Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MAISIE
“For once, I know where we are,” she said as soon as she jumped down from the minibus in Aberdyfi . “God, I’ve missed coming here so much. My taid used to drive us up here when we were young. We’d set a blanket out on the sand and toss a ball around until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore.”
“Sounds like a good day.” Iain joined her with Ted, looking out at the perfect sand and grassy dunes. No pebbled beach in sight, here.
“It was,” Maisie affirmed, “especially in summer. The sand and the view are just incredible here.”
“Well you’ve got this view for the next four miles.”
She spun. “Really?”
Gesturing inland at the half-dried estuary where the river was low, Iain said, “Tide’s out. You’ve got four miles of sand and ocean views up to Tywyn .”
Maisie didn’t need any more convincing to get moving. She took Ted’s lead from him and powered down to the seafront with the dog skipping at her heels, listening to the low rumble of Iain’s laughter fading behind her.
What he’d offered to do for her on the drive here had left her in a little bit of an emotional wreck. She hadn’t been hankering for his help, but he’d given it unprompted, and she’d called Faye straightaway to say that she’d be able to go to Baked ’s opening without elaborating on how she’d be getting there – Faye would only have a million questions that Maisie wasn’t sure she was ready to answer.
Her agreement to only be friends with Iain said one thing, yet when he looked at her like he had done at Vera’s party, her body gave a different reaction. How he’d stood so close behind her, and the shudder she’d felt when his breath had ghosted along her skin – there was too much to be read into, and she’d rather keep those untimely feelings to herself before they snowballed into something she couldn’t shake off.
The entire stretch of soft sand up to where they left the beach before they’d end up trapped between the groynes on Tywyn’s seafront, was gorgeous. Typically breezy and overcast but exactly as Maisie remembered as she walked wide-eyed along the quiet shore. And for once there’d been no hills for her to deal with – her knees thanked her very much.
They’d purposefully gotten ahead of the group, if not just to curb Ted’s enthusiasm to run free, but so that when Iain slipped his hand into hers, every single one of Vera’s friends could see it.
Step two of the plan to convincingly fake date: obvious affection.
Tick.
Though Maisie’s pulse still hadn’t slowed down from the shock of Iain’s skin against her palm, the way he’d taken her hand between them so casually like he’d done it a thousand times. She hadn’t said anything because, above all, it felt right. His massive hand engulfing hers, his big body shielding hers from the salty wind blowing in from out at sea.
More than that, Iain didn’t back off. Like it was natural to be so close willingly.
Eighty minutes after setting off, their hands were still joined as they walked through the town to a spot where Iain promised her ice cream. Who cared if it was ten degrees and eleven in the morning? The folk here ate frozen desserts in all weather.
The ice cream shop was surrounded by locals perched on the stone seating and picnic benches outside. Seagulls wandered across the rooftop angling for a snack, and the hoisted red dragon of Wales buffered in the wind.
A sign on the entrance window listed the flavours of the day.
“They have whiskey ice cream?” Maisie was half doubtful and half intrigued.
“ Oes. ? * They do,” Iain said. “But you’re not here for that, Daffy.”
Her eyes narrowed on him. “Am I not allowed to choose my own flavour?”
“Just trust me on this.”
“Fine.” Maisie folded her arms beneath her breasts and pretended not to notice the downward flick of Iain’s gaze.
He shifted Ted’s lead in his hand and passed it to her. “Hold Ted.”
“ Please wouldn’t go amiss.” Maisie lowered her tone as a subtle reminder that they were supposed to be pretending they’re sweet on each other. Though Iain went one step further and cupped her cheek in his hand, engulfing her jaw right as their group funnelled into the shop two feet away.
“Please, Maisie, trust me?”
One of the ladies gasped.
Of all the eyes in the world, the dark-green in Iain’s might’ve been the most beautiful green Maisie had ever seen. Like moss on a sturdy, old stone wall, or fern leaves in a forest.
The fight within her ebbed as his palm warmed her cheek. “Okay.”
Iain lingered for a moment, a breath of air passing between them, then his touch fell away and a tiny creature inside of Maisie shed a tear at the loss.
She moved herself and Ted over to the patch of grass at the side of the isolated building, facing out to the fields beyond the car park while Iain disappeared inside. She shrugged off her backpack and dropped it on the grass to give her spine a rest.
