Chapter Nine
As late afternoon tipped into evening and the shadows grew longer, the after-work drinking crowd drifted home and we were surrounded by date-night couples sharing lingering golden-hour kisses or holding hands across tabletops in the twilight.
I’d never been one for PDAs – I thought that was just how I was wired – so it was unsettling to realise just how much I wanted to join their ranks.
Was it the lightning that had changed me, or was it because I’d never met anyone I wanted to touch as much as I did the man sitting opposite me, despite having virtually advised him to go back to his ex?
I shivered and Rhys sprang to his feet, returning moments later with a soft plaid blanket from a basket the pub made available for garden guests.
He draped it around me like a cape, and I managed to hide another shiver as his hand rested briefly on my shoulder.
Friends don’t do things like that, I reminded myself.
Rhys was two steps towards his own seat when he came to an abrupt halt.
‘Ellie, don’t move,’ he said, his voice urgent.
I froze in the act of settling the folds of the blanket more comfortably around me.
His tone was calm, but his eyes were staring at my throat, and not in the way he’d done earlier.
I twitched the blanket a little tighter around me and that was when I felt the weird tickling sensation beneath the woollen folds.
‘Keep absolutely still,’ Rhys said quietly, which was impossible now that I could hear an angry buzzing sound coming from beneath the plaid blanket. I jerked, and the enormous bee that had been crawling along my collarbone dropped down inside the scoop neckline of my dress.
‘Stay calm,’ he instructed, and I tried to, but the bee – realising its predicament – got angry and then got scared. It lashed out at the flesh it was trapped against, which happened to be my right boob.
I winced, unable to stifle a small yelp of pain. Ironically, I think I’d made less fuss when the lightning had struck me.
Rhys was beside me in a second.
‘Did it sting you?’
‘Yep.’ I pulled the fabric of my dress away and peered into the void. ‘It’s still in there.’
I’d been undressed by others before him, but never with such speed or dexterity.
Rhys reached behind me, his hand going unerringly to the zip of my dress, which he slid down as though his fingers had been primed to do so all night.
Although probably not in the middle of a pub garden, with every head turned our way.
My dress fell open, and the bee tumbled out onto the grass.
It wasn’t the only thing to spill, as my bra was the half-cup style and so flimsy the outline of my nipples was clearly silhouetted through the lace.
Once again, Rhys’s reactions were fast, sweeping up the discarded blanket and throwing it protectively around me.
‘Come on,’ he said, placing a guiding arm at my back. ‘Let’s go inside and get some ice for that sting.’
I resisted as he tried to tug me gently towards the warm lights of the pub.
‘It’s okay, Rhys. I don’t want to make a fuss.’
‘You’re not,’ he said. ‘We just need some better light to see how bad it is.’
Never before had a man said that he wanted to see my boobs to assess how bad they looked. I could have stayed and argued with him in the middle of the beer garden, but doing so would only draw even more attention our way, so I scooped up my bag and allowed him to lead me towards the main building.
If the pub had been busy before, it was now positively heaving, so Rhys left me standing beside the door as he wove through the crowd towards the bar. It was two-to-three-deep in customers, but somehow he caught the barman’s eye as he approached.
‘Could we have some ice for a bee sting, please?’ I heard him ask, with an apology for queue-jumping to those waiting to be served. The bartender passed him a beer glass filled to the brim with ice cubes and the crowd parted like a biblical sea as he made his way back to me.
‘That was impressive,’ I said. ‘I bet you’re great at hailing taxis.’
‘Being tall helps.’
It was more than that. It was being him. Being Rhys. But that was taking me back into dangerous waters, so I simply nodded as though that explained everything.
‘Shall we find somewhere more private and get you out of that dress.’
I couldn’t help a small snort of laughter.
‘Has that line ever worked for you in the past?’
I liked the twinkle in his eyes and the way he pretended to seriously consider my question.
‘Not so much, now you mention it.’
I had a feeling he was lying.
With his hand cupping my elbow, he steered us towards the Ladies’. I reached to take the glass of ice, but Rhys had already knocked on the door and, getting no response, nudged it open with his shoulder and pulled me inside.
That took the smile from my face.
‘You can’t be in here,’ I said, which was nonsense, as he was very much in there already.
‘There are unisex toilets everywhere these days,’ he replied easily.
‘Yes, but this doesn’t happen to be one of them.’
I shot a glance towards the row of cubicles. The open doors revealed they were all empty and there was no one at the hand basins. For now, at least, we had the room to ourselves.
