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“We’ll take my car, if that’s okay.” Daisy directed me to the side of the hangar. “This job is a double-handler, so we’ll spend the morning just blasting through it. After, we’ll return here for lunch and I’ll give you the address for your afternoon booking. That one will be a weekly slot, if you want it. Sound good?”
“Very good. I really need a full schedule and regular work.”
“I’ve got booking requests coming out of my ears, so that won’t be a problem. Good cleaners who are willing to drive out around the Cairngorms are apparently hard to come by.”
She unlocked a red car with a vacuum cleaner and cleaning goods in the trunk. I added my caddy to the collection and climbed in the passenger side.
Daisy drove us onto a mountain road. We passed a sign for a snowboarding centre then headed out into white-covered hills, dark trees here and there, their boughs laden with snow.
The sky was brightening with the approaching dawn, the world muted and soft.
“It’s so pretty here,” I mused.
“Right? The beauty is unreal. It’s one of the reasons I never intend to leave, other than the fact my bestie lives here.”
“Ariel who interviewed with you? I really liked her.”
“That’s her. It might be isolated here, but there’s a tight circle of ladies, and we all support each other.”
A trickle of warmth replaced some of my uptight nerves. I’d always been a girls’ girl, though that had been to my detriment with regard to one woman in particular.
“I love that. It must be lovely to have people you’re so close to nearby.”
Daisy gave a laugh. “Also my boyfriend. I should’ve started with him maybe, but he was my third reason to stay in order of time. He’s Ben, the head of the bodyguard service.”
I made the connection to the blond man I’d seen yesterday with Daisy. “Valentine’s boss?”
“And his brother. Though you wouldn’t know it.”
I squinted at her. Valentine and Ben, from the brief sighting I’d had of the latter, didn’t look all that alike. Maybe it was just the hair colour throwing me, with Valentine’s warm black nothing like Ben’s honey yellow. They hadn’t seemed close either.
But my employer moved on, changing the subject back to work, and I got my head in the game.
I didn’t want to get personal. Not yet.
This was day one of living here, and there were questions I didn’t want to answer.
At the house in question, Daisy took a deep breath. “The owner wants it done in four hours but said the people who’d rented it had left it in a state. It’s going to be a miracle if we finish.”
It was a sizable home, but what kind of mess took over eight combined hours of work? I braced myself, determined to shift my butt to prove my worth.
My new life depended on it.
By eleven-thirty, we’d finally finished. The five-bed home was a holiday property that had been rented by a group who’d partied hard. A bottle of wine had been left in the middle of the lounge carpet like someone had played spin the bottle, just without emptying it first so it had puddled in a vinegary stench. From there outwards, devastation ran wild.
Food on the walls.
Mud tramped through the kitchen, into the hall, and up the carpeted stairs.
Trasheverywhere.
Daisy had divided up the work, popped in headphones, and got stuck in. I’d leapt to follow. Hard work never scared me, but this was so disrespectful to the homeowners that it made me mad.
True to my word, I’d scrubbed, scraped, swept, and polished, and it had all come up good.
We carried bags of rubbish out to the bins and returned the keys to the lockbox.
“The owner said it was bad,” she said. “But that was far worse than I expected. I’m sorry. Talk about a baptism of fire for your very first job.”
