Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MAISIE
Maisie couldn’t be sure that her cold was just a cold and not in fact a fever, because Iain Howell moved around her flat like a hallucination, wearing bright-pink washing-up gloves and picking up tissues that she hadn’t had the energy to throw out.
He was here and he was … wearing a suit?
It must be a fever dream. Her mountain man didn’t own suits . He wore muddy boots and brown jumpers and waxy coats that could out-survive a hailstorm.
Her eyes traced the well-fitted material as he tidied her living room, his jacket and tie folded on the back of her desk chair. The unbuttoned collar of the white dress shirt exposed the thick column of his neck. Maisie was delirious enough in all her states of aches and pains to be mesmerised by the meatiness and the inch-wide tease of dark, shaven hair on his chest.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” she said through a stuffed nose which muddled all of her sounds into the wrong ones. “I haven’t had the energy to tidy anything up.”
“My place is worse.” Iain groaned as he raised himself to his feet, a bin-liner in his hand steadily filling with balls of tissues. By the way he was cleaning up her mess, Maisie didn’t think his house could possibly be worse than hers.
“Really?”
“Ted doesn’t understand picking his toys up after himself.”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s a good boy, aren’t you?” Ted lifted his head from her lap where they cuddled together on her sofa, simultaneously nudging his nose against her boob.
It was a no-bra day – she’d been too unwell to bother with one – which meant it was a free for all in terms of where her breasts decided to sit. As Maisie lay here on her cramped sofa, one tried to migrate under her armpit. At least she wore a loose-fitting hoodie which left a lot to the imagination. Or it would do, if Iain even looked at her with those kinds of thoughts. She was hardly a picture of desirability tonight. She definitely looked like a disaster. Her hair was greasy and doing its own thing in a slicked back ponytail she’d drawn too tight. She could actually feel her skin being dewy and clammed up. Her face was blotchy and completely make-up free – she hardly ever went without at least something around her eyes.
And her nose … Well, it dripped like the leaky tap in her bathroom.
The cold had been what had hit her first, coming on last night after her shower. As soon as her drowsy head had hit her pillow, she’d passed out. This morning, she’d thought the long night’s sleep had just resulted from general tiredness. But no, her uterus attacked with a vengeance too.
So here she was. Being waited on hand and foot by a male nurse in a snug blue suit.
Iain dropped the bin-liner within her reach and moved the nearly-empty box of tissues closer on the coffee table.
“I have the immunity of a goldfish,” Maisie whined as she reached to grab another one.
“That doesn’t make?—”
“It made sense to me , okay?” she bawled.
Iain tilted his head as he stood above her, his smile lopsided as he tugged off the pink rubber gloves.
“I think it was the walk,” Maisie added, closing her eyes to stop the overhead light behind him from worsening her headache. “I should’ve taken my ear warmers off when I got too warm.” The afterthought sent her into a sneezing fit.
“I’ve had that fever before,” Iain murmured.
A delicate touch on her forehead made Maisie open her watery eyes, finding the blurry form of the back of a hand hovering above her brows. Unable to keep her eyes open, she tried to swat him away, but her arms felt like lead. “I don’t want you to get sick too.”
Iain huffed one of his semi-reluctant chuckles. “I have the immunity of a brick.”
“Bricks crumble over time,” she uttered.
“Ah, but Lego bricks are indestructible.”
Maisie peeled open an eye. “You trying to say that if I stood on you, you’d hurt me?”
“More like we’d fit together with a click.”
She stared at him so tall above her, then scoffed her best attempt at a laugh. Yes, she was definitely delirious. “Was that a line?”
One cheek went round with the crooked way that Iain smiled. “Did it work?”
If she had more of her wits about her, it wouldn’t have done. “I didn’t know you had the ability to flirt.” She didn’t know if she was actually hearing it, or if any of this was real.
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know I can do, Daffy.”
That was something Iain shouldn’t have said when Maisie still wasn’t sure if he was a hallucination or not. Her mind only conjured up strange images – far too sexual ones – that she had to put a halt to. It took even more energy out of her to do so.
Looking down at her, Iain inhaled and let that breath go. “I’m going to put away the groceries Vera brought,” he said more earnestly, more like his usual gruff self, turning towards her tidy little kitchen.
She wasn’t surprised that Vera had given in so easily to letting Iain bring up the supplies, but how had their paths even crossed? They lived on opposite sides of town, so that meant Iain must’ve intercepted her outside, which also meant he must have purposefully come from work – like he’d said he’d done – to her street.
They hadn’t arranged to see each other tonight, so he wasn’t here because of their agreement. Which meant that he was here … for her .
As that thought sunk in through the fog in Maisie’s mind, Iain appeared from her kitchen with a block of cheddar and half a loaf of sourdough in each hand. “You hungry?”
Her stomach chose to grumble right then. “Yes.”
“Do you have ale? Or beer?”
“There should be a bottle in the fridge. Why?”
“Have you ever had rarebit before?”
Maisie’s lips pulled in a grimace. “We don’t typically eat rabbits in London.”
Iain laughed that rare, hearty sound. Why couldn’t he ever do it when she had her phone in her hand ready to record, just for some proof that she hadn’t made it up?
“No, rare-bit ,” he enunciated with a thicker accent. “It’s essentially cheese on toast with more alcohol involved.”
