Payoff Pitch (Philadelphia Patriots) (16 page)

Teddy gave her an easy nod in reply. “He just said you were okay with me living here. But I told him that I wanted to talk to you myself before making a final decision. You and I didn’t get off to the best start on the weekend, and I know it wouldn’t be easy to have another woman in the house—”

“Mr. Noah has had
many
women stay in this house,” Cristina practically spat out, interrupting her. “That is not an issue.”

O—kay.

Teddy tried not to register her shock. Not so much that Noah had invited other women to stay here—though the
many
gave her some food for thought—but the fact that the housekeeper would throw it in her face. It felt mean-spirited and could set the conversation spinning in an even faster downward spiral.

She leaned forward, refusing to be a pushover. “Look, the only thing I care about, Cristina, is whether you and I can establish a good working relationship and get along day-to-day. I’m sure neither of us wants to live and work in a strained environment, and Noah obviously wouldn’t welcome any friction between us either.”

“There will be no friction, Miss Quinn,” Cristina said, stone-faced.

Teddy forced a wry smile. “Really, Cristina, you’ve got to start calling me Teddy. I’m not your boss
or
one of his girlfriends.” She’d tried all weekend to get the housekeeper to address her by her first name but without success.

When Cristina didn’t respond, she bit back a sigh. “Okay, I’m glad to hear you say there won’t be any friction, but if I take this job I would very much like for more than just co-existence between us. I’d like us to be able to get to know each other and hopefully even become friends.”

The housekeeper shot her a look so full of skepticism that Teddy thought she might as well be talking to the back of Cristina’s hand.

“We have things in common,” Teddy insisted. She didn’t want to say it, but in addition to living in the same house, they were both essentially domestic workers, paid by and subject to the whims of a rich employer.

Cristina scoffed, peering down her nose with disdain. “Not much. You know nothing about me.”

“Not yet, but I’d like to.” Teddy was unsure where to take the conversation. Cristina had given a commitment to try to get along—at least to the extent that there would be “no friction”, but was that good enough? She simply didn’t understand why the housekeeper continued to be so damn cold. The woman was totally loyal to Noah, after all, and he’d made it clear to her that he wanted her to work with Teddy.

Christina didn’t respond, her features as cold and unmoving as marble.

“Okay, we can leave it at that,” Teddy finally said, trying not to sound exasperated. “But I’d like you to be open and honest with me about one thing before I go.”

The housekeeper gave her yet another unnerving stare.

“I want to know why you so obviously dislike me,” Teddy said. “Maybe if I understood the reasons I could do something about it. But I’ll tell you this—the more we talk, the more determined I am to accept Noah’s offer. I thought I wouldn’t if you were against it, but I just can’t see refusing something that would be good for everyone, including you. Not when your hostility makes no sense.”

Teddy wasn’t used to being so hard-assed, and she had the clammy hands to prove it. She knew she was doing the right thing, though. Cristina’s rigid attitude had firmed her resolve instead of eroding it.

With a jerky motion unlike her usual calm grace, Cristina stood and walked toward the rear windows of the kitchen. After a few moments, she turned around and expelled a heavy breath. The tension around her lips and eyes made her look several years older. “I don’t want you to refuse Mr. Noah. He would be very disappointed by that, and he would be unhappy with me. I told him that there would be no problem with you and I meant it. Do you really wish me to say more?”

Teddy thought she could stand anything if it might somehow help break the tension. “I want to hear whatever you have to say,” she said in a gentle voice that she hoped was also reassuring.

“Very well.” Cristina widened her stance and put her hands on her slim hips, like she was about to deliver a lecture. “You make me worry,
Teddy
.”

Puzzled both by her declaration and the sudden switch to her first name, Teddy frowned but kept her peace.

“Like I said, Mr. Noah has had
quite
a few women here. Some have stayed for days at a time.” Cristina briefly dropped her gaze to the floor before raising it back up again. She looked both troubled and defiant. “But I have never seen him look at a woman quite the way he looks at you. That is why you make me worry. I worry about what you could do to him.”

