by Amy Andrews
‘He never went to any kind of childcare or kindy?’
Trinity’s heart thudded inside her ribcage; she was aware of the intensity of his gaze on her profile. But she kept her eyes firmly on Eddie and Oscar. ‘I couldn’t afford it.’
Once she’d shelled out for accommodation and food and paid bills there had been precious little money left and Trinity had learned to be thrifty. Being able to have Oscar in childcare even a couple of days a week would have allowed her to work more consistently, earn more money but then she’d have lost most of her wage to childcare fees.
Thank God for the public school system.
‘You don’t meet too many Trinitys.’
She blinked, startled by the change of topic enough to glance his way. ‘No.’
‘Is there an interesting story behind it?’
Interesting? For some maybe. Trinity would have preferred parents who’d prioritised stability over a creative name. She shrugged and took another sip of her beer. ‘My parents had a bit of a thing for The Matrix.’
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding with understanding. He’d clearly seen the movie. ‘Well, they chose well. You take after your namesake, putting three guys on the ground.’
Trinity looked away. ‘It was only two.’
She suffered more of his scrutiny as his feet kept up the gentle rhythm of the love seat. Eddie was teaching her son how to catch a ball now—something a father should be doing—and she clapped and cheered when Oscar caught one on his third attempt.
Oscar smiled at her as if he’d just caught a sunbeam.
‘How old are you?’ he asked finally as the excitement from the catch died down.
Trinity glanced at him again. She supposed if she were a different woman with a different life she might have batted her eyelids and asked him to guess. But her flirting skills—such as they’d been—were long dead and Reid was not the man to go reviving them on.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Really?’
She laughed then, a short, harsh noise. She couldn’t help herself. ‘Yes. I know I look older than that.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘You act older than that.’
Trinity almost rolled her eyes. She was dealing with stuff he wouldn’t understand in his eight-bedroom-house world.
‘So you were nineteen when you had Oscar?’
‘Yes.’ But she did not want to get into that with him so she changed the subject. To him. That was what men liked, didn’t they? To talk about themselves?
‘How old are you?’
She’d been trying to gauge his age since she met him. But it was hard to tell with bearded men—shave it off and it took away ten years. She’d put him at somewhere between thirty and forty.
He laughed. ‘Way older than you.’
Trinity breathed easier as he allowed himself to be sidetracked but also felt her interest being piqued. Maybe he was over forty? ‘Fifty?’ she asked innocently, cocking an eyebrow at him.
He laughed again, a big belly one. ‘Very funny. I’m thirty-four.’
So he had ten years on her. Maybe not way older but enough for it to be an issue—for some. Not her because there wasn’t a thing between them. No, sirree. Not even a hope of a thing no matter how sexually attracted she felt. Maybe the age gap would be sufficient to stem the neck fantasies...
‘Wow. That is old,’ she murmured.
He grinned, completely undeterred by her statement, and it took her breath away. Not just because the man appeared to be impervious to insults, but because his smile was flirty and, if she wasn’t very much mistaken, her mouth was curving into a smile as well.
She didn’t think her smile was flirty but—oh, dear—this was not good. She was not to flirt with Reid. Or let his flirtations go to her head. He was being nice, for crying out loud. This was how people who could afford decent houses and lived good lives interacted.
Annoyed, she turned her attention back to Oscar. She drank half her beer in three swallows as her brain scrambled to make sense of what had just happened. Maybe she’d gone that long without any kind of affection from a man that her body had decided to take over?
Thankfully he didn’t say anything for a while and Trinity decided if she ignored him he might go inside or out to play with Oscar and Eddie.
No such luck.
‘What are your plans tomorrow when Oscar’s at school? You’ll be a lady of leisure.’
She snorted. Trinity had a lot of big dreams in her head. She dreamed of a healthy kid and a stable job. A house to rent, enough money to pay bills and put food on the table and a more reliable car. In her biggest fantasy she could actually afford a deposit on a mortgage.
She never dared dream of a life of leisure.
‘Get my car back hopefully.’
Oscar’s new school was about a half-hour walk from Reid’s. Hopefully it’d just be the trip to school tomorrow they’d have to walk. They were used to the activity but at this time of year they’d both be a puddle of sweat when they got there. She’d investigated the bus options in the area but it wasn’t well serviced by public transport so having her wheels back was paramount.
‘Gav’s going to drop it back as soon as it’s done,’ Reid confirmed. ‘You can use Pops’ car to drop Oscar to school if you like.’
This was the second time Reid had offered her the use of the BMW. Trinity had an excellent driving record but there was no way she’d feel comfortable driving some classic car whose tyres looked as if they cost more than her entire Mazda.
‘It’s okay, we don’t mind walking.’
He looked as if he was going to push but didn’t. ‘What else have you got planned?’
‘I have to look for a job.’
‘What kind of job?’
‘Bar work,’ she said, turning her head to pierce him with a defensive look, lifting her chin. ‘Or cleaning jobs.’ She worked hard at whatever she did and she refused to be embarrassed by the menial nature of the jobs she’d taken to support her and her son.
