“That, Miss Bagshaw, is quite obvious.” He glared at her, and Lucy glared back. It was better than the other option, which was to burst into tears. As a barista she’d had her fair share of angry customers whose Americano didn’t come fast enough, or whose cappuccino didn’t foam quite the way they wanted it to. And when a customer took somebody’s else cup? Always her fault.
She’d always laughed it off, and the other staff had laughed it off too, but somehow it hadn’t felt as awful as this. She was too raw to be yelled at right now. She needed to grow back a layer of skin before Alex Kincaid tore another strip off.
“Sorry,” she said again, and Alex glared at her for another five seconds before turning abruptly on his heel and stalking off.
Lucy sank into her seat; she was actually trembling. Behind her Maggie made a sound that was very nearly a snort.
“I know it’s the beginning of term and all that, but it is only fifty pieces of bloody card stock.” She sighed and then clapped a hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “He is usually fair,” she told her. “He must be having a bad day.”
Lucy bit the inside of her cheek as she felt emotion bottle up her throat; she wasn’t sure whether a laugh or a sob was welling up inside her. She’d been flitting from one over-the-top emotion to the next ever since everything had blown up in Boston. On one hand, it was all soridiculous, whether it was her mother’s grandstanding about not showing favoritism or AlexKincaid’s dressing-down about card stock or her sister’s seeming resentment of her. And yet, however ridiculous, it could still hurt.
She stared at the closed office door, wondering why Alex Kincaid was so tightly wound. He was head teacher of a lovely little primary school in a lovely little village in a lovely little corner of the Lake District. And the sun was actually shining today. What on earth did the man have to be stressed about?
She sank back into her seat and stared blankly at the computer screen. Why had all the text turned green?
Fifteen minutes later Lucy had managed to turn the text back to black, but had lost a paragraph about PE uniforms in the letter to parents and was frantically trying to find where it had gone. She did not relish the idea of asking Alex Kincaid to resend the letter to her e-mail, and Maggie Bains had “popped off” to feed her cats. Lucy suspected she would be gone for some time.
A sudden cry from the school yard where the younger children (called, rather adorably, Infants) played, had Lucy lifting her head. With nothing short of alarm she watched one of the playground supervisors bring a tiny-looking girl into the office. She knew she was working in a school, but she hadn’t actually thought she’d have to interact too much with the children. She had absolutely no qualifications and yet the playground supervisor didn’t seem to realize this, for she plonked the girl down on a chair right next to Lucy.
“Can you do something with this little one, then?” the supervisor asked cheerfully. “I’ve got to get back out there.”
“Sure, of course,” Lucy murmured, because she could hardly say otherwise. She told herself it couldn’t be very hard, comforting such a very small girl, and yet it was her smallness that terrified Lucy.
The girl had huge blue eyes and masses of light brown hair, like a cloud around her pointed, elfin face. She sniffed loudly andthen mumbled something so garbled by tears and a Cumbrian accent that Lucy couldn’t make out a single word.
“Well, then,” she said in the too-hearty voice she knew was so often used by people who were not comfortable with children. “Let’s get you a Band—a plaster, shall we?” Except she remembered as she rose from her chair, Maggie had said the school policy was no plasters, only ice packs. But did you really put an ice pack on a cut knee?
“We can clean it off, at least,” she told the girl, although she had no idea if that was government policy or not. Still, a little water surely couldn’t hurt. She went to the staff room and ran some warm water onto a paper towel, and then brought it back to the girl, who had thankfully stopped crying but was still sniffling.
“Here we are.” Cautiously Lucy dabbed at the cut knee. Once the blood was cleared away, it didn’t look so bad. “I just need to fill out an accident report,” she said as Maggie’s instructions came back to her. She dug through a drawer and filled out the form before handing it to the little girl, who took it with a doleful sniff. “Now you give that to your mum or dad when you get home, all right?”
“I don’t have a dad.” The girl spoke matter-of-factly, just as Lucy once had. The telltale wobbly tilt of the chin and the defiant glint in the eye were familiar too.
“Well, your mum, then,” she said, keeping her voice cheerful. The girl nodded, biting her lip, and the gesture caught at Lucy’s heart.
Seeing her sitting there, hunched over, her face tear-streaked and her lip still wobbling . . . Lucy knewexactlyhow she felt. “There, there,” she said softly, and impulsively she gave the girl a clumsy hug.Thathad to be against government policy, but this little girl needed a hug.Lucyneeded a hug. And it seemed likea six-year-old with a scraped knee was the only person who was going to give it to her.
And the little girl must have been grateful, because she threw her arms around Lucy and pressed her face into her shoulder. Lucy was gently easing back when she felt someone’s gaze on her. She looked up and froze when she saw Alex Kincaid staring at her with that terrifyingly inscrutable expression from the doorway of his office.
Lucy braced herself for the sharp criticism that was surely coming her way. Only this time she wasn’t going to trip all over herself to apologize. She stared back for a moment, her chin lifted in bravado more than actual courage, and then after about two seconds she glanced quickly away. So much for courage. The man had an absolutely basilisk stare.
When she risked glancing at him again, however, he was smiling, rather awkwardly.
“All right, Eva?” he asked, and the girl nodded, wide-eyed. It looked as if most people were intimidated by Alex Kincaid. Although to be fair, he had a rather nice smile. No more than a quirking of his mouth, really, but it softened him a bit.
She straightened and gave Eva a smile of her own. “I think you can go back outside now.”
Eva scrambled off the chair and headed out, and Lucy braced herself for Alex’s criticism.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you about the card stock,” he said stiltedly. Someone was actually saying sorry to her. It was a rather nice feeling.
“That’s all right,” she answered. “It was only paper, after all.”
Which was, she realized belatedly, probably not the right response.
By four thirty she was exhausted. She’d regularly worked eight-hour days at the café in Boston, but that now felt like a jaunt at the beach compared with this. Her mind spun with allthe information Maggie had thrown at her, despite the older woman’s assurances that she’d be “right as rain” by tomorrow afternoon, when Maggie was leaving. Lucy felt panicked at the thought. Or she would feel panicked if she had the energy to summon the emotion.
Yet there were still a few things to look forward to, she thought as she headed out into the glorious September afternoon that Juliet had told her existed, but Lucy hadn’t quite believed. The sun was still high in the sky, bathing everything in gold, and the air was warm—or at least warmish.
