Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
MAISIE
“Everybody! This is my granddaughter.”
Maisie wanted to crawl back into Vera’s rust bucket of a Vauxhall Corsa, feeling like a lone chip on a seafront bench with a flock of seagulls all flapping their wings to get to her.
She was all up for making friends whilst she was here; she couldn’t exactly let herself turn into a hermit who never left the house; but nowhere – nowhere – in the last twelve hours since she’d been ambushed in the bath had Vera mentioned that the entirety of her hiking group was made up exclusively of over-sixty retirees.
Then again, why should she have expected anything different?
They all looked at her with bright eyes as though on the verge of saying ‘my oh my, how much you’ve grown’, a mix of faces and statures with a common theme of grey hair.
“Hi.” Maisie tried to wave, pulling on a nice smile that Vera would be proud of, but she felt her personality sliding to the ground and back to the car. She’d agreed to this thinking that maybe she’d be going on little jaunts and strolls along the coastline and neighbouring hills, but one look at every rucksack, waterproof layer, and hiking stick, and she knew she was wrong. Suddenly she was way out of her depth before she’d even left Aber’s promenade.
“Maisie wanted to join us all today,” Vera announced.
Maisie didn’t.
Maisie wanted to go home, put on her comfiest clothes, some music, and get on with making jewellery. She wasn’t built for … this.
Walking in London consisted of dodging litter on the ground and avoiding bumping shoulders with every single person imaginable. She hated trying to get on the tube even at the best of off-peak travel. Those underground stations were stuffy all the time and grew extremely warm when crowded. Nobody liked that. Maisie certainly didn’t. She’d always said that her body ran warm which she didn’t entirely discount was due to her size. She’d learned what fabrics to wear to help her skin breathe and generally to avoid becoming a sardine in the Underground’s can as much as possible, but as soon as her boobs started sweating like an introvert in a nightclub, it was game over.
Now, suddenly, she had eleven brand new faces (plus Ronnie) all coming up to her, hugging her, and telling her names that she was going to have forgotten in five minutes if the freezing wind hurtling off the bay didn’t blow them away first. The sea of thickly Welsh accents which she still wasn’t used to hearing in such concentration hit her with a pang of nostalgia from childhood summers here.
Beside them, brave souls braced the cold to walk along the pebbly beach as the tide drew out to sea.
Why did you say yes, Maise? Why?
With the round of introductions complete, she was ushered down the promenade to where a minibus had parked fifty feet from the pier, the driver sipping from a Thermos and patiently waiting for the group to pile in. She waited at the back of the line, glancing inside to try and figure out what the seating situation was like whilst she tore into a plastic-wrapped croissant . Bash, her half-French friend, would have a fit if he saw her eating one that was shop-bought from a multipack, but she’d overslept and rushed straight past breakfast to get here for this ungodly hour of eight-thirty on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t exactly polite to eat something so flaky in a vehicle that wasn’t hers, so this was her only chance if she wanted to stop her belly from protesting.
The woman in front of her – Molly? Mabel? – drew a travel mug from the pocket of her bright-purple backpack ready to carry on board. “Damn thing is leaking again,” she mumbled, tightening and loosening the lid on the mug before she climbed her way up the couple of steps onto the minibus.
Maisie figured it’d be easier to manoeuvre inside without her borrowed backpack, complete with extra straps and a pocket for every single item that she had thought to bring, being on her back. It weighed in one hand whilst the croissant was gripped in her other as she began up the minibus’ steps.
“Does anyone have a tissue at hand?” Molly/Mabel called out at the top of the steps. “This useless thing is dripping tea everywh?—”
From behind her, someone ripped Maisie’s pastry out of her grasp. “Hey!”
“Ted!” A masculine boom.
Now, this would have all been fine; Maisie could have caught herself on the thin handrail if it was on the side that she didn’t hold her backpack, or if she’d have spotted the pool of peppermint-scented tea on the linoleum step before her brand new boot found it first. She slipped before she even had a chance to do anything at all, and gravity took the reins. Molly/Mable startled at her yell as Maisie free-fell backwards towards the pavement.
