Just Not Mine (6 page)

“Yeh, he looks good enough. Not that I’m tempted. But I couldn’t use anybody anyway,” she told Clive now. “Not sure I could play this game at all, really. Not fair to either of them, is it, and I don’t like women who manipulate men.”

“You don’
t have to use anybody,” Clive promised. “You aren’t manipulating, or if you are, only a weeny little bit, not enough to count. Just mention him. Just drop him into the conversation. How helpful he’s been, how he offered to mow your grass.”

“To mow my
grass?”

Clive
waved an airy hand. “If I had a neighbor as fit as you? First thing I’d do is tell her I had the mower out anyway, why don’t I do her garden at the same time as mine, because it’s really no trouble at all. Take my shirt off while I did it, maybe. Before you know it, she’s inviting me into the kitchen, offering me a cuppa, one thing leads to another …”

Josie laughed. “So that offer’s a signal
Derek will recognize as a threat, and he’ll want to come back and wee around the boundaries to let the other dogs know this is his territory, that what you’re saying? Because my neighbor offered to cut my grass?”

“That’s
exactly
what I’m saying. Mention. And see if I’m not right.”

When he
was awoken by the insistent
beep-beep-beep
of a reversing truck, followed by a metallic grinding that boded no good at all, Hugh wasn’t, somehow, entirely surprised. This had been his first chance to sleep past seven since Aunt Cora had left, so naturally there would be a truck making what sounded like the delivery of a lifetime to the dairy, first thing Saturday morning.

When he got outside, though, it wasn’t the dairy at all. It was Josie’s house, and the truck whose liftgate was now lowered to the street, allowing the driver to hop into a forklift and maneuver it onto the road, was apparently delivering her a very large early Christmas present, judging from
her look of excitement as she hustled backwards to get out of the way.

More beeping from the forklift, more maneuvering, and the first of two shrink-wrapped pallets was deposited in her driveway with the man headed back for the second.

She caught sight of Hugh, raised a hand in greeting, and he crossed the few meters of footpath to join her, wishing he’d combed his hair. Or even cut it, as Amelia had suggested. Shaved, maybe, because he had a feeling he looked like a wild man. And she looked as choice as always.

Not wearing the silky robe today, unfortunately, but then, if she greeted a deliveryman
dressed like that, the bloke would never leave. No, she was in a deep red T-shirt, well-worn brown shorts, and work boots, her hair pulled back in a knot, and she shouldn’t have looked nearly as good as she did. She looked like a Hollywood actress playing the part of an undercover cop posing as a site inspector, the casting and the deception both ridiculously improbable.

“Morning,” he said with his usual impressive form, once he reached her.

“Morning.” She glanced quickly at him, then back at the driver again. “Woke you again, eh.”

He raked a hand through his mess of hair
, doing his best to finger-comb it into place. “Could be.”

“
Sorry. This was the only delivery time they had. Least I let you sleep the rest of the week. Did my singing at the back of the house,” she explained.

He nodded. He’d
looked out for her, actually. But her car, a not-new Toyota Corolla wagon, had always been gone from the drive by the time he’d left the house for his early-morning walk up Mt. Victoria, even though it was only six-thirty. She really
did
have the early shift. Didn’t get home early, though, because the car hadn’t been back again until seven-thirty or eight. He wasn’t proud that he knew that, but he did. The window of the room across from his own was always dark, too, by the time he went to bed. Whether that was because she’d gone to sleep or because she’d gone off again, he didn’t know. He wasn’t
that
much of a stalker.

He’d wondered what she did to be able to afford to live in Devonport. Something that required long hours. A lawyer, maybe. She had the cool, assessing stare for it. Or, more likely, got the money for the house in a divorce settlement, because she had “trophy wife” written all over her. Although why any man would’ve
let her go, he couldn’t fathom. If Hugh had had a woman like that, he’d have held onto her.

The driver was maneuvering the second pallet onto the arms of the forklift as
Hugh stood beside Josie and watched. “What is it?” he asked her, trying to see inside the thick layer of opaque plastic surrounding the solid cube lashed to the pallet at their feet.

