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Becca’s hand was frozen midair, clutching a coffee mug she’d been about to put in the dishwasher. The skin around her eyes was tense.
Definitely cornered, ready to run.
Flynn looked away.
Grandpa Ed pinned him with a stern expression that demanded an apology.
After a moment, Flynn muttered one.
An older woman sat on the couch across from his grandfather. She was as tall as she was wide, dressed in dark blue scrubs decorated with the bodies of pro wrestlers. Her thinning, too-brown hair was helmet-short. And the frown she wore indicated the interview he’d forgotten about wasn’t going well and wouldn’t likely improve with his appearance.
His grandfather performed the introductions. “Miss Caldwell’s come a long, long way for this interview.”
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Flynn came forward to shake Miss Caldwell’s hand. “We had an emergency at the construction site.”
“So I heard.” Miss Caldwell stood, accepting his handshake with a firm one worthy of the professional wrestlers that dotted her attire. She remained standing, as if preparing to leave. “Is the position still open?”
“No,” Grandpa Ed said briskly. “I’ve got Becca.”
Flynn ignored him. “We haven’t made a decision. Becca is a temporary solution.”
Miss Caldwell didn’t believe Flynn, nor did she sit. She glanced toward the kitchen.
Flynn followed the direction of her gaze.
Becca wore the same black exercise leggings and pink hoodie that she’d had on that morning. Her long, black hair hung in a thick, smooth braid down her back. No scrubs. No disapproving frown, although he knew she had one. Becca looked like someone’s girlfriend, not a caregiver.
Flynn blinked and glanced back at Miss Caldwell, who looked as if she might want to plant at least one of her bright white sneakers on his backside.
“Well.” Miss Caldwell ping-ponged looks at each of them. “Mr. Blonkowski has my résumé. I’d better be going.”
Given the choice between arguing that Miss Caldwell should stay or having his caregiver—at least temporarily—be Becca, Flynn surprised himself. He thanked Miss Caldwell for coming, and escorted her as far as the front door.
Grandpa Ed turned on a rerun of Jeopardy! The well-known theme blared from the television.
Flynn swiped the remote from him and muted the show. “I thought we agreed to be nice.”
“Miss Caldwell wouldn’t have lasted a week driving an hour in good traffic, much less ninety minutes each way in bad traffic. Did you see her chin? It was soft. The first time I lost my temper she’d be out the door. I did her a favor.”
“She looked capable enough to me.” The term battle-ax came to mind.
“She’s very qualified.” Becca scrubbed the sink as if it deserved punishment. “I think she’d do an excellent job. She wouldn’t quit in a week.”
“She might last two,” Grandpa Ed allowed grumpily. He lowered his voice. “Any woman who’d praise the competition is worth hiring.”
Flynn took off his baseball cap and ran a hand through his hair. It was long enough to pull into a short ponytail, longer than Joey’s had been the last time he’d seen him, but not as long as Joey’s had been today. “You drove Miss Caldwell away.”
His grandfather huffed. “I did not.”
“Yes, you did.” Becca wiped her hands on a dish towel, sniffed it, made a face and set it aside. “She was confused as to why I was here. We used to work at the same agency.”
“Used to?” Flynn asked.
“Yes.” She drew a deep breath.
Flynn had a feeling he wasn’t going to like whatever she said next.
Thank God.
“We don’t care about your previous employment.” Grandpa Ed gave Flynn the stink eye. His back was to Becca, so she couldn’t see him. “Do we, Flynn?”
“Yes, we do.”
“No, we don’t.”
Flynn’s fingers dug into the crown of his baseball cap.
“I’ll tell you anyway.” Becca raised her chin, as if bracing herself for a punch.
Flynn looked forward to whatever she was about to say. Her confession would most likely convince his grandfather they couldn’t hire her.
“Three years ago I moved to Santa Rosa. I worked for the agency that’s sending candidates out here. I was assigned to care for an elderly woman who rescued Australian shepherds.” Becca walked over and knelt beside Abby, stroking her dark fur. “When Lily passed away, her son wanted to take all the dogs to the kill-shelter. I protested and eventually found homes for them all, including Abby. But I got fired because caregivers aren’t supposed to get involved with their clients.”
The little dog stared at Flynn with dark, accusing eyes, as if to say: find fault with that.
Grandpa Ed scowled at Flynn. “You did the right thing, Becca. No one’s accusing you of anything.”
