Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
MAIA
Ididn’t know how I made it through work that day.
Autopilot switched into gear, and I tackled tasks while my mind cooried up in the corner in panic mode.
How the hell was I supposed to get out of this idiotic campaign without losing everything?
I’d chosen not to tell Hilary the truth about Will just yet because I had to believe there was a way to get out of it without humiliating myself in the process.
One positive was that it did, for the first time in a month, distract me from the hurt in my heart.
Liza, thankfully, emailed the report I wanted, but I could feel the frost even in her three-sentence email.
Becky approached during my lunch hour to congratulate me.
I could tell by the smug gleam in her eyes that she knew I was miserable.
The urge to unleash the past month of emotions on her was real, but ever the professional, I nodded along to whatever she said, dissociating so I wouldn’t claw off her face.
By the time I’d walked up through the wide, perfectly symmetrical Georgian streets of New Town and then downward onto Hart Street, my pulse raced as my mind whirred with possible solutions.
Hart Street was two rows of Georgian terraced homes and black wrought iron gated facades.
There were a couple of new architectural additions to the street.
Near the top of the road, there was a lane between the buildings called Hart Street Lane.
Unlike the Gothic, creepy alleyways up on Old Town, this narrow lane was a well-lit, flower box–laden pathway into the back of the homes.
It had a tree-surrounded courtyard and in the middle of the clearing what had once been an old schoolhouse was now four flats.
There was a main entrance, with two flats on the ground floor.
My flat was on the top floor across the landing from my neighbor Geri Mills.
Geri was a seventy-eight-year-old artist and self-proclaimed spinster.
She said spinster had always been a filthy word, but she took pride in the fact that she’d lived a happy, sex-filled life without being “bogged down by the terrible business of marriage and cohabitation.”
“That’s what spinsterhood really is, my dear. Happiness,” she’d told me a few months after I moved into my flat. “A beautiful girl like you ought to have lots of sex, but never tie yourself down to one person.”
Suffice it to say, Geri did not congratulate me when Will and I got engaged.
She probably would once I told her the engagement was off.
The thought made my stomach drop as I glanced at her door before unlocking mine.
It was a two-bedroom flat, it had high ceilings and a bay window that mostly looked out at tree branches, making me feel like I was anywhere but in the middle of the city.
It was a little dark because we were surrounded by foliage and buildings, but it was cocooned away from all the hustle and bustle.
As I pressed a hand to the hallway wall for balance to loosen my ankle-strapped high heels, my attention snagged on my photograph wall. For years, I grew up in a home with no family portraits.
With no family, really.
When I moved in with Dad and Grace, I’d become almost obsessive about cataloguing life and displaying my happy memories. Will called my wall of photographs “clutter.”
It wasn’t clutter to me. It was the visual representation of a life I was grateful for because it hadn’t always been this way.
My handsome dad and beautiful Grace. My wee brother Lachlan who grew up so fast across those pictures on the wall.
A baby in my arms when I was seventeen. A teenager last Christmas, his arms crossed over his chest as I squeezed him into my side for a cuddle for the camera.
My face was lit up with laughter because he was so annoyed by the affection.
I didn’t see enough of him. Lachlan, or Lockie as we called him, would be a man before I knew it.
I was thirty years old and having to start my romantic life all over again. There was no way I could face my career being wiped out too.
My misty eyes moved over the wall as I stretched my sore feet into the hardwood floors.
There was a photo of my extended family, all the amazing, kind people who’d welcomed Dad, Grace, and my dad’s sister Shannon into their lives.
It was from my sixteenth birthday party at the Italian restaurant D’Alessandro’s.
The restaurant was owned by my uncle Marco’s family.
Marco wasn’t really my uncle, but he was close friends with Dad and Aunt Shannon through his wife Hannah, a member of the Carmichael clan.
Her best friend was Cole, and Cole was married to Aunt Shannon.
Cole’s sister, Aunt Jo, was best friends with Joss Carmichael, my pseudo-cousin Beth’s mum.
And there were a lot more of us than that.
We were a large, complicated, tangled bunch who loved one another so much.