Minutes later, Iain emerged alongside the rest of the hiking group with two simple wafer cones topped with a generous swirl of soft, white ice cream.
“This is what you’ve been bragging about?” she said as he handed her a cone, their fingers skimming over one another’s.
“ This , Daffy, is the best honey ice cream you’ll ever taste.” Iain didn’t touch his yet, Ted using him as a climbing pole to try for a sniff.
“If you say so.” Iain’s gaze stayed put on her mouth while Maisie tasted the tip, and it was— “Oh my god.” She licked up the side for more. “That’s incredible.”
A low noise came from the chest in front of her as Iain popped out a crick in his neck. “Stop. That,” he said, his voice all low and gravelly.
“Why?”
“There are children present.”
Maisie looked around at the young families and grandparents with their grandchildren. “So?”
He turned away from her, the wafer in his hand looking close to breaking. “Forget it.”
The sense of being watched made Maisie look towards the rest of their group all squished around a picnic bench. That awkward tickle along the side of her face hadn’t been wrong – Vera led the charge in pretending not to be openly staring at them over here.
With Ted’s lead looped over her wrist, she took Iain’s other hand.
“What are you doing?”
Wouldn’t he ever just trust her?
“Dragging you off to pretend like we’re having a flirty conversation,” Maisie said as she walked backwards, as if their current conversation wasn’t halfway there already with his grumbling about her appreciative sounds.
It was entirely inappropriate to wonder what kind of woman it’d take for him to be … loud.
Iain’s tense shoulders shifted when he understood her meaning, his body loosening as he followed her lead. “Flirty, hm?”
“Preferably.”
Maisie backed herself against the grey wall before the undercurrent of nerves in her system could get the better of her. It wasn’t fear, but rather excitement; the consequential eyes on them be damned.
It’s all pretend.
Pretend.
Pretend.
But bloody hell she didn’t foresee what was coming for her.
Iain slipped his hand out of hers and placed it on the wall right beside her head, leaning over her as he swirled his tongue around the head of his ice cream. Her eyes fell to his mouth, and her lungs filled as his truly excellent lips rolled the white, creamy traces off of them, sending one delicate tingle through her body.
This wasn’t what Maisie had been expecting. There was flirty and then there was … this.
“What did you want to pretend to talk about?” His voice was something distant in her distracted ear.
Maisie swallowed down hard. “We need to orchestrate a breakup.” Iain’s brows raised and wrinkled at the words she’d blurted. “ Nain made me go to lunch yesterday, and all of the women were grilling me about you,” she said. “I couldn’t do it. You need to break up with me.”
This whole plan had been her idea but already it was too much. If they carried on this way – him being broody and touchy and her falling for it – then she would fall for him. That wasn’t on the cards. Absolutely not possible. Iain wouldn’t reciprocate the feeling, he’d said that he couldn’t , so it just wasn’t fair.
“Why do I have to be the prick?” he demanded, albeit quietly.
“You expect them to believe that I would break up with you …? Wait, maybe that’s better? I won’t get any pitying looks if I was the one to end this.”
“But it’s fine that I get them instead?”
Maisie popped her hip, careless about how loud she was. “Oh please – you’re the man. They’ll look at you and tell you that you’ll bounce right back. They’d look at me and tell me how it’s such a shame that another nice one has gotten away from me. It’ll be a nightmare.” She couldn’t have laid out double standard for him any clearer.
Slowly Iain drew back and gave her space, still licking his ice cream like Maisie wished someone would her?—
“Fine. When do you want to do this?” he asked.
“It needs to be when they’ll all be around to hear about it.”
“Tomorrow?”
“That’s Valentine’s Day.”
“So?” Iain said flatly, his shoulders tense again.
“You’re going to be that guy who breaks up with his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day?” Maisie hoped she was wrong. “Do you want them to hate you?”
“I thought you were going to break up with me in this scenario?”
“ Agh . Right.” The ice cream melted down her finger and Maisie cleaned it up with her tongue. There wasn’t going to be a right way out of this; not one which quelled more questions than it stirred.
Iain brushed the tread of his boot across the grass. “Our Valentine’s Day was last month, anyway,” he said.
