Chapter 21 #2
A blast of warmth and gently perfumed air envelops her as he opens the door to his hotel room.
What’s she doing here? What’s she thinking?
Scott leaves her at the threshold, starts to run a bath, and returns to the bedroom where she’s standing, shivering.
He peels off her soaked clothes, one item at a time, discarding the sodden material on the floor as he goes.
As he exposes Heather’s body, he rubs at her arms, embraces her in a bear hug and places warming kisses on her flesh.
‘Got to warm you up,’ he murmurs. His eyes are hooded but there’s an observable twitch in his cheek as he concentrates on the task.
Heather fights the inclination to melt into the strong undulations of his body. The sound of the wind rattling the glass in the hotel windows keeps her footed in practicalities. She grapples amongst the wet clothes on the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks, his forehead furrowing, as she rifles through her coat pockets.
‘Sorry. Not trying to kill the vibe. My phone.’ She holds it aloft once she finds it. ‘Just switching location devices off. Don’t want Georgia working out where I am.’
The small dimple in Scott’s chin deepens as he laughs. ‘How the tables have turned,’ he says.
Her frozen fingers can barely move, but eventually, she finds the app and disables her location devices, then hastily plugs her charger into a free socket by the bed.
Even in her highly turned on state, she’s not going to accept a battery life of below 13%.
She turns back to him as quickly as she possibly can.
Heather’s hands are inflexible with the cold, but once she’s down to her underwear she, in turn, removes clothing from Scott’s body.
Every exposed area of flesh renders her speechless.
She knows he works out and could probably jigsaw together the various parts of his body she’s seen exposed over the past few months, but seeing it together, an unveiled painting, in its true glory, practically takes her breath away.
She places a flat palm on his chest, absorbing his warmth and feeling the curve of his pectoral muscles beneath her hand.
She looks up at him, ‘A perfect fit,’ she whispers.
‘A perfect fit,’ he replies.
If his idea had been to warm her up in the bath, he had another think coming.
Heather can’t bear the thought of being apart from him for another second longer.
She pulls him closer, puts her arms around his shoulders, and slowly, slowly, clenches her abdominals to bring her legs around his waist. He walks them towards the luxuriously sheeted King Size bed and gradually lowers her down.
She melts into the soft goose down of the bedspread.
Her skin might be blue and cold to the touch, but inside, in the core of her body, she’s aware of a heat she’s seldom felt with such ferocity.
This man makes her alive, connected, whole.
Every muscle, every fibre of her being wants to feel him.
His fingers brush her hair to the side and his kisses move incrementally from her face and to her lips as though he knows instinctively what she needs.
She groans when he moves them away from her lips but shudders when they pass onto her collar bone, around her areoles and lower, towards her navel.
She interweaves her fingers through the tousled blond curls on his head and practically forces him lower.
She’s moaning his name, urging him to the place she most wants to feel the warm, probing insistence of his tongue. But he takes his time, teasing her and driving her into a near frenzy when finally, finally, he’s there. Right where she wants him.
Heather’s back rises into an arch. Any thought of bashfulness jettisons from her brain as it fills with the sheer ecstasy of Scott on her. Just at the point when Heather feels there’s nothing left to give to him, Scott places his hands on either side of her head and pulls his body above hers.
‘Do you—?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
It’s a passionate, desperate, frenzied yell. And within seconds, he’s where she needs him to be, moving gently until her mind and body dissociate, and she’s completely and utterly gone.
SCOTT
The bird song penetrating the hotel window tells Scott that last night’s storm has given way to a glorious morning.
He turns to face her. How often has he wondered what it would be like to watch her sleep?
He’d been curious to know if the dip between her eyebrows smoothed when she was relaxed.
He’d wondered if she was a pillow dribbler or a teeth grinder.
Or if she slept with her phone under her pillow in case news from Georgia required immediate intervention.
She’s none of these things. She’s calm, tranquil, the boundless possibilities for the future laid out on the smoothness of her skin and the unruffled softness of her forehead. Her hair is spread like a luxurious brown fan across the pillow.
‘What’s up?’ she says when she comes to.
Would it be crass and inappropriate to say: ‘I am?’ Because, man, oh, man. Last night was …
She props herself up on her elbow, exposing the gentle curve of her breast and kisses him softly on the mouth before he can respond.
