‘Oh, hell,’ she muttered, quickly changing her grip, but it was too late—the box simply disintegrated and its contents splashed everywhere. Glancing down at it all, her blood froze. She immediately looked for his reaction. Tension twisted his usual good-humoured expression. She could see him thinking, his face hardening as his jaw clamped, his eyes darkening.
Did he doubt her?
Defensiveness rose, intensified by tortured memories and the frustration from this latest fix-it job the house demanded. Truthfully she’d forgotten that box was even there. She’d had to. But his icy attention was fixed on the stuff now scattered, half submerged, over the floor and that defensiveness burst from her in a bitter torrent. ‘I’m not a junkie, Gabe.’
He went all the more rigid. ‘I know that,’ he said roughly.
Given the number of plastic-wrapped syringes, blister packs of prescription-only painkillers, bottles of morphine and who knew what else, she wouldn’t really have blamed him for wondering.
‘They were your grandfather’s,’ he said shortly.
She bent, scrambling to get it all together. ‘I meant to take it to a pharmacy to get rid of, but I just boxed and forgot it.’
‘I can drop it off.’ He bent down beside her and gathered the needles.
‘He was diabetic,’ she felt compelled to explain. ‘Injections a couple times a day. Then pain relief too. Some of the pills were Grandma’s.’ It really did look as if she were running some kind of drugs lab. ‘She had so many they took an age to dispense.’
‘Why did it have to be you?’ he asked. ‘Where were the district nurses?’
‘Busy.’ Her defensiveness resurged—higher. ‘I could manage. Grandad didn’t want to die in hospital so at the end I didn’t call anyone. I gave him the painkiller the doctor prescribed and I held his hand and I watched him. In the end I called an ambulance because …’ Because she couldn’t bear it any more. She paused and tried to suck back her emotion. ‘By the time it got there, he’d gone. That’s a decision I made and I live with.’
She’d fought so damn hard with her stupid garden with her organic everything, and trying to make him laugh and do everything and anything anyone said might help battle that bastard disease. And for a couple of years there she’d succeeded. She’d thought it would go on like that indefinitely—what a dream that had been. Because all of a sudden he’d deteriorated and there had been no coming back from it. She looked up from the dirty puddle. ‘It happens all the time. Cancer is the country’s number one killer. People cope.’
‘Most people don’t have to cope alone,’ Gabe answered gruffly, his hands full.
She shrugged, fully regretting revealing the little she just had to him. ‘There was so much bad stuff happening in the city at that time, the medics were run off their feet.’
Gabe nodded but said nothing more. His pallor surprised her—for a doctor he looked a little shaken by all the medical guff. Tightlipped, he stood and got a plastic bag to tip it all into. Then came back and viciously chucked the remainder in too.
Roxie blinked at the energy crackling off him. He was angry? Well, so was she. She didn’t want to deal with this—least of all in front of him. She was so sick of fighting to keep this place okay. She picked up the box that had her mother’s letters and papers in. She’d put it down here after it had given her nothing but disappointment. Not a single clue as to who her father had been. That dream had died a year ago too. ‘I’ll take some of these boxes upstairs,’ she said dismissively.
‘You don’t want me to help you carry them up?’ he called after her.
‘No, I’m fine.’
Really? Gabe wasn’t so sure about that—he heard raw emotion in her bitten-off words. ‘It wouldn’t take me a minute.’
‘You’ve already done enough calling the plumber.’
Yeah, and she didn’t exactly sound grateful about that. Gabe gritted his teeth, feeling extremely pissed off and it was worsening with each second. ‘It really wouldn’t take a minute.’
‘I can manage.’ She had her back to him, box in arms, stomping up the stairs already.
‘I can help,’ he argued. He hated her stubborn insistence on managing all by her damned self. She’d had to manage all kinds of hell as the primary carer, for not one, but two terminally ill elderly people. Alone. Why couldn’t she say yes to a bit of muscle to help lug some bloody boxes now? Why couldn’t she smile and say ‘sure’ and ‘thanks’?
She looked over her shoulder, shooting him a quelling look. ‘I don’t need you to.’
Don’t want you to, was what she really meant.
Gabe flung the bag of drugs into the corner of the garage. He could hear her stropping around up in her postage-stamp-sized studio. His fists clenched. There’d been no need for her to get snippy with him—the pipes weren’t his fault, despite his random wish that she’d move in with him, he hadn’t tampered with the plumbing like some sick stalker. But from years of working with finely balanced athletes, Gabe knew that a bad mood was often aggravated by not enough food. She must have gone straight from work to her driving test and then to the Blades practice. She had to be hungry. So he’d feed her. He wanted her to accept something from him tonight—and not merely sex.
He knocked on her door an hour or so later. For once she answered almost right away but that wasn’t what made him blink so rapidly. No, she’d changed into the most hideous track-pants he’d ever seen, and, given he worked with sportsmen, he’d seen some ratty trackies. These were thick, massive and shapeless and he really just wanted to remove them then and there. But he reminded himself that wasn’t the first priority.
‘I’m guessing you probably haven’t made dinner so I made enough for you too.’ He refused to be offended if she said no to him. Even if he had gone to a stupid amount of effort.
‘You have?’ She blinked at him.
He nodded. ‘It’s on the deck if you want to come and get it.’
She hesitated.
‘It’s getting cold and I’ve gone to a lot of trouble.’ He put on some pressure with a wicked look. He wanted to see her smile.
And she did smile—all sceptical, as if she didn’t believe he’d ever go to any trouble. Oh, the irony.
‘Okay, give me a second.’ Roxie stepped back inside and shut the door. Gabe had gotten o
ver his snappy temper flare, surely she could too. Hopefully he’d forgotten her angst moment in the garage. She was too tough to let a blasted pipe get her down—so it would delay her trip another couple of weeks perhaps; worse things had happened. She grabbed the half-bottle with the D on it—that and Gabe back in stud mode would help bubble her out of the funk.
‘Wow,’ she said, taking in the laden plates on the outdoor dining table. ‘Not sure the Bolly is good enough for this.’
‘Don’t get too effusive.’ He pulled out her chair. ‘It’s only burger and chips.’
‘Not your average burger and chips.’ She sat, breathing in the yum display. They were home-made bean patties, ripped-from-the-plant salad and freshly dug new potatoes cooked then crisped up something yummy. Her mouth watered, her appetite suddenly screaming. ‘You cooked all this?’
‘I’m a single man, living alone,’ he drawled. ‘You didn’t think I could cook?’
‘But it’s—’
‘Veggie, I know. Not bad for a beef-farm boy, huh?’ He popped the cork and poured the champagne into two glasses—frowning when that was enough to empty the bottle.
She picked up her fork and took a bite of the patty poking out from the toasted roll. Oh, wow. ‘You really made this from scratch?’
‘Your amazement is insulting.’
She chuckled, warmth trickling back into her chilled body. ‘I’ve never met anyone who makes veggie burgers like these. From scratch. Not even me.’
He pulled his phone from his pocket and swiped the screen a few times. ‘Okay, I got the recipe online. Here.’
She angled her head to read the page he’d pulled up. ‘The Heganator?’ She didn’t just giggle, she squealed. ‘Hegan?’
‘Yeah, cool recipes for the hot vegan male.’ He turned the phone back to study it, oh, so intently. Then he peered over the top of the phone, eyes twinkling. ‘I think it’s really written by a woman. Apparently hegans like burgers and barbecues.’
‘You’re hot but you’re not a hegan,’ she said, almost all her old flirt tone back.