Hold Me Close - Talia Hibbert Page 0,150

does,” he interrupted. “It absolutely matters. If you took this job, Hannah, we’d be living together. You have to watch your own back, too, you know.”

She was, for a moment, rendered speechless. Thankfully, it didn’t last long. “Alright. That’s… I suppose that’s true.”

He nodded, raising his drink to his lips. Hannah was embarrassingly distracted by the bob of his throat and the press of his mouth against glass. She wondered how strange it would seem if she closed her eyes, just to escape that hypnotic sight.

Quite strange, probably.

He finished drinking and said, “So, do you want to know what I did?”

As if she didn’t know already. “You were charged with affray and grievous bodily harm on two separate occasions after taking part in supposedly non-violent protests.”

He faltered. “You… appear to have memorised my criminal record.”

“Memorised is a strong word. I heard about it. Once.” Briskly, Hannah turned away from his open astonishment and picked up the planner on the booth seat beside her. She slapped it onto the table with a little thud and opened it up. “Anyway! Now that we’ve gotten the necessary disclosure out of the way—”

“What the bloody hell is that?” He stared at her lovely teal planner as if she’d just shat on the table.

“It’s my planner,” she said, even though that should be pretty obvious. The word PLANNER was imprinted onto the leather front cover. Honestly, people were so unobservant.

“Why is it so… huge?”

“Could we focus on the matter at hand?” It belatedly occurred to her that this was actually a job interview and she should be on her best behaviour. You know, polite and meek and subordinate, and all the other things she wasn’t.

But it was far too late now. Somehow—maybe because he was friendly like Evan or charming like Zach or blunt like Ruth—she’d accidentally started being herself around Nate Davis. Of course, Hannah’s self was generally far too abrasive to forget. And since she couldn’t erase the last ten minutes, she’d just have to forge ahead and wow him with the many meaningful pieces of paper she’d collected in her life.

“This,” she said, pulling out a crisp white sheet, “is my C.V. References are available on request. And this is a letter from a family I babysit for occasionally…” She laid it on the table in front of him. “I find the third paragraph especially helpful. Now, over here I have all of my qualifications—”

Nate held up a hand, using his other to turn over her C.V. “Uh… hang on. If you want me to read all of this, it’ll take me a while. And I’ll need digital copies.”

“You will?”

He glanced up. “Oh, yeah. Turns out I’m dyslexic. Hey, since I’m back in town, I should hunt down Mr. Meyers and tell him I’m not an idiot, but he is a raging dick.”

“Mr. Meyers died three years ago,” Hannah said automatically. Retaining and relaying information was a lot easier than grappling with emotional responses.

“Hmm. Does he have a gravestone I can piss on, or anything?”

She really shouldn’t laugh at such awful disrespect. She absolutely should not. But since their old Geography teacher had gained all his life’s happiness through bullying the children he taught, she allowed herself a tiny snicker.

Which made Nate’s wicked grin spread wider. And now that shallow dimple was visible again, barely hidden by his stubble, and she was getting heart-pounding, sense-stealing Year Ten flashbacks. Abort mission.

“I can definitely email these,” she said briskly, sliding out a few more pages. “I mean, I can scan them, and—”

“Christ, don’t bother scanning shit. Honestly, I’m not gonna read it.”

She blinked. “Um… I could… read it for you?”

“I can read, love.” Oh, God. Now he’d think she’d said that because he was dyslexic, rather than because she was a try-hard weirdo. Only he didn’t seem particularly offended. Especially not when he said, “It’s just, I’m 99% sure that I’m going to hire you.”

For a moment, Hannah’s jaw actually dropped. How mortifying. She clamped it shut before anything untoward could sneak out, like an embarrassing flood of gratitude or a comment about his biceps.

Finally, she managed to croak out, “You are?”

“Yeah. I mean, you should probably meet the kids again, just to make sure you all get along okay. I don’t know if you noticed the other day, but they’re kind of…”

“Energetic,” she supplied smoothly.

His mouth tipped up into a slow, wry smile. “Yeah. That.”

She knew very well that he actually wanted to see her interact with them. While she’d known Nate and