Yeah. That was pretty much her worst nightmare.
She stared at the door, willing herself to get this over with. She had to get her supplies and get back across town before the shelter closed its doors for the night. If she didn’t catch a train in the next twenty minutes, she ran the risk of having to sleep outside again. And April was a temperamental jerk in New York City. It meant she could be sleeping outside in a forty-five degree rainstorm or a sixty degree balmy night. There was no telling and Rebecca was not in the mood to gamble.
She took a deep breath and raised her hand to knock when the elevator dinged behind her. She jumped, whirling around and pressing her back to 9J’s door. A delivery man in a bike helmet, an orange reflector vest, and very high socks stepped off the elevator and straight toward her.
Giving Rebecca a curious look, the delivery man pressed the doorbell at the side of 9J’s door.
She jumped away, standing four feet away from him and staring at the door with wide eyes. A moment later, it swung open.
“Hey, Rico,” the humongous, hairy blonde man said as he reached into his back pocket for his wallet. He looked up and green eyes landed on Rebecca. His face pulled into a friendly smile that was very much offset by his wild beard. “Oh. Hi, there.”
Rico looked between the two of them, accepted his tip, and handed over the bag of food that smelled so good Rebecca held back a moan. She couldn’t, however, hold back the path of her eyes that followed the food from the delivery man’s hand to the resident’s hand.
“Night, Atlas,” the delivery man called and headed back to the elevator.
Atlas? Had she heard that right? Wasn’t that the name of the guy who held the world up on his shoulders? Kind of made sense considering how huge this man was. He could probably lift a Volkswagen if he put his mind to it.
“You’re back for your things, right?” His voice was very low but still very clear. He’d obviously showered and changed since she’d last seen him. His longish blonde hair was damp and flopping to one side, curling on the ends. He wore a baby blue t-shirt with a graphic cloud over his chest and a pair of pajama pants with Tabasco hot sauce bottles printed all over them. His feet were bare. One of his toenails was bruised purple.
Rebecca felt like she was in the presence of a grizzly bear that was pretending to be well trained.
Her heart kicked up another notch. She nodded to answer his question.
“C’mon in.” He held the door open and stepped aside.
Wishing like hell that she could snap her fingers like a witch and her cleaning supplies would zoom on out to her, Rebecca didn’t see any other way but to go into his apartment. She stepped inside and habit had her slipping her shoes off. She was the cleaning lady after all and she’d just spent an hour mopping these floors.
“You can call me Atlas, by the way,” he told her and then looked at her expectantly. The look on his face was so open, so curious that Rebecca felt the very foreign urge to chuckle, one she hadn’t felt in a very long time. Maybe this man wasn’t a grizzly bear. Maybe he was more of a wolf cub.
He was obviously waiting for her to supply her name, but Rebecca had made it this far through life on a certain set of rules and she wasn’t about to let a man in silly pants throw her off her game. She simply nodded to show that she’d heard him.
He looked disappointed but didn’t press her. “Through this way,” he told her, leading her through to the kitchen as if she didn’t know this apartment like the back of her hand, as if she were a guest in his home.
As soon as she made it into the kitchen, she slid over to her things and started to pack them into the cart. She couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten her supplies. She’d never done anything like that before. She blamed it on the fact that she’d fallen asleep at a client’s house. She still wasn’t sure how the hell that had happened. She’d been tired, sure. But she was always tired. She should have gotten used to it by now.
One minute she’d been watching the clock and finishing her lunch and the next minute she’d been jolting awake while a gigantic man in a Dolly Parton shirt had been standing not ten feet away from her.
“Dang it,” Atlas muttered as he began to unpack the mouthwatering food. “Sometimes they throw in extra food for me because I’m a frequent flier at the restaurant, but they always forget I don’t like chicken quesadillas.”
He didn’t like chicken quesadillas? Was this man off his rocker? What was there to not like about cheesy, salty, meaty goodness? She looked up from the cart and watched as he held open a takeout box. There was steam curling out of it. Rebecca couldn’t remember the last time she’d had something so fresh that it was still steaming.
The shelter provided a bag lunch and she bought food from the grocery store for her dinners and breakfasts. But she didn’t have a kitchen to prepare any food and she couldn’t buy in bulk, because she didn’t have a place to store it. So she ended up with a lot of energy bars and a lot of cold ravioli from the can.
Her mouth watered at the scent of the Mexican food. This was torture.
Atlas sighed, like he was extremely put-upon by the restaurant’s forgetfulness. In a heart-stopping moment, he lifted the lid of his trashcan and held the container of hot, delicious food over top.
Rebecca would never understand rich people. He was willing to throw away an entire container of free food simply because he didn’t care for it?
“Unless,” he turned back around, a careless expression on his face. “You want it? I’m just gonna throw it away unless you’re hungry.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip. Did she want it? She’d have stuck pins under her fingernails for a bite. “If you’re gonna throw it away…”
“Great!” he chirped brightly, closing the trashcan and sliding the container down the counter in her direction.
