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Imogen snorted as if she disagreed with Kai’s interpretation. She gestured at the collection. “All the notable buildings in town are represented.” She pointed at one. “There’s the palace.”
“Do you have an Etsy shop or something?” Cara asked. “My mom would love these.”
“A what shop?”
“He doesn’t make them for money,” Mr. Benz said from her other side. Cara had been so blinded by Kai’s rugged Alpine masculine beauty, not to mention his carpentry skills, that she’d almost forgotten about Mr. Benz.
Well, that wasn’t true. Mr. Benz was difficult to forget. There was something about his presence that... took up space. You knew he was there even if he was silent. Maybe that’s what had been wrong with her on the walk down the mountain. She didn’t know how to deal with the juxtaposition between Mr. Benz’s literal silence and his attention-commanding demeanor.
“Heshouldsell them,” Imogen said. “I get people trying to buy them all the time.” Kai merely grunted. “But no, he’s too busy being a hermit.” She turned to Cara. “Kai lives alone in the woods in the cutest log cabin you ever saw.”
Kai rolled his eyes. Kai, she was sensing, was a man of few words, but if hewereprone to using words, he would probably expend a few objecting to his home being calledcute.
Hmm. An absurdly good-looking, talented-with-his-hands man of few words who lived alone.
Was it possible things were starting to look up?
She glanced at Mr. Benz, feeling the ever-present magnetism of his attention. He was already looking at her, his expression as impossible to read as ever. She needed to get rid of him. Not just now, as it related to Kai, but, elementally. It was starting to feel as though the success of her project here depended on it.
To Matteo’s surprise, Ms. Delaney wanted to walk back up the hill. He’d been prepared to call for a car. He wouldn’t have minded. Spending time with Ms. Delaney was oddly innervating, and he was tired.
“Why don’t we have it out, then?” she said as soon as they cleared the crowded village square.
“I beg your pardon?”
She stopped walking and turned to him, her pale skin illuminated by one of the village’s gas streetlights. “You clearly don’t want me here, and that’s fine. Message received. But is this the attitude I should expect from everyone else? From the king?”
Matteo had to admit she’d disarmed him with her forthrightness. He was accustomed to the subtle currents of palace politics,where achieving one’s goals sometimes required a bit of strategy. Almost like playing a game of chess. He wasn’t used to being called out so directly. But he supposed he also wasn’t used to working with American management consultants.
“Come on,” she said with an air of impatience. “I don’t want to do this covert warfare bullshit. If there’s going to be warfare, let’s have it be overt. You don’t like me. All right. I can live with that. I don’t like you, either.” She was waving a hand around in the air, and it was ungloved. It was too dim to see the red of her nail polish, but her fingertips read as “dark” against the relative paleness of her skin. It was difficult to look away from them. “I can’t play your game if I don’t know the rules,” she said when he took too long to speak.
He took a step back. He scrambled to think what to say to regain the upper hand. It wasn’t lost on him that she’d used the wordgame. He had just compared his usual methods for advancing his agenda to playing chess. Paradoxically, though, being seen through so completely made him want tostopplaying.
All right, they would do things her way. For now. “Idon’twant you here. And...” Should he say the rest? Well, she’d started it. “Idon’tlike you. It’s nothing personal, mind you. I’m sure you’re very good at your job.” She stared at him, assessing. He could almost see her mind spinning up. She was a worthy adversary. In another circumstance, one with lower stakes, he would have enjoyed facing off with her. “Are you going to lay people off?”
“I’mnot going to do anything other than the job I’ve been tasked with, which is to report to Morneau’s board of directors on how Morneau can modernize and become more profitable.”
“You know what I mean.”
She continued to look at him evenly, her face betraying no emotion. He didn’t like that. He was used to being able to read people more easily than this. “I think it’s very likely that there will be layoffs, yes. Demand for Morneau’s products—”
“Which arewatches,” he interrupted. That was the problem with people like her. Everything was interchangeable to them. Morneau could be making any kind of widget, and it would be all the same to her. He sniffed, feeling more like himself. It helped that she had redonned her gloves, so he didn’t have to look at her fingernails.
“Demand for Morneau’s watches,” she said smoothly, unbothered by the correction, “has fallen by thirty-nine percent over the past decade. Do you know what’s happened to the company’s workforce over the same period?”
He did not, which was embarrassing. He knew the current size of the workforce, roughly speaking—he read the company’s annual report every year—but he didn’t have the figure from the previous year memorized, much less that from ten years ago.
He resolved to do better.
“Morneau’s workforce is up two percent over the last ten years,” she informed him coolly.
“Is it now?” He smirked. He couldn’t help it. That two percent was probably down to him. Not that she needed to know that.
“How does that make sense when productivity is down?” she went on, not unkindly, he had to concede. Her voice had lost its earlier confrontational quality. She was speaking softly now, as if she knew she was breaking bad news.
He didn’t like that she thought she knew him, that she thought he was the kind of person she needed to treat gently. He didn’tlike itat all. “Your organizing principle here is that productivity is the be-all, end-all of human civilization, correct?”
“Well, since it’s my job to ‘save hapless, backward companies from themselves,’”—she made quotation marks with her fingers, and damn it, he was back to thinking about her nails even though he couldn’t see them—“I suppose I’m going to have to go with yes.”
