Chapter 2
2
Boathouse Cottage, St Aidan
Clean sheets and crumbling cliffs
Sunday
‘Y ou don’t recognise me, do you?’
I was so busy avoiding getting thrown off the property earlier, I was less observant than I should have been. Now I look more closely as I cross the kitchen, there is something familiar about his stubbled jaw, but it’s mostly the way his eyes look like he’s laughing at some side-cracking private joke in a very superior way. And now he’s had a shower and has reappeared with towelled hair, in jeans and a polo shirt, apart from the smirk, he’s scrubbed up pretty well.
‘Give me a clue?’
He looks even more pleased with himself. ‘Scarlett and Tate’s wedding party…’
My stomach gives a horrible lurch of shock, then I collect myself and try to act like a normal person would. That was the day minimalism went out of the window and they got married in a country house hotel with a deer park, a lake and a hundred and fifty close friends.
The guy is staring through narrowed, hazel-brown eyes. ‘I was one of the three best men.’
I ignore the goosebumps on my arms, and swallow down the nausea in my throat. ‘And I was one of the seven bridespeople.’
The bride and groom had equal numbers on their sides, but where Scarlett’s team were a happy mix of unpretentious women, some of Tate’s crew were up themselves to the point of being obnoxious. And then there was Mason, my plus one, who I’ve trained myself never to think about and is the reason why I feel like I’m about to throw up.
The smile lilting around the corners of this guy’s mouth turns to triumph. ‘ You were the bridesmaid everyone was looking at!’
I fire a warning shot. ‘Be careful where you go with that. These days hasty observations about women can land you in very hot water, if not in court.’
He gives a cough. ‘Due to your amazing red hair, obviously.’
He’s missed that the bride’s is a very similar shade, though in his favour Scarlett is more of a strawberry blonde where I’m copper, and her hair has always been naturally sleek where mine is seriously messy.
I shake what’s left of my own hair. ‘There’s less of it now.’ Two years ago it was long and wild, caught up in braids and twists, woven with pearl strings, but I cut it off in an attempt to leave the past behind. Lately I’ve been rocking an asymmetrical choppy bob that’s now grown out and looks a lot like I’ve got a beech hedge in autumn spreading across my shoulders.
As for the milk-white silk slip dresses Scarlett chose for her attendants, they looked fabulous on the others, because they knew what was coming and had spent the previous six months in the gym, dieting away their hips and getting breasts. Even the one with a seven-month baby bump carried her dress off better than me.
My summer of haymaking in Somerset coupled with a serious apple crumble habit had put more pounds on me than it took off. I also missed out on the group memo about ditching our underwear. Take it from me, leaving my bra on the floor and using tit tape for the first time on the day of the event was never going to end well. Whoever this guy is, if he remembers my neckline sliding all points south, east and west the entire day, he has that in common with the other hundred and forty-nine guests.
I come in from outside in my wet T-shirt with a towel wrapped around my chest, and noticing his gaze sliding down to my cleavage, I decide I may as well correct his wrong conclusions. ‘My boobs are smaller than they look. They only stick out because my ribcage is big.’ I might have flashed them around to get attention once, but I definitely don’t do that anymore.
‘Thank you for clearing that one up.’ His grin breaks fully free at that point and unleashes the kind of slices in his cheeks that would have melted me as a teenager. At the ripe old age of twenty-eight, after a series of dickhead boyfriends and one gut-wrenching incident no one knows about, I’m more discerning. These days it takes a lot more than cute dimples to even raise an eyebrow. No one’s come anywhere near the starting blocks, and after what I went through, I can’t ever imagine that changing.
My track record suggests I’m crap at appraising men, but as this guy holds out his hand my internal knobhead alarm explodes into action.
‘In case you’ve forgotten, I’m Miles. Miles Appleton. It’s great to run into you again.’
I tuck my phone under one elbow, cling onto my towel, and ease out my spare hand. Our palms meet with a tingle, and when his fingers close around mine, it hits me like a ton of bricks.
Talk about overlaying bad things with worse– I should have known the minute I saw him! His name is laser-cut in my list of men to be avoided until the end of time. Miles Appleton, the best man Scarlett had personally selected as my visual-match slash partner-for-the-day who refused to come anywhere near me. All Scarlett’s hopes for elementally composed groups were tossed aside when he glued himself to the pregnant bride attendant half his height, and I ended up partnering Tate’s twelve-year-old half-brother who was small for his age. As Miles basically trashed her wedding album single-handedly, I doubt she’ll have forgiven him either. Which makes it doubly strange that he’s here at the cottage.