“Huh?” Maisie was sure that of all things, the current date wasn’t something she’d get wrong.
“ Dydd Santes Dwynwen ,? * ” Iain elaborated, “the Welsh day of love, is January twenty-fifth.”
Twenty-fifth of January. Why did that date ring a bell in the back of Maisie’s brain?
“You didn’t celebrate?” she assumed.
Iain cocked his head, giving her another of his dry looks. “What do you think?” The answer was as clear as crystal on his face. “I was helping you move into your flat, anyway.”
Maisie’s brow creased. “On your version of Valentine's Day?”
Iain grunted something affirmatory. He’d said he had no plans that day, but choosing to spend a ‘day of love’ with someone who was practically a stranger was— Wait . Iain hadn’t chosen anything. That whole morning had been orchestrated by?—
“Oh my god.” Maisie’s stomach swooped like she’d just taken a misstep on the downhill of a cliff walk. Ted picked up his head at her frustrated tone.
A thin veil of concern draped over Iain’s features. “What?”
“ Nain convinced you to help me that day,” Maisie blurted, her eyes close to bursting from their sockets. “She would’ve known it was your Valentine’s Day and that I had no idea about it. Her scheme to get us alone on your Day of Love s lipped right past me! Why that conniving?—”
Iain’s hand cupped her cheek and turned her face up to him, his thumb pressing her lips shut. “Any louder, Daffy, and they’ll figure out that we know what they’re doing.”
Blinking up at him, Maisie’s pulse danced southward to where she wished his thumb might press. Their gazes held, Iain’s thumb lingering for another too-short moment before falling away.
She regathered herself and recognised how utterly unbothered he was by the meddling she’d just uncovered. “Why didn’t you tell me that day had meaning?” And more importantly, why hadn’t he mentioned this ‘day of love’ when they’d talked about the ways Vera and her posse had set them up?
“I was trying not to think of anything that day.” His tersely given answer threw another layer onto the stack of things he wasn’t telling her.
Maisie decided to get back to the point of what they were originally discussing. “Do you have any ideas for how we should break up?”
Iain stole a furtive glance behind him at the peeping Toms. “How about we just tell them we’re not together anymore?”
“And hope that they don’t ask questions?” That wasn’t likely. “We need a story. We need a reason.”
“Maisie, none of this is real,” he slightly growled. “We don’t need any reason. We tell them that we went on a few dates, and we didn’t align. We’ll stay friends.”
Maisie chewed on her lip, contemplating if that plan would be believable enough. They could say that they’d had an argument … but that would make seeing each other for hikes more awkward than they’d been before this plan. No, if it was going to end, it had to be amicable.
Their conversation hadn’t outwardly appeared as flirty as it should for a little while. Being bold, Maisie moved her hand through the air between them, tucked her fingers behind an unzipped panel of Iain’s coat, then ran her knuckles over his stomach. His really, really sturdy stomach.
“Actually, what if we waited longer?” she suggested, adding an air of coyness to her ruse.
With that darkened look still deepening his strong features, Iain’s head cocked. “Now why would we do that?”
Maisie rolled an answer right off of her tongue. “So that no one can say we didn’t give this a fair shot and try to get us together again. A few more weeks and it’d be believable that we tried but we’re not compatible. Nain should be less likely to try and convince us to give it another go.”
“You and your mind,” Iain mumbled. The barrel of his chest filled up against the back of her hand, his body drifting closer. “Fine. A few more weeks.”
“Fine.” Now that that was sorted, Maisie took a deeper breath and dropped her hand before it could get used to the feeling of his body beneath it.
Ted sat by Iain’s feet and stared up at them, whining ever so quietly for the remains of the dessert he wasn’t allowed to taste. Iain dipped his fingers into one of the tactical pockets on his trousers and tossed a couple of treats into the grass for him to sniff out instead.
Maisie studied him – Iain, not Ted – wondering who the man was beneath the surface that he kept a wall around. She’d seen a glimpse of him the other night when he’d walked her home; the gentleness in how he’d not wanted her to be alone in the dark, the sadness in his eyes when he’d mentioned his brothers. The loneliness that radiated when she’d talked about missing London and her friends, as if it was a feeling he’d never known. It wasn’t ideal, but at least it meant that she knew she was loved and had people to love in return.
