Read Online Just Not Mine by Rosalind James - Free Book Online Page A

was back. “I did. Surprised?”
    He laughed. “Yeh. I’ll admit, I am.” She had dug out and leveled the dirt foundation for her new patio, he could see, and had about half of the space covered by a lumpy layer of sand in which to set the brick, had been in the middle of opening another sandbag when he’d interrupted her. What was more, the perimeter of the prospective patio was marked by stakes and string, and he could tell at a glance that the string was level, too.
    “You know what you’re doing,” he said.
    “Yeh. I do.” The look she sent him was challenging. “Glad of the help, though.”
    “Help, not advice,” he said with a rueful smile. “Got it. You open the bags, I’ll dump them for now, how’s that?”
    “With one hand ?”
    “I can’t open bags so well with one, but I can carry and dump with one. And you two can do a bag together,” he told the kids.
    “Here.” Josie finished opening her bag, indicated it to the kids. “Drag it over there between you, and then tip it over, pull it along so the sand pours out.”
    It was a bit awkward, Hu gh found, handling fifteen-kilo bags with one hand, but he was determined to manage it. There might have been a bit of showing off there, too. Just a bit.
    And there was definitely some showing off after all the sand was poured and raked smooth, and she dragged over the heavy tamper and started pounding away. He watched her for a couple minutes, but when she paused to give her muscles a rest, he took it from her with his good right hand.
    “I’ll have a go,” he said.
    He could see her opening her mouth to say the one-handed thing again, but he hadn’t spent his life in the gym for nothing. Up in the air, down with a bang to compress the sand, over and over, and she was laughing a little.
    “ I’m dead impressed,” she said, and he grinned at her and kept tamping.
    “Here, Amelia.” She handed Amelia a pair of heavy kitchen shears. “You and Charlie go out to the driveway and cut the plastic off the bricks, shove it in the bin for me, OK? Because once your brother gets done showing me his muscles, we get to start the fun bit.”
    Hugh looked at Josie and laughed himself. “Building the patio is the fun bit?”
    “Of c ourse it is. That’s when the magic happens, when you see that your construction mess is turning into something.”
    They worked through the morning, loading up, hauling brick barrowload by barrowload to the back garden, Hugh taking one handle, one of th e kids on the other side. After the first couple rounds, Hugh sent Amelia back to their own shed for another wheelbarrow and they went a bit faster, Josie deputizing Charlie to help her unload the wheelbarrow and place the bricks in the neat parquet pattern she had designed. She must have measured, because they fit perfectly in the space she’d laid out, with a couple of centimeters of space between each brick.
    “ I’ll put mortar in between here,” she explained to Hugh, “so I don’t get weeds growing up under,” and he nodded.
    “You’ve got the knack of it, Charlie,” Josie told the boy as he laid each brick with care, and Hugh smiled to see him puffing up at the praise. Well, there wasn’t much a man wouldn’t do for a beautiful woman, and he wasn’t too surprised that his brother was as susceptible as he was himself.
    They broke for lunch in her kitchen, ham and tomato sandwiches and apples,
    “You don’t have to fix us lunch,” Hugh said. “I can take them home to eat.”
    “Nah,” Josie said. “If you’re working for me, I’m at least going to feed you. This would’ve taken me all weekend. Instead, we’ll be done today.”
    Hugh looked a round the old-fashioned kitchen. Spotlessly clean, but he’d bet it hadn’t been updated in forty years. Cheap cabinetry, laminated countertops, brown vinyl flooring peeling a bit around the bottoms of the cabinets. “I’m surprised you didn’t want to fix the kitchen first thing.”
    She shrugged and smiled.