Chapter 8
Eight
THEO
Two days later, Sarah was well enough to start work.
Although the contract hadn’t been drawn up yet and it would take more time than I’d like, we decided to start work on the screenplay.
It gave me an excuse to stay away from Ardnoch, and to stay hidden from my brother who had apparently run out of numbers to call me from because I hadn’t heard from him in days.
North had contacted me while Sarah was still ill and, for some reason, I’d lied and told him I was traveling, trying to find something to unplug the cork stuck up the arsehole of my creativity.
I wasn’t quite ready for anyone to know where I was.
Now that the little mouse was well again, she was up at the crack of dawn, and I made breakfast because when I was at home, I liked to cook. We took turns showering because there was only one. Being a gentleman, I let her go first.
Clean, fed, and ready to work, I strode out of the guest room and into the living room to find her perched on the couch watching something on her phone on low volume.
“Switch it off,” I demanded. “Time to get to work.”
Sarah shot me an impatient glance. “I think Britain might have its newest serial killer.”
“Is that the tagline for the series? Hmm, I don’t know. A little cliché.”
“No.” She shoved her phone in my face. “A third girl has been murdered down south. That’s three in a year.
The police said there is a pattern to the murders and are warning young women not to walk alone at night.
All three victims are blond, between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight.
I picked up on that. The police haven’t highlighted that in their statement yet. ”
Morbid curiosity filled me as I read the article under the news video.
Something familiar scraped across my brain at the pattern Sarah noted.
I wondered if similar murders had happened in the past and if this was a copycat killer.
Unsurprisingly, I read a lot of true crime, so it was quite possible it was stuck in my memory bank somewhere.
“Always the detective, little mouse. Now come. We have our own serial killer to get to grips with.”
She nodded and slipped off the couch’s arm, her silken hair, the color of wheat, falling over her face.
I’d never seen or felt softer hair. I studied her as she walked past me and slipped gracefully into her desk chair.
Her cardigan fell off her shoulder, revealing an expanse of creamy pale skin.
Golden freckles sprinkled her petite shoulder, which told me she’d walked in the sun a lot during the summer.
Everything about Sarah was soft, silky, and graceful.
I hadn’t lied to her when I’d told her she was rather beautiful.
It just continually surprised me because …
well, how had I missed how attractive she was?
Strolling past her, I took a seat at the narrow desk I’d moved from the guest room. To take advantage of the view from the front window, I’d abutted the second desk against Sarah’s, which meant we were sitting quite intimately.
She wrinkled her nose adorably as she glanced between my desk and hers.
My lips twitched at her obvious perturbance. “What?”
“Nothing.” She pulled out her laptop and opened it.
“Am I too close to you, darling? Invading your personal space?”
Sarah shook her head a little too vehemently. “No, it’s fine.”
“I can move,” I pushed, enjoying her discomfort more than I should.
“I said it’s fine.” She smiled, but it had a bite. That only amused me more.
Letting it go because I knew she was too damn polite to demand I move, I opened my laptop. While Sarah was sick, I’d begun making notes, highlighting the copy of the book she’d given me with scenes I wanted to incorporate into the script.
Scripts were an entirely different beast from novels, and I had to hope that Sarah wouldn’t get too hung up on the fact that it was more difficult to understand the nuance of a scene when it was only written in dialogue and basic actions.
A few hours later, Sarah pulled me from my deep thoughts to announce she’d finished her chapter for the day. Taken aback to realize how much time had passed, and how easily we’d worked in each other’s presence, I looked up from my laptop to stare out at the Highland loch beyond.
“Well?”
At her question, I dragged my gaze from the view. “Well, what?”
She shrugged and gestured to my laptop. “I was so into my work I don’t know how you’re getting on.”
“Good.” And it had been. No writer’s block. “I’ve finished the first scene. Why don’t we have lunch and then you can read it?”
