Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MAISIE
Sleeping next to each other was a very bad, terrible, completely wrong, very – very bad idea.
Whilst Iain had been changing into his pyjamas in the bathroom – long bottoms and a t-shirt, thank god – Maisie had laid down in the centre of the bed and confirmed her suspicion that the thing was bloody tiny. Arms spread out wide like an eagle, her fingers hung over each edge where the mattress ended.
Under the duvet, she tucked herself as far up against the wall as she could. The wood panelling was cold, and she was far from comfortable in the I’m-sleeping-next-to-a-rugby-playing-hunk sense. It was new for Maisie. Most definitely a problem when she wanted to roll over and be wrapped up tightly in his arms.
They hadn’t put a pillow between them for a wall, a) because there weren’t any spare, and b) because there was literally no space for one. Between Iain’s hulking stature, his broad chest, and massive thighs, and, well … her, only two inches sat between where they each tried to sleep.
It’d been half an hour since they’d both gotten under the duvet, and Maisie’s brain was practically a fully charged battery. There was no ‘off’ button. And what kept her awake? Iain breathing beside her. The rhythmic sound was too damn distracting. All of him was warm, and that warmth carried his scent. Maisie couldn’t pin down what it was exactly without looking at any of the bottles he’d lined up on the shower’s shelf – but if sweatily chopping logs and throwing them onto a burning, smoky fire could be bottled, then that’s what she lay beside.
Or tried not to lay beside. The shiplap wall was an inch from her nose as she lay in the most uncomfortable, sidewards plank position known to man.
“Can you stop that?” Iain grumbled in the absolute darkness.
“Stop what?” she answered a little sharply.
“Making me think I’m making you uncomfortable.” His voice was deeper in the dead of night, like the devil himself rasping in her ear.
Maisie tucked her arms further into her chest. “We’re sharing a bed, if you haven’t noticed.” She’d been trying to do him a favour by staying as far away as possible.
“I’m sure you’ve shared a bed with someone else before.”
Yes, she had, but …
Without a quip ready to go, Maisie’s silence went on for a little too long. And the more it went on, the more she knew Iain would be thinking her virgin status didn’t just include rarebit.
She had to say something. “It’s … been a long while,” she clarified.
Iain took a deep breath, and Maisie never expected him to say, “Me too.”
For some reason, she rolled onto her back and laid her silk bonnet covered head on her too-flat pillow. Miraculously, only her elbow bumped what she hoped was Iain’s; she couldn’t tell with the absolute darkness. Ted snoring from his bed at the foot of theirs the only sound.
“When was your last?” she pried. Not to judge a book by its cover, but Maisie didn’t believe that if Iain made an offer to any lady with the capacity to lust then that lady would say no .
She received a huff in protest, as expected, imagining the easy arc of his eyebrow. “Really?”
“I think it’s only fair that I know what kind of rake I’m dealing with here,” Maisie playfully argued, smiling to herself as she stared at the ceiling.
“Ladies first.”
“Age before beauty.”
As her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, Maisie swore that Iain at least cracked a smile. A sound like bristles scratching softly hinted she’d be getting an honest answer; the man lying beside her didn’t run a hand over his bearded face and make himself stressed over nothing.
Seconds later, he said, “January.”
She frowned. “That’s not that long.”
“Of last year.”
Maisie took back her words, rolling her lips together. “Oh.” That was a long time ago. Over a year – which wasn’t that long in some contexts, but in this one …
Evidently, they were both well and truly in a sexual dry spell. That kiss they’d shared had been Maisie’s first in over eight months, and being in a man’s arms again had been overwhelming to her system – like being shocked back to life. So she couldn’t imagine what Iain might’ve felt after double that time on his own, if he’d felt anything at all. The way he took care of her, held her hand and reassured her constantly, even how he’d given her his coat this evening – it didn’t feel meaningless.
Maybe it was and she just didn’t want it to be.
Maybe the distance closing between them was just a product of the situation they’d found themselves in: two lonely people caught up in a fake entanglement. There were bound to be lines that blurred, and Maisie couldn’t stop them from happening. She liked him. She liked when he cracked a smile that was just for her, when his rare laugh rumbled when they were alone. When he opened himself up like this and let her see inside of his tough I-don’t-need-anyone exterior.
His kingdom might be lost, but all lost things were meant to be found again.
Iain offered up more detail that he didn’t have to give her. “Was the first time after my engagement ended.”
The washing-powder-scented duvet stretched against Maisie’s chest as she inhaled, too easily tempted by her curiosity to dig deeper into his story. He’d sounded ashamed about sleeping with someone else after breaking up. “Do you feel like you betrayed her? Your ex?”
Iain’s breathing stopped.