So this was how she was going to die? She’d thought that maybe it’d be the hike that ended her, but she hadn’t even made it onto the bus, first.
Heart exploding into a rhythm it might never have experienced before, Maisie braced for her body to smack the ground and for her head to really, really hurt. But she stopped falling, as if gravity had given one tug at her and given up. Her shoulder blades pushed down into something sturdy that came with giant hands under her arms and a cloud of warm breath on the back of her neck.
“Woah, hey—you alright?” A deep, Welsh-accented rumble.
Okay, so she might not have died from falling, but she could have from the gasp that emptied every sac of air in her lungs.
“You okay?” whoever he was that held her up asked again. His hands were still wrapped on her waist, under her arms with a grip that was definitely more purposeful than how any man had handled her in the last seven months, and her body had gone limp within them.
“Oh. Yes. Sorry .” Maisie levered forwards back onto her feet, grabbing the handrail like it was a life raft. “Sorry.” Avoiding the driver’s gaze, she twisted with both feet firmly planted on the step to put a face to the voice that had helped her and— holy macaroni.
She locked eyes with the mountain of a man, and her tongue swiftly tied. He could steal her breakfast out of her hand again and Maisie would do something insane like thank him. He looked older, mid-thirties if the creases at the corner of his eyes meant anything, jaw roughened by a dark beard. He’d held her up without struggle, which was enough to send a tickle of something down Maisie’s spine before embarrassment took its place. And she could see then exactly how he’d not let her fall .
Those arms under a brown, waxed jacket …
Aaaaaaand now she was staring.
Mountain Man bent and picked up the discarded wrapping of what had been her croissant, and only then did she see it was a dog who’d stolen her breakfast.
“Ted,” Mountain Man muttered, disappointed. He looked at her and his green eyes were full of embarrassment. “Sorry about him.” He gestured down at the large, wiry brown dog with a comically long moustache from its snout.
People often say that dogs look like their owners, and these two looked as though one had perhaps been the other in a previous life. Ted, sitting proud, didn’t seem to care that his owner had just saved her from falling because he himself had nabbed her pastry in the process. Mountain Man’s brow was just as unimpressed.
Maisie let the unintelligible mutters from inside the bus pass her by.
“Excuse his aloofness. He doesn’t care for anything except treats.” The dog’s head snapped up and tilted at the magic word. “Including your breakfast, I assume.” Mountain Man held the clear wrapper as if he didn’t know whether to give it back to her, empty, or scrunch it into his own pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “I have supplies if you’re hungry, or I can buy you lunch when we stop on the walk.”
Maisie found enough sense to untie her tongue. His apology had mostly gone in through one of her ears and out of the other. She didn’t know what to say to such a face as his, one with a bump in his nose like it’d been broken once and creases on his forehead that may just be from how he was yet to stop frowning. Her reaction didn’t make any sense at all. Rough and rugged-looking had never been her type; her last boyfriend had worn gingham bow ties to work.
Gingham. Bow ties.
“It’s … okay.” Maisie managed to keep some semblance of brightness. “I have another in my backpack, so long as Ted doesn’t sneak his nose in.” She gave the dog a glance and swore that he raised an overgrown eyebrow at her in a challenge.
“I promise he won’t.”
Her gaze fell. “Is he … Is he wearing boots?”
Mountain Man shrugged and stuffed the plastic wrapping into his coat pocket. “Keeps his paws clean.”
“And silent,” Maisie said under her breath. Her heart rate had just about returned to normal. As normal as it could be when flustered because a man – this man – had saved her.
Whatever happened to feminism? To women saving themselves? Not even Maisie’s mass of red curls would’ve protected her head from that backwards fall, so she let all ideology of being a modern woman fly away from her mind as he stared at her.
“Moo Moo?”
No. Dear god, no. Not the ‘Moo Moo’.