Even though I used to be famous for giving people the benefit of the doubt, it’s unlikely anyone could make the leap from the total tosser he was to acceptable, which is all the more reason for me to tread very carefully here.
‘I’m Betty. Or Beth. Or Eliza. All short for Elizabeth, which no one ever calls me.’ I go overboard on the name options so I can skip the ‘happy to see you’ bit. I’m appalled that he’s turned up, and he’s just redoubled that. Then it hits me there are other priorities to deal with. ‘I should get dressed.’
I stare around the floor, looking for the skirts and cardi I tossed away earlier.
He coughs again, and comes forward with a pile of neatly folded garments. ‘You might need these?’
I hide my horror that he must have touched my bra to move things to this stage, and carry on.
‘Valet service?’ Maybe that’s how he clawed his way back into Scarlett’s good books. I look into his eyes as I move forward to take back my clothes, but all I get is a rather alarming shiver down my spine and the sense that he’s staring over my shoulder. ‘Everything okay back there, Miles?’
He pulls a face. ‘That very much depends, Eliza Beth Betty, on how you define fine. My plate of fresh bakes by the window has vanished, and in its place I’m looking at… a donkey?’
As the penny drops I spin around and run the length of the room. ‘Jeez, Pumpkin, head outside the window please! ’ I push my way past his bony cheek to peer over the thick stone sill and confirm the worst. I hare outside and leap over the stile into the field, with Miles a breath behind me. We come to a halt by an upturned tray next to Pumpkin’s neat front hooves. As I wedge my thigh against Pumpkin’s shoulder to shove him backwards, we all look down at the pile of pastries scattered among the grass blades.
Miles frowns. ‘Are ponies allowed to eat laminated pastry?’
‘Why?’ Pumpkin’s crumb-free nose suggests we disturbed him before he got that far.
Miles is scrutinising the ground. ‘I made a lot more pastries than are here, that’s all.’
I can’t possibly fess up that I ate my body weight of the things before he even came back, so I move this on. ‘ You made them? You have personally nailed the art of croissant dough?’ As baking skills go, that’s high level! I move on to covering up. ‘Isn’t puffed crust mostly filled with air? They probably crumbled to nothing as they fell.’
He turns over the tray and pushes the remnants onto it. ‘When a horse refuses them, I get the message. My previous attempts weren’t edible either.’
As I lean on Pumpkin, I’m cringing with guilt that he has no idea how delicious they were, but it’s his fault for crushing my self-esteem so thoroughly at the wedding. He was the one who strutted round all day ignoring the one person he was supposed to be escorting. However bruised I was by that, I still have standards, so I give a sniff. ‘I’m sorry these are ruined. I should have closed the window when I put Pumpkin in the field.’
We make our way back to the kitchen, and he drops the pastries into the bin. ‘Yet another wild idea I won’t be revisiting.’ He’s talking in riddles, but there’s no need to reply because he’s picked up my clothes pile again. ‘As I was saying, Scarlett and Tate tidy as they go. We might want to do the same?’
Could he be any more condescending? Except that’s not the worst part of what he’s said. ‘We?’
He nods. ‘Until tomorrow, I’m afraid that’s us.’
I suspend my disbelief at what an arse he sounds, and finally get where he’s heading with this. ‘You’re thinking about arrangements for tonight…’ As my pony just demolished his baking, I’m on the back foot here.
Miles raises his eyebrows. ‘You take the bedroom. If you give me a few minutes I’ll change the sheets.’
His assumption that he’s in charge makes me disagree on principle. ‘We women have spent a century fighting for equality. I’ll take the sofa, then it saves on laundry.’
He narrows his eyes. ‘It’s your call. I’m going out shortly, so I won’t be in your way. I’ll do my best not to wake you when I get back.’
Heading for the bathroom to dress, I make myself beam at him. ‘By the time I wake up in the morning, you’ll probably be gone.’
There’s no reason at all I should be feeling disappointed. If this is about closure, I’ve pretty much got that. Locking myself in the minuscule bathroom, I give a sigh of relief that after tomorrow I’ll have no further need to shut the bathroom door at all. I mean, even with Scarlett’s Purdy and Figg lemongrass toilet drops, there’s no way I could do a number two with a stranger around.
First thing tomorrow Scarlett will be on the end of the phone to sort this out, and then it’ll be Pumpkin and me at Boathouse Cottage, all the way to October!