She quickly finished packing her cart and stood up, trying not to look too desperate as she reached for the container of food. To her confusion, he’d pulled out two sets of silverware and napkins. And, there, he was setting two empty glasses on the counter. He turned his back and pulled open the fridge. “Let’s see. I’ve got… water, beer, soy milk, and orange juice with a very questionable expiration date.”
“It’s still fresh,” she told him. She’d checked the date herself not two hours ago. If it had been expired, she would have thrown it out for him. She normally wouldn’t have said anything at all, much less to correct him, but she was totally thrown off kilter by the fact that he was obviously assuming that she was going to stay and eat dinner with him.
She realized then that there was probably no graceful way to refuse the dinner invitation and still take the food he offered. Accepting the food meant eating it here alongside him. Rebecca eyed the dinner. Was a chicken quesadilla worth getting locked out of the shelter for the night? Her eyes flicked to the window and saw that it was still overcast outside. It could mean rain.
“Does that mean you want orange juice?” he asked, turning back around with the juice in his hand.
Yes, she freaking wanted some of that orange juice. It was the good kind. With real pulp and no extra sugar. She’d looked at the ingredients that afternoon. It had said: oranges. That was it.
That, there, was rich people orange juice.
But what she wanted more than orange juice? A place to sleep tonight.
“Um. Actually, I have to go.”
The expression on his face fell so quickly that Rebecca felt the unusual urge to soften her refusal.
“I… have a train to catch.” It was the truth. She had to take the subway across the city now or else she’d miss her chance at the shelter. But saying it in that particular way had implied something else. It implied that she had a train ticket for one of the trains that ran on a timetable. A train that led someplace like Long Island or Jersey city. A train out to the suburbs.
Right. Don’t make her laugh. As if she could even afford one of those tickets. Let alone the home in the suburbs.
“Ah.” His expressi
on immediately cleared, accepting her explanation. “In that case…”
He rifled through his cabinets and came up with a plastic water bottle. He dumped half the carton of orange juice into it.
Then he grabbed a canvas tote bag and put the quesadilla container in the tote. She watched, dumbfounded, as he added to-go ramekins of salsa, sour cream, and hot sauce. Then, to her complete astonishment, he added his metal silverware to the tote. Not the plastic kind.
By the time she’d shaken the sense back into her head, he was digging around in a drawer, attempting to find the cap to the water bottle he’d filled with orange juice.
The man was sending her on her way with the best dinner she would eat in damn near a year. And he was sending her on her way with real silverware and a Nalgene water bottle. None of those things came cheap.
She was stunned.
Atlas dug through the drawer, growling in frustration when he couldn’t find what he was looking for.
“That one doesn’t have a top,” she said dimly, quietly. She’d noticed that a few weeks ago, most of his water bottles were without tops.
“Can’t stand a topless water bottle,” he said with such a cheesy grin that she almost smiled back.
He transferred the juice to a bottle with a top and put that in the tote bag too.
“You… didn’t have to do all that,” she said in a quiet voice. She honestly couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I like sharing. And there was too much food for just me. Besides, now that you have my silverware and water bottle hostage, you have to come back.”
She blinked at him. Come back? Regardless of how awkward it had been to get caught sleeping on the job, if he wasn’t firing her, then she was coming back. The income from this job was way, way too important to her. It had been the only cleaning service she’d been able to find that hadn’t required a background check. She couldn’t afford to do anything to mess it up.
“Same time next week?” he asked when she still hadn’t responded to him.
She blinked and packed the tote bag into her cart. “Whatever works for you, sir.”
He outright laughed at that. “You’re literally the first person in my entire life to call me sir. Kinda get a kick out of it, though. Maybe I’ll start insisting on it at work.”
He was grinning at her, for reasons that Rebecca couldn’t even begin to guess. She nodded, cleared her throat, and took the plunge. “Thank you for my dinner. And thank you for being so… understanding about what happened earlier.”
He waved his hand through the air. “Seriously, it’s not a big deal, Beverly.”
She blinked, her brow knitting together. Beverly?
He carefully read her expression before breaking into a grin again. “Okay, so, it’s definitely not Beverly. Strike one. But seriously, you can nap all you want in my house as long as you keep folding my guest towels like that. You make towel-folding into an artform.”
There was no way to respond to that, so Rebecca didn’t even try. She just nodded again and started to wheel her cart down the hall. He made it to the door while she was still slipping her tennis shoes on and swung it open for her.
“See you next week, Meredith.”
Rebecca wrinkled her nose at the name and made him laugh again. Nodding her head at him as she passed, she did something she never did. She turned back to look at him. But she needed one more look at this ridiculous man in ridiculous clothing.
“Home safe, Augustine.”
She wrinkled her nose again and this time he closed the door. She could hear him laughing on the other side.
CHAPTER TWO
A week later, Rebecca was once again cleaning 9J. She didn’t want it to feel any different than it had felt before. But it did. She found herself dusting his bookshelf with a different eye. She read the titles and wondered about the man who’d put those books there. There were a lot of Nicholas Sparks novels. And a lot of Jane Austen. And was that? Yup. An entire shelf of Nora Roberts books.