“Bricks. For my patio,” she answered absently, her eyes on the forklift driver, though he wasn’t much of a beauty spot. Dressed pretty much exactly like
her, shorts, boots, wool socks, and T-shirt, and not looking nearly as good in it.

“Having a new one built, are you?
” Hugh asked her. “Sounds like a good idea. I think Mrs. Alberts’s husband must’ve laid that concrete back around the Dawn of Man. Made a dog’s breakfast of it, too, as cracked as it’s got since then. The spirit was willing enough there, but the flesh was weak. You’re probably living with a fair few of his subpar DIY projects. He was a banker.”

“You could be right.
That was why I could afford the place, because it didn’t show well. Still doesn’t, for that matter, but at least the concrete’s gone. First step toward the back garden of my dreams. And this,” she said, laying a caressing hand on the plastic, “is the second.”

“Who’ve you got putting it in for you?”
he asked.

He had to wait for her to thank the driver, who wheeled his machine sharply round again, headed it back into the truck bed, and commenced to prepare for departure.

“Hope you asked around, got some names,” Hugh persisted over the sound of the liftgate slowly grinding back into place. “I could’ve given you a couple.”

She laughed. “Got a name, haven’t I. Me.”

“You?” He couldn’t have been more gobsmacked. “You mean you’re helping?”

That
detached, amused look was back on her face, to his annoyance. “No, I mean I’m doing it. A couple of my mates came by and gave me a hand with the demo, because that sledgehammer’s hard to swing after a few goes, but I couldn’t really ask them to give me another weekend. But that’s OK. This bit’s just time and patience.”

She’d been using a
sledgehammer?
Yeh, he’d bet it had been hard for her to swing. But that she’d done it at all … “Could be a bit more work than you realize,” he said cautiously, feeling his way over what he could tell was shaky ground as she raised a hand to the departing driver.

“No worries. I’ve got all weekend to do it. More, if it comes to that. Brick doesn’t have a time limit. Not like a concrete pour, is it.”

“Yeh, nah,” he agreed, still bemused. “It isn’t. But I’ll give you a hand, how’s that. Make it go a bit faster.” And avert disaster, he hoped.

She looked at him, and he had the uncomfortable f
eeling that she could read his mind. All parts of it. “A hand would be about what it’d be. Seeing as you’ve only got one.”

He looked
down at his cast. “Yeh, well, I’m not too bad with one.”

“
Oh, wait,” she said. “This is cutting the grass.”

“
Pardon?” What? What grass?

“I appreciate the offer
, but before I let you spend your day like that, I should tell you, I’ve got a partner.”

Of course she did. Damn. He looked around. “Where is he, then?”

“Oh, not
here,”
she said. “He’s in Aussie, working over there.”

“So d’you have anyone here to help you, or not?”

“Not.”

“Then
…” He shrugged. “You’ve still got the offer of my hand, for what it’s worth.”

“
Good,” she said. “Fantastic. Thanks. Come over once you’ve had breakfast, see what your one hand can bring to the party.”

* * *

Well,
that
was disappointing, he thought as he headed back to the house. He couldn’t really have backed out of it, though. And anyway, he couldn’t have listened to her building a brick patio all weekend, known she was tackling that massive project on her own without offering to help. Not possible.

She didn’t hear him when he returned
an hour later, because she had her headphones in, was singing along to more bad pop, of which she seemed to have a limitless supply, as she crouched and hacked open a bag at her feet. He touched her elbow, and she jumped and whirled on her toes, not losing her balance, he noticed.

“Oh. Hi
,” she said, and smiled at the kids with none of the distance she kept from Hugh, and her smile was like the sun coming out.

“Thought you could be
right about the one hand,” he told her. “So I brought five.” He looked at the work she’d been doing, and rapidly reassessed. “Did you do all this?” he asked.

The amused look was back. “I did. Surprised?”

He laughed. “Yeh. I’ll admit, I am.” She had dug out and leveled the dirt foundation for her new patio, he could see, and had about half of the space covered by a lumpy layer of sand in which to set the brick, had been in the middle of opening another sandbag when he’d interrupted her. What was more, the perimeter of the prospective patio was marked by stakes and string, and he could tell at a glance that the string was level, too.

“You know what you’re doing,” he said.

“Yeh. I do.” The look she sent him was challenging. “Glad of the help, though.”