After a several long seconds, Teddy realized she’d better shut her gaping mouth before she started catching flies.

Noah gave a soft tap on the open door before poking his head inside the room. “Anybody home?”

“Down here,” Teddy said. “On the floor.”

When he peered around the door to the left, his body quickly snapped to attention. She was on her knees with her head bent low and her arms extended as she carefully applied painter’s tape to the top of the baseboards. Mostly what he saw was her butt hiked in the air, and he liked the sight very much. She had on a pair of tiny shorts in a bright shade of pink that made her ass look like a sweet piece of candy. Her skimpy shirt stopped a good three inches from the waistband of the shorts, revealing her smooth, tanned skin and a delicate, graceful back just begging to be caressed.

Christ.
He was turning as hard as a fence post, something he did
not
want her to see.

He took a few deep breaths and thought about the excruciating pain that had hit him when his ligament tore last season. That thought usually took care of a hard-on pretty quick. “I didn’t realize you already started. I figured you’d wait for me.”

Teddy had shown up ready to start painting just as Noah was getting set for a workout downstairs. He’d figured she’d have coffee and wait for him to finish before heading up to start working. Then again, maybe she didn’t want to spend any more time around Cristina than absolutely necessary. The two of them had been circling each other for the past two days like a pair of UFC fighters feeling out their opponent, the tension between them thick, wary and vaguely hostile. It didn’t seem to matter what he said to his housekeeper, she still treated Teddy as an adversary.

Without turning around, Teddy straightened and ripped off another length of tape from the roll. “I figured I might as well get going. The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can move in, right?”

The other day, when she’d given him the good news that she’d agreed to his proposition, Teddy had also said she wanted to take him up on his offer to redecorate her blah-looking bedroom. He’d tried hard to talk her into letting him build a basement suite for her, but she’d been adamant against it, citing the cost. While that kind of expense didn’t matter to him, it obviously did to her and he got that. But he also couldn’t help wondering whether her reluctance was partially due to lack of commitment to the job—at least the living-in part. He sensed she didn’t want him to spend a lot of money only to have the experiment not work out and see her move back in with Emma.

Teddy’s determination to save money had obviously extended to her insistence that he allow her to repaint the room herself. If there was one thing she knew how to do, she’d said, it was wield a brush, roller and spray gun, having done a lot of painting back on the family farm. He’d quickly given up trying to talk her into letting him call in a professional painter. The next morning, his teammates Nick and Ryan had dropped over to help him temporarily move the bedroom furniture into the garage.

Noah grabbed the spare roll of tape from the middle of the floor and tackled the corner next to the one Teddy was working on. As he started to apply a strip to the baseboard in front of him, he couldn’t help casting a couple of covert glances her way. She looked so damn luscious this morning it physically ached to watch her. Her breasts weren’t large, but they were perky and nicely rounded, jutting out against her white cotton shirt in tantalizing fashion. She’d tied her hair back in a low ponytail and didn’t have a stitch of makeup on as far as he could tell. Everything about her was fresh and sweet and real. Maybe it was because he was so used to women like Callie and the models he’d dated—women who as far as he could tell never showed their faces in public without taking an hour in front of a makeup mirror—that he found Teddy so refreshing. So genuine. If she had any pretensions, he hadn’t discovered them yet.

She shot him a smile just before she bent over again. “It’s sweet of you to help, but I really can do this by myself, and you’re already so busy. Don’t you have a bullpen session this afternoon?”

Noah chuckled to himself. For someone who claimed to know nothing about baseball, Teddy was catching on quickly. “Yep. You learn fast, girl. You must be great in school.”

Teddy stretched her slim body to tape the last three feet of the section she was working on before answering him in a distracted manner. “I’ve always done pretty well whenever I get the chance to take classes.”

She’d told him yesterday about her struggle to squeeze in courses at Temple as she worked slowly and steadily toward her Bachelor’s degree.

