Chapter 11
Warren muttered a curse as Eiley peeled back, his skin tautening around his bones at the sudden lack of touch.
It wasn’t the only taut thing, either, his erection painfully stiff against the seam of his jeans.
If he’d been thinking clearly, he would turn around, adjust himself before their visitors saw, but his attention, his clarity, even his body, still belonged to her, and it all clenched at the wild panic in her eyes.
“Just a minute!” She launched away from him like he carried the plague. He tried not to let the hurt show, steeling his features into neutrality as she turned her back to him.
In much less than a minute, the red-haired bloke from the pub, the one who must have been her brother, filled the narrow doorway of the stockroom.
His lips parted with a concern that diminished quickly when his sea-blue eyes scraped from Eiley to Warren.
Warren grabbed the nearest pile of books he could find, holding them low to hide his hard on. Shite .
“The hell’s he doing here?” he asked with more derision than felt fair from a stranger.
“We, erm, we were …” Eiley stuttered.
“I was helping her with the flood damage,” Warren provided. “You must be the brother, aye? I’m Warren.”
“Did I ask you?” Her brother’s snarl was low with warning.
“Fraser,” Eiley snapped. “He was helping me. What are you doing here?”
Before Fraser could answer, a peal of voices rang through the bookshop, a child shouting for their mummy rising above them. Warren was quick to take another step back, spine crashing against the bookshelves. The kids were here.
As a wee lad raced into the stockroom, into her arms, Eiley’s face lit up in a way Warren hadn’t thought possible. Everything he’d known about her changed in an instant: posture relaxing, tenderness radiating through.
“Hi, munchkin. Did you miss me?” She twirled with the lad, dimples half-hidden by his shoulders.
Warren smiled without meaning to, just as he always did when he got to witness moments like this. The best part of the job was when he could reunite a bairn with their parents or retrieve something they’d thought lost.
Yet it came hand-in-hand with sadness. Envy he kept waiting to grow out of always gave him that same winded feeling he’d experienced as a kid falling off his bike for the first time.
Family was a given to most people. He had a front row seat to all the things he should have had, too. All the things he’d lost.
“Yes, lots and lots! Auntie Harp said we have to stay at Nanna’s again!
” The boy looped his arms around his mum’s neck.
He shared her freckles and innocent frown, but his hair was ash-brown and his eyes a bright hazel.
Not for the first time, Warren wondered where his father was, and why Eiley hadn’t mentioned him even once.
He didn’t want to consider the options, though they wriggled into the back of his mind anyway: dead or just not here?
He hoped she and the kids hadn’t experienced the same world-ending loss he had.
“We do. I’m so sorry, Brook.” Eiley set Brook down, kneeling so they were on the same eye level. “I know you liked having your own room, but the flat’s been damaged so we’re going to have to stay with Nanna until it’s fixed. But it’s not forever, okay?”
The stockroom became even more cramped when a blonde woman, who he assumed was Auntie Harp, the writer, appeared with a fair-haired, sleepy toddler on the ample curve of her hip. Looked like Warren would be meeting all of the family today.
Harper winced at Eiley. “Sorry. I tried to hold him off as long as I could, but Cam and I came home early to see how you were. Sky’s already settling in at your mum’s.” And then her inquisitive brown eyes turned to Warren. “Holy Hercules. What is he doing here?”
Eiley took her youngest – Saff, he recalled – from the other woman, blowing raspberries into her neck until a gorgeous giggle escaped her.
She bore much more resemblance to her mum, with fine, strawberry blonde hair tied in a band with a tiny blue bow and adorably cherubic cheeks.
Warren didn’t know how to look away from all that contagious joy.
He’d come across plenty of mothers before, but fuck, Eiley was the most loving, most beautiful, he’d ever seen.
“This is Warren,” Eiley introduced with another sharp warning glance at her brother. “He was the firefighter who helped me.”
“Wait, the firefighter with a raging superiority complex is also the slimy womaniser from the tavern?” Harper cocked her head, examining him without any sense of shame. “You missed that part out of the text!”
Warren raised his brows at Eiley. “Wow. You’re full of kind things to say about me, eh?”
“Did he cause you trouble?” asked Fraser, tugging Brook aside as though afraid the child might be tainted if he came too close.
“No. Everything is … fine. Anyway ” – Eiley turned what was fast becoming Warren’s favourite shade of pink – “thank you, both, for taking care of the kids. Did you enjoy your morning with Cam, Harper?”
Harper only narrowed her eyes, leaning closer to Eiley and pointing at the pale column of her neck. “Is that a love bite ?”
Warren risked a glance and found the red mark was, quite possibly, a love bite. From him. He’d gotten a bit carried away, afraid she’d slip through his fingers if he didn’t latch onto every bare patch of skin.
“No!” Eiley shouted, covering the bruise with her sleeve. In her arms, Saffron jumped.
“Auntie Harp, what is a mumaniser?” Brook questioned.
God, this was a disaster. Warren tried to fix it hastily, perhaps even make light of the situation so Fraser would stop glowering: “It’s slang for an exceptionally handsome lad.”