Her expression was filled with curiosity as she stared at my screen. “Okay,” she agreed reluctantly.
I tried not to laugh at how much she clearly wanted to read it now. “Food first,” I insisted. While she might be better, she was still only a few days into her recovery and needed fuel. “Let’s eat out. I fancy that little burger place down by the water.”
“Burger place?” She frowned.
“Yes. You haven’t seen it.” I explained where I’d seen the sign.
“Oh, I hadn’t noticed. Someone else must have bought that restaurant. It used to be a wee café.”
“Let’s try it, then.”
Sarah eyed me. For someone so shy with everyone else, she had a way of looking unwaveringly at me that unnerved me a little.
Like she was peeling back my layers. And I didn’t want anyone peeling back my layers, thank you very much.
I didn’t have many. I was almost entirely layerless. Deliberately so.
“Okay,” she finally agreed with a shrug.
I tried not to take offense to the fact that she was so underwhelmed at the thought of dining with me.
Women usually loved eating out with me. Well …
they loved me eating them out. An image of Sarah lying flushed and naked with my head between her thighs rose out of nowhere, and I jumped out of my desk chair like the action might shove the image right back out of my head.
There would be none of that between me and the little mouse. I had rules against mixing business with pleasure.
I salivated over my bacon burger while Sarah ate a small portion of mac and cheese. I thought about the scene I’d written and how complex Sarah’s characters were. It was important to me that I translated the characters perfectly because there was no improving on them.
A tourist walked in as I mused and Sarah looked up. Her cheeks immediately flushed bright red, and I shot the tourist a look. It was a younger fella, handsome, rugged, outdoorsy type, and he was smiling invitingly at my lunch companion.
My hand tightened around my fork as he wandered off, still looking at her over his shoulder. His eyes met my hard gaze and he quickly looked away. Sarah glanced back down at her plate, her pretty cheeks still pink.
“Lord, you don’t half blush, do you,” I muttered, annoyed.
She shot me a vulnerable look that made me feel like a bastard before she took a long gulp of her cold water as if to cool her cheeks. Unfortunately, my shitty commentary only made her blush harder.
I bent my head toward her, catching her gaze, and asked her more gently, “How can someone as intelligent as you, someone who understands human emotions and psychology as well as you, someone whose writing is fierce with confidence, be so shy?”
Her stunning eyes widened ever so slightly. “I—I don’t think those things necessarily go hand in hand, anyway.”
“Yes, perhaps. But there must be a reason a grown woman is as shy as you are?”
“Are you mocking me?” she asked, quietly dignified in her wariness.
“No,” I answered sincerely for once. “I’m genuinely curious. Do you even know why you’re so shy? Especially of men.” I gestured toward where the tourist now sat at the counter.
Sarah studied me for what seemed like too long. Then, “I’ll tell you why I am the way I am if you tell me something real about yourself. And not something I could find out if I googled you.”
The challenge made me tense, all the muscles in my body locking. I glowered at my meal. Something real she couldn’t learn from Google? The only real things about me existed in the past.
“Or not,” she said so quietly, it was almost a whisper.
But damn it, I was just curious enough about her to give her something. “I held my mother’s hand while she died,” I offered bluntly.
Shocked at what I’d revealed, I imagine I gaped at her like she’d said the words. Hating the pity in her eyes, I shrugged, tone bland, “Is that the kind of thing you were looking for?”
Her gaze washed over my face in understanding, and I wanted to lash out at her for it. To my relief, she didn’t offer me a useless sorry or sympathy.
“My mum was an addict,” she confessed softly instead.
“It started with alcohol and then eventually whatever she could get her hands on. The substance abuse turned her into someone else. I … She … she abused me as well.” She lowered her gaze, fiddling with her fork.
“Emotionally and verbally. She … she didn’t have the nicest boyfriends either,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
Sharp pain sliced up my palm.
