28
28
Juniper
Juniper: Enough about work, tell me about the cruise.
How’s the weather?
Juniper: Actually, screw the weather.
I want to know about the men …
Is there anyone you like?
Are you finally getting some?
Fiona: You’re as bad as your aunt.
Juniper: Sylvia knows how to have fun.
Don’t avoid the question!
Fiona: A lady doesn’t kiss and tell.
Juniper: That means yes.
“Is the shower leaking again?” Callum’s fingers clasped tightly in mine as we crept up the stairs of Ivy House.
In the other he held the steaming pizza box.
“Nope. It seems you actually do great work … for a cowboy.”
“You’re a cruel woman, harpy.” That hand went to my waist, halting my first step on the landing, voice curling at my ear.
“Turnabout will be fair play once I get you riding me.”
Jesus .
I didn’t know how we’d lasted this long.
I hadn’t so much as touched a man for almost a year before this thing with Callum and I’d been fine.
A little tightly wound , but fine.
Suddenly sex – sex with him – I couldn’t think of anything else.
Slow . I repeated the word to myself.
The word that had become akin to a talisman to Callum this week, whenever things progressed just a little too close to the point of no return.
It was his boundary, and I respected it.
“When I’m riding you, Macabe , this little argument will be the furthest thing from your mind. Now shut up before you wake someone.” I unlocked room five, not bothering to flick on the light.
He made it two steps inside.
Then stopped. “What’s all this?”
I closed the door behind us, so only the spill of moonlight from the open curtains and the golden warmth of the fairy lights I’d dug out of the Christmas box shone between us.
“I thought it was about time I took you on a date.”
I suddenly felt silly, as he quietly tracked my efforts at a romantic gesture, from the neatly made bed to the mound of plaids circled by unlit candles on the floor before the window.
Seemingly forgetting the pizza, his arms went limp at his sides and the slices slid across the box with a wet scratch.
He hated it.
“I meant to come up and light the candles but you distracted me,” I said quickly.
“And I can grab more blankets if it’s not warm enough.” His throat only bobbed so I kicked off my shoes, stepping onto the soft plaids.
“Look, we can do something else if this is terrible—”
“It’s not.” His eyes shone.
“I just – I have the stupidest urge to cry.”
My heart thumped, tasting the sweetness of this moment I would return to over and over until the edges began to smudge, when Callum Macabe looked at me as if I were made of starlight.
“Then cry.”
Eyes shining, he, nodding to my socked feet burrowing into the blanket.
“That’s something I always liked about you, you know.”
“My ability to plan a cheap date?” I waited for him to sit then spread another blanket over our laps.
“ No . That one of the first things you do anywhere is take your shoes off.” It was a quirk few people noticed.
Alexander always said it was because I could make myself at home anywhere, but I always felt it was the opposite, that it helped curb my desire to run.
Beneath the blanket, Callum tugged my legs over his lap, running a thumb along the arch of my foot again with exquisite pressure.
“For a woman who apparently hates nature you’re definitely the bare-feet-in-the-grass type.” He repeated the action, and I couldn’t hold back my moan.
“Every time I’d see these black-painted little toes, I had to fight the urge to bite every single one of them.”
“A foot fetish? I didn’t peg you as a deviant.”
“More like a Juniper Ross fetish.” His head tipped, and he nipped at my jaw, nose skimming until it rested at the small birthmark at the base of my neck.
“This little mark I only ever got to see when the weather was warm enough for you to wear a strappy little top. Did you never catch me searching for it?” I shook my head.
“How about your mouth?” His fingers traced my lips and they tingled as though touched by electricity.
“Every time you spoke; ate; smiled; you had me, sweetheart, you had me right in the palm of your hand and I didn’t even try to hide it.”
The confession blew me apart, I needed him to kiss me, needed him under me and – and because he could read me like a book – he went right back to rubbing my feet.
Torturing me with every touch.
I flopped back into the cushions.
“Are you going to tell me what’s been going on with you?” My eyes sprang open and he continued, “You were quiet this morning. And last night.”
“Lubing me up with foot rubs is coercion.”
His nose wrinkled.
“Please never use the term ‘lubing me up’ out of the house.”
“Too graphic?” I grinned.
“What do you think?” He tugged my foot further into his lap so I could feel just how graphic he found it.
“Now tell me.”
I hesitated, biting my lip.
“It seems stupid.”
