Melinda Curtis - Summer Kisses

Miss Caldwell didn’t believe Flynn, nor did she sit. She glanced toward the kitchen.

Flynn followed the direction of her gaze.

Becca wore the same black exercise leggings and pink hoodie that she’d had on that morning. Her long, black hair hung in a thick, smooth braid down her back. No scrubs. No disapproving frown, although he knew she had one. Becca looked like someone’s girlfriend, not a caregiver.

Flynn blinked and glanced back at Miss Caldwell, who looked as if she might want to plant at least one of her bright white sneakers on his backside.

“Well.” Miss Caldwell ping-ponged looks at each of them. “Mr. Blonkowski has my résumé. I’d better be going.”

Given the choice between arguing that Miss Caldwell should stay or having his caregiver—at least temporarily—be Becca, Flynn surprised himself. He thanked Miss Caldwell for coming, and escorted her as far as the front door.

Grandpa Ed turned on a rerun of Jeopardy! The well-known theme blared from the television.

Flynn swiped the remote from him and muted the show. “I thought we agreed to be nice.”

“Miss Caldwell wouldn’t have lasted a week driving an hour in good traffic, much less ninety minutes each way in bad traffic. Did you see her chin? It was soft. The first time I lost my temper she’d be out the door. I did her a favor.”

“She looked capable enough to me.” The term battle-ax came to mind.

“She’s very qualified.” Becca scrubbed the sink as if it deserved punishment. “I think she’d do an excellent job. She wouldn’t quit in a week.”

“She might last two,” Grandpa Ed allowed grumpily. He lowered his voice. “Any woman who’d praise the competition is worth hiring.”

Flynn took off his baseball cap and ran a hand through his hair. It was long enough to pull into a short ponytail, longer than Joey’s had been the last time he’d seen him, but not as long as Joey’s had been today. “You drove Miss Caldwell away.”

His grandfather huffed. “I did not.”

“Yes, you did.” Becca wiped her hands on a dish towel, sniffed it, made a face and set it aside. “She was confused as to why I was here. We used to work at the same agency.”

“Used to?” Flynn asked.

“Yes.” She drew a deep breath.

Flynn had a feeling he wasn’t going to like whatever she said next.

Thank God.

“We don’t care about your previous employment.” Grandpa Ed gave Flynn the stink eye. His back was to Becca, so she couldn’t see him. “Do we, Flynn?”

“Yes, we do.”

“No, we don’t.”

Flynn’s fingers dug into the crown of his baseball cap.

“I’ll tell you anyway.” Becca raised her chin, as if bracing herself for a punch.

Flynn looked forward to whatever she was about to say. Her confession would most likely convince his grandfather they couldn’t hire her.

“Three years ago I moved to Santa Rosa. I worked for the agency that’s sending candidates out here. I was assigned to care for an elderly woman who rescued Australian shepherds.” Becca walked over and knelt beside Abby, stroking her dark fur. “When Lily passed away, her son wanted to take all the dogs to the kill-shelter. I protested and eventually found homes for them all, including Abby. But I got fired because caregivers aren’t supposed to get involved with their clients.”

The little dog stared at Flynn with dark, accusing eyes, as if to say: find fault with that.

Grandpa Ed scowled at Flynn. “You did the right thing, Becca. No one’s accusing you of anything.”

His grandfather couldn’t see Becca’s features flinch, as if the right hook she’d been waiting for had been struck. Flynn felt a corresponding jab to his gut.

She was guilty. Of what, he had no idea. But if she was the only acceptable option to Grandpa Ed, he was going to find out what she was hiding.

“We’ll be hiring you regardless,” Grandpa Ed said. “Won’t we, Flynn?”

Flynn didn’t answer. He looked at Becca. Deal breakers lined up in his head like dominos—theft, blackmail, murder, angry ex-husbands searching for her. “I need to talk to Becca outside. Alone.”

To her credit, Becca walked out, head high, as if she’d known all along the gallows awaited.

He led her toward the river, stopping to sit on a fallen log overlooking the steep bank that cut away to the slow-flowing water. She settled on the log a few feet away from him, brushing at the bark as if it was a crumb-littered bench seat at a restaurant.

“I’m sure you’ve realized my grandfather wants to hire you,” Flynn began. “But there’s something else you’re not telling me and I won’t hire you until I know what it is.”

* * *

THE TRUTH PRESSED at Becca’s throat.

She swallowed it back.

Took a breath.

Risked looking toward Flynn.

Beneath his black ball cap, his reddish-brown hair glinted in the afternoon sunlight, almost as blinding as the rippling river. His jaw was a hard line. She couldn’t look him in the eye.

The truth pressed on her once more.

Becca swallowed it again.

She and the truth had an odd track record. Like the time her father had walked out after learning Becca’s mother had stage-four cancer. Or the first time Terry had asked her to marry him. He’d walked out when she’d said she was scared and needed time to think.

Abby pranced across Becca’s toes and looked down the steep, crumbling bank toward the river, her nose quivering.

“You have two choices if you want the job.” Flynn’s voice was as unflappable as his jaw line. “You can tell me what you’re hiding or I can do a background check.”

Tell him the truth? Which version? No one ever really wanted to hear the unvarnished truth. They wanted a massaged answer tailored to their expectations. Telling Flynn about the lawsuit placed her odds of landing the job near zero. But it was a definite zero if she walked away without saying anything.

“I want this job.” She swallowed and rephrased. “I need this job.” To repair her reputation before it fell from somewhere near barely employable to no-way-in-Hades employable.

“I need someone I can trust taking care of my grandfather.”

Untrustworthy. Becca stiffened. She glanced over her shoulder at the driveway, even as Abby picked her way daintily to the shoreline.

“Agnes trusts you,” he said softly. “And I trust Agnes. But I need a reason to believe in you.”

His words drew her gaze back toward his. Gone were the hard lines, the guardedness, the at-a-distance cool. In their place was compassion. A white-flagged truce.

If there was a chance, she had to take it. She had to speak up, without varnish or angles. On a big gust of forced air, she told him the truth. “After leaving the agency I went to work for a wonderful woman who was estranged from her son. Gary had decided twenty-some years prior that his mother didn’t respect him enough, so he didn’t visit. He didn’t call. The most he could be troubled with was a generic card on holidays.” Virginia had been heartbroken every Christmas, every birthday. “I worked for Virginia for two years, and while I was with her, she learned that I had a tremendous amount of debt.”

At the mention of her money woes, Flynn’s expression seemed to close off.

It seemed pointless to say more, but Becca hadn’t told a soul other than her lawyer, and the story continued to bubble out. “My husband and I had bought a house in San Diego and when he died, I couldn’t make the payments. Terry had life insurance, but we’d only been married a few months when he died. He hadn’t changed his policy to include me.” She twisted her wedding ring. “The money went to his mom. The debts went to me. I sold his truck. I sold our furniture. I traded my car for the motorhome and let the house slide into foreclosure, but we still had credit card debt.” It was amazing how quickly the interest on a few purchases multiplied. “When Virginia’s kidneys started to fail, she insisted on paying off the last ten thousand dollars I owed. I knew it went against the caregiver code, but by then she was more like a grandmother than a client, so I accepted.”