I glanced down to realize I’d gripped the small table too hard and there was a splinter sticking out of my skin. I pulled it out and returned my attention to Sarah.
Her gaze was filled with so much hurt, I wanted to run from it. Yet I forced myself to stay. “When the one person who’s supposed to love you, to think the sun shines from your arse, continually tells you that you’re stupid, worthless, that you ruined their life … you start to buy into it.”
“And where was your father in all this?” I bit out, guilt eating at me.
“He died in a farming accident when I was a baby. He was Grandpa’s son.
Mum took me away from the farm after he was killed.
But I stayed with my grandparents during the summers.
Eventually, when I was twelve, things got so bad that I called Grandpa.
He contacted social services and after a bit of time, my grandparents were given custody.
They tried hard to undo what she’d done, but her words were tattooed on my brain.
Every time I thought of asking a boy out or going to uni or going for a job I really wanted, I’d hear her voice in my head telling me that I couldn’t.
That the boy wouldn’t want me, that I wasn’t smart enough for uni, or good enough for the job. ”
“Jesus fuck,” I muttered, horrified.
“It took everything I had to publish the first Juno McLeod book. I’d been writing the series for years and Grandpa knew about it.
When Jared found out, he hounded me until I decided to self-publish it.
It was the success of the series that made me start to realize my mum was wrong about me.
That was solidified when a publisher, a big publisher, wanted the print rights.
Then Grandpa … not long before he died, he sat me down and told me he was worried about me.
That he wanted me to go out and live. Really live.
” Tears glimmered in her eyes. “When he died, I decided I owed him to try. To go after what I want.”
Understanding dawned. “Which is why you came to my room to ask me to adapt the book?” And I’d treated her like an insignificant simpleton.
All the droll remarks I’d made about being so shocked by how smart and intelligent she was, how beautiful she was, I was just being typical me. Not thinking of the harm in it.
But I realized I’d probably been inflicting much harm indeed.
“I know I’m a cold-hearted sod sometimes, and I can’t promise not to be myself, but I can promise that from now on, I will never poke fun at your intelligence or worthiness again.”
Sarah’s lips parted in shock and then her expression softened in a way that scared the shit out of me.
So I pushed away my plate and pulled out my wallet and added blandly, “Thank goodness you realized you’re far from stupid or you wouldn’t be enjoying someone as menseful as I am.”
She snorted. “You’re not at all well-behaved or particularly polite. I’d say you were more jaculiferous than menseful.”
Grinning, I stood, holding out a hand to help her from the table. “You think I’m prickly, little mouse?”
“As a porcupine.”
“I have never been accused of prickliness before.” I narrowed my eyes at her teasing. “But I shall try to refrain from being jaculiferous in the future.”
Sarah sighed dreamily. “It’s such a good word.”
My smile was so wide, it almost hurt as I stared down at her, resisting the urge to pull her into my side. “It is an excellent word.” We strode together to the counter to pay, and I waved away her hand as she held out her card. “Mendaciloquent is also a good word.”
“To tell lies,” she defined.
Good lord, she really did have the most exceptional vocabulary.
“It sounds better when you say it in your posh accent,” she teased.
“Everything sounds better in my posh accent.”
“True.” Her gaze flittered to the handsome tourist from earlier before coming back to me. “Though other accents are nice as well.”
Had the tourist spoken with an accent? I hadn’t heard him speak. Frowning, I paid for the meal, left a tip, and then took Sarah by the elbow, blocking her view of the tourist as I led her out. “How about crepuscular?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I think it sounds more like something that grows on a wound than anything relating to twilight.”
I threw my head back, laughing as I held open the door for her. “This is why you’re a writer.”
Sarah threw me a wide grin over her shoulder as she walked out of the restaurant, and I ignored a sharp twinge in my chest at the sight of it and followed her.
In a desperate attempt to feel anything but that, I lobbed unusual words to test her and chuckled at her smug success with every one of them.