“If it’s upsetting you, it isn’t stupid.”
I blew out a breath, “Fiona hasn’t called in over a week, she always calls.”
His thumbs didn’t stop their ministrations.
“Why don’t you phone her?”
“Because as soon as I talk to her I’ll have to confess everything. I guess it’s finally dawning on me that she’ll be back soon, and she might not be happy with what she finds.”
“Have you considered that maybe she hasn’t called because, instead of worrying, she’s using her time away to let loose, exactly like you hoped she would?”
“You think?”
He shrugged, hands tightening around my foot.
“As much as you needed to know that you can manage this place alone, she probably needs to discover that there’s still a life for her outside of Ivy House.”
We lapsed into silence as I pondered that.
I’d spent so long thinking of the inn and Kinleith as some kind of self-exiled prison, I’d never once stopped to consider if Fiona felt the same.
Was she clinging to the past so tightly because she feared letting go without the promise of something to catch her?
“I don’t know her like you do, sweetheart. But I do know that you were really fucking brave, you took a risk and worked your arse off to make it happen. There isn’t a chance in hell Fiona will walk into this room and not see the love and dedication you’ve poured into every inch of it.”
“ Bloody hell . You’re irritatingly sweet sometimes. No wonder every woman on this island melts for you.”
He laughed, sinking down beside me until we were eye level.
“Melts for me? Who might that be?”
“Who do you think? Jill Mortimer.” My nose screwed.
“Just the thought of her curves and all that blonde hair makes me want to date her.”
Callum looked delighted.
“ Oh , I get it now.”
“What?”
“This …” He waved a hand.
“Seeing you jealous is a lot of fun.”
“I’m not jealous!”
Eyes dancing, he crawled over me.
“You are so fucking jealous. It’s cute. If it makes you feel better, I’ve been there … a lot.”
I bypassed that little confession and said, “A man hasn’t called me cute in my entire life.”
“Idiots. The lot of them.” He parted my thighs with a knee and lowered between them.
“You’re exceedingly cute. Especially when you’re jealous.”
“ I’m not jealous .”
He pecked a kiss to my throat, then a second to my pulse.
“Did you write about it in your diary? Burn pictures of my face on a blood moon?”
“ Fuck off , Macabe.”
He barked a laugh.
“Back to Macabe, are we?”
“Yes!” Feeling way too vulnerable, I folded my arms over my face, shielding my expression.
“Juniper, sweetheart …” His face burrowed into my chest, allowing me the privacy I needed.
“Nothing ever happened with Jill. Unless you count a drunken kiss when I was sixteen … which I don’t.”
My body, just on the cusp of relaxing, stiffened all over again and I was glad I couldn’t see his face as I spat, “That counts.”
His fingers brushed up my waist. “Then I feel pretty shitty because it was my first kiss and I’d downed an entire bottle of cheap cider five minutes earlier, which I proceeded to throw up all over her shoes the second it ended. Not exactly my finest moment.”
I dropped my hands, meeting his steady gaze.
“I’m sorry. I’m a child.”
“You’re human. You think I don’t want to tear the balls from every man you’ve ever been with? Because I do. And I’ve had copious amounts of time to imagine exactly how I’d do it.”
“How?”
He bared his teeth.
“ Viciously .”
“Painfully?” My legs tightened around his hips.
“ Jesus , you’re a bloodthirsty little demon, anyone ever tell you that?”
“Frequently.”
His hands dove into my hair, forcing me to hold his stare.
“And just so we’re crystal fucking clear. There’s been no one else … not since I broke up with Beth.”
Beth.
I remembered the kind brunette.
A school teacher he’d dated for a few brief months after Alistair and I got engaged.
“Why?”
“There’s nothing more lonely than a relationship with the wrong person.”
My chest tightened.
“So you’re saying you want the full Juniper Ross experience?”
He brushed my hair back, eyes dancing.
“Unequivocally. What does that entail exactly?”
“Well …” My hands flicked nervously over the blanket’s trim.
“Demon cats to start with.”
“Perfect.” His thumb stroked my earlobe.
“What else?”
“Mercurial moods,” I said.
“Mercurial moods happen to be my favourite kind of moods.”
“How long?” I asked.
I knew he understood my vague question, because his fingers stilled.
Then he rolled onto his side, drawing me after him until my back was to his chest, pulling the blanket over us until only our heads poked out the top, like we needed to be comfortable for this confession.