Maisie closed her eyes and screwed them shut. She’d gone too far. Fished in waters too deep.
She was about to apologise and backtrack, but Iain said sombrely, “She’ll always be a part of me, Maisie. I can’t erase the years we had together.”
Maisie’s pulse thrummed more anxiously in her chest. Again she found herself needing to know if the reason why he’d said he couldn’t commit to a woman yet was because he was still in love with her. On Valentine’s Day he’d said that he was in love enough to have let her go, but that could mean anything, right?
She couldn’t have feelings for a man who was in love with someone else – her heart couldn’t take it.
“I … I just don’t think you’ve let her go,” she said, twisting the duvet between her fingers.
Creases were sure to have deepened beside Iain’s eyes. “I’m not still in love with her, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Relief shouldn’t have made Maisie’s body loosen. “You’re just not ready to move on? Be with someone … new?”
One of Iain’s throaty rumbles entered the darkness. “I’ve disappointed enough women.”
Maisie turned her head. The vaguest line of silver silhouetted him staring at the ceiling. How could he not see that he’d done everything right? It wasn’t his fault that his ex-fiancé wanted something different than what she’d told him at the start. His humility for taking himself out of the equation and sacrificing the ending he’d wanted so that she could go and live her dream wasn’t disappointing at all.
Maisie’s heart yearned to be loved like that.
She whispered, “You’ve never disappointed me.”
Calm quiet fell, as if the world had stopped so that Iain could hear her. His cheek slowly fell to his pillow. The glint in his eyes from the moonlight peeking through the crack of the curtains landed on hers, and Maisie’s breath hitched at the sight so near.
She anticipated he would argue, something self-deprecating along the lines of not yet or I will do. But he only stared at her, his features softening.
Maisie wanted so desperately to comb her fingers through his curls of deep-brown hair and cuddle him to her chest, let him feel what it felt like to have someone believe in him. And in that moment as their eyes held, her heart collided up with the stars and her map overlapped to align with his.
Maisie knew then what she wanted. Her heart beat so fast the rush brought tears to the corners of her eyes, because the fake ness of her feelings ended here.
Her lips parted and her inhale shook, words rushing to her tongue with thoughts of how he’d started to mean more to her than she had planned.
But of course?—
Iain exhaled. “Your turn,” he said briskly, turning his face back to the ceiling.
The rush in Maisie came crashing down. What had they been talking about originally? Ah, yes, their respective lack of sex.
Maisie scoffed hollowly to distract from the disappointment of how he’d shifted their conversation. “Half of Aberystwyth already knows how long I’ve been single.”
“That doesn’t mean you’ve been alone all this time.”
“For me it does,” she said.
Curiosity filled the silent space that Iain left for her to explain.
What was it about their meetings after the sun went down that made Maisie want to confess everything from her past? This conversation happened every single time she let a new man into her life, and it never got less uncomfortable to say. Iain might as well know too.
Since they were being vulnerable again, Maisie closed her eyes and just let the words flow out into the darkness. “I struggle with being … intimate,” she confessed, flattening the duvet over her stomach. “My last few attempts at boyfriends haven’t been entirely patient with that. They didn’t seem to understand that I can’t just …” Get turned on at the drop of a hat. “I need a little bit of mental prep to relax. I can’t rush, and that’s a turn off apparently.”
“Then you’ve been dating boys ,” Iain told her, his voice that same no-nonsense firmness as when he’d said that if he was going to kiss her, he’d do it right. “Any man would take the time to make sure you were comfortable before he thought of himself.”
Maisie fizzed with warmth. No man had ever said that to her before or even showed her that they could treat her that way before they got bored. “What you just said about knowing your value – I saw that in you the first day that we met. Don’t ever lose it.” What Iain had told her meant more to her than he could know.
Of course it would have to be the one man who didn’t want her who said those things.
“Things start out like that,” she said, thinking of those usual first few honeymoon-sweet weeks of dating someone, “but then after a time I think they see me as too much work.” Now, with every guy she met and got to know, she treated them like a bad joke: going along with things though all the while waiting for the punchline she’d heard a hundred times before.
“You’re not work , Maisie. You’re you.” Iain’s voice held so much promise, making her eyes burn in response.
“Why am I telling you this?” Maisie asked herself, rolling away to her side as if that’d help her not be seen in pitch darkness. She had to shift the duvet around her hips and shove some of it back to Iain’s side.
“Because you want to be heard,” Iain said gently, his words going straight to the sore spot on her heart and healing it. “I hear you.”
It was no use trying to push back against the welling tears or the sniffles, or the feeling like hands were splayed around her ribs, fingers pushing each one down into her chest. Silently, she let the single drop of water from her eye roll down her cheek and dampen her pillow.