Eiley squeezed her eyes shut, flustered and likely wishing she’d told Warren to piss off hours ago. He couldn’t blame her. There wasn’t enough pizza in Belbarrow to fix this.
Fraser crossed his arms, revealing biceps almost as bulky as Warren’s. Double shite . “Actually, Brook, it’s a word we use for bad men who don’t treat women with respect.”
“Which, of course, is not true of me,” Warren was quick to point out. “Hence why I’m here to help.”
“I wish I had popcorn,” uttered Harper.
Warren wished he had a very strong bottle of whisky. Or an exit route that didn’t have several people-shaped obstacles.
“I’m going to go and shift some of those boxes out front,” he decided, only to struggle to slip past Fraser’s broad figure at the door. He danced from one foot to the other, daunted despite the extra inch or two he had over Fraser. “Excuse me, mate.”
“I’m not your mate ,” Fraser replied stonily.
Harper pulled Fraser aside. “Babe, knock down the testosterone levels before we all implode.” She patted Warren on the chest. “Sorry about him. Gets grouchy when he hasn’t eaten his lunch.”
“I’m disowning you. Both of you,” Eiley said.
Warren took it as his cue to scarper, grinning when he heard Brook ask, “Mum, what’s tentotserone?”
He tuned out their conversation as Eiley broke the news about Harper’s books, glad for the chance to get his heart rate, and his cock, down to normal levels again.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so humiliatingly horny.
He might have been a serial dater, but his sex life left something to be desired of late.
And, fuck did he desire – her. The way they’d crashed into the bookshelf together, the weight of her thighs around his hips, the little gasps from her O-shaped lips when he’d touched her.
He’d discovered something new inside of her, something he needed more of.
“This book is about a firefighter, too,” a voice said from beside him suddenly, breaking him out of his completely inappropriate thoughts. Brook held out a buckled copy of a children’s book.
Warren bent down to take a look. The cover displayed an illustrated girl with pigtails and red uniform, chest puffed out confidently before a firehouse.
It took him a moment to read the title, letters swimming in a blur with all the clashing colours and fonts: Frankie the Firefighter . “Oh, aye? Is it any good?”
“Not sure. I haven’t read it yet. Would you like to read it together?”
He contemplated the boxes and books he hadn’t yet helped with, but he couldn’t resist Brook’s expectant face. “All right.” Grabbing two chairs from the nook by the window, he sat down and turned on his torch to make the pages more visible. “You might have to read it, though. I’m not very good.”
“You can’t read?”
Warren shook his head. “Not very well. I have dyslexia. That means the letters get all jumbled together and it takes a really long time to understand what the words say.”
“My best friend, Katy, has dyslexia. I sometimes read to her so that she can still love the same books as me,” Brook replied sagely, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.
Warren supposed it was, but people seemed to think he could grow out of it as an adult, his poor spelling still mocked when he submitted incident reports or signed off on inspections.
“I bet Katy appreciates that a lot. You’re a good lad.” Warren nudged him, pleased when Brook grinned with a bashful tilt to his chin. “Go on, then. Tell me about Frankie the Firefighter.”
So Brook began reading, far more confident at it than Warren had ever been.
He asked questions, sometimes, wondering if Warren’s job was anything like Frankie’s, and Warren was keen to tell him all about the station across from his school.
When Fraser emerged, Warren pretended to be too interested in the book to notice, even if he felt a glare scoring right through the middle of his forehead like a laser beam.
And when Eiley followed shortly after, he didn’t look at her, either.
Didn’t dare, afraid it would just leave him wanting again.
Brook finished with a resolute closing of the book, looking up at Warren as though for approval.
“That was a great story, buddy. Thank you for reading it to me.”
“Brook is trying to take Eiley’s place as the bookworm of the family,” Harper supplied, crouched over her box of paperbacks.
“Oh, aye? I thought that spot would belong to the town’s famous writer.”
She smirked dryly. “I’m the town’s only writer, but I do appreciate the flattery.”
Fraser made a point of clearing his throat, and Warren resisted rolling his eyes.
Harper certainly wasn’t the one he was interested in, pretty as she was.
It was Eiley his skin prickled for, Eiley whose fingertips he’d tried to memorise the feeling of as they’d crept across his skin.
Then again, he doubted Fraser would be happy to know that, either.
Since the grump was glaring again, Warren stood up and tucked the chairs away. “Is there anything else I can do before I call it a day?” He directed the question at Eiley, who was helping little Saff navigate the book stacks on wobbly legs.
She bit her lip, hesitating for a moment before meeting him by the doorway. “Could you help me put these boxes in my car?”
“I can do that,” Fraser was quick to butt in.
“I know you can, but I didn’t ask you,” Eiley retorted.
A shiver rattled through him, that heat resurfacing in his gut, hotter now that he wasn’t on the receiving end of her ire. “All right, then. Happy to help.”
He picked up the box, waiting for her to lead the way. Hoping that perhaps she wanted something more than just his help with the heavy lifting.
Hoping that, at some point, she might let them finish what they’d started.