Book People

Chapter Nine

I would never have imagined that a kiss could change the world.

But yours did.

C

KATE

I don’t realise how close I am to him until he turns his head and his gaze finds mine. Through the lenses of his glasses, his eyes are electric. He’s all essence, this man, and I have the strangest thought: he’s all passion or he’s all ice, there’s no in-between. Does he know there’s a middle ground? Does he know how to be in it?

It must be exhausting being him, with no place to rest.

It’s instinct that has me raising a hand to touch his cheek, for what reason I don’t know. Maybe in comfort or reassurance, I’m not sure which. Not that he lets me touch him, because his own hand comes up, so fast, and his fingers close around my wrist, stopping me.

His grip is strong and warm. Not too hard to hurt, but enough to know I couldn’t break it if I tried. His eyes are blazing.

Aisling told me that he looked at me like a wolf looks at a rabbit and I can see what she means now. He is a wolf. And he’s hungry.

A hot shock passes through me. I’ve made a mistake, a bad one, but the letters got me carried away and I wanted to look at them. I hadn’t known how close I was to him until it was too late. Until he turned and looked at me and I’m trapped now. Not by his grip, I know he’d let me go if I asked. No, I’m trapped by his gaze. By the lightning crackling in his eyes.

I can’t remember the last time a man looked at me like that. I don’t think Jasper ever did.

‘What are you doing?’ he growls. ‘Touching me, Miss Jones, is a very bad idea.’

I know it’s a bad idea. I know very well, and yet still I ask, ‘Why?’ It’s a goad and my heart is beating far too hard and far too fast. But I want to see. I want to know what he would do if I pushed him.

He does not disappoint.

‘This is why,’ he says.

He discards his glasses, leans forward, and his mouth covers mine.

Somehow I always knew this would happen and I don’t avoid him.

He lets go of my wrist and lifts his hands, his fingers sliding into my hair, curling into fists, holding me still. Not that I’m going anywhere, because my God . . .

This man can kiss . If kissing was an Olympic sport, he’d win a gold medal. He’d win all the bloody medals.

His mouth is so hot and he is demanding, nipping at my bottom lip, teasing it, coaxing me to open for him and before I’m even conscious of it, that’s what I do. He doesn’t hesitate, taking advantage of my invitation, deepening the kiss.

My heart races even faster and I’m hot all over, my skin tight. He smells good, the heat of his body inches from mine and all I can think about is getting even closer to him than I am already.

God, if he kisses like this, what else can he do? I want to find out. I’m desperate to find out.

I lift my own hands, touching the wall of his chest, testing the muscles beneath the warm cotton of his T-shirt. He feels strong and hard, and I want to press myself against him, relieve the sudden, nagging ache between my thighs.

Our kiss gets hotter, becoming feverish. He tastes good, too, the flavour of the scotch giving it a kick, though I really don’t need the extra alcohol. Not when I’m half drunk on him already.

Then, just as I’m melting against him, my fingers curling into the cotton of his shirt, he releases me abruptly and pulls away.

I stare at him, open-mouthed, as he pushes himself off the couch and takes a couple of steps towards the windows, his back to me. His tall figure is rigid with tension and I can hear the harsh rush of his breath, his hands in fists at his sides.

My heartbeat thuds and I have difficulty finding air. It’s as if I’ve been diving down very deep and have suddenly rushed to the surface, and all my addled brain can think is Can you get the bends from a mind-blowing kiss?

‘That was a mistake,’ Sebastian says, in a voice I don’t recognise. ‘You should leave.’

I blink and what’s actually happening takes a minute to penetrate.

That kiss, that astonishing kiss, was a mistake. And now he wants me to leave.

I’m still breathing hard, my nipples feeling tight and sensitive against the lacy cotton cups of my bra, and the ache between my legs won’t let up.

I don’t know what happened. I mean, part of me knew that he was attracted to me, even if it was only on a subconscious level and, yes, I found him unbelievably hot, much to my annoyance.

But he was the one who crossed the line here, not me. He was the one who brought it out into the open, and if he’s not going to do anything about it, then he’ll have to do better than ‘It was a mistake. You should leave’.

We’re doing this festival together. We’ll have to be in each other’s company. We still have to go through these letters and, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to turn tail and run from the room like a sixteen-year-old virgin. I ran away from Jasper without telling him where I was going, it’s true, but that was different. He would have followed me and I was afraid he’d manipulate me into staying.

But I’m not afraid of Sebastian. We have to talk about this and like hell is he going to send me away.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Tell me what that was all about.’

He gets even more tense, his shoulders just about around his ears, his knuckles white. ‘If you know what’s good for you—’

‘Don’t be such a drama king, Sebastian,’ I snap, saying his name for the first time and getting some satisfaction from the way he twitches when I say it. ‘We have to work together on this festival and, before you even say a word, no, I’m not going to pretend it never happened.’