“Why are you so … so different?” she demanded to know before she could stop herself. Even if they weren’t actually dating, no man had treated her the way Iain did.
He sighed. “Because I’ve been beaten down into the ground and made to believe things I wanted to achieve weren’t possible for someone like me.” Maisie’s chin quivered as she tried not to make a sound. “I won’t make anyone feel less than they are, not even a little bit.”
“Except yourself.” She wasn’t afraid to call him out; Iain didn’t deserve to punish himself the way he did. “If you wouldn’t treat someone else that way then you shouldn’t treat yourself like that either.”
His final sigh echoed through the cabin. “I know.”
When she’d woken up to grey-blue light glowing around the closed curtains, Iain wasn’t there. And neither was Ted. But something in how Maisie had woken on his side of the bed with her arms and legs sprawled out like she’d had the entire thing to herself all night suggested why he’d jumped ship. If she’d woken with a man who wasn’t her partner stretched and curled all over her, then she’d have silently extracted herself from the situation too.
Assuming the duo were off letting Ted do what Ted needed to do, she’d readied herself and gone to the canteen to get them breakfast: a couple of pastries and some kind of DIY jam and bread package to toast with their cabin’s tiny toaster. On her return, wind made her regret not tying her hair up before she’d left, with curls flying into her face without a hand spare to shift them.
Ted’s snout pressed against the door’s glass like a guard dog, abandoning his duties at the sight of food when she trudged back up the cabin steps. Blindly, thanks to her curls, Maisie managed to slip inside without letting Ted out, with breakfast tucked beneath her chin and her breasts acting as a handy ledge for the paper bags.
Music caught her ears beneath the pit-pat of Ted’s claws on the hardwood.
Was that … jazz ? Her phone was in the thigh pocket of her leggings, so it definitely didn’t come from that.
“Oh, Ted , get out of the way,” she hushed, navigating her way through a curtain of red hair to the kitchenette while trying to keep the mild muddiness of her boots contained to as few steps as she could. Her hip found the countertop, and she deposited their breakfast.
Finally she flipped her hair out of her face and found where the low sound was coming from. The bathroom door was wide open, a hazy yellow glow bouncing off the white tiled walls. It sounded like a waterfall gushed in there while steam flooded out into the rest of the cabin, and her roommate was nowhere to be found.
Tugging off her coat and tossing it on the bed, Maisie took one sidestep. What kind of idiot went outside and left the shower?—
Her jaw dropped with a gasp. Rooted on the spot, she stared at where condensation had smeared away on the shower’s glass wall, revealing that she’d been wrong.
Iain was definitely here.
A very wet and very … naked Iain, lathered in white suds of shower gel and running his hands all over his blocky muscles, eyes closed and turning under the overhead stream of water.
The cabin suddenly became a log-fired sauna, and Maisie was the poor fool too underprepared to take the heat that sweltered under her skin.
Rugby players really were something else entirely.
At least, this one was.
Her focus had never been so solely on one sight in her entire life. Droplets rolled down Iain’s chest through dark, trimmed hair, following the hard-earned rivulets his physicality had so unfortunately graced him with, and the unhinged urge to lick them off didn’t even catch Maisie by surprise. Excitement pooled in the neglected space between her stomach and her thighs, her pulse lowering down south with it.
“Shitting hell …” she exhaled, her head going light from the sight in front of her.
Iain’s chin spun to his shoulder. “Maisie?”
“Fuck.” She bolted out of the door as best as her unsupported breasts would allow – it was the wrong morning to have abandoned a bra for another few comfortable hours. Ted flew hot on her heels, and Maisie was halfway down the decked steps when she realised. “No—no—go back inside!” she whisper-shouted at the creature. Ted dropped his jaw in a defiant grin.
“Maisie?” Iain shouted, the music now silent. “That you?” Pipes squeaked inside of the cabin as if he’d cut the water off.
Maisie twisted back and forth between the open path through the forest and the steps that led her back into unchartered, and frankly awkward, territory.
“ Shit . Come on.” She didn’t even have a lead for Ted, but she’d walked with him enough to trust he wouldn’t run off anywhere.
The mutt accompanied her bumbling escape. She’d rather be caught dead than caught drooling over Iain in the shower when he hadn’t even known she was there. There was something seriously wrong with her if one glance at him had stunned her so completely.
Iain’s naked, dripping, sculpted torso like Oceanus in Rome was the only image behind Maisie’s eyes as she stumbled over twigs and stones on the trail. Her fingers went to her phone and pulled it from her leggings, needing to call someone before she spiralled into a complete meltdown.