Before last week, Rebecca hadn’t even looked at the titles. She kept her mind focused on her work, not wondering about the resident of 9J. But this week, she felt… confused. Why so much chick lit? Maybe there was a woman living here after all? But no. Not possible. Rebecca had never seen so much as an extra toothbrush in this apartment. She wasn’t responsible for his laundry, but he’d often leave a load of linens in the dryer for her to put out and there were occasionally some unmentionables clinging with static. But never a woman’s undergarments.
Once a few weeks ago, she’d come in to see a high chair at the breakfast bar, a bowl of half eaten sweet potatoes and a dirty bib. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but now, she pictured the gigantic, blonde Atlas and she wondered whose baby that had been.
Was it his?
Did he have a kid who only came over once in a blue moon? Did he have a woman somewhere else in the city and he only went to her house instead of inviting her over? She thought of his Dolly Parton shirt and flamingo shorts. Suddenly, her dusting rag poised in the air, a thought occurred to Rebecca. Maybe he was gay?
He hadn’t seemed gay. But he also hadn’t pushed her to stay over for dinner. He hadn’t tried to touch her or let his eyes wander all over her body. Those were the kinds of things that Rebecca had come to expect from straight men.
Atlas had just laughed a lot, smiled even more, and then sent her on her way with dinner.
She couldn’t pin him down.
Rebecca was done dusting the shelves and knew that she couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to vacuum. But she really, really didn’t want to. Clients provided the vacuums with this cleaning service and usually she was grateful for not having to lug one all over the city. But Atlas’s vacuum was a pain in the ass. It was one of those ancient machines from about 1965. It got the job done like a champ, but damn, that thing was heavy.
And today, Rebecca did not want to deal with heavy.
She winced as she dragged it out of the closet, pressing one palm over the ribs that ached. Even the skin felt sensitive to the touch.
She wrestled the vacuum into the living room and decided that task alone warranted her a quick break. She went to the bathroom and splashed water over her hot neck. When she looked up at herself in the mirror, she winced again. Not from pain, but from the sight of herself. The bruises along her cheekbone had darkened over night and her bottom lip was split.
She was certain that her ribs were broken, but having suffered through broken ribs before, she’d just tightly wrapped an ace bandage around them and called it a good job. She washed her hands, gingerly splashed cold water on her face and drank some tap water from the cup of her hands.
She rested with her palms on the rim of the sink for a long minute before she got up the energy to get going on the vacuum.
The feeling was very familiar, calling up the energy to work when she felt like she had absolutely nothing left. She’d had to do it in Atlantic City over and over again.
She’d be a shell of herself, hungry, exhausted, miserable. And then Mark would appear in the door of the dressing room and she’d know, know, that he was going to pick her. He always picked her.
So, Rebecca would eye herself in the mirror, tell herself that this was better than being out on the streets, and then she would march out to the stage and do her damn job.
At least as a cleaning lady she didn’t have to do her job with a rhinestone thong up her ass.
Rebecca took one more minute to try and erase Mark’s voice from her head. She was already in enough pain today without adding to it.
Taking a deep breath, she walked slowly out to the living room, eyeing the heavy vacuum with something akin to hatred.
It had already been one of the longest, most miserable days of her life. She might as well get it over with.
***
Atlas loved his job. He was good at it, it paid well, he loved his coworkers, what more could he ask for?
And he especially loved wor
king for Rook Securities this week. Because they all had an unexpected week off of work with full pay.
The head of their security firm, Javier Rook, had taken his first vacation in five years. And seeing as how they didn’t have any clients on the docket right now, they’d hung up the metaphorical closed sign for the next week.
One of the reasons that he loved having this week off was that he got to spend a heck of a lot of time with Brooke, his niece. Or Brookie the Cookie, as he liked to call her. But the other reason percolating in the back of his head, as he took the elevator up to his apartment, was that because he wasn’t off bodyguarding some rich prick, Atlas got to be home in the middle of the work week. And that meant—hopefully—seeing his cleaning elf again.
For the life of him, he couldn’t have explained why that was important to him. But his spidey senses were tingling. He didn’t want to bother her, but he wanted more information where she was concerned.
He and his brother had often gone a day or two without a hot meal when they were kids. A product of having an almost invisible mother and an abusive asshole of a father. Atlas knew what hungry looked like. And his cleaning lady had been hungry. And not in the I’ve-just-had-a-long-day-at-work-so-bring-on-the-meatloaf sort of way. But in a systemic way. He would have bet a thousand dollars that whatever was going on in her life, she did not have a steady food supply.
Which also explained the ridiculous amount of Thai food in his hands. He figured that maybe if he apologized for bursting in on her with Pad Thai and drunken noodles, then maybe she’d forgive him. His hopeful heart was dancing with visions of maybe a smile from her. Maybe she’d even feel so full and happy that she’d tell him her name.
He stepped through his entryway, kicked off his shoes, and followed the sound of the vacuum to his living room.
He saw her in profile. She was dragging his vacuum over his living room rug and wincing, one palm pressed flat to her ribs.
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