Chapter 14 #2
‘I want…’ My voice catches. ‘I want to stop running. I want to remember what it feels like to be real. To be me. And I don’t know where else to do that than here.’
His eyes drop to my mouth, then back to my eyes. The air between us feels charged, electric.
‘Isla,’ he whispers, and it’s a little bit tortured, a little bit memory, a little bit fantasy.
I don’t think. I just move.
My hands find his face, fingers sliding through damp beard, and then my mouth is on his – warm, certain, shaking.
He stills. One breath. Two. Then – he breaks.
His arms come around me hard, lifting, pressing me back against the counter. His mouth claims mine with heat and urgency that makes me gasp. It’s not careful. It’s not sweet. It’s raw, unfiltered need.
His hands thread into my hair. A sound – half groan, half my name – spills between us, and I’m lost in it.
I press closer, wanting the weight of him, the solidity. The grounding. He tastes like rain and tea and the kind of promise no one makes out loud.
Everything else disappears. My foot. The press. Marcus. All of it. Gone.
Just us. This kitchen. This kiss. The sea in our blood and the past in our bones.
When we finally break apart, breathing hard, he rests his forehead against mine.
‘Isla,’ he breathes – and the way he says it, it’s not a name. It’s a place.
I grip his shirt, needing something to hold on to. ‘Don’t apologise.’
His eyes open, blue and burning. ‘I wasn’t going to.’
Then he kisses me again. Slower. Deeper. Devastation wrapped in tenderness. And I let it all go. My edges. My armour. My fear.
Until my phone rings and we both break apart to glance down at the screen, where an image of Reid Usher and me at an awards ceremony, arms wrapped tight around one another, flashes with almost cruel brilliance.
Kit steps back, looking between me and the phone. ‘I forgot you had a boyfriend.’ The lines on his face are back to cold indifference.
‘Kit, it’s not—’
A shrill, urgent wail cuts through the air.
Not a phone. Not a car alarm.
The RNLI signal. I haven’t heard it in so long I’ve almost forgotten it existed.
His hand is already reaching for his phone.
‘Harding,’ he answers, voice clipped, urgent. ‘Where? How many?’
He’s already moving, grabbing his jacket from the hook by the door, soaked through and waiting.
‘Kit, we need to talk.’
‘Fishing boat capsized. Pencarrow Point. Three missing.’ His eyes meet mine – tight, haunted. ‘And I believe your boyfriend is trying to call you.’
He nods to my phone, but I don’t miss the tic in his cheek, the grind of his teeth.
My phone is dancing again with a six-month-old version of me and the life I used to own.
‘Kit—’ But he’s gone, storming out of the back door.
I close my eyes. Fingers pressed to my lips.
I kissed him, and he kissed me back.
My phone starts trilling again. This time I swipe. ‘Reid?’
‘Babe, how are you?’
‘Fucking marvellous. You?’
There’s a pause. ‘Isla, I’m sorry. You know what it’s like, everyone has advice to give, an opinion. I just thought if we lai—’
‘No, Reid. Just no.’
‘Isla, come on.’
I slide down the kitchen cabinets until I’m on the cold, tiled floor. ‘Did you know? Did you guess?’
‘Of course not, I’m not a complete arsehole.’
I think of him, probably all tanned and golden, sitting on his veranda in Malibu, green juice and iPad on the pristine white table in front of him.
And I think about me, the woman who once sat opposite him, nibbling a quarter of toast, empty.
Like a seashell that’s been dragged in by a dangerous current, hollow on the inside, shiny on the out, stranded at high tide in a foreign land.
‘But you were happy to write a statement in support of Marcus.’
‘You think I wrote that? Come off it, Isla.’
‘But you let it go out under your name. The whole world thought we were together and you took the side of the man who—’
‘We are together, babe. You and me. This will blow over, you can come back, and then—’
‘And then nothing,’ I cut in. ‘Nothing. Goodbye, Reid.’
I hang up, and lean my head back against Maggie’s canary-yellow kitchen cabinet, my tears landing with the hammering in time with the gathering storm outside.
The wind sounds like something alive, breathing and howling against Maggie’s cottage windows.
Each gust seems stronger than the last, finding new cracks to whistle through, testing Kit’s repair job with vindictive glee.
Rain lashes horizontally, bullets of water striking glass with such force I keep expecting something to shatter.
I’ve tried everything to distract myself. But all I can think about is Kit out there on that furious sea.
Kit Harding. Rushing into danger like it’s his job. Well, it is his job. Volunteer job, unpaid. Kit Harding risking his life for strangers because that’s who he is.
Meanwhile, I can’t even answer my agent’s calls.
I check the time again. Two hours since the siren. Two hours since Kit raced out the door with that look on his face – a mixture of fear and determination that I recognise from years ago, because his dad used to wear the same one when the alarm went off.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I mutter to myself, pacing the small sitting room again. My ankle throbs with each step. Even walking on a busted ankle feels like too big a risk these days. Meanwhile, Kit’s out there battling twenty-foot waves and gale-force winds.
I hobble to the window for the hundredth time, pressing my forehead against the cool glass, trying to see through the darkness towards the harbour. Nothing but blackness and sheets of rain. No sign of boat lights returning.
The scenarios playing through my head are cinematic in their horror – waves crashing over the sides, Kit swept overboard, Kit trapped beneath the capsized boat, Kit’s body washing up on shore tomorrow morning.
‘Stop it,’ I tell myself sharply. ‘Just stop.’
But I can’t.
My phone rings. Richard again. I actually reach for it this time, desperate for distraction, but something stops me. How can I discuss lighting choices for a Vogue cover shoot while Kit might be drowning?
The thought propels me from the window. Before I can reconsider, I’m pulling on Maggie’s ancient yellow raincoat hanging on a hook in the utility room.
It smells faintly of her lavender sachets and sea salt.
In the boot room, I wiggle my foot into the wellies, wincing as my foot pulsates beneath the rubber.
‘Fuck. Shit.’ My words echo back at me from the rough walls, only to be swallowed up by a scream of wind that rattles the windows.
The gale nearly rips the door from my hands as I step outside. Rain instantly slaps my face, needle-sharp and freezing. I pull the hood tighter and hobble down the path, my ankle protesting with each step.
God, this is stupid. What exactly is my plan? To stand on the harbour wall watching for the lifeboat? To get blown into the sea myself? But I can’t stay in that cottage a minute longer, pacing and imagining the worst.
The village is eerily deserted, windows glowing warmly behind drawn curtains. Only a madwoman would be out in this. And yet, as I round the corner towards the harbour, I see a flash of light from the Lavender Café.