She’d made a decision to get her act together when she’d found out she was pregnant with Oscar at sixteen weeks. She hadn’t wanted to raise him on the streets with a permanently stoned father and she knew she’d never get ahead by relying on government help alone.
He nodded, unperturbed by the information. ‘If you want to use the computer, it’s all yours.’
‘Thank you.’
Trinity was grateful for the offer. She usually went to the library to use their computers for job searching. Using Reid’s meant she wasn’t limited to a time slot or aware of the next person hovering in the background ready to leap in when her time was up.
Her name was down with several agencies but she rarely got work through them because she was considered unreliable. Employers had always been impressed with her diligence and work ethic but having to bring Oscar with her or leave in the middle of a shift or not be able to come in at short notice hadn’t made for lengthy stays at any one place of employment.
‘What did you want to be?’ he asked. ‘When you were a kid?’
Trinity gave a half-laugh. A kid? God. Had she ever been a kid? She’d always seemed to be the adult in her house. ‘I wanted to be Barbie.’
He laughed too and it was deep and sonorous and settled in her marrow. ‘I think that job is taken.’
She lifted the beer to her mouth and said, ‘Story of my life,’ around the opening, her lips turned up in a smile.
‘You had Barbie?’
‘No.’ She smiled at him. Again. She really needed to stop doing that.
‘This girl I knew had a zillion though. Barbie seemed pretty damn happy with her lot.’
Barbie’s life was all pink campervans, glamorous clothes and a steady guy. It had seemed like bliss compared to the wrecking ball of h
er home life.
‘And later?’
It hadn’t really mattered what she’d wanted to be later because, at seventeen, she’d finally walked out on a life of complete and utter dysfunction, swapping it for one even more uncertain and dangerous on the streets but where she’d actually felt loved.
For a while.
Having spent five years in hospitals though, Trinity had entertained the idea of one day being a nurse. She’d even looked into the part-time courses on offer. In a few years, once their lives were on track, maybe she could enrol. Work her way towards a job she knew she’d love and even greater financial stability.
‘I’ve never really been that ambitious,’ she dismissed, realising Reid was still waiting for an answer. Her smile was forced now, definitely not flirty. ‘Did you always want to be a doctor?’
Subject. Changed.
‘Oh, no,’ he said with a wide, self-deprecating grin. ‘I wanted to be a baddie. Like the ones in the movies.’
The admission surprised a laugh out of Trinity. ‘Not the good guy?’
He shook his head. ‘The bad guys had cooler gadgets and blew up more stuff.’
Well, he’d succeeded. He looked pretty damn badass to her, with his arm tats taunting her peripheral vision and memories of his other ink taunting her inward eye. He owned the whole bad-boy thing. Tats, beard, bike. The type of guy mothers warned their daughters about.
Well, some mothers. Hers would have probably been all over him.
But she’d seen enough of Dr Reid Hamilton these last few days to know that was just a fashion statement. He’d taken in a single mother with a child—complete strangers—and offered them a chance to get ahead with no strings attached. He was a carer for his grandfather. He mowed his neighbour’s lawn, for crying out loud.
There was nothing baddie about him. He was the goodie. The good guy.
Dr Good Guy.
CHAPTER SIX
‘IS THAT WHAT the tats are about?’ Trinity asked.
He glanced down, rubbed his left palm over the tats of his right forearm. ‘Nah. I got these in the army. It started off as a drunken dare on my first tour to the Middle East then one became two and then I pretty much became obsessed with ink.’
The army? So he’d been a doctor in the military? He’d been to the Middle East. She was bursting with questions over that but where she came from people didn’t pry.
‘And the long hair? The beard?’
He shoved his hand through his hair, pushing it back off his forehead before stroking his beard. He extended his neck and ran the backs of his fingers up the ridge of his trachea.
‘I got out of the military at the beginning of the year. I was sick of buzz cuts and shaving and I needed a sabbatical. When I came home I bought a motorbike and I took off on a trip to ride all the way around Australia. I just...checked out. Which wasn’t conducive to shaving or having my hair cut every other week, which suits me just fine.’
Trinity could only imagine how wonderful it would be to have the luxury of taking off. Just checking out for a while.
‘I got a call in August about Pops’ fall and came home to take care of him but the beard...’ He stroked it again, a slight smile curving his mouth. ‘I decided to keep it.’
His whiskers made a delightfully scratchy sound Trinity felt deep, deep inside her. Reid must really love his grandfather to drop everything and come home to care for him. ‘How far did you get?’ she asked.
‘’Bout halfway.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame.’
He shrugged dismissively. ‘Pops was more important. He’s always been there for me. He took me in when my life started to go off the rails a little in my teenage years. It’s the least I could do. I owe him.’
Reid’s life had gone off the rails? Curiouser and curiouser. But none of her business. She didn’t like it when people snooped into hers so she sure as hell wasn’t going to snoop into his. ‘He’s lucky to have you,’ she murmured.