He’s silent a moment longer, then turns around. Again, he’s blazing, his jaw tight, his eyes all fire. As if he’s at the end of the rope he’s hanging himself with and can’t decide whether to kick the chair away or climb down.

‘What do you think just happened?’ His deep voice is full of anger, though I don’t understand why. ‘I kissed you.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘You did.’

‘I shouldn’t have.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t even like you.’

I ignore this, because I’m starting to see what the problem is and maybe I should have known it all along, but I didn’t. The tension between us. Those sparks in his eyes sometimes when he looks at me.

I raise a brow. ‘Is this why my existence is a problem? You’re attracted to me and you don’t like it?’

The muscle in his jaw leaps. ‘Yes,’ he forces out through gritted teeth.

Something turns over inside me. Satisfaction.

Yes, girl, you still got it.

I can’t deny I like that. It feels healing, especially after Jasper with his petty slights and snide comments. His small criticisms that steadily eroded me away until I was listing on my foundations. I was too loud. Too quiet. I could be selfish. I needed to be less uptight. I gave out mixed signals. I needed to respect his time, and on and on.

I’d thought that I was the problem. That I was boring and not pretty enough, not experienced enough, too inhibited, or any one of the thousand things that women beat themselves up for not being. Even after the truth of him and our relationship was revealed, there was a part of me that still blamed myself.

Now, after kissing Sebastian, that part has gone silent. Because now, even though Sebastian obviously thinks I’m a problem too, it’s not because I’m lacking in anything. It’s because I’ve got too much of what he wants, and even though he’s angry, he’s not trying to make me feel less. He’s not criticising me or slighting me, or manipulating me into thinking I’ve done something wrong.

He’s angry for wanting me and is honest about it.

In fact, honest is all he’s been since I met him.

God, that’s refreshing.

Then something else occurs to me.

If one kiss from Sebastian can rock my world, then sex with him will destroy me. Literally.

Shit. Maybe he’s right after all. Maybe this was a mistake.

‘So,’ I say eventually. ‘What do you want to do about it?’

‘Nothing.’ There is finality in the word. He means it. ‘I never date women in the village and I’m not changing the habit of years just for you.’

My stomach drops at that, but I ignore it. Sure, I like honesty, but sometimes it sucks.

‘Okay.’ I try to sound casual, like I don’t care a bit, and I think I’m successful. Mostly. ‘I hear you.’

He glares as if I’m arguing with him. ‘If I want sex, I find it elsewhere. I don’t sleep with women who live here, it’s too close to home. And as you say, we’re working together. This festival is too important to get derailed by an inconvenient sexual attraction.’

I lift my hands. ‘Hey, I’m not arguing with you.’

He continues to glower. ‘You’re a problem, Miss Jones.’

‘Miss Jones? Seriously? After you kissed me senseless? Surely I deserve a Kate?’

‘Like I said, you’re a problem, Miss Jones .’

My God. The man is so rigidly intense and dramatic, he’s impossible. It’s starting to annoy me. He may be more straight up than Jasper, but I’m really over being a problem.

‘Actually,’ I snap, ‘ I’m not the problem. You’re the problem, Mr Blackwood . I can’t do anything about the fact that I exist, but if you’re going to continue being a grumpy bastard just because of your own silly little rules, then may I suggest investing in a chastity belt? Now.’ I lean forward and start gathering up the pieces of paper that are scattered on the floor. ‘I’m going to look at these letters because we need to see if they’re something Lisa Underwood is going to be interested in.’

‘Take them.’ He bites out each word. ‘Take them home and have a look at them there.’

I glance up at him in surprise. ‘You don’t want to—’

‘No.’ He’s still standing there, rigid, white around the mouth. Then he adds, ‘Please, Miss Jones.’

He looks almost . . . tortured, and my annoyance fades. I had no idea I have such an effect on him. I’d be even more flattered if it hadn’t appeared to actively hurt him, and I don’t want to hurt him.

But then, of course it would. He’s not a man comfortable with the halfway point, with the in-between, the shades of grey. It’s all or nothing for him, and right now, all he can do is nothing.

It wouldn’t be fair to push myself on him and it wouldn’t be fair to argue. If the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn’t want him here either, and arguing will only make me look like a dick.

‘Okay.’ I clutch the envelopes in my hand as I get slowly to my feet. ‘Thanks for the whisky.’ I turn and go to the door, then pause before it and turn back. ‘It wasn’t a mistake, Sebastian,’ I say. ‘And I’m not sorry you kissed me. I’ll text you tomorrow.’

I don’t wait for him to reply. I leave.

It’s only a few steps across the high street and then I’m back in my little flat above my shop.

