Incapable (Love Triumphs Book 3) Read Free Page A

lady scared of breaking a hip shuffle than a recognisable groove. Not that she had much dancer in her anyway, but somehow in all that time with Hamish she’d lost her sense of rhythm, along with the logic of who she was without him.
    And without him was bliss, a deep hot bubble bath, a feather bed, a big mouthful of chocolate praline, endless coffee refills you didn’t have to make yourself.
    So getting her hippy hippy shake back should be easy.
    But maybe not today. She dropped into the armchair with a grunt. Today her back ached from humping suitcases and boxes up the stairs. Today was all about the savouring, and she could do that while slumping. It was the equivalent of a day spa appointment that was going to last the rest of her life. It was indulgence and choice, ease and relaxation served with real peppermint tea that was steamy and fragrant.
    It was so weird.
    She’d hadn’t been on her own, truly on her own, without someone in the next room whose needs she’d committed to meet, for eight years. And even before that, after Mum died, with Dad’s drinking, there’d been that need to be the one who cared, who was responsible, whose needs came last.
    That realisation was probably why it was hard to get out of the chair. She felt heavy with the difference. Not that it mattered. She could rust in this chair and no one would mind. That was such a lonely loser thought it made her smile. Because that’s exactly what she wanted, to be alone, and if that made her a loser then bring it on, baby, embrace the lame, cultivate the nerd, and institutionalise the geek.
    She swung a denim-clad leg over the arm of the chair and fist-pumped, feeling vaguely stupid for doing it. Because for all the sit in the chair till she fused with its second-hand distressed leather notions, she had to get at least part way organised. She had a new job to start Monday and in that particular sphere she had to show a whole lot of anti-loser characteristics. Which meant finding appropriate clothing to wear, sorting out the bathroom and working out how to manage without a power supply and still have decent hair.
    The better casual clothes she needed were in the red suitcase. The confidence she needed had to be summoned, and it wasn’t going to be as easy as ringing for a pizza. But she’d managed to conjure cool, calm and professionally collected during the Skype interview a month ago, and that’d been a disconcerting experience, pitching her heart out about her experience to her laptop screen in a cubicle at the library while a man in a tweed jacket with actual elbow patches and a cloth cap scowled at her over the partition.
    He was reading something that exuded old book smell and making increasingly aggressive shhh noises. She was reading the expression on the faces of two people whose Sydney-based recording studio she fervently wanted to work for and sprouting off about her Bachelor’s Degree in Audio Engineering.
    At about the time she mentioned being a panel operator for Radio London Mode, tweed man stood up and glared at her. She ignored his looming presence and went on to talk about her stint as house engineer for the Little Shakespeare Theatre. Tweedy lost it and started complaining loudly while she grimaced and explained how she’d been the engineer for a variety of freelance contracts in the advertising and documentary making industry over the last four years. It wasn’t the career she’d hoped to build, it was what she had to trade with.
    But Tweedy was making noises akin to a human distress beacon so she’d been forced to acknowledge she was logged in at the library because she’d needed a private space. She didn’t tell them Hamish would’ve made life even tougher for her than Tweedy had. She did tell them she’d need time to relocate from London to Sydney. Then she expected to wait with all the pleasure of having a dead limb from pins and needles before the inevitable analysis of her résumé revealed her patchy work