The contact, half a square centimetre – maybe 0.
05% of his total body surface area – sends sensations shooting through his entire frame, signalling to every neurone, every blood vessel, every organ that she’s here, with him, and he wants her.
So, so, badly. But there’s something that must be said first. He needs to pull himself away from these thoughts and focus on the important thing.
‘There’s something I should have told you,’ he says. Because surely it must be time to tell her what’s happening in his world? A hint at the very least?
Heather shuffles higher onto the pillows and takes a glug from the glass by her side of the bed. ‘Sorry. Morning breath. Smells rank,’ she says. She swirls the water around her mouth, over her teeth. It’s the sweetest, most endearing movement.
‘Okay. Tell me,’ she says, returning the glass to the nightstand.
But before he can continue, Heather’s phone begins to vibrate from the place on the floor where she plugged it in last night.
Heather’s eyes go wide as she looks from Scott’s face and back to the phone.
It’s inevitable she’s going to answer. She slides her feet over the edge of the bed and sits, her back to him.
She has a perfect swimmer’s body. Her back is strong and muscular, her long hair skims her shoulder blades, which stand like a perfectly formed mountain range.
Within seconds, she’s pacing across the floor to her phone. He’d expected a little modesty but is thrilled that she embraces her nudity so brazenly in front of him. How did he not notice when they first met that she was so hot?
The atmosphere in the room changes the moment she sees Georgia’s name and slides to accept the call, which goes straight to loudspeaker.
‘Mum! Where are you? I can see your car in the car park, but your location’s not updating. We’re going to be late for Mr. Lafferty.’
Heather’s mouth drops, and Scott’s on his feet in an instant.
They’d been so caught up in each other they’d completely forgotten the appointment with the prospective landlord at 10 am.
Heather was meant to be driving up from Edinburgh this morning.
Scott glances at his watch. 9:50. He’s pulling on his boxers, mis-stepping his way into his jeans, pulling his t-shirt on inside out.
It’s still a little damp from the deluge last night and smells a little musty, but there’s no time to select a clean one from his case.
Heather puts the phone on the bed and begins dressing herself.
‘Sorry, love,’ she shouts in the general direction of the microphone as she pulls on her knickers, which Scott’s sure must still be sodden, up her thighs. ‘I arrived early. Went for a walk in town.’
Heather winces as she topples slightly while pulling her jeans on.
‘Scott’s not here, either,’ says Georgia. ‘B’s been trying to call him, but it’s going straight to voicemail. Mum, hurry. We’ll lose this house if we’re not there on time.’
‘Okay, look. I’ll swing past Scott’s hotel on my way past and see if he’s there. He’s maybe lost track of time over breakfast. We’ll be there in five. Promise.’
Heather places a hand on either side of her gaping mouth, presumably mortified by the lie. The blush which lingers on her cheeks when she removes her hands is, Scott thinks, adorable.
***
Scott’s no stranger to Estate Agent patter, he knows how images are enhanced to show a property in an exaggeratedly favourable light, but nothing prepares him for the facade on his daughter’s prospective second year home.
The rendering, which is grey and cracked, has broken away under the first-floor windows and is coated in a thin layer of green algae from the ground to knee height.
A rusted bike frame has been chucked in the front garden along with a shopping trolley which looks to be twenty or thirty years old.
Subconsciously, he and Heather take a step apart from each other as they come into the girls’ view.
‘Here you are. Finally,’ Brianna shouts when she notices him.
‘Muuuuum,’ wails Georgia, ‘we’re ten minutes late.’
He and Heather sneak a glance. As if neither of them has never been kept waiting by their girls over the years.
‘Sorry. Sorry, girls,’ Heather gives them both a hug which, Scott reckons, can count as a combined welcome from them both.
The front door of the property opens with a discernible squeak to reveal a man who appears to be an exaggerated 1980s caricature of a slime ball.
Pulled over his pot belly, the landlord is wearing a shiny, purple tracksuit in a material Scott thinks might be velour.
He’s wearing a baseball cap on his head and a greasy rat’s tail over his shoulder, which Scott can only assume is a carefully styled ponytail.