“This is —”
“Complicated,” she finished for him. “You’re lucky, Mr. Pierce, that I’ve sworn off complications and mistakes. Because, otherwise, I would have found you irresistible.”
“Irresistible how?” Beckett asked before he thought better of it.
Gianna stood on her tiptoes and placed a soft kiss on his cheek. “Thanks for walking me home, Beckett.”
She turned away from him and followed the walkway around the side of his house to the backyard.
Beckett touched his cheek and frowned after her. It was the second time she had kissed him and he wasn’t going to lie. It wasn’t enough.
“What’s with the dopey grin?” Evan demanded when Gia let herself in the front door.
“I don’t have a dopey grin. I have a self-satisfied grin. That’s totally different,” she corrected him.
“Whatever,” he sighed, and went back to his homework at the dining table.
“How’s it going?” Gia asked, settling in next to him.
He shrugged his shoulders and frowned at the book in front of him.
“What do you think about school here so far?” Gia opened her water bottle and drank deeply.
Evan shrugged again. “It’s okay, I guess.”
“Is it a lot different?”
“There’s a girl in my class named Oceana,” Evan said, refreshing the screen of his tablet. He scrolled through some pictures and opened one. “This is her.”
Gia peered at Oceana’s school photo on the screen. In any other town in America, the perky little blonde would have been a cheerleader. In Blue Moon, she wore a hand-crocheted vest and lived on a sheep farm.
“This town is weird,” Evan announced.
“I agree. Weird good or weird bad?”
“Mostly weird good. I guess. Like the teachers don’t make us sit too long and stuff. They make us take stretching breaks, kind of like your classes. But the lunches are weird bad. At my old school we had pizza and nachos and stuff. Here they have this quinoa casserole crap.”
Gia swallowed a laugh. “Maybe we should look at packing your lunch a couple days a week?”
Evan nodded. “I think that would be for the best.”
“Your dad call tonight?” Gia asked, taking another drink of water.
“Nope.”
She automatically squashed the annoyance and the desire to make an excuse for Evan’s father. She and Paul had worked out a call schedule that promised the kids reliable, consistent communication with their father so he could stay up on what was happening with them.
And as was typical with her ex-husband, he continued to flake out on them, blissfully unaware of the damage that his inconsistency and lack-of-presence did to their little family.
Gia changed the subject. “How was Rora for you tonight?”
“She was good. She only made me watch two episodes of that dumb whiny cartoon.”
Gia rolled her eyes heavenward. “She has to grow out of that show eventually, right? Every time it’s on I want to put a frying pan through the TV.”
“Yeah.” Evan rewarded her with a small smile.
“So, listen. This was my last Friday night class. I have another teacher who is going to take over the time slot. So that means just Tuesday and Thursday night classes for me. How do you feel about being Aurora’s official, compensated guardian on those nights?”
Evan leaned back and crossed his arms. His hazel eyes narrowed. “What kind of compensation are we talking?”
“For watching your sister from 5:30 to 7:30 I’m prepared to offer you five dollars.” She purposely low-balled him.
“Fifteen,” he countered.
“Ten.”
“Deal,” he said extending his hand.
She shook it solemnly. “And if you need a night off to do school work or hang out with friends or build creepy robots — whatever it is kids your age do — let me know and I’ll have Grampa watch Rora.”
“Robots? Seriously, Gia?”
Gia held up her hands. “Hey, whatever floats your boat. No judgment.”
“You fit right in with the rest of these weirdos,” he told her.
She jumped out her chair and put him in a headlock and covered the top of his head with noisy kisses. “I’m totally changing your name to Compost Heap Decker,” she told him. He put up a struggle, but his laughter prevented him from wiggling free.
His sandy hair needed a trim, Gia noted. But they had worked out a deal back when he turned ten that he was in charge of haircut decisions.
“Hey, I was going to make an appointment to get my hair trimmed. I saw this crazy place called The Grateful Head. Let me know if you want an appointment. That’s a play on a band, by the way.”
Evan leveled the haughty gaze of a twelve-year-old at her. “I know who the Grateful Dead are.”
Of course Paul Decker’s son would know the Grateful Dead. Paul’s finest gift to his children was a deep and abiding appreciation of music.
“Good, then I don’t have to tell your dad that your brains are being consumed by pop artists and you want a life-sized One Direction poster for Christmas.”