His grandfather couldn’t see Becca’s features flinch, as if the right hook she’d been waiting for had been struck. Flynn felt a corresponding jab to his gut.
She was guilty. Of what, he had no idea. But if she was the only acceptable option to Grandpa Ed, he was going to find out what she was hiding.
“We’ll be hiring you regardless,” Grandpa Ed said. “Won’t we, Flynn?”
Flynn didn’t answer. He looked at Becca. Deal breakers lined up in his head like dominos—theft, blackmail, murder, angry ex-husbands searching for her. “I need to talk to Becca outside. Alone.”
To her credit, Becca walked out, head high, as if she’d known all along the gallows awaited.
He led her toward the river, stopping to sit on a fallen log overlooking the steep bank that cut away to the slow-flowing water. She settled on the log a few feet away from him, brushing at the bark as if it was a crumb-littered bench seat at a restaurant.
“I’m sure you’ve realized my grandfather wants to hire you,” Flynn began. “But there’s something else you’re not telling me and I won’t hire you until I know what it is.”
* * *
THE TRUTH PRESSED at Becca’s throat.
She swallowed it back.
Took a breath.
Risked looking toward Flynn.
Beneath his black ball cap, his reddish-brown hair glinted in the afternoon sunlight, almost as blinding as the rippling river. His jaw was a hard line. She couldn’t look him in the eye.
The truth pressed on her once more.
Becca swallowed it again.
She and the truth had an odd track record. Like the time her father had walked out after learning Becca’s mother had stage-four cancer. Or the first time Terry had asked her to marry him. He’d walked out when she’d said she was scared and needed time to think.
Abby pranced across Becca’s toes and looked down the steep, crumbling bank toward the river, her nose quivering.
“You have two choices if you want the job.” Flynn’s voice was as unflappable as his jaw line. “You can tell me what you’re hiding or I can do a background check.”
Tell him the truth? Which version? No one ever really wanted to hear the unvarnished truth. They wanted a massaged answer tailored to their expectations. Telling Flynn about the lawsuit placed her odds of landing the job near zero. But it was a definite zero if she walked away without saying anything.
“I want this job.” She swallowed and rephrased. “I need this job.” To repair her reputation before it fell from somewhere near barely employable to no-way-in-Hades employable.
“I need someone I can trust taking care of my grandfather.”
Untrustworthy. Becca stiffened. She glanced over her shoulder at the driveway, even as Abby picked her way daintily to the shoreline.
“Agnes trusts you,” he said softly. “And I trust Agnes. But I need a reason to believe in you.”
His words drew her gaze back toward his. Gone were the hard lines, the guardedness, the at-a-distance cool. In their place was compassion. A white-flagged truce.
If there was a chance, she had to take it. She had to speak up, without varnish or angles. On a big gust of forced air, she told him the truth. “After leaving the agency I went to work for a wonderful woman who was estranged from her son. Gary had decided twenty-some years prior that his mother didn’t respect him enough, so he didn’t visit. He didn’t call. The most he could be troubled with was a generic card on holidays.” Virginia had been heartbroken every Christmas, every birthday. “I worked for Virginia for two years, and while I was with her, she learned that I had a tremendous amount of debt.”
At the mention of her money woes, Flynn’s expression seemed to close off.
It seemed pointless to say more, but Becca hadn’t told a soul other than her lawyer, and the story continued to bubble out. “My husband and I had bought a house in San Diego and when he died, I couldn’t make the payments. Terry had life insurance, but we’d only been married a few months when he died. He hadn’t changed his policy to include me.” She twisted her wedding ring. “The money went to his mom. The debts went to me. I sold his truck. I sold our furniture. I traded my car for the motorhome and let the house slide into foreclosure, but we still had credit card debt.” It was amazing how quickly the interest on a few purchases multiplied. “When Virginia’s kidneys started to fail, she insisted on paying off the last ten thousand dollars I owed. I knew it went against the caregiver code, but by then she was more like a grandmother than a client, so I accepted.”
“Ten thousand dollars.” Flynn’s voice was so flat. Him being a millionaire and all, ten thousand dollars was probably nothing.
To her, it’d been a fortune. “I’d been struggling for so long, I didn’t want to struggle anymore. I shouldn’t have taken that check.” Becca rubbed her palms up and down her thighs. “I didn’t ask for the money. I’ve never asked my clients for anything.”
