Unsuitable Read Free Page B

a dude to do this full stop.
    He
watched Mia’s lips and chin for any sign of a wobble. She wavered on her feet,
then bent forward and touched his shin with her hand. He kept very still. She
patted the laces on his shoes. Then she poked his hand, pulled the hair his
forearm. She moved closer, humming to herself, then she put both hands to his
face and stared into his eyes. He stifled a shiver. She probably knew exactly how
he planned to play suckerfish to Sky’s little mermaid tonight.
    “Oh,
Mia,” said Audrey, in that fond parent tone, the one Charlie had never used.
    Reece
didn’t move. Neither did Mia, but she hummed and fluttered her oversize
eyelashes and held his face. She was making up her mind. He didn’t think she
was going to start wailing now, the time for that had passed.
    “Mia,
honey, don’t do that to Reece.”
    Her
eyes flicked up to Audrey, then to Reece’s. She let his face go then pushed on
his arm with a grunt. “Move dis.”
    He
lifted his arm and she perched on his knee and leant back on his side. “Read
me.” Hah. He’d won the kid, but her mother was another story.
    “Oh
for heaven’s sake.” Audrey walked around and stood in front of them, hands to
her hips. “Reece doesn’t want to read to you,” she said to Mia, and to him,
“Sorry about this.”
    “Why?”
said Mia.
    She
gave a little bounce, which he felt in his hip joint. “I’m happy to read a
story.”
    “I’m
being snowed.” Audrey went to the coffee table and pulled out Hairy Maclary .
She handed him the book. “By both of you.”
    He
read Hairy Maclary with Mia turning the pages. When he got to the end
she bounced. “Again.”
    “No,
Mia. I need to talk to Reece now. You can have The Little Mermaid from the beginning.”
    Mia
clung onto his arm. “No.”
    “Mia,
will you draw me a picture of Hairy Maclary?”
    She
looked him in the eye. “Okay.” She scrambled off his knee and went to the
colouring book.
    Reece
stood, doing it slowly so not to alarm anyone.
    “Neat
trick.” Audrey sounded pissed off.
    “Sorry,
sometimes I scare little kids without meaning to.” Not just little kids, little
kid’s mothers. “You need to get that first impression right.” Not something he
could fix with Audrey.
    “Yes,
well.” Audrey patted the couch. “You can sit here.”
    He
sat beside her and Audrey grilled him like a t-bone. No medium rare about it. She
got stuck in, going over his quals and experience.
    “Why
do you want to be a nanny?”
    A
reasonable question. But he had to answer it and not sound like a creep. A
chick could say, because I love kids. A guy like him says it and it’s suspect.
    “Little
people are fascinating. They’re learning so much at this age, every day
something new.” That’s what he felt, and he said it without cringing.
    Audrey
angled her head to the side. “Everyday Mia wants to do the same things,
sometimes in a precise order. Child care isn’t exactly a job with built in
excitement, it’s more about routine at this age.”
    Okaay.
He smiled. Audrey was going to make him pay for charming Mia. He could tell her
he’d spent years thinking he’d be a builder, constructing homes with cement and
glass and steel, but what he’d missed when he was laying bricks and rendering cement
was the human contact, the sense he was contributing to something more
important than a home beautiful experience. But that made him sound creepy too.
    “I
appreciate the need for routine, but there’s also so much learning going on in
a kid’s head. So much to absorb and understand. I like being a part of that
process.”
    “That
doesn’t tell me why you’d choose to be a nanny. You could be a school teacher.”
    He’d
thought about that. Primary school. But it was kids before they even got as far
as the schoolyard who interested him most. Again, hard not to sound like he was
wearing an overcoat about to flash his privates and dangle a boiled lolly. Working
with kids was historically women’s