“Would you really break up with someone on Valentine’s Day?” she asked.
Iain raised his gaze through his dark lashes, an inch away from a bite of his ice cream. “I’m not that much of a prick,” he said.
“Good.” That was reassuring to know. Maisie didn’t think she could trust someone who would choose to dump a person on Valentine’s Day. Then again, that also meant— “We’re probably going to have to do something.”
“Huh?”
“On Valentine’s Day tomorrow. They’ll want to know if we did anything together,” she noted with a pointed side-eye at the picnic table full of earwiggers. How the thing hadn’t toppled over with the way they all tried to lean towards the conversation, she didn’t know.
Iain shrugged. “So lie.”
“I can’t lie to my nain like that,” Maisie whisper-hissed. “She’ll sniff it out. She’ll expect us to see each other.”
“This whole thing, Maisie, isn’t real.”
“I know …”
He sighed. “I suppose … we could take Ted out together and get some lunch.”
“That’s your idea of romantic?” Iain frowned at her response, so she backtracked. “It sounds good. Not too much for early days.”
“Good. Because I don’t want to be associated with this stupid holiday.”
That conversational opening was too irresistible to leave alone. “Bad experience?”
“Something like that.” Iain tossed the last of the wafer cone into his mouth and chewed.
His nugget of information was like fairy dust to Maisie. She didn’t have to look far to know where she’d gotten that piece of her personality from.
She toyed some more with his coat, slanting her body against the wall. “You know, you keep on saying these cryptic things without ever really explaining them.”
Iain’s side-eye was enough of a warning. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Maybe not with me, which is fair, we hardly know each other. But do you talk to anyone at all?”
He sighed through his nose. “Enough people know what happened. Trust me, I’ve done my share of talking.”
Brushing the toe of her boot across the ground, Maisie let her hand fall back to her side. “I get that. Valentine’s Day can be tough, and that’s fine. Sometimes the world tells you it’s bad to want romantic love, but I still believe in it.”
“Then maybe you haven’t been burned like I have.”
She looked at him then. “Who burned you?”
Iain let the silence sit, and in the end he didn’t answer her, following Ted with his eyes as the dog sniffed around the grass.
Maisie began to make him an offer, if not just to save them both from feeling pathetic and lonely tomorrow – okay, maybe just her . “Look, if you don’t have any plans, then you’re welcome to just come to my flat and do whatever you’d like. I’ll be working, but we need to put on some kind of show for this plan.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’re the one who said to give this a month,” she reminded him.
“I’ll think about it less if you keep on asking.”
Well that wasn’t pleasant.
“Sorry,” Maisie uttered, affronted by that little spat.
Iain glanced at her then turned completely. “No … I’m sorry.” His fingers found her upper arm and squeezed. He barely had to exert any pressure at all and Maisie felt it. “I haven’t had to do this for a while, that doesn’t give me the right to be short with you.”
“Apology accepted.” Maisie glanced again to the rest of their group and whispered, “They’re looking at us.”
“So?”
“So you look … dangerously close to kissing me right now.” Not that she wanted him to – she wasn’t asking – but the look on his face, how he was a little fired up, leaning above her …
Maybe she did want to know what his lips would be like, just once. It could be research for their plan.
Iain didn’t even blink. “Would you like me to kiss you?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Warmth worked up Maisie’s neck as she squirmed against the wall in an attempt to stand taller. “Not if it’s not necessary.” Because they couldn’t, could they? Anything real between them was off limits.
“How will I know if it is necessary?” Iain’s eyes looked increasingly hooded.
“I don’t know. Use the brain that I suppose you have in here.” She tapped the side of his head above his ear, which was a mistake, because now she knew how the short crop of his salt-and-pepper sides felt beneath her fingers.
Iain’s body went unnaturally still until her fingers fell away.
“Fine,” he said. “ If the need arises for me to kiss you, am I allowed?”
“You’re asking for permission?”
“I’d rather that than be slapped in the face.”
Well that was an extremely valid point.
“If the need arises, and only when the group is around” — Maisie breathed in and out — “you can kiss me.”
Grunting in acknowledgement, Iain seemed satisfied with that answer, but the pool of anticipation in Maisie’s stomach was far from settled.
* ? Yes, they do.
* ? Saint Dwynwen’s Day