So was she. And Oscar.
‘Nah. I’m the lucky one. But one day, after he’s gone, I’ll be back out on that road as fast as my legs and a two-hundred-horsepower engine can take me.’
For some reason the news surprised her. She’d made assumptions about him being settled in suburbia based on where he lived and what he did even though he looked the exact opposite of suburban guy. She should have known the second he’d swung off his motorbike and taken off his gloves and helmet that he was a rolling stone.
‘You don’t like Sydney?’
‘I love Sydney. It was where I was born and raised. It’s my home. But I’ve spent fifteen years of my life with no control over where I went and what I did every day. And that was fine. I was in service to my country. I’m proud of that. But I’m also done.’
He tipped his head back and guzzled the rest of his beer.
‘I want to go where I want to go and do what I want to do. I want the open road and freedom. I don’t want to be tied down to any one place or one way of life any more. I want to stop where I want to stop and leave when I want to leave.’
Trinity didn’t know anything about his life or where it had taken him but she’d kill to have what he had right here in suburban Sydney. She supposed that was the difference between choosing a transitory life and having one thrust upon you.
‘I would have thought you’d have cherished the...stability of settling in one place after moving around so much. Of actually...coming home.’
Stability was everything to Trinity. She’d lacked it her entire life and she craved it as Oscar’s father had craved the pot he’d smoked far too much.
His gaze met and locked with hers as he shook his head slowly. ‘I think I was born with a wandering soul.’
Trinity believed him. She could almost see the lone rider in his wild-blue-yonder eyes. ‘Well,’ she said, turning her attention back to the catching lesson, ‘to each their own.’
They watched the game for a few minutes to the steady rock of the chair. ‘Listen,’ Reid said, twisting his body in a half-turn to face her. ‘I wanted to talk to you about something.’
Trinity didn’t like the suddenly serious tone of his voice one iota and she stiffened as the possibilities flipped like a Rolodex through her head. Here it came. Her pulse pounded in ominous warning. She knew it was too good to be true. He’d given her a couple of days to get settled and now he was going to pull the rug out from underneath her.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected something like this but she’d started to let her guard down, actually believe in her good luck. In him.
She was going to be pretty damn angry with him—and herself—if it all went pear-shaped. With Terrible Todd she’d politely told him to remove his hand from her pants and get out of the way or he’d have a sexual harassment suit jammed up his ass quicker than he could blink.
She wasn’t sure she could be so polite with Reid.
‘Okay...’ She gulped down the rest of her beer and forced herself to look at him. If he was going to kick her out or put the hard word on her then he was going to have to look her in the eye.
‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.’
Oh, dear God. ‘Just say it.’
‘I’d like to offer you a job.’
Trinity blanked out. Her pulse tripped madly as she tried to reconcile the calamity going on inside her head with his words.
I’d like to offer you a job.
Not, I’d like to come to an arrangement.
‘What?’ she asked, slowly letting out the breath that was screaming in her lungs for release.
‘I think Pops needs someone with him when I’m not home. You need a job. It’s win-win.’
She opened her mouth to protest. Even though she wasn’t sure anything would actually come out. He waved it
away. ‘Just until you find something else and I can arrange something more permanent.’
He shifted in the chair so he was facing her more fully, his expression earnest as the swinging motion went a little haywire. He bent his right leg up, his foot resting on top of his left knee. The frayed edge of his denim cut-offs sat mid-thigh. No tattoos that far south, just golden brown hair, as wild and thick as the hair on his head.
His feet were bare. And big.
She pushed back highly inappropriate thoughts about the correlation between foot size and the size of what a guy was packing between his legs.
What was the matter with her? The man had been scrupulously above board with her—hadn’t once checked out her legs or ogled her boobs as Terrible Todd had done—and she was thinking about the size of his package.
She scrambled for something useful to say. ‘Do you mind me asking...is it Alzheimer’s?’ She’d been wondering, had assumed it was, or something like it, but now she was grateful just to be able to say something—anything—as her brain grappled with his job offer.
And the size of his feet.
‘Yes. It was diagnosed when he fractured his hip a couple of months ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Trinity murmured, glancing at Eddie laughing and playing with Oscar. He might not be young but there was still a vitality to the old man.
‘It’s early stages and he’s on a drug trial which has had very promising results so they’re hoping we’ll halt or at least slow the progress.’
Trinity nodded, turning her thoughts to the next thing. ‘He broke his hip?’
‘Yes. His neck of femur, actually. It’s pretty common in someone his age but it’s been pinned. He had some complications with a wound infection, which delayed his recovery, but he’s only on twice-weekly physio now and he gets around quite well without an aid as you can see.’
‘Is that why he has the higher chair?’
‘Yes. While he’s in the recovery phase. The therapists at my work do his physio so I normally either take him with me or come back for him. It would be very convenient for me to have someone who can drive him to his appointment and back home again as he hasn’t been cleared to drive again yet and, frankly, I’m not sure he should still have his licence but I’ll worry about that when we get to it.’