‘No,’ he mutters, his voice all gravel and grit, as he trails one finger up the inside of my forearm to the crook of my elbow before dragging it down again, his fingers settling lightly around my wrist.
I nearly jump out of my seat. Heat scatters around my body, from the tips of my fingers right down into the depths of my insides, where it swells and grows as his fingertips skate deftly over my skin. I wouldn’t have said that my arms were particularly sensitive, but I’m rewriting the book on that now. My libido takes the reins, and I wonder how it would feel to have his hands on other parts of my body.
I feel like I can’t breathe.
‘You’ll know if I’m trying to seduce you,’ he mutters in that same gruff voice, like a promise, and then he lets go of my armand leans back in his chair, casually, like nothing happened at all.
I don’t move a muscle for a full ten seconds. It takes me that long to regain even a semblance of my faculties.
‘What?’ he asks, one corner of his mouth tugging back into an easy grin. I can’t help but stare at it as my senses slowly return to me.
I shake my head, hands gesturing to nothing in particular. ‘You just shocked me, that’s all. I didn’t know you could turn on the charm like that.’
He throws his head back with his laugh. ‘You didn’t? Remember, I’m a reformed womaniser.’
I did know that, but I hadn’t heard it from him, and I wasn’t fully sure how true it was. With the work I do, I’m fully aware how spin works, and now that he’s brought it up, I’m curious to hear things from his side.
‘You are?’ I ask, my voice even, and I see his expression change with my tone. Had he expected judgement from me?
There’s a twitch in the muscle at his jawline. ‘That’s what everyone says.’
That’s my tell that there’s more to this story. ‘What doyousay?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looks away, one hand going to scratch under his chin. ‘There was a period of my life when I… didn’t always make the best decisions.’ There’s something in the way he says it which nags at me. It reads like shame, or maybe regret, and the reporter in me can’t resist pushing it.
‘You were trying to live out your fantasies of being a heartbreaker?’
His brows tug together at the question– thoughtful rather than offended. ‘No,’ he says, his shrug just barely a movement. ‘It was simpler than that.’
I’m drawn in. ‘What happened?’
He doesn’t answer for a moment, like he’s weighing his words, and when he finds them, they’re so open and honest that they tug at my chest, pulling me closer with every syllable.
‘I loved, I lost, I tried my hardest not to love again.’
My breath catches in my throat. It’s entirely the opposite reaction to mine in a similar situation. I loved, I lost and I tried my hardest to fill the emptiness which remained with love. Or something that looked like love, anyway. I’m realising now that love was never what was on offer.
Even so, Bram’s words resonate with me so clearly it’s almost painful– the pitch-perfect note which makes a glass shatter into a million pieces. There’s a part of me that wants to lean further into it, to lay myself bare in the same way he just did. But something holds me back before I can even find the words.
‘That tracks,’ I say instead. ‘Isn’t it lonely?’
He looks straight at me, his eyes soft and warm. ‘It didn’t use to be,’ he says, and I feel the weight of every word, at once exciting and comfortable and something else– something that hums lightly beneath my skin. Something beautiful and haunting, like a tide that draws me in, again and again.
Because in this moment all I can think is that if this were a date, it’d actually be kind of perfect.
Chapter Eighteen
BRAM
It’s a little after ten by the time we get back into my car, and the mood is very different from when we got out. Between the relief of knowing my mum’s ok, the amazing food I’ve just eaten and the unspeakable joy of being trolled by Lucy, I’m feeling almost giddy. And, as a bonus, the badly parked idiot next to us has gone, so we’re both able to climb into the car like the normal humans that one of us is.
I even managed to slide the driver’s seat back into its normal position without Lucy noticing that my knees were momentarily around my ears. Could life get any better?
It turns out that the answer is yes, because when I turn to look at Lucy, she’s looking right back at me, head resting against the seat, her blonde waves in beautiful disarray around her head. I want to reach into them and kiss her until she’s breathless. God, I’ve been turned on since I touched her forearm in the restaurant.
Yes, her forearm. It’s obviously been way too long since I’ve seen any action. She’d only have to touch my leg and I’d?—
‘How long will it take to drive back to the coast?’ she asks, breaking me out of my dirty daydream. I’d blush if my not-entirely-working circulatory system hadn’t just diverted all available blood in my body below my belt.