Unsuitable

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 work and yeah, he knew he was bucking the trend, but he’d never figured on the inbuilt bias against a man wanting to work with kids.

“I considered regular teaching and I still might go down that track in the future.” It was easier with older kids. There was a demand for more male teachers to counter the number of single parent families where mum was in charge. “For now I want a nanny position because little kids fascinate me.”

“They’re loud, sulky, erratic egomaniacs, who haven’t got a clue they don’t run the world.”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “I love that. Look, I know this is the most basic question, but if I tell you I love kids from two to five years old, I sound like a dirty pervert. Particularly because I look like this.” He kept his eyes on Audrey, waiting to see dismissal. “But I do love kids this age. They’re like aliens learning everything for the first time and I find that exciting.”

“How often do you work-out?”

The abrupt change in tack surprised him. “I, ah. I worked my way though my degree as a builder’s labourer. That’s what I thought I wanted to do with my life, build homes. My size is genetic and I keep fit, but if you’re worried I’ll want time off to work-out, don’t be. The job comes first.”

Audrey gave a solemn nod. And fair enough. His physicality was always the elephant in the room, courtesy of a father he’d only seen pictures of and a whole past life she didn’t need to know about.

“Tell me about your child care roles.”

Mia bought him a page of scribble to look at while he told Audrey about the Flannery boys and then Jayden Ramsey. But neither of those jobs would help her feel comfortable about him caring for Mia. She listened politely but she was somewhere else while he talked about Jayden’s hyperactivity and Liam Flannery’s diabetes. Mia bought her colouring and sat closer to him. What he really needed to do was to tell Audrey about the girls, but that meant telling her about his family and it didn’t seem professional.

“You’ve got excellent experience caring for boys.”

He wanted to ask what she thought the difference was. Every kid was different. Callum Flannery loved to play dress-ups, the more it glittered the better. Some mornings he wouldn’t leave the house without lip gloss. He was five and he had firm opinions about his haircuts. This was going to happen to Reece in other interviews unless he only ever applied to care for boys.