Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Joshua
As I headed out of the lift after my Saturday morning session in the downstairs gym, I couldn’t keep my gaze from Hartford’s door.
Despite the concerns about my business that should have been occupying all my waking hours, over the last few days, my thoughts kept sliding to Hartford.
What was she doing? How was she getting on with that broken leg?
Maybe I had imagined those feelings she’d stirred in me.
Most importantly, why couldn’t I get this woman out of my head?
Just as I turned the key, her door swung open and Hartford appeared, a knotted bag hanging from her right crutch.
“Joshua!” she said, her smile so wide my heart tripped in my chest. “How are you?”
“You want a hand with that?” I nodded toward the bag. I’d been a selfish dick, not checking on her. She had a broken leg and probably could have done with some help unpacking and getting settled.
She laughed. “It’s just rubbish. I’m going to the chute. I’m a bit obsessed with it to be honest. Any excuse to use it.”
“You’re obsessed with throwing things out?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No, just the chute bit. Pull it open, drop it in, and voilà, it’s gone.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay.”
She gave me a one-shouldered shrug as if she couldn’t care less what I thought. “It’s so convenient.”
She’d switched out her scrubs today but replaced them with what looked like pajamas. I was getting the distinct impression that Hartford didn’t really own normal clothes.
“Are you unpacked?”
“I am. It didn’t take long. I was just about to go to the supermarket. Want to come?”
I should go inside, run a bath, put on some music and relax—ready myself for the next week of chaos—but I hadn’t seen Hartford for a few days and . . . Well, I had promised my mother I’d make sure she was okay. “Is there one around here?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Joshua Luca, tell me you shop for your own groceries.”
There was just something about this woman that made me smile, even when she was semi-scolding me. “I can’t do that because I’d be lying.”
“Then I insist you come with me.” She hobbled past me and I caught the scent of cinnamon. “I’ll just use the chute and then we’ll go.”
It didn’t seem to occur to her that I might have plans.
Or that if I didn’t shop for groceries, it was because I didn’t have time or didn’t want to or had someone to do that sort of thing.
Something about her assumptions drew me in.
That, and the fabulous arse I couldn’t stop staring at as she limped down the corridor.
She turned back after using the chute. “There.” Her eyes were wide and bright and completely focused on me. “I just need to wash my hands, grab my bag, and we’ll go. Yes?”
I got the feeling she wasn’t looking for an answer as she disappeared back in to ready herself.
I let myself into my flat and shrugged off my jacket, then pulled it back on.
This was ridiculous. I didn’t want to go shopping.
I was looking forward to some thinking time or “Genius Time” as Tristan liked to call it.
I hadn’t told Tristan that I liked to have my Genius Time in the bath.
There was such a thing as oversharing, even among best friends.
The bath was where I figured out solutions to problems. I’d had a bath every day since I’d learned about the Merdon acquisition.
I was still waiting for inspiration to strike.
I guess I could get my Genius Time after a trip to the supermarket.
It would mean I could carry back what Hartford bought and then leave her to it and shut the door.
I’d probably discover that the frisson of .
. . whatever I’d felt, and the deep stir of my gut when I’d picked her up at the airport, had dissipated.
A shopping trip with Hartford would clear my head, allow me to focus my thoughts on my business.
“You ready?” Hartford poked her head around my door.
“You know where you’re headed?”
“Of course. But tell me you know where your local supermarket is.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. She liked to prod, but in a way that was . . . charming almost. “There’s a Waitrose just around the corner.”
“Then we’ll head there.” She grinned at me as if I were her student and I’d unexpectedly given her the correct answer to a question.
As we stepped into the London drizzle, she took a deep breath in. I forced myself to glance away from her rising chest. Had she always had a chest like that? “I’d forgotten what rain felt like.”
“London’s different to Yemen, I imagine.” I led us to the crossing.
“Couldn’t be much more different.” She turned her head to look back on the hotel residences. “We slept under canvass in a compound, obviously.”
“A compound?”
Hartford expertly navigated the crossings and pavements like she’d always had her leg in plaster.
My mother might have thought she needed help to settle in, but she was wrong.
She didn’t need anyone’s help to do anything by the looks of things.
