that damned ill-advised kiss.
A minute later he was set to go and he reversed quickly, eager to make his escape. Except when he passed her car, it was still there and she was out of it, standing at the front with the bonnet open, looking at the engine.
He groaned out loud. No, no, no! So close. He sighed, reversing again and manoeuvring his car back into his car space. He disembarked with trepidation, knowing he shouldn’t but knowing he couldn’t not offer to help her.
‘Problem?’ he asked, as he strode towards her.
Billie looked at him with eyes that felt like they’d been marinating in formaldehyde all night. If possible he looked even better than before. ‘It won’t start,’ she grumbled.
‘Is it just cold?’
‘No. I think the battery’s flat.’
‘Want me to give it a try?’
‘Knock yourself out,’ she invited.
Gareth slid into the plush leather passenger seat and turned the key. A faint couple of drunken whirrs could be heard and that was it. He placed his head on the steering-wheel. Yep. Dead as a doornail.
‘Did you leave your lights on?’ he asked, as he climbed out.
She shook her head. She’d taken her hair out of her ponytail and it swished around her face, the tips brushing against the velour lettering decorating the front of her hoody. Her nose was pink from the cold.
‘The car automatically turns them off anyway.’
Of course it did. It wasn’t some twenty-year-old dinosaur. A pity, because if it had been he could have offered her a jump start. But with the newer vehicles being almost totally computerised, he knew that wasn’t advisable.
‘Do you have roadside assistance?’
‘No. I know, I know …’ Billie said, as he frowned at her. She rubbed her hands together, pleased for the warmth of her jeans and fleecy top in her unexpected foray into the cold. ‘It expired a few months back and I keep meaning to renew it but …’
His whiskers looked even shaggier after three nights and his disapproving blue eyes seemed to leap out at her across the distance. ‘You’re a woman driving alone places, you should have roadside assistance.’
Billie supposed she should be affronted by his assumption that she was some helpless woman but, as with everything else, she found his concern for her well-being completely irresistible.
He sighed. ‘I’ll drive down to the nearest battery place and get you one,’ he said.
Billie blinked as his irresistibility cranked up another notch. Was he crazy? ‘It’s Sunday, Gareth. Nothing’s going to be open till at least ten and I don’t know about you but I’m too tired to wait that long.’ She shut her bonnet. ‘I’ll get a taxi home and deal with the battery this afternoon after I’ve had a sleep.’
Gareth knew he was caught then. He couldn’t let her get a taxi home. Not when he could easily drop her. Unless she lived way out of his way. ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’
He hoped it was somewhere really far away.
Billie would have been deaf not to hear the reluctance in his voice. And she was too tired to decipher what it meant. Tired enough to be pissed off. ‘You don’t have to do that, Gareth,’ she said testily, fishing around in her bag for her mobile phone. ‘I’m perfectly capable of ringing and paying for a taxi. I could even walk.’
She watched a muscle clench in his jaw. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he dismissed. ‘You’ve worked all night and I’m here with a perfectly functioning car. It makes sense. Now … Where. Do. You. Live?’
She glared at him. ‘Only a really stupid man would call a tired woman stupid.’
Gareth shut his eyes and raked a hand through his hair, muttering, ‘Bloody hell.’ He glanced at her then. ‘I apologise, okay? Just tell me where you live already.’
‘Paddo.’
Paddington. Of course she did. Trendy, yuppie suburb as befitted her sparkly dress and expensive car. ‘Perfect. You’re on my way home.’ He was house-sitting in the outer suburbs but she lived in his general direction.
She folded her arms. He could tell she was deciding between being churlish and grateful. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind?’
Gareth shook his head. ‘Of course not,’ he said, indicating that she should make her way to his car. ‘As long as you don’t mind slumming it?’
Billie shot him a disparaging look. ‘I’m sure I’ll manage.’
Gareth nodded as she passed in front of him. The question was, would he?
THEY DROVE IN silence for a while as Gareth navigated out of the hospital grounds and onto the quiet Sunday morning roads. He noticed she tucked her hands between her denim-clad thighs as he pulled up at the first red traffic light.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked, cranking the heat up a little more.
‘Not too bad,’ she murmured.
Gareth supposed the seats in her car were heated and this was probably a real step down for her. And maybe when he’d been younger, before life had dealt him a tonne of stuff to deal with, he might have felt the divide between them acutely.
But he’d since lived a life that had confirmed that possessions meant very little—from the pockmarked earth of the war-torn Middle East to the beige walls of an oncology unit—he’d learned very quickly that stuff didn’t matter.
And frankly he was too tired and too tempted by her to care for her comfort.
Her scent filled the car. He suddenly realised that she’d been wearing the same perfume last Saturday night but he had been too focused on the accident to realise. Something sweet. Maybe fruity? Banana? With a hint of vanilla and something … sharper.
Great—she smelled like a banana daiquiri.
And now it was in his car. And probably destined to be so for days, taunting him with the memory.
She shifted and in his peripheral vision he could see two narrow stretches of denim hugging her thighs, her hands still jammed between them.
‘So,’ Gareth said out of complete desperation, trying to not think about her thighs and how good they might feel wrapped around him, ‘you called yourself Dr Keyes … the other night. With M-Dog.’
Yep. Complete desperation. Why else would he even be remotely stupid enough to bring up that night when they were trapped in a tiny, warm cab together, only a small gap and a gearstick separating them, the kiss lying large between them?
But Billie didn’t seem to notice