I’d gone from being alone to having a huge family within the space of a few months. It had been overwhelming in the best way.
Now there were photos of them all over my wall.
Pics of my best friend from high school, Leigh, hung there too.
From fifteen years old to now. She lived and worked in Glasgow, but we tried to see each other as often as we could.
Other than Beth and my cousins, my social group was scattered all over the world.
I’d met most of my current friends when I went to uni in London.
My closest friends were my two roommates, Penny and Davina.
Penny now lived in Texas and Davina was in Dubai.
The truth was … since I’d met Will, my social world had become his. When we were together, we hung out with his friends. Hence why none of my cousins or Leigh had met Will—in the three years we’d been together.
That said everything. Why hadn’t I realized that wasn’t normal?
Hurt flared across my chest.
My gaze landed on a photo of Will and me. Grace had taken it. He was kissing my cheek, and my face was scrunched up in laughter. We looked happy.
Tears dripped down my cheeks and I wiped them away wondering how I could have been so wrong about that.
It was a shock to realize I no longer trusted myself—no longer trusted my feelings.
I took the picture off the wall and then reached for the other three photos of us together.
With a sick, churning stomach, I shoved them into my side table drawer to deal with later.
Then I kissed my fingertips and pressed them to a photo of Dad, Grace, and Lockie as I passed it to venture into the kitchen.
It was moments like these I wished I was a daily wine drinker. Like Will, I wasn’t big on alcohol. If I was out with the girls, I’d have a few cocktails, but that was it.
Stopping in the kitchen, I realized I’d intended to make a snack, yet I wasn’t hungry.
Turning around, I wandered out of the kitchen, through the sitting room, and back out into the hall.
My bedroom was on the same side as the living room and had a lovely, leafy view.
The second bedroom was so small I’d turned it into a wardrobe.
It was fair to say I loved clothes. I loved how they transformed a person.
So, I had rails of clothes, far more than one person needed, and boxes and boxes upon shoes.
Thankfully, this extra space allowed my bedroom to remain mostly clutter-free.
Shutting the blinds, I changed out of my tight-fitted pencil dress into joggers and a cropped tee.
I’d barely pulled the tee on when my doorbell rang, setting off the app on my phone.
I hurried into the hall to pull my phone out of my purse.
Ignoring the notifications that I had missed calls and a bunch of unanswered texts from Will that had piled up over the past month, I tapped on the doorbell app.
There wasn’t a security door into the building, so I’d installed the camera doorbell. The camera app flared to life and my heart skipped a beat at the sight of Baird.
If Will really wanted to talk to me, he could come to my flat. Like Baird. Who didn’t like how we’d left things and had shown up mere hours later.
A pleasant ache scored across my chest as I opened the door to him.
His gorgeous, dark eyes held mine for a second, and I felt more than a sizzle of the physical attraction I’d gotten very good at ignoring. Baird McMillan was probably the most beautiful man I’d ever met.
However, lots of women thought so, and he was the biggest flirt on the planet.
Baird was a good-natured lothario. He’d never intentionally hurt a woman.
I think he’d chew off his own arm first. But this was a man who could flirt with a lamppost. He’d never be satisfied with the same woman for the rest of his life.
He was heartbreak waiting to happen for anyone who fell in love with him, so he’d never be a romantic possibility for me.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy looking at him.
This morning he’d not only surprised me with the tabloid story but with his haircut.
I’d loved his long hair. Yet he was sexier than ever with it shorter. It was wet right now and hanging across his temples in waves. He had to brush it out of his eyes, his big, tattooed hand impatiently swiping at it.
My dad had tattoos. Nearly all my uncles had tattoos, including Uncle Cole.
Baird could give Cole—one of the best tattoo artists in the country—a run for his money.
Baird had a full sleeve of artwork all the way to the fingers on his right hand.
This past year, the tattoo collection had grown.
Now he had tattoos across his chest and up onto his neck.
They were Celtic tribal in style, and Cole had expertly shaded the designs so the ink wasn’t overly prominent.
If you’d asked me whether I’d be attracted to a guy with a neck tattoo, I would have said no.
And I would have been wrong.