скачать книгу бесплатно
He hesitated. Because she clearly wasn’t fine. She was hauling stuff with a baby in this heat. That didn’t seem to be fine to him. He shrugged. Not his problem. “Okay. But if you need help, I’m right here. Ask.”
She nodded as she pushed the stroller over her doorstep and closed the door. Whatever. I offered. A minute later, he heard her door open and close again. He frowned at the sight out his front window. She was heading off again, empty backpack and empty stroller. Well, the kid was still in there. He stood there for a long minute. She doesn’t want your help, dude. Let it go. He let it go.
Until she repeated the process. He opened his front door again. “Hey. Wait up.”
She stopped on the sidewalk and turned back to him. “I’ve got this.”
“I’m sure you do. But I’ve got an SUV. Might cut down on the number of trips you have to make.”
She let go of the stroller to lift her hair off her neck as she contemplated him. He hated that his offer of help had to be considered with such a concern for safety, but that was the world today. “I told you my name. I’m Josh Sanders. I can call references for you right now. I want to help. I can’t stand watching you run back and forth in this heat with the little guy.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone. “See, I’ll call my boss. Sadie Martin.” He tapped through, hoping Sadie would answer. She did. He put the call on speaker and moved closer to Mickie.
“Hey, Josh, what’s up?” Sadie asked. He couldn’t get over how happy and relaxed she sounded. Love was agreeing with her.
“Hey. Listen, I’ve got my new neighbor Mickie here and she needs some help moving her stuff. Tell her I’m a good guy.”
“He’s a great guy, Mickie. Let him help. Don’t let him cook for you, but let him help you move heavy things.”
Mickie smiled but was still shaking her head. “You could be anyone,” she said.
“But I’m not,” Sadie said through the speaker. “I’m Sadie Martin. I own the Cleaning Crew down in Charleston. Josh is my number-one guy. He’s up there getting our second location started. You can look us up online. He was the only person I trusted on this planet to do that for me. Let him help you move some boxes.”
“I really do have an SUV,” Josh said. “If you have a car seat, we can put it in there and be done in, what? One or two trips?”
She looked down at Ian and then up at the sun. It was well past noon. She pressed her lips together. A sigh flowed out of her. “Okay,” she said.
He would have been relieved if not for the tone of her voice. The way she said it, it sounded as if she’d failed at something.
CHAPTER TWO (#u75a50be8-f610-5f06-9e36-19a6d09ba0e7)
SHE COULD NOT believe she was doing this. Getting in a car with a strange man. Worse, putting her baby in a car with a stranger. She looked at him, looked him right in the eyes, trying to gauge if she could trust him. He didn’t try to convince her. He held her eye contact and gave her a smile that seemed to say “I understand.”
They made it happen. Somehow, awkwardly. She wrestled the car seat in place in the backseat. Once she had it in and secured—even tugged on the seat a few times to make sure it was strapped in correctly—she lifted Ian out of the stroller. “Up, big man,” she said and Ian climbed in, squirming around as she buckled him.
“Go! Go! Go!” Ian said. He slapped both hands together each time he said it.
“Yeah, we’re gonna go, go, go,” Mickie muttered under her breath as she shut the back door and climbed up front into the passenger’s seat. Hopefully not to our most gruesome end.
Josh smiled at her from the driver’s seat. “All set?”
“Sure.” She leaned against the door and closed her eyes. Tired. She was so damn tired. Of every little thing being an obstacle. Of keeping a smiling face and happy voice for Ian. Of hiding the tears and her fears from him. None of this was his fault. The car didn’t move and she opened her eyes.
“Where are we going?”
“Oh. Yeah. That’d help, huh? That garage a little ways down on Devine Street. Next to the Jiffy Lube?”
He dropped the car in Drive and pulled out into the light Sunday traffic. “You lived at the garage?”
“No. My car is at the garage.”
Actually, her car was dead. She should have been grateful that it decided to pop its transmission out onto the road so close to her new place, but still...this was the new place that she couldn’t afford anymore since the job she’d counted on had crapped out. Then the car crapped out. She rubbed her eyes. It’ll be okay. You have some left in savings. The apartment is on the bus line. You’ll find another job. She twisted in her seat to look at Ian. He was passed out. Poor baby. This guy must think she was the worst mother in the world, dragging him around in the heat.