Mountain Man’s brow twitched, and Maisie stifled a groan.
“Is everything okay?” Vera leant around the seats at the very top of the steps.
“I’m great.” Maisie let out a nervous chuckle and wrangled her backpack, determined to get up the steps without another incident and hide away at the back of the bus. “Just slipped.”
“We saw Iain catch you.”
Two thoughts came to mind: first, wasn’t that just peachy? and second, Iain. Mountain Man’s name was Iain. And he apparently wasn’t a stranger.
Dots of dried dirt littered his worn jacket, and his leathered hiking boots were discoloured in places. Maisie should’ve realised a lot sooner that he was with the group, though age–wise he didn’t fit in at all. “When we stop on the walk” he’d said – she should’ve figured it out then, but her mind had been elsewhere, namely on those earthy eyes that felt like they studied her far beneath just her skin.
Maisie trudged up the steps and bypassed the strange look on the driver’s face, answering her grandma. “Yes, he was very …” Strong. “Kind.”
Boots treaded up the steps behind her. She hadn’t stood level with Iain, but she just knew that he was at least half a foot taller than her, and she was a decent five foot seven for a woman. A fact that became painfully obvious when she stopped dead at the start of the aisle between the seating, and Iain had no choice but to crowd behind her. She felt his presence even if no inch of their bodies touched, which sent her hormones into a little bit of a touch-deprived overdrive.
Oh god. It was like she was the last salty chip at the beach again. Every single seat bar two next to each other in the middle of the bus were occupied, and every single one of them had faces that zeroed in on her. It just had to be a capacity fifteen minibus, didn’t it?
“Why don’t you sit with Iain?” Vera ushered as she wriggled back to her seat next to Ronnie.
An enclosed space for however long this drive took with a man she’d only met one minute ago? Sure. Maisie didn’t sweat from the idea at all. And she didn’t really have a choice.
Her cheeks were impossibly hot as she bumbled onwards, having to crab sideways slightly as she went, and sat down, claiming the only available window seat so that Ted could lie down beside Iain in the aisle. Then there was the urgent decision of what to do with her backpack. She left it sitting on her knees and tried not to glance as Iain folded himself down into his seat beside her. Unfortunately, Maisie couldn’t exactly stop the thickness of her hips from invading his space.
So there they were. Pressed awkwardly side by side. Two relative youngsters in a bus full of septuagenarians.
Wonderful .
The minibus rumbled into life and drove north up the promenade, past tall Victorian seafront hotels and multicoloured terrace buildings. Maisie could make out the railway she used to take up the cliff to the top of Constitution Hill as a child with Vera and her taid . Coming from London, it used to be the first thing she and her brothers would do when they visited, and it always fascinated her how on a clear day she could see for hundreds of miles from the top in every direction along the coast.
She didn’t get those kinds of views anymore.
After five minutes of driving out of town, Iain still hadn’t said anything. Maisie was sure that he was trying to give her space, but this was going to be an agonising journey if she didn’t make conversation.
“What breed is Ted?” she asked, clutching at straws to keep herself composed. Normally simple conversations like these happened before a man had had his hands on her.
Iain’s head whipped as though he hadn’t expected to hear her voice. “Huh?” Did he need her to repeat herself? “He’s a German Wirehaired Pointer. Five years old.”
His hand moved from his lap to scratch Ted between the ears, drawing Maisie’s attention down. She wished that she hadn’t looked, catching how the green-brown technical fabric of Iain’s outdoor trousers laden with exterior pockets and zips strained against his thighs.
So he worked out too as well as looking like he did facially. That was … nice.
She forced herself to swallow. “Do you always bring him on hikes?”
“He loves it.” Iain was quiet for a second, any expression hidden by his thick beard. Then he turned on her. “Who are you?”
Maisie startled at the bluntness. “Pardon?”
A couple of the elders in the rows in front of them definitely leaned back into their seats.
“I assume ‘Moo Moo’ isn’t your real name?”
