Only money she didn’t have. She should have been saving everything—not having her hair done or buying multiple bottles of Bollinger. She should have waited until she had more resources to deal with these seemingly inevitable setbacks. The house had eaten all her resources over the last year; she’d really hoped she’d hit the end of it. This was supposed to be her new start. Angered with her idiocy, she splashed forwards to lift the first of the boxes to safety out in the garden. The contents of the ones at ground level must be sodden already.
Gabe had his phone to his ear; she could hear the ‘on hold’ music as she walked. ‘You should move into the Treehouse while this dries out,’ he said.
She shook her head. No way would she move in with Gabe. Her instinct had been whispering a warning to pull back on the time she spent with him and at that suggestion it shrieked. ‘It’s just a flood. Upstairs isn’t damaged, only the stuff stored down here. It won’t take long to dry.’ She hoped. She also hoped like hell the plumber wasn’t going to cost a bomb.
‘You might want to transfer some of this stuff to plastic boxes for longer-term storage, especially the paperwork,’ he said.
Did he think she hadn’t considered that first time round? Of course she should have used better storage when she’d originally sorted all the stuff, but the banana boxes had been free from the supermarket. She didn’t bother answering—the man was made of money, he had no clue what it was like for those not born with silver spoons.
‘Don’t do that.’ He frowned at her. ‘I’ll lift them for you—’ He broke off as someone finally took him off hold.
Roxie kept lifting and lugging—they were her boxes after all. Gabe’s frown deepened as she marched back and forth past him carrying the worst affected out to the deck. She listened to him issue instructions to the plumber with his innate lord-of-all authority. Which annoyed her even more. She couldn’t ask him not to make the call, didn’t want to reveal her proximity to the poverty line, but she couldn’t let the entire property flood either. As he wrapped the call she bent down for the next box—the bottom one of the first tower. The water was already at the one-third mark. She hoisted it up, cold wet running down her arm.
‘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-humored 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. Tight-lipped, 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 infront 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.