I sit on my own couch and force the kiss from my head, giving my attention to the envelopes in my hand.

They’re all love notes from C to H, none of them addressed or stamped. Which means they weren’t posted. But if they weren’t, how did they get to him? Were they put into a letterbox? Then again, that would mean that anyone could potentially have picked one up and opened it, and if they were afraid of being discovered, which I think they were, surely they wouldn’t have risked that? So, not letterboxes then. They must have been slipped directly to him somehow.

I take a note from its envelope and sit back, unfolding the crackling paper, staring at the red ink. It’s faded with time, the handwriting old-fashioned and flowing, but I can still read it.

I can’t sleep now. Every night, when I close my eyes, all I see is you. I like it. It feels as if you are visiting me. I don’t mind being so tired during the day when you visit me every night, even if it is only in my dreams.

C

I pull out another and this time it’s different. This time the ink on the page is black, the handwriting forceful, with slashing capitals and hasty punctuation.

Three days and I miss you. I can’t bear not seeing you. Can you think of an excuse to get away? Even for an hour. Even half that and I would be happy.

H

There is longing in the words, I can feel it, and it makes my chest ache.

I pull out another one.

We don’t need anyone’s permission. And he won’t stop us. He doesn’t have the guts. We could go north or even across to Europe. I can’t stand being apart from you, not a second longer.

H

I swallow, the ache in my chest tightening. Who is ‘he’ that could stop them? And were they stopped? Is that why they didn’t end up together? What happened?

I pull out more.

It’s hard for me to get away in the evenings. I know you know. Perhaps tomorrow? After lunch? He’ll be out for most of the day. As for Mrs Dalloway , well, it’s an interesting book. We should discuss face to face, I think.

C

So, I was right when I read about Wuthering Heights over Sebastian’s shoulder: his great-grandfather had been giving her books. The romanticism of it thrills me beyond measure and the eventual tragedy of it makes my throat ache along with my chest.

Perhaps she died and her family returned the letters to him, and that’s why he has all hers. Or maybe he did something awful and she returned them. Whatever happened, their affair didn’t last.

I open another one.

We can’t go to Europe now, love. It’s too dangerous. I think war is going to come whether we like it or not. Can you meet me tonight? Same time, the usual place. I won’t keep you long, but we need to discuss this.

H

I stare down at the note, frowning. The war he mentions would have to be the Second World War, which dates these notes to before 1939.

Was that what happened in the end? Was it the war that interrupted their affair?

I reach for my phone, bite my lip a second, then text Sebastian quickly. It’s a terse note, no mention of what happened between us earlier.

Did your great-grandfather fight in WW 2?

I probably shouldn’t have bothered him again tonight, but this can’t wait. Or at least, I can’t wait. Also, I’ll be damned if I let one kiss get in the way of something that could save this festival.

He replies immediately, his text as terse as mine.

Yes. He was away for the duration.

Okay, interesting. I type out another question.

When did he marry?

Again, Sebastian responds quickly.

The year after he returned. 1946.

Right. But he didn’t marry his C. He married someone else, Sebastian’s great-grandmother. I wonder who C was and what happened to her. Because something must have. If Sebastian Blackwood the First was as intense as his great-grandson is now, then I couldn’t imagine him letting any kind of obstacle get in his way.

Except, of course, if the obstacle was himself.

I let out a breath, not seeing the paper for a minute, only Sebastian’s taut expression and the blaze of his eyes.

‘I never date women in the village . . .’

I was brought up in London, not a small village, though even the largest of cities are just collections of villages if you really think about it. Certainly, London, as big as it is, could seem like a village sometimes.

So, I can see why he wouldn’t want to have a relationship with someone who lived here. If it all went bad, there’d be no escape. You’d have to see them every day and that would be difficult, especially if they then went out with someone else. Also, it’s a pretty small pool here and finding someone eligible that you like must be a challenge.

Even so, you could bend your own self-imposed rules for someone if you wanted them enough. Especially if you found yourself trapped by those same rules.

Except I can’t see Sebastian bending his. He doesn’t have any give in him and maybe his great-grandfather was the same. Maybe Sebastian the First got in his own way and wouldn’t bend for the woman he loved. Maybe that’s why he married someone else, because he had some stupid rule of his own that he wouldn’t break.

In fact, maybe that’s why the Blackwood men were supposedly cursed. Maybe they were all too rigid and, instead of bending, they broke.

I sigh. I shouldn’t think about Sebastian. It’s not like I’m going to have a relationship with him. In fact, I’m not going to have a relationship with any man for the foreseeable future, because men suck.