“From the very start. The first moment I saw you on the station platform.”
“ Wait … the platform. You mean on the train?”
“No. I noticed you through the window while I was running down the platform. I couldn’t say why at the time, but something pulled me to you before my brain could even catch up.”
I stroked the back of his arm, enjoying the picture he painted.
“What did you think when you sat down?”
I felt his chuckle against my back.
“That you were too young for me.”
“Still true.”
He pinched my waist. “I thought … you were beautiful and brilliant and so damn intriguing I couldn’t let you walk away from me at the other end.”
It was fucked up.
But I heard his sweet words and didn’t know how to associate myself with the picture he painted.
“What?” he asked eventually, my silence bringing his head up.
“I don’t know … It’s just hard for me to believe, I guess.”
“That someone would think that about you?”
“ Yes .” The admission felt loud in the quiet room.
“You just seemed so flirty and confident, I thought it was all a joke to you. That’s why I didn’t tell you who I was right away, I wanted to beat you at your own game.”
He groaned, pressing rapid kisses to my neck.
“What you must have thought of me.”
I tipped my head back.
“I thought you were funny and too attractive. Even if I was in love with your brother.” He stiffened and I grabbed his arm before he could pull away.
“I’m sorry—” We hadn’t discussed Alistair since that first night.
Like a coward, I was waiting for him to broach the subject.
“Don’t apologise.” I felt his slow sigh.
“I never blamed you for loving Alistair. I was jealous as hell, but I never blamed you. And when it ended … I blamed him .”
I picked at a loose thread on the blanket.
“I thought you were happy because I wasn’t good enough for him.”
“You are everything , Juniper. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, because it’s in my interest not to … I hate even thinking it, but, it was real for him, sweetheart. I don’t know all the gory details of what went down between you, but however it ended, his heart broke too.” The knowledge was a balm I hadn’t known I needed.
And yet I felt nothing but an absent sort of ache for Alistair as another truth locked firmly into place.
A far scarier one because it meant putting my heart on the line all over again.
His hands tightened around me, like he intended to keep me.
“I was thinking. The ceilidh at the distillery next week … Maybe we could use it as a soft launch.”
“What’s a soft launch?”
He played with the ends of my hair, the only sign that he was nervous.
“We share a few dances, let people see us talking – I obviously won’t be able to take my eyes off you – a soft launch.”
“So we’d let people know we’re together. Like together, together ?”
“Yes, together, together. I can ask on a slip of paper if you like, circle A for yes, B for no.”
“Arse.” I reached back to pinch his thigh.
He flinched, laughing hard against my nape.
“Now I’m definitely not going.”
“You offered the full Juniper Ross experience and I’m cashing it in.”
“People will gossip,” I reminded him, more nervous for him than for me, he had far more to lose and not just with his family.
Some people in Kinleith had old-fashioned views; dating his brother’s ex-fiancée hardly gave off the “respected member of the community” vibes he’d perfected.
“I couldn’t give a shit. We tell the people who matter, everyone else can go to hell.”
His steely resolve made my chest loosen.
“Fine.”
“ Fine ? That’s all I get? Fine? I’m glad time spent with me is so appealing.”
“I can still change my mind.”
“Nope. No take-backs.” He pulled me tight to him, humming his pleasure.
We were doing this. I suddenly felt ill.
“We need to tell Alistair,” I said.
I’d known we couldn’t stay in this little bubble forever, but I’d hoped we’d get a few more weeks.
I tried to imagine Callum and I holding hands as we walked down the high street.
Sitting across from Alistair at Macabe family dinners.
A dream that still felt out of reach.
It was the green light he’d been waiting for, but his pause felt hesitant.
“I know. I don’t want to ruin Mal and April’s night, so I’ll tell him after the party. He should hear it from me.”
I batted the worry to the back of my mind, settling against the crook of his arm as we stared at the glittering sky outside the large open window and said, “Is this why you brought me up here? A smart move on your part. A target is more vulnerable half frozen to death.”
“Evil wee harpy,” he tsked, but rearranged our bodies until his leg hooked over mine.
“You brought me here, remember? And I didn’t even get to eat the pizza … I’m beginning to think it’s so you could have your wicked way with me.”
Very tempting, but that wasn’t why I’d planned this.
“Be patient, you’ll see.”
We didn’t have to wait long.