“How old is he?” Josh asked.
She looked over at Josh, this strange man. Cute, but really? From the way he’d carried Ian out of his apartment that morning, a sight she’d giggled long and hard over once her fright had diminished, she knew he had zero to no experience with children. Good-looking, with curly, black hair, and a bit shaggy, but that was okay. Blue eyes. No rings on his fingers, she could see that as he held the steering wheel. And they were nice hands. Strong-looking hands. She looked away. “Almost two,” she said.
“Oh.”
Silence followed. So much silence that when he hit the turn signal, it startled her. “Why did you ask?” she asked as they pulled into the garage’s parking lot. She pointed to her poor dead car, parked to the side.
He shrugged. “Aren’t you supposed to ask things like that about people’s kids?”
Instead of answering, she unhooked her seat belt and opened the door. She glanced back at Ian. He was still sleeping. Good.
“I’ll leave the AC running,” Josh said. He pulled the parking brake, slid out, popped open the back hatch.
Mickie frowned. Part of her was screaming to not leave Ian alone in a running car, but what else could she do? She left her door open just in case she had to jump in and save him. Her eyes scanned the parking lot as she walked to her car and unlocked the back door and the trunk. Everything she owned in the world was crammed in there. Well, everything that would fit anyway. She’d left some furniture behind. Well, hey, it wasn’t like it had been Queen Anne antiques. Mostly Wal-Mart and sidewalk-salvage, chipboard, snap-together stuff. Hey, you could afford what you could afford. She reached into the backseat and hauled out a box. She’d replace it. Right. With the money from the job that you, oh, yeah, no longer have.
“All of it?” Josh asked as he started moving boxes from the trunk of her car to his SUV.
“Yeah, everything that will fit. Guy here told me he was having the car hauled to the junkyard in the morning whether I had my stuff out or not.”
“What a dick. Seriously?”
She nodded and swallowed down the lump in her throat. Yeah, the guy had been a dick. But he’d given her two hundred dollars for the corpse of her car and a day to get her stuff out. She could sleep on the floor. She could eat ramen noodles. But Ian needed real food and the money, well, that would get it for him. It took a depressingly short amount of time to move everything out of the car.
“Where’s your furniture?” Josh asked as they got back in his car.
She felt her cheeks burn hot. “It’s coming,” she lied. There was nothing coming. She couldn’t afford to rent a U-Haul. She certainly couldn’t afford a moving company. It wasn’t like they were family heirlooms. She hoped the next tenants would have use of it, maybe for kindling in the fireplace when winter began to make its way south.
She and Josh didn’t talk at all on the ride back to the apartment. That was actually something Mickie was very grateful for. She was exhausted and worried and seemed to be constantly on the edge of tears. She needed to get settled and get some sleep and regroup. She’d be fine. She needed a moment.
“Hey,” he said.
She jumped at the soft whisper and the gentle touch on her arm. The seat belt tightened against her. Damn. She’d fallen asleep? In a strange car? With a strange man? And her baby in the back? She twisted to look over her shoulder. Ian was still asleep. Josh had driven across the grass and had backed the SUV up to her front door.
“Wow,” she said. “Oh, my God. Sorry. Must be my naptime, too.”
She blew out a breath, got herself together. Wow.
Then she climbed out and got the car seat unhooked, not even bothering to take out Ian. She manhandled the entire thing out of the SUV with him in it. Josh was there and he took it in one hand. “I’ve got it. Open the door and you can get him settled. I’ll bring all the stuff in for you.”
“You don’t have to. I can get it. I’ll let you know when I’m done and you can move the car back.”
He stayed on the front porch, leaning in to put the car seat inside the front door. “Now, that isn’t going to happen. But if you don’t want me inside, I’ll move things to the porch and you can take them from there.”
She opened to her mouth to protest. Stop it. Stop it, Mickie. He’s being a normal nice guy. Stop treating everyone like the enemy. “I’m sorry to be so...” So what? She didn’t know. Scared? Bitchy? Suspicious?
“Cautious? Don’t worry about it. I understand.”
He walked off and opened the hatch. Mickie watched for a moment the way that the muscles of his back shifted against the fabric of his T-shirt, how his biceps flexed as he lifted boxes. A flutter of warm appreciation for a gorgeous male body tried to come to life deep in her belly. She turned to Ian, snorting out a hard laugh at her stupidity. Because a man would make all this better. Right. That’s what got you into this mess, Mickie. A good-looking, sweet-talking, nice-acting man.
