Did he think she wouldn’t be ready? Ha.
He began, “It was a day for killing underlings.” She typed each word as it fell from his mouth. “A day without mercy, the sky a gray wolf, crouched on the land, hungry and unforgiving. The man in the watch cap was waiting for him at the station as agreed Elise.” He said her name so softly, without even a hint of a pause to signal it was coming.
But she was ready. She punched in a period after the word agreed and stopped typing. The room was suddenly totally silent. A strange, hot little shiver raced beneath her skin as she waited, fingers poised on the keyboard, for the sound of her name.
Finally, almost in a whisper, he said, “Not bad, Elise.” And they were off and running again. “The man thought he was safe, thought he understood his place and his function. He assumed he would come through this in one piece as long as he did his job. But no one was safe. It was the nature of the game they played. Jack didn’t want to kill the man. And maybe, if things went as planned, he wouldn’t have to. Too bad things so rarely proceeded as planned...”
Jed went on, his deep voice rising and falling.
Breathing slowly and evenly, Elise had found that calm space she’d learned to inhabit back in Mrs. Clemo’s second period keyboarding class. So few people took keyboarding, even back then. But Elise had, because you never knew when it might come in handy to actually be good at something so basic, something most people nowadays just fumbled their way through.
Elise let his words wash into her, through her, and then pushed them out her fingers as he kept on.
And on. Sometimes his voice was eerily soft—and sometimes he shouted.
She tuned out his unnerving changes in volume and tone and stayed with her task, typing the words as he spoke them, throwing in punctuation wherever his pace and phrasing seemed to indicate it, stopping when she heard her name, and then waiting—calm, ready, silent—until he said her name again.
There was something about typing that just worked for her, that was as effortless as drawing her next breath.
Not that she’d ever want to type for a living. Uh-uh. Too much sitting. For the long haul, she needed a job with variety, a job where she didn’t have to spend all day on her butt.
But Nellie had mentioned a looming deadline, hadn’t she? How long did he have? A few months at the most? Elise could be a typist for three months. If the money was good enough.
About twenty minutes after he started dictating, Jed said her name yet again—and after that, he was silent.
She cast him a quick, questioning glance.
With one big arm across his chest and the other elbow braced on it, he stroked the scruff of beard on his square jaw, a calculating gleam in his eyes. Finally, he spoke. “The typing test is over. Swivel that chair around.” She turned her chair to face him. “Can you go on like that for hours?”
She took a minute to consider the question.
It was a minute too long, apparently, because he muttered impatiently, “You may speak now.”
“Thank you,” she replied with a sarcasm he either didn’t notice or chose to ignore. “I would need a five-minute break every two hours, long enough to stand up and walk around a little.”
“I can accept that.”
“An hour for lunch.”
He scowled as he continued to stroke his rocklike jaw. Apparently, in his world, typists shouldn’t be allowed to waste precious time on food. But then he conceded, “All right. An hour. But you’ll need to be flexible as to which hour. If the story’s flowing, you might have to wait a while to eat.”
“Even with regular five-minute breaks, there have to be limits. No more than five hours at a stretch without an hour-long break.”
A grunt of disapproval escaped him. But then he agreed, “Five hours. All right. The work will be intense and you’ll need to roll with that. I have to get a book out fast and I’ll need you when I need you—which will be ten to twelve hours a day. You will have to live here and you will work six days a week, with Sundays off.”
Live here in his house? God, it sounded awful. But in the end, it was all about the money. If the money was good enough, she could bear a whole boatload of awful.
And wait. What about Mr. Wiggles? He would have to come with her. “I have a cat. My cat will be moving in with me.”
Dead silence from Walsh. He stopped stroking his jaw and moved to the windows. For several seconds, he stared out at the mountains.
It appeared that Mr. Wiggles was going to be a deal-killer. Well, so be it. She’d barely gotten the big sweetie out alive during the fire. If she had to live with this strange, grumpy man, Wigs was coming with her. Or she wouldn’t come at all.
Jed turned those intense eyes on her again. “Fine. Bring the damn cat.” She felt equal parts triumphant that she’d won her demand and let down that she was one step closer to being Jed Walsh’s typing slave for she still didn’t know how long. She was about to ask him how long the job would last when he said flatly, “Unfortunately, I find you sexually attractive. That could be a problem.” Did he actually just say that? Another of those odd shivers swept through her as he added thoughtfully, “But then there’s the cat. I hate cats. That should help.” Frowning, he kept those cold eyes steadily on her. “You’re thinking I shouldn’t have told you that I’m attracted to you. But I think it’s better if we’re on the same page.”
She probably shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t resist. “What page is that, Jed?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “The one where you know that I’m aware of you as a woman, but we both know that work is the focus here and we will be keeping it strictly professional.”
Elise said nothing. Really, what was there to say? The less the better, clearly. She shouldn’t be flattered. But she was, a little. Apparently the extra pounds she’d put on since the fire didn’t look so bad on her, after all.
“My deadline is November first and it will not be extended.”
“Four and a half months.” She mentally calculated the money that might be hers.
“It’s likely you’ll be finished by mid-October, but I need you to commit till November first, just in case I run into trouble. I do most of my rewriting while composing the first draft of the manuscript. So essentially, the book is finished when I get to the last page. Then I clean it up, but that I usually can do on my own in a couple of weeks, max."
"All right. Four to four and a half months, then."
"Yes. If you last, the position will become permanent. It’s a grind when I’m on a project. But as I said, I type my own rewrites, so as soon as I’ve made it to the end of the first draft, I probably won’t need you until I start the next book. You’ll have weeks and sometimes months off at a time between books.”
Elise thought of all those thousands he supposedly would pay. She could almost let him think she might be willing to type his novels long-term to get a chance at that money.
But she wasn’t willing, no way. And it was only right to let him know up front. “I’m sorry, Jed. If we can come to terms, I’ll do this one project. But as of November first, I’ll be moving on.”
His scowl deepened. “I pay well.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“If you work out, I’ll need you to stay on.”
“Sorry, not happening. I’m done the first of November.