“A few Christmases ago. Fucked if I can remember how many. I figured he’d turn into a cute little baby gay, but it’s not really like that around here.”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“Then you should get out more. This place is nothing like the city, but that’s not a bad thing.”
His words hung in the air. He probably meant nothing by them—why would he when years had passed since our lives had anything in common?—but the sense of failure hit all the same. And being the masochist I was, I couldn’t leave it alone. “How’s tricks down here for you? Bet the views are better than London when you’re up in that chopper.”
Rhys grunted. “I’d know if I looked.”
“Still not a fan of flying?”
“Nope. I’d work the ground ambulances if I could be bothered with the long-arse road trips for every call.”
“You’re a flight paramedic due to laziness? Dude, that’s fucked up.”
Rhys tickled Ella’s cheek. “Lots of things are fucked up. Doesn’t stop them happening.”
And wasn’t that the truth? Rhys said more words. And I answered him. But my mind was elsewhere as we shot the shit as if it hadn’t been more than a year since we’d last spent any significant time together, and even longer since we’d walked the same path. Without Ella to cling to, I searched for the new comfort I’d found in the last few days. For Toby.
I found him on the horizon, throwing something out of a bucket to a huge black horse. He was sitting on a fence, and even from this distance, I could make out his soft dark hair and strong, lean shoulders. I wished I could see his face.
“Earth to Cole?”
“Hmm?” I took a fussing Ella from Rhys’s outstretched arms. She quieted and shoved her fist in her mouth. “Sorry. What?”
Rhys eyed me the way only he could. “I was going to say that fatherhood suits you, but seeing as you haven’t heard a word I’ve said for the last five minutes, I’ve changed my mind. Baby brain, huh?”
I went with it and shrugged. It wasn’t like I could admit that my thoughts had actually been trained on the stable hand I hardly knew instead of my daughter. “It’s a thing. What time are you on shift?”
“Midday.”
It was half-past eleven, but Rhys didn’t seem worried. He slugged my shoulder and left me to it. I watched him go and considered the change in him from the sharp-edged city boy I’d once known.
Perhaps the sea air was magic after all.
The thought had me rolling my eyes at my own damn self. I locked my car and returned to the cottage to feed Ella and put her down for a nap. And that was how the rest of my day panned out—feeding, wiping, hovering outside her door in case she needed me. Which, of course, she didn’t when she was asleep, so eventually, after I’d put her to bed for the night, I found myself sitting on the stairs with nothing to do.
I scrolled mindlessly through Instagram, frustration building in my bones as the futility of it warred with my seeming inability to stop. In London, I’d built my business on social media, documenting a life that bore little relation to my reality. Edgy black-and-white shots of the class I’d taught on Hampstead Heath, images of my own body contorted into stretches most of my clients didn’t have the time or inclination to work towards. There was no mention of Ella. Or my move south.Delete it. But I didn’t. I clung to it like a safety net and hated myself a little bit more.
A soft tap on the front door drew me away from my brooding.
Expecting perhaps Harry with yet another invitation to dinner, I jogged down the stairs with a heavy sigh and dragged the door open.
But it wasn’t Harry. It was Toby. And I had no words for how pleased I was to see him.
* * *
Toby
Somehow, despite Cole being barely a few years older than me, I’d expected his daughter to be an actual child, not a baby with a bottle and a dummy. Andsomehowthe revelation, and the sight of him holding her close to his chest, made him even sexier to me than he had been with his bare feet and hippie pants.
I tried all day to stay away, picking up jobs around the farm that had been neglected for weeks. I worked so hard that Joe came out of the house and yelled at me to stop. When I ignored him, he went back inside and fetched a handful of twenty-pound notes, rolled up and secured with an elastic band. “Go and get drunk or something. Jesus-fucking-Christ, stop making me feel lazy.”
As if. Joe was the least lazy person I’d ever met and the reason I possessed a work ethic that wouldn’t quit. But seeing as I’d run out of light, he won. And I found myself on Cole’s doorstep, drinking in the sight of him instead of a cold beer down the pub.
He didn’t say anything, just stared at me, unblinking with his hypnotic green eyes, leaving me scrambling for words to explain myself.
“I was passing,” I said, brilliantly.