Outlier (Daydreamer #3)

1. Six minutes and forty-five seconds

Six minutes and forty-five seconds

Vicky

I glanced at the large digital clock next to my front door and frowned.

He was three minutes and forty-eight seconds late.

Maybe he wasn’t coming? I shook my head in short jerks—that was an illogical assumption.

Of course he was coming. The man needed to make money – I’d looked into his company accounts and verified that this was the case – and I was paying him a lot of money.

The fact that he still did his own deliveries made absolutely no sense. This was something he needed to contract out. His time would be much better spent creating the beautiful furniture he made.

My mind flashed to the glimpse I’d had of him in his workshop a couple of months ago, and my mouth went dry.

I’d been with Lucy, Lottie and Hayley in Little Buckingham looking for a small, runaway pony (a bizarre but actually not uncommon occurrence in Little Buckingham).

Lucy had thought that Legolas might have made a beeline for her brother’s workshop to “piss him right off”.

The pony wasn’t there, but Mike was, and as always, he looked incredible.

His flannel shirt was wrapped around his waist, and he had a tight thermal covering his upper body as he sanded down a large table, his muscles rippling under the material with each pass.

He’d smiled at Lucy, Lottie and Hayley, but also as always, when he looked at me, his smile dropped.

Mike didn’t really like me. To be honest, not a lot of people did.

But I was hoping maybe I could change that.

Lucy and Lottie had bolstered my confidence enough over the last few months to start believing it was possible at least.

When I brought my hand up to smooth my hair, I noticed it was shaking. I clenched my jaw in frustration. I could not have a meltdown. Not now. Not with him four minutes and twenty-two seconds late.

So I did the breathing exercises Abdul had taught me and balled my hands into fists to stop the tremors.

When I shifted on my feet, I felt my muscles protest. I’d been standing in this same spot facing my front door for the last forty-nine minutes, so still and tense, that now, everything had stiffened.

I was aware that standing still in one’s corridor for nearly an hour, staring at a door, was not normal behaviour, but normal behaviour was not exactly my forte.

When I became hyperfocused on something, my quirks slipped into downright weird territory. And it was fair to say that when it came to Mike, I was extremely hyperfocused. I was almost more obsessed with Mike Mayweather than I was with hedgehogs.

Almost.

The problem was that the more hyperfocused I became, the more my behaviour deteriorated into the less-than-normal zone. I did not want Mike to think I was less than normal when he already didn’t like me.

My throat tightened as I went over one of the causes for his aversion to me.

My memory can be very useful. I can recall events, conversations, and everything I’ve ever read or seen with perfect clarity.

Academically, this is a huge advantage. However, when you’ve done something so awful and incorrect that you’d rather forget it completely, the ability to replay it entirely, down to the tiniest detail is not useful; it’s a curse.

I could still picture Lucy Mayweather’s face the day we threw all those awful accusations at her and then threw her out of the office.

I could also picture the surveillance footage we recovered of Lucy being assaulted only seconds before.

My brain tended to dwell on upsetting things despite how illogical that might be.

As a consequence, I’d replayed Will Brent throwing Lucy against the office wall, and her head bouncing against the plaster too many times to count.

So no, Mike did not like me, not after that.

When he’d later stormed into the office, stomping through the carefully controlled environment in his steel-capped work boots, all six-foot-four inches of him vibrating with fury over what we’d allowed to happen to Lucy, I’d never seen anything as magnificent in my entire life.

I thought I was defective in that area. Well, I was defective in a lot of areas, truth be told, but with men, particularly so.

Until I saw Mike Mayweather that day, I couldn’t imagine ever voluntarily letting someone put their mouth on mine, let alone all the other stuff .

But when it came to Mike, all I could think about was what his lips would feel like, whether his beard was scratchy or soft, and how his large body would feel on top of mine.

After years of believing that I was dead when it came to attraction, my attraction to Mike had become all I could think about. Hence, my standing stock still in the corridor, staring at my front door.

For fifty-two minutes.

I closed my eyes to focus on my breathing again, but they snapped open when the door suddenly shook with two loud pounding knocks. Without thinking, I instantly pulled it open to stare at a huge, flannel-covered chest.

He was right there. So close, I could smell him.

Now, I was very sensitive to scent in general and quite intolerant of most, especially when related to other human beings.

But Mike’s clean, woodsy, manly scent was so good, it made me feel light-headed for a moment.

That, combined with the outline of his muscular chest in another tight thermal under said flannel shirt, worked together to short-circuit my brain.

All I could do was stare at his chest. Which was weird, and I so, so wanted not to be weird in front of this man.

He cleared his throat, and my gaze shot from his chest to his angry brown eyes with their thick eyelashes.

The eyelashes were incongruous with the rest of his extremely rugged appearance—thick beard, which was in no way sculpted like the other men of my acquaintance, messy brown hair a few days past needing a cut, tanned skin weathered from all the time he spent outdoors.

I’d never seen anything so beautiful.

“You going to stand there staring at me all day, princess?” he asked in his growly voice. He didn’t say princess in a nice way, but he did at least leave off the “ice” part.

I hated that nickname. Ice princess . I knew what it implied—that I was stuck-up, aloof, and I thought I was better than everyone else.

I knew that was Mike’s opinion of me too.

But this encounter was supposed to change all that.

I was wearing actual jeans, for God’s sake.

Granted, Lottie had had to trial dozens of pairs for me until she found one soft enough for me to tolerate, and even then, I was still really uncomfortable and desperate to be back in my fleece-lined tights, or even better, my buttery soft leggings.

But the idea of these jeans was to make me look normal.

In fact, my entire carefully crafted appearance was trying to achieve that aim, from my “messy bun” which had taken me the best part of an hour and involved processing no fewer than five hours of YouTube videos, to my “natural look” make-up, to the relaxed cream jumper, which was just on the wrong side of itchy – itchiness was a real problem for me but I decided that if could put up with the jeans, then I could tolerate the jumper as well.

I’d even debated whether I needed to wear sexy underwear.

There was no way I would have been able to tolerate lace or any underwiring, but I could maybe, maybe have dealt with satin if push came to shove.

Instead, I decided to stay with my normal seamless cotton super-soft bra and knickers for now.

I didn’t think Mike would accept my proposal initially. He’d likely have a period of consideration, and I could then work up to tolerating uncomfortable underwear so that I’d be ready to wear it at a predetermined place and time.

“You’re six minutes and forty-five seconds late.”

Yes, that is what I said to him. I am a socially incompetent person, but that was bad, even for me.

The trouble was I had a terrible habit of stating facts as they popped into my head.

And in my experience, people didn’t want to have the unabridged truth foisted on them regularly.

It was just one of the various ways I lacked social skills.

I did not have the ability to lie, not even white lies.

Now, if everyone functioned like me, that would be fine. With white lies and half-truths eliminated, we could all live in honest harmony, being completely straight with each other at all times, and not taking offence to other people simply stating facts.

But the world was not full of Vickys. We were a rarity. And we were considered rude.

Mike crossed his impressive arms over his chest, his muscles bunching under his shirt as he did it, and his expression darkened.

“Christ, can we just get this over with then?” he snapped. “I wouldn’t want to waste any more of your precious seconds than strictly necessary.”

I stared up at him and blinked. “I have cleared my entire day for this delivery,” I said, yet again, blindly stating the truth without thinking through the consequences.

His eyebrows shot up. “For fuck’s sake, why?”

I opened my mouth to speak but then closed it again, just catching myself in time before I could blurt out that I’d spent the entire morning making myself look “normal,” and that I was hoping he would be willing to negotiate terms with me this afternoon.