“I bet Virginia’s son was livid.”
“There’s an understatement.” Becca wanted to laugh but couldn’t quite work up the energy. “Although he inherited close to half a million dollars, he’s trying to bring a lawsuit against me.”
“Trying?”
“There’s a pretrial hearing in a few weeks.” She rubbed her hands over her legs again. “I know accepting that money wasn’t one hundred percent right, but it wasn’t one hundred percent wrong, either.”
He studied her face, intent blue gaze checking for any clue that she was less than truthful. “The legal system moves slowly. What’ve you been doing since Virginia died?”
“I spent the past nine months working for a wonderful man who passed away from heart failure a few weeks ago.” She’d told Harold she couldn’t deliver the ring. He’d argued, in a twiglike voice staked with death-is-coming urgency, that his daughter would think he’d had an affair if he left the ring to Agnes in his will. It’d taken Becca a week after his death to work up the courage to contact Agnes. And a week more to show her face.
Regrets? She had too many.
“And you didn’t accept any money from him?”
“No.” Her voice was low and husky. Her liar’s voice. She prayed he wouldn’t notice. She hadn’t accepted money, after all. But if Harold’s daughter looked for the ring...
“Why live in a motorhome? You’re out of debt now, right? Why not rent an apartment?”
Why was it Flynn asked questions no one else did? Questions Becca didn’t want to answer. But the job was at stake and she’d already told him so much. “I helped my mother pass on. I helped my grandmother pass on. I’m on a first-name basis with grief, but that doesn’t mean that I can shoulder the cares of my client’s family. During their last few days, I’m already thinking about where I’ll go next. I know it’s a cowardly defense mechanism, but it works for me.”
It had been different when Terry was alive. The San Diego metropolitan area had all been new to her, making it easier to accept assignments in suburbs that had different characters and different landscapes.
When Flynn didn’t say anything, Becca pressed on. “I like people. Your grandfather may grow fond of me. I can tell him about my case, if you like, to make sure he’s still comfortable hiring me. But from what Agnes told me, you’ll only need someone for a few weeks.” When she was done, she might even accept another assignment in the small, quaint town.
Flynn blinked, confusion crowding his brows.
“I mean,” Becca clarified, because it looked like Flynn thought Agnes had predicted Edwin’s demise, “Agnes said you told her it would only be a few weeks before Edwin is up and moving around. Like his old self.”
“Yes,” he said vaguely, turning to stare at the river, as if trying to figure out how to gracefully get rid of her.
Her getting the job also seemed to have drifted down river. “I’m so glad your grandfather’s prognosis is good. I’d like to say goodbye to him before—”
Flynn’s glance cut to her.
“—I leave.” She stood and whistled for Abby, who was rooting around deep in the bushes lining the bank.
“Wait.” Flynn touched her hand, sending a current of heat up her arm. He pulled away abruptly and ran his fingers against his thumb, over and over, as if she’d shocked him and his fingers needed reassurance that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
She’d shocked herself. The jolt of awareness proved that he was a man and she a woman. If there was an awareness switch, she’d like it turned off, please.
Abby ran up the bank, dancing at Becca’s feet.
“I know I’m going to regret this.” Flynn was still rubbing his fingers over his thumb, staring at them in wonder. “I won’t let you near my money or my grandfather’s checkbook. What assurance can you give me that you won’t take advantage of him? Or me?”
He was offering her the job in a roundabout way that wounded her pride.
Common sense dictated a grateful yet graceful acceptance. “Only my word. If you can’t accept that, I’m sure Gerry Caldwell is available.”
His brows lowered. “Grandpa Ed wants you. I know you need this job, probably for a character reference or something that’ll help you with your court case.”
“How did you—”
“I guessed. It’s what I’d do. Keep my nose clean. Working for a millionaire without any missteps can be a powerful statement.” His words were all business, even if his gaze pried and stroked where it didn’t belong.
Blackberry bushes lined the path they’d taken to the river. Bees buzzed behind her, the noise vibrating against the circular realization that there was no trust here. No trust. She wanted him to have faith in her.
What she didn’t want, what she couldn’t afford, was the attraction between them, stoked by his intent gaze, as if he, too, was trying to figure out: Why her?
“This is a bad idea.” She turned and started down the path back to the house.
Abby leaped ahead.