Her eyes widened as her stomach fell with embarrassment. She’d hoped to forget that he knew about that.
Okay, it’s fine. Just start over. “I’m Maisie, Vera Moss’ granddaughter. I just moved in with her.” Which made her sound thoroughly pathetic for her age.
Iain got a look in his pinched eyes— would he stop scowling for just one second —and hummed. “That makes sense.”
Maisie recoiled. “What does?”
“Vera talks about you,” he said. “A lot.”
Her trousers rustled as she shifted. “She does?”
A deep sort of grunt was what she received in return. More like a wordless rumble. It wasn’t rude, but a sound that made her suspect the man who her entire side was pressed up against was very much a ‘keeps to himself’ kind of guy.
Iain faced forwards as the bus rattled out of town, being driven like a sports car instead of the metal tin it actually was. Was he going to say anything else? Maybe tell her what her nain said about her since he’d apparently heard a lot? How could she go about prodding him gently?
“Good things, I hope.”
His eyes flicked to her. “That depends on your definition of ‘good’.”
Coming from anyone else, Maisie would’ve expected an impish grin and a meaningful look, but that statement from Iain only filled her with dread. “I’m scared to even ask, now.”
“You could say that everyone here knows you broke up with your boyfriend seven months ago.”
Well wasn’t that just fantastic. It wasn’t her work or her jewellery business that her nain gossiped about, it was her dating history.
“This is terrible,” Maisie uttered. She rubbed at her face before remembering that her eyelashes were coated in mascara and ripped her hand away.
“You’re from London.” Was that a question to steer the conversation away from her horrid dating life, or the start of Iain telling her everything else that he knew about her? “What’s that like?”
A question, then.
“Have you ever been?” Her gaze wandered up to his hair which was considerably shorter and more salt-and-peppery on the sides than it was on top. Her earlier guess that he was in his mid-thirties seemed more correct.
“Once,” he said. “Wasn’t my cup of tea. I guess if you live there, you must see it differently.”
“It’s everything that you’d imagine. Loud. Busy.” But it was home. It was all she’d ever really known.
“Is that why you’ve moved here instead?”
Maisie checked to see how many seats ahead of her Vera and Ronnie were. They were far enough out of earshot, but she couldn’t trust that Molly/Mabel across from Iain, or any of the other grey heads around her, wouldn’t relay her answer back to them.
“Not completely. The short version of the story is that I’m a web designer.” Maisie stuck to the script that she’d prepared for anyone who asked. “I design websites for e-commerce, smaller businesses and such. I’m completely remote and fancied a change of scenery. Which is why I’m able to move here and be closer to Nain .”
Iain didn’t respond; she didn’t expect him to. His hand stayed dropped down by his side where she assumed he stroked Ted.
The minibus chugged along under the shaded cover of trees from the woodland around them. The elders of the group chatted amongst themselves while Maisie still had trouble stopping herself from yawning with the early start to her Saturday. At least they hadn’t started singing yet. There was always a chance with Vera being on board.
A particularly sharp bend in the road slung her against Iain with a squeak. Her backpack toppled over into his lap, and judging by the stifled, pained noise that came from him, the metal water bottle in the side pocket hit him somewhere most unfortunate.
“Shi—I’m so sor?—”
Her luck ran out when another bend in the road taken too quickly flung Iain into her and her into the window. They were pressed side to side tightly enough for Maisie to recognise how he shifted his hips in the narrow seat. Internally, she grimaced and grabbed her backpack from his lap.
Iain’s eyes stayed closed as his breaths held more of a rumble. Should she ask if he was alright? Was it too early into their acquaintance to be concerned for the wellbeing of whatever he had going on beneath his trousers that her filled-to-the-brim water bottle had hit?
Yes. Definitely. It definitely was.
Maisie wrapped her arms around the backpack and hugged it against her chest, hoping to hide behind it for the rest of the journey.
