Page 30 of Just Come Over
She was late getting back, as she’d expected, once she’d made another stop at Pak ‘n’ Save. She saw them all as soon as she pulled into the drive, and once she did, she got out to get a better look.
Casey, still with the flower pinned to her dinosaur shirt, was running full-tilt across the grass, her curly hair bouncing around her shoulders and a rugby ball under her arm. Rhys was just behind her, calling, “Chuck it over.” She did, in a wild pass that made Zora smile, and Rhys adjusted his stride, stuck a hand out and caught the ball like it had Velcro on it, and flicked it behind his back, one-handed, to Isaiah. “Good one,” he called, when her son caught it. Isaiah turned and ran in the other direction, since they were all about to crash into the bushes, but Casey tripped. Rhys scooped her up in one big arm before she could fall, turned around just that fast, set her down again, and said something. Probably, knowing Rhys, something like, “No forward passes.” Casey took off, and Rhys jogged over to Zora with a grin on his face, looking like a buccaneer taking a night off from ferocity, and said, “Hi. How’d you go? Here, let me get those.”
He reached for her grocery bags, and she handed them over. “I thought you’d need dinner,” she said, ignoring, as best she could, that other side ofhim,the one she’d never seen before, that was making her go a bit goopy inside. Not to mention the size of his arms in the white T-shirt, or the contrast it made with his golden-brown skin and the blue-black tattoo. He must have had it on under the long-sleeved dress shirt he’d been wearing earlier. She also didn’t look at his rear view when he leaped up the stairs into the house, taking them two at a time, or the breadth of his shoulders. Much.
“Some of this is for you,” she said when he’d set the groceries down on the benchtop. “Milk, bread, butter, eggs, bacon. The essentials. You said you didn’t have anything,” she reminded him when he looked surprised. “So I thought, as I had to pop by anyway to get a few things for tonight...”
“Good of you,” he said. “Anything else out in the van?”
She couldn’t help laughing. “Heaps. There was dinner, and then there was Casey. I could’ve gone a little wild.”
“I’ll go get it,” he said, “and then we can sort out what I owe you.”
When he came back, he was carrying at least eight bags at once. “Bring in the vases as well?” he asked. “I noticed you had a collection out there.”
“Yes, please. Put them in the shed.” What a luxury it was to have somebody to carry in your groceries and help empty out your van. Bonus points for looking so good doing it.
Five minutes, and Rhys was back. “I gave them a bit of a scrub,” he said, “and put them in the rack to dry. They looked like they needed it.”
“Oh.” Well,thiswas confusing. “I was thinking how nice it was to have that kind of help, but now, you’re just spoiling me.”
His eyes were so warm, and she was getting a little lost in the green and gold of them, and the contrast with his hair and skin. “Could be. Could be you deserve some spoiling, too. What can I do?”
“Take the skin off the chicken breasts, if you’re offering. Never my favorite thing.” That hadn’t been flirty. He was concerned, that was all. He’d said as much. His sense of responsibility was as oversized as the rest of him, even for somebody who didn’t belong to him. Like, say, her.
“I’m offering.” He moved around her and washed his hands at the sink, careful not to touch her in the confined space, she noticed. Which was good. The other night had been unfortunate, but this was a new start. Not that she needed one, now that she knew enough about him to get over her inconvenient near-obsession.
It would have been easier, though, if he hadn’t smelled so good when he got close. Like cedar and sandalwood and clean man. It was faint, but it was there. She hadn’t noticed it the other night, probably because the house had smelled like curry, but she was noticing it now.
She said, still unpacking groceries, “You took a shower when you got home.”
He looked up, then smiled. Slowly. Bloody hell, but he had a good smile, sexy and warm. “Yeh,” he said, “I did. But then, I’ve been bathing regularly ever since I turned thirty.”
She had to laugh. “Sorry. That came out wrong. It’s just that you, ah... that you smell good, so I...” She waved a bag of spinach about in a random matter. “I’m, ah, a florist, so...” This was not going well.
“Shower gel,” he said. “Somebody bought me some once, and it seemed to be appreciated, so I’ve kept on. You haven’t discovered my secret perfume habit, no worries. It works, though, you think?”
“Yes,” she said. “Nice. Manly.” She so needed to find another subject. Also, “it seemed to be appreciated?” That was a reminder, if she’d needed one, that he’d never suffered for lack of female attention. He’d said he’d taken his ring off fast, once he and Victoria had split. She’d just bet. “Casey woke up, eh.” Another dead obvious statement, but what could you do. She wasn’t in her best form.
“She did. We both did, in fact, when Isaiah came home.” He dumped the chicken skins in the rubbish and handed her the packet with the meat. “Seems I sat down and more or less passed out.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. So you decided to play rugby. Make a cup of tea, if you like.”
“It seemed like a good way to wake up. And I will, thanks. D’you want one?”
“Sure.” It was nice to work in a kitchen with somebody. She’d forgotten that, too, or maybe she’d never known it. Dylan hadn’t been much for cooking.
“Isaiah’s playing on the wing, he told me,” Rhys said. “He’s fast, but that’s no surprise. Got good hands, too.”
“You’d know, I guess. He enjoys it, but it’s not a passion. Which is maybe just as well.”
“Rugby can be a ticket out,” he said, “but Isaiah doesn’t need a ticket.”
“No. He doesn’t.” Not like Rhys had, or Dylan. Why was Dylan always “less so?” Because Rhys had been older, probably, and protective. Always.
They’d been with their mum, first, and then their grandmother, their dad’s mum. And finally, Rhys had gone with his dad across the ditch to Aussie, because Tana Fletcher had been doing construction on the Gold Coast, and had taken his near-teenage son to live with him. Abruptly, Dylan had said, and unexpectedly. Dylan had felt left out and left behind, but Zora suspected that Rhys had been the one who’d been alone.
He’d picked up Rugby League out there as easily as he’d played Union until then, and by the age of nineteen, he’d already begun to establish himself as a battering ram, impossible to put away. The newspapers, Dylan had told her, half-proud and half-resentful, had been full of him, and so had the nightclubs, because Rhys had worked hard and played harder, throwing himself into the higher-profile League scene the same way he threw himself into everything.