JOSH MOVED THE boxes to the porch and let Mickie carry them deeper into the apartment. Most of the boxes looked old, like they’d been used and reused and kept together with duct tape. She was cagey about letting him in and he could understand that. She was a young mother. Living alone, it seemed. Well, alone except for Ian. Which had to make it even more difficult. There was nothing he could do or say to put her more at ease other than try not to make it worse.
As he set the last of the boxes down inside the door, she came over and pushed it out of the way with her foot. He glanced inside. She’d moved them all into the empty living room. His eyes went back to her. She leaned against the door frame with one hand on the doorknob. Her khaki shorts and black T-shirt were streaked with dust. She pushed a hand through blond hair that looked like a fall of silk and looked up at him with ice-blue eyes. She was very pretty. And very young. And had a kid.
“Thank you for letting me help you,” he said. “This means I’m all caught up on my good deeds for at least a week.”
She smiled and he felt something within him warm at the sight. “Thank you for insisting. I’m sorry if I was treating you like you were a creep or something.”
“Understandable.” He stuck his hands in his back pockets as he searched for something else to say. He wanted to keep looking into those eyes, wanted to ask about those distant shield maiden genes. Where was she from, where was she going? Then, he noticed the dark smudges beneath those eyes. She’d fallen asleep on the short ride home. Tired, right. She was exhausted, and he could respect that. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he said.
Back in his own place, Josh powered up the laptop. He could still hear her moving around. Strange that he’d never noticed the sounds of the previous tenant. She was clinking glassware, opening and closing cabinets and making other assorted unpacking thumps and bumps. She seemed to be alone, not only living alone with the little guy, but also alone in the city. She’s not alone, dude, she has a baby. You know, those miniature humans that you don’t have any contact with? He shook his head. Get it together, man.
He had a lot to do tomorrow. There were three interviews for new Crew members, two client interviews and four actual cleanings to do. He skimmed through the calendar. Good. All regular cleanings, all in apartments, so that should be easy. It was a straightforward business model: hot guys cleaning house. It had worked for Sadie down in Charleston and he was here to make it happen a second time, in the state capital. He loaded the addresses into his phone and Googled them to look at the map and get a sense of the locations. His phone rang and Sadie’s name popped up on the screen.
“Did you save your damsel in distress?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“How you doing up there?”
“Good.” He gave her a brief rundown of Crew business.
“I meant with you, Josh,” she said when he finished. “How are you doing?”
“Good. Starting to not feel lost every place I go. I found a yoga studio that seems like it isn’t just a place to go look pretty. Still looking for a dojo.”
He sat back and rubbed a hand through his curly hair. And a barbershop. He needed to find one of those. Yoga and meditation were akin to breathing. He couldn’t go without, not for long. Not if he wanted to stay himself, the self he could stand. And while he was perfectly able to practice at home, there was something about being in a class, about being pushed past his limits, that he needed. The dojo? Well, he’d been studying martial arts since he was twenty. Yoga for peace of mind and karate for discipline—the two things that kept him sane. That kept him functional.
“Is she pretty?”
“Huh?”
“Your new neighbor. Is she pretty?”
He laughed. “Now that you’re disgustingly happy in love, you want to hook up everyone you know?”
“You should try it. It’s awesomely fun.”
“She has a kid. A little kid. A baby-size kid.”
Sadie didn’t say anything but he could hear her breathe. She let out a slow sigh. “I wish I could hug you.”
“I don’t need a hug. I need some pointers on the behavior contract.”
Yeah, that. The behavior contract. The Cleaning Crew, as a business model, provided a superior cleaning service and nothing else. But Sadie had found that some clients’ understanding of this simple fact was at times fuzzy. Hot guys, right? It wasn’t surprising where some people’s minds went. A false allegation in the company’s early days had frightened her. Now she required clients and employees to sign a contract that essentially said “keep your hands to yourself.”
“What’s the problem? It’s pretty straightforward.”
“Some clients are taking it as condescending. Like we’re saying they won’t be able to control themselves around a good-looking guy or something.”
“Huh,” Sadie said. She paused for a moment. “There may be something to that. It’s not everyone, is it? Just a few here and there?”