“Like a little village ringfenced by security where we could move freely without . . . worrying. It’s where we were safe. ”
“And you didn’t leave that compound, apart to go to the hospital?” It must have been like living in a prison. I couldn’t imagine living like that for a week, let alone a year.
“Sometimes to collect supplies or help a child who’d been injured and couldn’t be brought to the hospital. But not on our own.”
She’d basically been putting aside her safety and comfort to look after people. That was so . . . admirable. “So why are you back?”
She nodded at her leg.
“Was that, like, a bullet or something?”
She snorted, almost as if she was disappointed. “No. I tripped, but my leg must have been weak from the first time I broke it. This time wasn’t so bad.”
I would have thought tripping was better than being shot, but maybe I didn’t understand the nuances. “Mum said you have a job starting here. So, you’re back to stay?”
“Yes. Starts next week. I’ll be a little hampered from a practical perspective, because . . . you know, the leg. But I’ll figure it out. I always do.”
“You looking forward to it?”
She nodded and glanced away, as if not entirely sure. “It will be a change.”
Hardly an enthusiastic response. At my raised eyebrows, she continued.
“It will help my specialty, I think. I just . . . you know, I just enjoyed Medicines Sans Frontiers for the last few years. You’re so all-in, you know? In a place like London, I’m not sure how . . . busy I’m going to be.” Her voice flattened like it had been sat on.
“People need medical attention in London.”
“We’ll see. Anyway, I didn’t have any choice. I had to come back and it’s a good hospital. I have a lot to be thankful for. My boss is like The Guy in pediatric medicine, so I’m bound to learn a lot, if nothing else.”
I couldn’t believe that anyone would be so unhappy to be back in London, the best city in the world—and in a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park no less. But her obvious disappointment tugged at something inside me and I wanted to make it right.
“Give yourself a chance. You might love it here, sleeping under Egyptian cotton and cashmere.”
She laughed and her nose wrinkled in a way I’d never noticed when she was younger. I had the urge to circle her waist and pull her closer so I could examine the freckles that sprinkled her cheeks. I wanted to make her feel that everything was going to be okay.
Why had I agreed to this shopping trip?
“This is the best bit,” she said as I set the bags on the side. “Unpacking it all. Seeing what you’ve bought.”
“I’d find that an easier concept to grasp if we’d come back from Hermès, not Waitrose.”
She grinned at me and I tried to tell myself it didn’t feel good to make her smile.
“Grab a potato peeler and get started,” she said. “And don’t give me that I don’t know how to use a potato peeler. I’ve eaten your mother’s apple pie; I know you can peel.”
She was right, I’d been roped in to peeling duties as a kid more often than I cared to remember. “It’s been a while. Remind me again why we can’t just order something in? That way, I don’t have to peel anything. And we would have had the entire morning to do something more exciting than shop.”
“More exciting?” She made a puffing sound through her completely bitable lips. “Like you could have a more exciting time than battling your way up and down supermarket aisles. Especially when you had me for company.”
I couldn’t help but smile at her comfort around me. The feeling was mutual. There was something too easy about being in her presence. “Yes, so exciting.” I had to fake the sarcasm.
She laughed, a warm, sunny laugh that threatened to clear the rainclouds. “Aha! This will be perfect.” She presented an empty, oversized jam jar that she’d found lurking in one of the cupboards. “How much do you think you would have spent ordering in dinner tonight?”
I couldn’t help but wonder if whatever I said would result in a scornful reprimand. “I’m not sure. Why?”
“I want your money.”
“I thought you didn’t want my money, or at least the apartment I rented. What do you need?”
“What would you have spent on dinner tonight?”
I gave up trying to understand what she was trying to say. “I don’t know. Fifty or sixty quid.”
She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head and held out her hand. “Okay, hand it over. Give me fifty pounds.”
She was asking me for money to peel her potatoes? I didn’t have the energy to argue with her. I just pulled out my wallet and handed over three twenty-pound notes.
“Perfect.” She unscrewed the gold metal lid of the jar and dropped the money inside. “Medicines Sans Frontiers is always in need of additional funds. This will help. Thank you.”
I wasn’t sure if it was the cause or her, but something in my gut shifted. Her passion for doing good was admirable. “You going to volunteer with them again?”