‘People will think we’re in here for another reason,’ I said, seizing on the first objection I could think of.
Rhys’s eyebrows rose.
‘What reason?’
He was so convincing I almost believed him.
‘You know what I’m talking about.’ I was a sexually experienced woman in her thirties who had no business blushing like a teenager, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. ‘They’ll think we’ve ducked in here for a quickie.’
‘I don’t do quickies,’ he said, his words stealing every sassy retort from my head. ‘Now, shall we get some ice on that sting?’
I drew in a deep breath before releasing my hold on the blanket, allowing it to fall to the tiled floor. My unzipped dress was hanging from one shoulder, revealing quite a lot of cleavage and a large inflamed area of skin that extended beneath the lace of my bra.
All at once it went very quiet in the Ladies’, with only the hum of the fluorescent lighting to mask the fact that one of us was breathing a little raggedly.
Maybe we both were. He felt it too. I know he did by the way he took a sudden jerky step backwards as though the bolt of lightning still arced between us.
I could see my breasts rising and falling as my breathing grew shallower.
‘Can you see where it stung you?’ His voice sounded different now.
I peeled the fabric of the bra cup away. The skin was bright red around an angry puncture mark.
I nodded.
‘Is the stinger still in it?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s hard to see from this angle.’
He’d taken a half step towards me before stopping. ‘Do you want me to look?’
It was a question with a hundred different answers, all of them probably wrong.
I nodded, not sure if I could trust my voice.
He stepped forward and I closed my eyes, too scared he’d see things within them that he wasn’t meant to know.
He didn’t touch me, and I truly don’t know if I was relieved or disappointed.
‘I think it’s fine,’ he said, his voice gruff. My eyes flew open, and he was already turning away and reaching for a small hand towel from a basket on the countertop. Taking a handful of ice, he dropped it onto the square, folding it up to make a compress.
‘Hold this against you. It should help with the pain and the swelling,’ he said, passing me the towel and then turning around again as I slid it onto the inflamed skin of my breast.
‘I think it was a bumblebee rather than a honey one,’ he told the wall tiles beside the hand drier. ‘Which is good because they don’t leave their stingers behind.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, then rashly decided to defuse the moment with humour. ‘I’d have hated having to ask anyone to suck out the venom.’
His shoulders twitched. ‘I think you’ll find that’s for snakebites.’
I had another quip at the ready, but it died in my throat when he added, ‘But, for the record, I don’t think there’d have been a shortage of volunteers to help you out.’
I wanted to ask if he’d have been one of them, but I wasn’t that reckless.
Leaving the icy pad inside my bra, I straightened my dress and zipped it back up.
‘All decent,’ I said.
Rhys turned back to face me. It was hard to be sure in this light, but he looked a little flushed.
‘You certainly seem to know a lot about bees.’
He shrugged. ‘You have to when your daughter is allergic to their sting and suffers from asthma.’
His words were a much-needed verbal bucket of cold water. There was a physical attraction here, we’d both be stupid to deny it. But it wasn’t going anywhere. It couldn’t. And if I had to repeat that mantra a thousand times before my traitorous body finally believed me, then so be it.
‘Well, that was another really interesting evening.’
I gave a chuff of amusement. ‘They do seem to be our speciality,’ I said, looking out through his car’s windscreen at my flat. I wasn’t going to invite him inside and I don’t think he expected me to.
We’d left the sexually charged atmosphere behind in the pub bathroom, but if it was haunting him the way it was me, I doubted either of us would get much sleep that night.
‘I’ve had a nice evening, Rhys. Thank you.’
‘Me too,’ he said, his expression hidden by the shadows of the car.
This was the moment, if it had been a date, where I would lean in or he would pull me towards him for a goodnight kiss.
And I was so scared that he would and so scared that he wouldn’t that I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough.
I fumbled with the unfamiliar door catch, but Rhys was already out of the driver’s seat and striding to open the door for me.
We stood on the pavement in a pool of light from a streetlamp, like actors on a stage.
His hands came up to rest lightly on my shoulders.
‘Take care of yourself, Ellie,’ he said, bending to graze a feather-soft kiss on my cheek. ‘Watch out for bees.’
‘You too,’ I said, my voice scarcely more than a whisper.
I turned to walk up my path, knowing his eyes would follow me until I was safely inside.
He’d wait for me to unlock the door and slip through it.
He probably wouldn’t move until he’d seen the lights go on in my flat.
That was the kind of man Rhys Davies was.
Don’t ask me how I knew that about him. I just did.