“Yeah. I started being way more careful in how I explained it after that. It’s helped some.”
“All right. Keep me posted. If it gets to be a problem, I guess I could drive up and get them signed.”
“I guess.” But he didn’t want her to do that. If this was going to be his branch, his company to grow, then he had to find a way around this. He figured that it was the newness of the idea here in Columbia. In Charleston, the company had been established long enough that new clients knew about the contract, knew about the expectations Sadie had for them and the guys. It was still in the titillation phase here. A hot guy vacuuming your rugs? Giggle and drool. He heard Jules, Sadie’s fiancé’s niece, in the background, yelling for Sadie to come look at this right now. “I’ll figure it out. Go. Give Jules a hug from me.”
CHAPTER THREE (#u75a50be8-f610-5f06-9e36-19a6d09ba0e7)
MICKIE STARTLED AWAKE on her blanket bed on the floor. Sunlight streamed through the windows. How long had she slept? She scrambled up to her feet. More importantly, why had Ian slept so late? He usually woke her at the butt crack of dawn. She crossed the hall and found him sitting quietly on his own blanket bed with a book. Naked. She followed her nose to the dirty diaper tossed on the rug. Awesome. She added a trip to the Laundromat to her chore list for the day.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she cooed.
Ian looked up at her and smiled that goofy baby smile that always melted her heart. He held up the book. “Pat! Pat bunny!”
“We’ll pat the bunny. But first, let’s get you cleaned up, little man.”
The second order of business, after bath, book and breakfast, was to find a job. While Ian ate, Mickie sipped coffee and browsed through the local listings. Nursing school wouldn’t start for two and a half months. She’d have to rely on her savings while she was in school, but right now? Right now, she needed to work. The job that she’d had lined up—a nurses’ aide at the hospital affiliated with the nursing school—had been perfect. The pay was good, the hours were good and there had been access to the onsite day care center and valuable experience to put on a résumé. But at the last minute, the day-shift position had been changed to a night-shift position. Which wouldn’t have been a problem except the day care wasn’t offered overnight.
“Square one,” she said to Ian. “Not like we haven’t been back here before, huh, buddy?”
“One!” he shouted. He handed her a Cheerio.
“Thank you.”
“Whelk!”
Tears burned at her eyes as she watched Ian return to his breakfast. What was she doing? Dragging him willy-nilly along while she tried to get her shit together. Jumping and running at every bump in the night. She took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in her throat. This was it. Hopefully their last stop. She had two years to go and then she’d have her nursing degree. Once she had that, she’d have financial security. Right? Then they could stop. The two of them, her and Ian, they could begin to put down some roots and find some sense of normal. But first, she needed a job. And affordable day care.
She shook her head. Sitting around feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help a thing. Get to the Laundromat. Maybe there’d be some places along the way she could stop and put in applications.
An hour later, she was pushing the stroller out of the door, with duffel bags of laundry dangling from the handles. She had her backpack strapped on and an entirely too grumpy Ian strapped in the stroller. He didn’t want to go wash clothes. He wanted to read Pat the Bunny for the ten jillionth time. She paused to secure the swaying bags. The door of the apartment next to hers opened and a flicker of annoyance darted through her. Please don’t be Hot Guy offering to drive me again. She hated people offering to help her. It was stupid, she knew, but it made her scared. As if they could sense her vulnerability and weakness.
“All right, thanks for stopping by. I’ll let you know once the test results are back.”
She glanced over. Hot Neighbor Josh was shaking hands with a hot stranger dude. Hot Stranger Dude nodded. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
Mickie frowned at this exchange, then shook her head. None of your business. She tested the balance of the duffels and shifted the backpack.
“Hey, neighbor,” Josh called.
She tried not to look, but how could she not? He was too good-looking. That black curly hair and the blue eyes. His shoulders, his chest, his arms... He was built but he didn’t try to show it off by wearing a shirt two sizes too small for his body. She bit her bottom lip, felt it slip back into her mouth as she watched him. Those jeans. Levi’s. Straightforward workingman’s jeans. Nothing fancy. She felt warm in all the wrong places.
“Hi,” she said.
Short, sweet, to the point. Get out of here before he offers you a ride. She pushed the stroller but he met her at the sidewalk. He squatted to look at Ian.
