The Girl Next Door

(Chapters 9 - 12)

-9-

Finn had expected that Emma would clean the house: that's what he'd hired her to do. What he had not expected was to find himself stepping from the bottom of his staircase unto the wood floor in his sock feet and skittering like bald summer tires on glare ice across his own foyer. Clearly, she was trying to kill him. He grabbed at the banister to stop himself from sliding ass over teakettle, only to hear the crack of splintering wood and fall anyway, the broken remains of a railing spindle clutched uselessly in his hand. 

When he recovered the breath that had been knocked out of him, he let it out in a spate of curses foul enough to turn the air blue. Emma appeared in the kitchen doorway, her pert eyebrows raised over those too-large, too-innocent eyes, her lips pressed tightly together, but twitching. The bitch was laughing at him. (Well, trying not to laugh, but he could tell.)  

He pointed at her with the stair spindle, a very small, very violent part of him wishing he were close enough to run her through with the jagged wooden edge. He glared daggers at her and hissed, "You."  

Her eyes only widened more, until her brows completely disappeared beneath her hair and he could see almost all around the purpley-grey irises. "Me?" she echoed. "How can you possibly blame this on me? I wasn't even in the room." She paused dramatically and then inhaled, her nostrils flaring slightly as she exclaimed, "I know! You think I loosened the banister spokes as a booby trap, because I'm just that nefarious. Well, that's right, I confess. Take me away. Shoot, McCaffrey: clearly my evil little plots are no match for your genius."  

He rolled his eyes and stood gingerly, his hip and backside sore from the impact from the fall. "Hardy har har," he grumbled sarcastically. "You greased the floor." 

She shook her head. "I did not grease it: I waxed it. I thought that was what you were paying me to do." 

"You think I'm paying you to turn my foyer into a death trap?" he snapped. 

She put her hands on her hips and looked at him like he was an idiot. With exaggerated patience, she said, "You hired me to look after the house, yes? Well, that floor looked like it hadn't seen the business end of a broom or mop since the Clinton administration." 

Finn gritted his teeth. "I vacuum," he said defensively. He hated feeling the need to defend himself to her, but he did. He felt her judging him, as if she had the right. She looked at his less-than-stellar domestic skills and thought that meant he wasn't a good parent, as if just because he didn't scrub the bathroom every day he didn't take care of his daughter. "Shut up," he growled.  

Emma just looked at him, the pink bow of her lips tied up in a thin, fake, infuriating smirk. 

"You couldn't have put up some kind of sign to warn people that the floor would be slippery?" 

She shook her head. "This isn't a department store. Besides, I thought you'd notice the lack of clutter, the just-cleaned shine, or perhaps the pine wax smell...?" 

Again, she was insulting him. Now that she'd pointed these things out, they were obvious, but at the time he hadn't been paying attention. He'd been headed to the kitchen with just one thought in mind: coffee, so that he could stop falling asleep at his desk. Feeling foolish, he changed the subject.  

"Where's Catie?" he demanded, only to remember as he did that she'd knocked on his door a few hours ago to ask to go to a friend's house. "Oh, right." 

Emma reminded him anyway. "She went to Mandy Peterson's birthday party." 

Finn had been about to turn to examine the damage to the stair railing, but at this his head snapped back to Emma again. Catie had mentioned going to Mandy's, but she'd said nothing about a birthday party. "A party? Who else will be there?"