He nodded. ‘About that. Listen, you got time for a coffee or something? My place is just down the road. I’d like to get Poppy inside out of this cold.’
Vera hesitated. It was late, and she’d been planning a long bath and a deep-bottomed beverage. She shot a glance at her watch and dithered.
Saying yes would be a mistake. Get involved with no-one and avoid all drama … that had been her mantra as she packed up her life in Queanbeyan.
But … shehadjust employed this guy’s daughter. Maybe it was her civic duty to prove she wasn’t going to be an ogre of a boss.
Besides, she just had a cold, lonely apartment to go back to, with only her worries about guilty pleas for company, and this reckless spark the vet had lit in her brain felt good. When had she last felt good?
‘Sure,’ she said, recklessness winning out over caution, for now. She turned with Josh and started back down Paterson Street in the direction of the lake. Poppy’s chatter to her mother filled the air behind them.
‘You live above the vet clinic?’
‘Yeah. We, as in my sister Hannah and me, own the building together. It’s been in the Cody family for generations. Our grandparents ran a haberdashery from the ground floor, back when haberdasheries were a thing. There’s apartments on the upper storeys. Hannah’s on the top floor, I’m the middle floor.’
‘That’s handy for work.’
He smiled. ‘Sometimes too handy. And since I’m the junior partner, Hannah thinks it’s my job to deal with the middle-of-the-night pet dramas.’
‘So you bought into your sister’s practice?’
‘Well, “buy” probably isn’t the right word. Me and Hannah made a deal.’
‘Oh? What sort of deal?’
He shrugged. ‘She’d have let me into the business for nothing. But she’d used her savings to fund the fit-out—the treatment rooms, the x-ray machine, the dog run out back—and worked hard the last few years to build the practice up into a profitable business, so I found a way to pay her in kind.’
In kind? What an idea. If only she could pay the rent on the café in cakes and chicken ribbon sandwiches.
‘I worked construction when I left school. Ten years. I can knock out walls, lay tiles, plumb a shower. Hannah gave me the idea. The apartments on the upper storeys hadn’t seen a paintbrush since about 1920 when we moved in, so I strapped on my toolbelt and worked out my half of the practice fixing up her apartment. My place will be next and then, when time and money permit, we’re going to restore the street frontage to its original condition.’
A vision of Josh wearing a toolbelt and a patina of sawdust and man-sweat drifted across her mind’s eye, and she tripped on a crack in the footpath. She stiffened as his arm came up under hers and set her back on her feet.
‘You okay?’
Vera could feel herself blushing and unglued her fingers from Josh’s muscled forearm. What had they been talking about? Her mind had gone blank all of a sudden. Oh, right. Buildings. In kind.Kindness.
How messed up was her world that kindness felt like a word from a foreign language?
‘Construction to vet school. That seems like a big jump.’
‘Journalist to café owner and cake expert. Seems like you don’t mind a leap yourself.’
Vera stood stock-still on the footpath. How the hell did some random guy, who she’d barely met, know she used to be a journalist? And if he knew that, what else did he know? Her voice, when it came, was low. ‘It’s a long story. One I have no intention of sharing. I don’t know how you heard that, but—’
Josh touched her arm. ‘Hey. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I’ve got a few long stories myself, one of which crawled out and bit me on the bum today. Bit Poppy, too.’
She sighed. ‘Don’t tell me. Small-town gossip. Poppy did give me a mangled version that made virtually no sense. It seems like I was prying, now, but at the time I had no idea who she was or how to get her home without a bit more information.’
He reached his arm around her and gave her shoulders a little squeeze. It felt good. Too good, for a woman who’d sworn off men forever.
‘Whatever you did, it worked. This is the nicest Poppy’s been to me since I told her I was moving to Hanrahan.’
Vera eased herself away and looked back over her shoulder, to where Poppy was nattering away on the phone about puppies and bus travel and how to store meringues like a professional. Josh was right, at least Poppy looked a whole lot happier than when she’d first seen her, weeping in the shadows of the skip bin.
‘I should have guessed when she mentioned a guinea pig,’ she said, as she followed Josh across the park over to Salt Creek Flats Road.
‘Excuse me?’ He was looking at her like she’d lost her marbles. Which, truth be told, she may very well have done. She’d barely been in town a month, and already she was halfway to forgetting her personal vow to never get involved with any guy, ever again—no way, no how. Problem was, when she made that vow, she didn’t know she was about to meet a warm-hearted vet with a flirty grin and a kooky daughter.