“Oh.” Maisie’s cheeks coloured at her misunderstanding.
Iain disappeared into her kitchen, and the sounds of cupboard doors being opened and shut made both her and Ted intrigued. Maisie rolled out from under her blanket and onto her feet, giving herself a few seconds for the protesting pain in her abdomen to dull to something less intolerable, before shuffling in her bed socks to see what Iain was looking for. Sometimes things hurt so much, especially all through her lower back, that she couldn’t even catch her breath, couldn’t stand straight or move her legs like normal.
Ted beat her to the kitchen and sniffed at the air where groceries and ingredients were spread across her countertop.
“What are you doing?” Maisie’s tongue lazily dragged through the question.
Iain didn’t pass her a glance as he searched every nook and cranny of her tiny kitchen that he took up most of the space of. “Breaking your rarebit virginity.”
“How do you figure that?” It was a great assumption to make – though her brain might’ve skipped the rarebit part.
“You called it rabbit .” He sent her a stern brow around a cupboard door. “You can’t even blame it on your accent.”
“I don’t have an ac- cent.” Maisie copied his intonation … or at least attempted to. Her Welsh was terrible even when her nose wasn’t blocked.
“Around here, Daffy,” Iain said with a bag of plain flour getting white powder all over his hand, “you do.”
Maisie glossed over discussing the fact that she was a Londoner through and through who certainly wasn’t in London anymore, trying to rake her mind for if she’d ever had a man cook for her before, unprovoked.
It wasn’t likely.
“Why do you keep on calling me Daffy?” The first time had been at Vera’s party, and she’d heard it at least ten times since.
Iain grabbed a frying pan from the drying rack beside her sink and inspected it. “That’s something for you to think about while I cook.”
“You can cook?”
“I subscribe to the general practice of staying alive.”
Maisie rolled her eyes and went back to the settee for a nap.
Alcohol didn’t go with the pain medications she’d taken, so to Iain’s dismay he made her a sober Welsh rarebit. She didn’t have much in the way of functioning taste buds, either, but she welcomed the food to appease her gnawing stomach nonetheless. When she finished her plate, he went out to her kitchen and came back with more.
“Dank you.” Her nose blocked every sound from her mouth.
“Eat as much as you want.”
She would. And the fact that he encouraged it did wonders for her confidence. If only more people would be that thoughtful at the dinner table with a plus-sized girlie.
Maisie could’ve kissed him for keeping her plate full – she didn’t care how inflamed her body might feel in the morning because of it. All the cheesiness of the sauce and the oozing oils were delicious, combined with the sourness of the bread. The diced spring onions must have come from the bags her grandma had brought.
The dining table that she did have she used as an extension of her desk where she created her jewellery and packaged them, so there wasn’t much space for Iain to sit other than the opposite end of her sofa with Ted’s arse shoved against his side. Maisie didn’t have the concentration to focus on the television so let him scroll through the guide. It didn’t pass her by that he scrolled towards the sporting channels as he wiped cheesy sauce from his moustache and beard.
He hadn’t said anything about leaving, yet.
Puzzled, Maisie outrightly stared at his profile. Why was he being so … caring? She already established that he wasn’t here for their fake date thing. He was under no obligation to coax her through her cold and ill-timed cramps. And honestly, seeing a mountain be as gentle as a stream made her want to crawl into his lap and be held tightly.
“You don’t need to hang around with me if you have plans,” she said, trying to sound gracious, “I don’t want you to get this cold too.” Iain hadn’t come too close to her, but he hadn’t quarantined himself across her flat, either.
“There’s a Six Nations game on tonight,” he answered to her get-out offer, lifting another round of rarebit to his mouth, “that’s my only plan.”
A rugby match. Maisie didn’t know what to say to that. She’d never been obsessed with a sport enough to spend an evening watching it on telly like it was religion. “Well … you can watch it here if you’d like. I was only going to try packaging orders, if I could move from the sofa, that is.”
Iain’s attention sliced to her and then to all her supplies spread across the tables and organised in their drawers. “How do you package them?”
“In little boxes with some shredded tissue and a thank you note,” she said, then noticed the increasing look of concentration on his features. “What’s that look on your face for?”
“How do you know what’s ordered?” Iain deposited his empty plate on the coffee table and brushed crumbs off his hands.
“The website gives a list. The label printer does the labels, and I just have to get the order right. It’s simple once you’ve been doing it for a while. Seriously, what’s that look for?”
Iain got to his feet and strode over to her desk, scanning the contents and flicking through her open box of pre-packaged jewellery sets. “Tell me how to do all this.”
Maisie frowned as his fingertip tapped a keyboard button and woke up her computer. “Huh? Why?”
“So you can rest.”
So she could …? Maisie could only stare at him, her mouth which she had to breathe through anyway hanging open. Packaging wasn’t difficult work, but it required concentration, and Iain had never done it before. He’d done enough for her tonight – he didn’t need to do her job for her, too.
Her heart ached all of a sudden.
This wasn’t a part of their deal.
Iain faced her, setting his hands on his hips. “As long as you don’t mind watching the rugby, I’ll do your packaging.”
So after a little instruction, she watched him, in disbelief of how his giant, rough fingers handled all of her delicate jewelleries and recyclable film pockets so carefully. He was a little slow but better than she was capable of being at that moment.
And she wondered what kind of woman would choose to let him go.