“Help, not
advice,” he said with a rueful smile. “Got it. You open the bags, I’ll dump them for now, how’s that?”

“With one hand
?”

“I can’t open bags so well with one, but I can carry and dump with one. And you two can do a bag together,” he told the kids.

“Here.” Josie finished opening her bag, indicated it to the kids. “Drag it over there between you, and then tip it over, pull it along so the sand pours out.”

It was a bit awkward, Hu
gh found, handling fifteen-kilo bags with one hand, but he was determined to manage it. There might have been a bit of showing off there, too. Just a bit.

And there was
definitely
some showing off after all the sand was poured and raked smooth, and she dragged over the heavy tamper and started pounding away. He watched her for a couple minutes, but when she paused to give her muscles a rest, he took it from her with his good right hand.

“I’ll have a go,” he said.

He could see her opening her mouth to say the one-handed thing again, but he hadn’t spent his life in the gym for nothing. Up in the air, down with a bang to compress the sand, over and over, and she was laughing a little.

“
I’m dead impressed,” she said, and he grinned at her and kept tamping.

“Here, Amelia.” She handed Amelia a pair of heavy kitchen shears. “You and Charlie go out to the driveway and cut the plastic off the bricks, shove it in the bin for me, OK? Because once your brother gets done showing me his muscles, we get to start the fun bit.”

Hugh looked at Josie and laughed himself. “Building the patio is the fun bit?”

“Of c
ourse it is. That’s when the magic happens, when you see that your construction mess is turning into something.”

They worked through the morning, loading up, hauling brick barrowload by barrowload to the back garden, Hugh taking one handle, one of th
e kids on the other side. After the first couple rounds, Hugh sent Amelia back to their own shed for another wheelbarrow and they went a bit faster, Josie deputizing Charlie to help her unload the wheelbarrow and place the bricks in the neat parquet pattern she had designed. She must have measured, because they fit perfectly in the space she’d laid out, with a couple of centimeters of space between each brick.

“
I’ll put mortar in between here,” she explained to Hugh, “so I don’t get weeds growing up under,” and he nodded.

“You’ve got the knack of it, Charlie,” Josie told
the boy as he laid each brick with care, and Hugh smiled to see him puffing up at the praise. Well, there wasn’t much a man wouldn’t do for a beautiful woman, and he wasn’t too surprised that his brother was as susceptible as he was himself.

They broke for lunch in her kitchen,
ham and tomato sandwiches and apples,

“You don’t have to fix us lunch,” Hugh said. “I can take them home to eat.”

“Nah,” Josie said. “If you’re working for me, I’m at least going to feed you. This would’ve taken me all weekend. Instead, we’ll be done today.”

Hugh looked a
round the old-fashioned kitchen. Spotlessly clean, but he’d bet it hadn’t been updated in forty years. Cheap cabinetry, laminated countertops, brown vinyl flooring peeling a bit around the bottoms of the cabinets. “I’m surprised you didn’t want to fix the kitchen first thing.”

She shrugged and smiled.
“I’m Maori. Outside’s important. Nothing wrong with the stove, anyway, and the whole thing no worse than what my mum’s been feeding a family in for thirty years or so. I can wait for a flash kitchen, but I can’t wait to have someplace to sit and look at the trees and the sky, listen to the birds.”

“Your own patch of paradise,” he said.

“That’s it. I was in a flat before. No garden, and I was pining. So that’s first. And besides,” she said practically, “it’s the cheapest. That and painting. That comes next, because you should see the rest of the house.”

“I n
oticed that your bathroom was pink,” he said with another grin.

She laughed.
“Bright
pink, and look at that godawful bright blue in my lounge.”

“Not
iced that too,” he admitted.

“Somebo
dy must’ve told Mrs. Alberts that blue would be restful. Not that color, it isn’t. I told you I got this place cheaper than I should’ve, just because of the wallpaper and the paint. No worries, that’s all just sweat equity and a bit of paint. Easily fixed. I’ve already done my bedroom.”

And he’d like to see it. But he moved on.
“Yeh. My mum’s a decorator. The color on the paper isn’t what turns up on your wall. She spends a fair bit of time explaining that.”