But she could only bare the hiding for a minute, hoping instead that conversation might quell the awkwardness. “Do you know where we’re hiking today?”
“From Borth back to Aber. Should only take a couple of hours.”
“Borth … That’s another beach town, isn’t it?”
Iain made that same affirmative noise as earlier. If she held her phone out and recorded those grunts of replies, then maybe Google Translate could interpret them for her.
“I haven’t been for a while.” Maisie shifted her gaze to the windows across the bus where she could make out a sliver of ocean on the horizon. “I haven’t been anywhere around here for a while, actually.”
Iain turned his chin and looked at her as if there was something more to be said. She realised that he knew far too much about her for the minutes they’d known one another, and she knew next to nothing about him.
“How did you get involved with the group?” she asked. “No offence, but unless you’ve had some pretty impressive surgery, I’d say you’re about half the age of everyone else here.”
Was that a smile that twitched on his lips?
Iain turned his face fully to her, and Maisie’s pulse quivered. He was rugged in a way she’d never had the attention of before from a man, and she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to react, feeling a little like a moth being drawn to a flame.
“I could say the same for you,” he said.
“I didn’t expect to be the odd one out.” In several ways . “I’m a little glad that I’m not.” These people weren’t exactly the kind of ‘friends’ she’d envisioned meeting when Vera had pushed her into coming.
Maisie wondered briefly what her friends back home would be doing right now. Faye and Bash would both be snuggled together either in Bash’s mansion of a London townhouse or Faye’s new Manchester flat, now that she’d made her life easier by handing over the reins of her bakeries to an assistant at the weekends. Sienna would be opening up the florist shop where she worked, and Freddy would likely be cramming in an hour of work on children’s illustrations while simultaneously preparing his two young nephews for whatever activity they had today.
She didn’t expect Iain to answer the question she’d half-forgotten she’d asked, but he did.
“I was sick last year, couldn’t walk Ted for a couple of weeks. I posted in an online forum for Aber asking if anyone could help me out. Malc over there responded and walked Ted twice a day for me.”
That was a lot of words, more than he’d given her so far, but he said them all with such a straight face that Maisie didn’t entirely know what to make of them. “That’s kind.”
“He did me a favour those weeks,” Iain continued, and she couldn’t have been more silently shocked. “Told me about this group one evening when he dropped Ted off and asked if he could take Ted on the walk. He did. Then when I was better, Malc invited me too. Been rambling ever since.”
Their arms and hips were still pressed together and a small bump in the road made Maisie realise that this drive was the longest stretch of physical contact she’d had with anyone in – as Iain had so kindly reminded her – seven months.
“Did Vera have anything to do with you joining today by any chance?” he asked.
Maisie rolled her eyes and didn’t bother lowering her voice, even though it felt like the entire bus listened to their conversation. “She had everything to do with it. Even with a broken wrist she strong-armed me into coming today.”
“Well it’s nice to have another under-forty here.” Iain said so in such a deep, serious tone that it was hard to tell if the sentiment was real or not. “I’m glad you came.”
Butterflies swarming her stomach weren’t on the agenda for the morning, but they came anyway.
She held his gaze, somehow, raising an eyebrow. “You won’t be saying that when you have to drag me along the home stretch.”
“I’ll carry you instead.”
“You couldn’t.”
Iain passed a glance down her in a clean, slow sweep. “Don’t be so sure about that.”
Well … damn. Maisie only needed to take one look at him to believe his confidence. She drew in a breath and inadvertently pressed her thighs together, blush rising to her cheeks.
Something happened within her at those six words. No ex-boyfriend of hers had ever made her close to confident that if she jumped up, they could catch her. And here Iain was, a stranger , getting her all hot and tingly at the prospect of being carried across land for miles like some kind of mediaeval princess.
Maisie turned her face to the window, and the force of her grin hurt her face.
She wasn’t in Wales to date or dally with another man who would end up letting her down, but maybe having a rugged and rough mountain man temporarily sweep her off her feet wouldn’t hurt her plans.