d ever made.
Until this one.
Matthew seemed lost in his own thoughts, too. He stared at her for a long moment, rotating his spoon slowly through his fingers, like a card player tickling an ace. She couldn’t help watching—it was such a perfect example of the grace she’d mentioned earlier.
Finally he spoke.
“I have something I need to tell you,” he said, his voice low and grave. “Something you should know before you push this any further.”
She nodded, almost afraid to hope. But he didn’t look like a man who was trying to find a way to say no anymore. He looked like a man who was trying to find a way to say yes.
He took a deep breath and began.
“It’s simple, really. Simple and ugly. I just got out of prison.”
She could see that he expected some reaction. A recoil of horror, perhaps? An ‘eek’ as if she’d seen a ghost? He must not know that her great-grandfather had been in jail four times for bootlegging, and her grandmother’s brother had shot his best friend over a soprano. And the ancestor with the cannon had refused to pay taxes for decades.
Granvilles didn’t scare that easily. So she just looked at him and waited.
“I got out less than a month ago,” he went on finally. “I served three years of a five-year sentence at the New York State Penitentiary.”
“Why?” It seemed an inadequate reaction, but it was the only one she could come up with. “What did you do?”
“Embezzling. Grand larceny. There were actually several counts, with several fancy names. The short version is that I owned a financial consulting firm. I was good at picking investments, and I made a lot of money for a lot of people. But my partner…”
He set his jaw hard, and his brown eyes were suddenly black. “The money disappeared. All of it. Millions and millions of dollars. My partner went to South America, and I went to prison.”
The simplicity of his delivery was her best clue. He was in a lot of pain, and he was afraid that if he said any more the pain might show.
“But you didn’t take the money, did you? Your partner took it, isn’t that right?” She leaned across the table. “You aren’t an embezzler just because he’s an embezzler.”
Matthew took a long drink of coffee, as if his throat was very dry. “A jury of my peers found otherwise,” he said, and she heard the dark note of bitterness under the words. “And the New York State prison system didn’t seem to think there were any substantive distinctions, either. They found us equally to blame.”
He set the cup down carefully and turned his shadowed eyes her way. “So, there it is.”
Yes, there it was. She could almost feel the anger and bitter resentment radiating out from him. It pulsed across the table and touched her in thick, black waves. But she felt other things, too. She felt the loneliness, the courage, the shock of betrayed trust. The pure injustice and pain.
It was a lot to take in, almost too much.
She hoped she wouldn’t start crying. He would never understand. He might think she cried out of pity, when really they would be tears of indignation. What a bastard his partner must have been. How could any man leave a friend to pay so heavy a price?
“So what do you say, Natalie Granville? What is your gut telling you now?”
Somehow she managed to smile. “Right now my gut is telling me that we’d better hurry. It’s a statistical fact that every eight-point-two minutes another piece of Summer House falls apart. While we were discussing this nonsense, I probably lost the entire west wall of the Blue Bedroom.”
“Natalie, this isn’t nonsense. It’s real. I am a convicted felon. You could be—”
She sighed heavily. “For heaven’s sake! Let’s cut to the chase. Just give me a yes or no answer. If you accept this job, will you do your best to fix up my crazy old house?”
“I can’t—”
“Yes or no answer.”
He nodded cautiously. “Yes.”
“Are you going to try to cheat me?”
“No.”
“Rob me? Steal all my expensive stuff?”
He smiled just a little. “Do you have expensive stuff?”
She grinned. “Not a bit. But if I did, would you steal it?”
“No.”
“And would you ever physically hurt me?”
He took a breath. “Never.”
She stood up and held out her hand. “Then, as I tried to tell you yesterday, Matthew Quinn, you’re hired.”
Slowly he rose to his feet. Even more slowly, he accepted her outstretched hand. His grip was strong and sure and safe, and she smiled, thinking how lucky she was that the world’s most amazing handyman had somehow found his way to her rickety old door.
She was sorry for his sake that prison had brought him to this moment, but for one fleeting instant, selfishly, for her own sake, she was glad.
“Okay, then. It’s settled. Can you move in tomorrow morning?”
Gradually his own smile grew less strained. And he nodded. “I don’t see why not.”
“Great. I’ll be waiting for you.”
She picked up her glass and downed the last of the orange juice. Theo was so smart. Her hangover had completely, miraculously, disappeared.
“Natalie,” Matthew called out as she started to walk away.
She paused. “What?”
“I have to know. Why was that statue wearing a wedding dress yesterday?”
She shook her head, chuckling.
“I’ll tell you all about it someday,” she said. “Right now I can only say that I must have been having a Granville moment.”
He laughed softly. “The world will say you’re having another Granville moment now, hiring me.”
She shrugged, still smiling.
“Let it,” she said. “The world has been wrong before.”