They all want you to be someone you’re not and then get pissed off when you don’t fit their vision of you. Jasper wanted someone more polished and contained than I was. Someone sleek to have on his arm, to parade around at his endless corporate dos. He thought having a girlfriend in publishing made him look intellectual, so he’d tell me not to mention the kinds of books I edited, because it reflected badly on him. He’d say it with a smile and put in an eye-roll, suggesting it was his bosses and colleagues who were uptight about it, never him. But it was him.

He had rules too, and I never saw the cage he was constructing around me until he’d almost locked the door. It was on the second anniversary of Mum’s death and he had dinner with his new boss planned, and he wanted me to come. I told him that I wasn’t feeling up to it because of Mum, and his response was: ‘Bloody hell, Kate. This dinner is important to me. Your mum’s been dead two years. Get over it.’

I sat on the couch that night, grieving my mother, desperately scrolling through my phone so I could ring one of my friends for a chat. But I couldn’t find their numbers. Jasper had gone through my contacts a couple of months earlier on the pretext of helping me weed out ‘contacts you don’t need’, and it was only then, when I could have badly used a friend, that I realised he’d deleted them all. I hadn’t noticed because all my time was taken up with my job and him.

That’s when I knew. That’s when I saw the bars of my cage.

He only cared how he looked to his new boss. He hadn’t cared that my mother was dead or that I was still grieving.

He didn’t care about me. He’d never cared about me.

He took my love for him and twisted it subtly to centre himself in everything we did. Everything became about him. Nothing was about me.

The four years of our relationship hadn’t been a relationship at all. It had been a pot of water on the stove slowly coming to a boil, and I was the frog sitting in it. I was the frog who didn’t know she was being boiled alive.

He didn’t speak to me for a week after that night, but that week was enough for me to realise that I had to leave.

That’s why I walked out on him, and it’s a mistake I won’t make again.

I open another envelope.

Yesterday you told me that you had never read Dickens, so here is David Copperfield to try. It is my own personal copy. If you like it, send the book back with anything you want to say to me in between the pages. Do not sign the note or write anything that could identify us. That way, we can say whatever we want to each other.

There is no signature on this one, but I know it’s from H, Sebastian’s namesake, and that it’s clearly the first note.

Is that how it started? With a note in a book?

A shiver of excitement goes through me. Because if this is true and he brought her books with notes between the pages, then this is the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen. It also makes me desperate to know the answer to the other question: who was the woman?

I pick up my phone again and text what I’ve discovered so far to Sebastian.

We need to meet up to discuss

I add.

He’s typing a response and I watch my screen as the typing bubble appears then disappears. Appears then disappears. As if he can’t think what to say to me.

Finally, he settles on:

Later.

I stare at it. ‘Later.’ What does that mean? When the bloody hell is ‘later’? Does he not want to talk to me? Is that the problem? But even as I think that, I know. Of course that’s the problem.

Irritated, I toss my phone back down on the couch, trying to tell myself I’m not disappointed that he doesn’t want to meet. It’s late and I’m starting to second-guess myself. Did he really like that kiss? Or was it awful? Perhaps it was awful and that’s why he broke it off. That’s why he wanted me to leave. He couldn’t look me in the eye, couldn’t be straight with me and tell me I’m a terrible kisser. He didn’t know how to say it.

No, no. It can’t be that. He’s honest, I know it, and that kiss wasn’t terrible. He wouldn’t have continued to say that I was a problem if it was. Besides, those kinds of self-loathing thoughts are Jasper’s voice in my head, and I promised myself I’d stop thinking them.

I swallow and my head falls back against the couch. I close my eyes.

I feel his mouth on mine. Hot. The fever I tasted in that kiss now in my blood. My fingertips brush over my lips and it almost startles me because I hadn’t realised I’d even lifted my hand. My lips feel sensitised and raw.

What a bastard for doing that, for making me feel this.

I don’t know whether I hate him or whether I’m half in love with him.

I really hope it’s the former. Love is something I don’t want to tangle with again, and definitely not with him.

Later, after I drag myself to bed, I’m just on the verge of sleep when the phone at my bedside vibrates. I pick it up. It’s a text. From Sebastian.

I’m not sorry either.

Just like that, I’m wide awake.

Something tight in me releases. I know exactly what he’s referring to.

I stare at the phone a moment, unsure of how to reply. A ‘like’ seems weird, a ‘heart’ too much. A thumbs-up strange. I could send a heart eyes emoji, then again . . . maybe not. A kiss seems a little passive-aggressive. I’m tempted to send a saluting emoji – that would annoy him – but in the end, what I send is a basic text.

Good.

There’s another pause and then my phone vibrates again.

You taste like sunshine.

A wave of warmth goes through me, starting at my toes, flooding through my cheeks, a blazing heat.

I don’t know what to say to that. I literally have no words.

I shouldn’t respond, I really shouldn’t . . .

You go straight to my head.

I send it.

Then I turn my phone off.

Then I try to sleep.

And don’t.