Noah stuck a two foot piece of tape to the baseboard and then ran an assessing gaze over the length of the joint. “Damn.” He spotted a tiny gap between the sheet rock and the baseboard. “I can throw a baseball sixty-six feet and hit a glove—usually, anyway—but I can’t stick tape straight on a baseboard to save my life.”

Teddy laughed as she turned to him. “You probably haven’t had much practice painting.” She knew his family had money, though he’d carefully avoided telling her anything beyond the bare minimum.

Noah held up his hands. “Guilty.” He bent back down and repositioned the offending section of tape until he had it right.

Teddy scrambled to her feet. “I’m going to start on the ceiling joints.” She grabbed the stepladder from the middle of the room and positioned it near the corner she’d been working on. “I don’t think there’s much else you can do right now. Unless you have another stepladder.”

“No such luck, but there must be something else I can do.” She’d already taped around the windows and door jambs and had removed the switch and outlet plates and taped there, too. Only the ceiling remained. But he wanted to help as much as he could and definitely enjoyed being around her.

He pushed himself to his feet as Teddy climbed up to the top step of the ladder. “Hey, you’d better let me hold that steady for you,” he said as the ladder wobbled a little. “Unfortunately, it’s a light duty model.”

Teddy glanced down at him, her full mouth pulling into a skeptical twist. She wasn’t buying what she clearly thought was phony excuse to get up close and personal. Noah couldn’t exactly deny that instinct but genuinely worried that she could topple over when she had to stretch to reach up into the corner. He silently cursed the fact that he hadn’t gone right out and bought proper equipment for her once she insisted on painting the room herself.

When he refused to budge, she rolled her eyes. “Noah, I’m not dumb enough to fall off a six foot stepladder.” She turned and stretched her arms up to start the tape in the corner where the ten foot high ceiling met the walls. “I’ll be careful,” she added without looking at him.

He firmly grasped the edges of the ladder, eliminating the slight wobble. His eyes were more or less level with the bare patch of her back and it was all he could do not to run his tongue over it, tasting skin he knew would be soft and sweet. But why the hell did he keep putting himself in temptation’s way with her? He’d agreed that they had to keep the relationship between them to business and business alone, but every minute he spent with Teddy challenged that commitment. And, damn, he knew she wasn’t finding it easy either. If he knew female vibes, and he figured he did by now, Teddy was throwing enough of them off—consciously or not—to leave any red-blooded male with his tongue hanging out like Toby’s after a crazed run around the yard.

“I know, but I’m not risking a lawsuit, babe,” he finally said, making a joke out of it.

Oh, shit, I just called her “babe”.

The word had flowed unbidden from his lips. But then again, why wouldn’t it? That was the word that came naturally to mind when he was confronted with a seriously desirable woman, especially if he happened to be staring at her very fine ass at the time. And God in heaven, Teddy Quinn was nothing if not desirable. A babe and then some.

Teddy smoothed down the tape and then swung her head around to give him a look he couldn’t quite get a bead on. A second later, he backed away as she somehow managed to twist her body around until she faced him, her butt perched on the top of the ladder. Her easy physical grace in even the most awkward of positions drew his attention to her slim legs and pretty curves.

But when she folded her arms across her chest like a cross teacher and glared at him, he had to stifle a laugh. She was clearly annoyed but still cute as hell, like a fluffy, blue-eyed kitten about to snarl.

“You’re making this awfully hard, Noah,” she said in a voice that held a slight quaver. “Crazy hard.”

He grasped the ladder’s fiberglass rails, high up where her thighs emerged from the shorts. Speaking of hard, his cock had turned to stone again and the downward drift of her gaze told him she’d damn well noticed the bulge in his jeans.

“Yeah, but right now I’m not sure I give a damn.” He shifted his hand and gently stroked her bare leg. “Do you?” As he’d known it would, her skin felt warm and smooth under his fingertips.

Teddy sucked in a startled breath but surprised him when she didn’t brush his hand away. She raised her knee slightly until it collided softly with his chest. The move wasn’t aimed at getting him to back off. In fact, it felt to him like she’d decided she wanted another point of contact between their bodies. Even through his shirt, the heat of her body cranked him up.