According to the group chat she shared with her friends, Bash was up in Manchester visiting Faye, so calling her was off the cards – Maisie didn’t want to disturb their time together. Freddy was a great friend, but not the right one to listen to her spew about having too many sweat-inducing feelings for the man she was supposed to only be friends with. Which left Sienna.
It was half past nine, and her friend would be working at her florist, but she had to try. Her veins were going to combust if she didn’t.
“Pick up. Pick up.” Phone to her ear, she muttered as she followed Ted’s seemingly random path of sniffing.
“Hi Maise?—”
“I’m in trouble,” Maisie blurted.
“What? What’s happened?” Sienna’s voice changed to that hardened tone she did whenever one of them was being daft as she said, “Was it that Iain guy?”
“Yes!”
“Are you okay?”
No . No – she was absolutely not okay. Her body was … Maisie didn’t even know it could have this kind of sizzling reaction without ever being touched.
“I saw him naked, Sienna.” She didn’t care if there were fairies or goblins or Adar Llwch Gwins in the awakening woodland to hear her. “There was steam and water and rippling muscle and skin and?—”
“Jesus— breathe, Maisie.”
She slapped her hand to her neck where the skin was hot and flushed. “I think I forgot how.”
Ted stopped ahead of her, turning an unimpressed glance that told her to pull herself together before loping onwards. He took a turn down a narrower trail, and Maisie followed him without giving their direction any thought.
“Hang on,” Sienna said, and Maisie could imagine the fold in her arms, “you saw this guy naked and now you’re in trouble?”
“I don’t know what to do with him.”
“What do you mean you don’t know what to do with him?” Sienna calmly rebuffed.
“I saw him without his shirt on, and now I don’t know what to do.”
“Maisie, it’s not like you’ve never seen a half-naked man before.”
There was a little bit more to it than half naked … and little wasn’t exactly the right word.
Fallen twigs of bracken crunched underneath her boots. “I know, but … he’s different than the men I’ve dated before.”
“Different how?”
“He has abs. ABS! Those chunky ones that look like little bricks, not some flat, washboard surfer. And oh-my-god his chest, shoulders, arms – it’s intimidating!”
Sienna absolutely rolled her eyes on the other end. Maisie knew that she wouldn’t understand – the woman pulled sculpted, David- shaped men every week. “But why? I know you’re doing this fake dating thing so that the old folk will leave you two alone, but it is just fake right? You’re not sleeping with him, so why would that kind of body fluster you?”
“It shouldn’t,” Maisie argued. “And that’s what’s freaking me out. I shouldn’t have any reaction at all. I should be completely apathetic. But I’m walking around and— ohmygod it’s too hot in these clothes.” She wasn’t even wearing much: a pair of workout leggings and a loose t-shirt that made her hyper-aware of her breasts acting like pendulums as she speed-walked away from her feelings.
“Breathe, woman.”
She sucked in air.
“Maybe it’s because it’s Iain’s body?” Sienna pondered, and before Maisie could get a word in, added, “You’re already attracted to him on an emotional level, and now you find out that he’s conventionally attractive too?—”
“Woah, I–I am not attracted to Iain.” Hand pressed out in the air like it would stop the conversation, she halted, adding, “On any level.”
“If you say so, babe.”
Her phone beeped warningly. Maisie looked at the screen and realised she’d used a chat app to call over internet instead of the actual phone function.
She held it back to her ear. “Damn it, I think I’m getting out of range of the Wi-Fi. There’s no signal here.”
Sounding more amused, Sienna said, “You know I’ll just tell you to do what I’d do and go back in there to?—”
The call cut off.
“No,” Maisie whined, though maybe it wasn’t necessary to – maybe she should be glad her friend hadn’t been able to tell her to go back to the cabin, stroll in like she was the world’s hottest woman, throw off her clothes, and sashay her way over to Iain. She didn’t need that kind of anxiety in her mind.
She looked at the icons in the top corner of the screen; she was out of range for the Wi-Fi of the camp, and she had zero bars for phone service.
“Damn it.” Maisie shoved the phone into her pocket right as pit patters of rain lightly landed on the canopy of leaves above her.
Ted barked, and her eyes whipped up to his wiry form bolting down the winding trail.
“Ted!” Her boots kicked up stones as she did her version of jogging to try and catch up to him, yelling, “Ted! Come here.”
His scurrying paws darted further and further from her, his barks getting quieter through the trees. Maisie couldn’t even see him anymore, and as she stumbled into long grass and thorny undergrowth, her heartbeat raced at the same speed Ted had taken off at.
Raindrops landed on her cheek as she panted.
The trail had disappeared. She spun in circles but found the same exact view of trees and the shadows between them at every angle she faced.
“Shit—”
Iain was going to kill her; she’d lost his dog.
And slightly less importantly: she was lost.