I gave a half-embarrassed shrug. ‘Well, it helps if you happen to be an estate agent. When the good listings pop up, you nab them for yourself.’
‘Perhaps the next time one does, I should ask you to hold it for me.’
‘Are you thinking of moving?’
Please don’t be about to leave the area.
Please don’t be engaged to a supermodel.
Please don’t be a mind-reader.
The last was perhaps the most important, because one glimpse of the ridiculous thoughts cycling through my head would have had any sane man running for the hills.
‘I’ve been considering buying for a while,’ Rhys eventually replied, as though the answer had taken time to pin down. ‘I’m renting right now, but I’ve always owned. It’s starting to feel like the right time to do so again.’
There was a look in his eyes that took him away from me and my flat to somewhere else altogether. Intuition suggested his answer had something to do with the cryptic comments I’d overheard between him and Olly.
‘How about some tea?’ I asked. ‘Unless you fancy a beer or something stronger?’
‘Probably best to steer clear of alcohol, after everything that’s happened.’
It was a sensible answer, but I couldn’t ignore the feeling that he was gently retreating from that delicious romcom moment we’d shared on the doorstep. He was steering us back into the friend zone, and even though friends might be conspicuously thin on the ground in my life right now, it still wasn’t somewhere I wanted us to go.
‘Milk and sugar?’ I asked, pasting a cheery smile over my disappointment.
‘Please.’
I took one last glance at him as I left the lounge and really wished I hadn’t. He’d already pulled his mobile from his pocket and was keying in a number.
The soundproofing in my flat wasn’t great. I knew exactly when the couple in the flat downstairs were running their washingmachine, flushing the loo, or having sex, so hearing what was being said in my lounge was hard to avoid. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I turned on both taps full blast and instructed Alexa to increase the volume of the music currently playing. I had no desire to inadvertently eavesdrop on Rhys’s private conversation, even though I was practically combusting with curiosity to know who he was calling.
Despite the distracting background soundtrack, I could still hear the low rumble of his voice. The words weren’t clear, but I could pick up on the emotion behind them. He sounded agitated.
The tea was made and beginning to cool, and yet it didn’t feel right to barge into the lounge and interrupt his privacy. Scared of what you might hear? Old Ellie was becoming a proper nuisance, and it was getting increasingly hard to shut her up.
‘Would you like a biscuit with your tea?’ I called out in a carrying, sing-song voice when I decided I’d hidden out in the kitchen for long enough. I’d given him advance warning of my reappearance, and yet Rhys still looked startled when I rejoined him. I smiled as though I wasn’t perfectly aware I’d walked in during the middle of an awkward conversation and placed the mugs on a low table beside my highly impractical white sofa that I never sat on without a throw.
‘Just message and let me know when I can call,’ he said into his mobile. His voice sounded a thousand times wearier than it had earlier.
He looked up, splitting his attention between the phone call and me. ‘No thanks,’ he mouthed in reply to my offer of a biscuit, which was just as well as I didn’t have any in the flat. He gestured towards his phone and mimed another word, ‘Sorry.’
I gave a don’t worry about it shrug and pointed to the door, to indicate I’d leave him to finish his conversation in private. He shook his head and reached for my forearm to stall me. I jolted. Thetouch of his hand set off fireworks inside my nervous system. While I couldn’t remember exactly how it had felt when the lightning had struck, it surely couldn’t have been more electrifying than this?
And it wasn’t just me who felt... whatever it was. Rhys’s eyes widened when his skin connected with mine. What the hell was happening?
‘Just turn on the news or check the internet,’ he mumbled into his phone. ‘There’ll be something about it on there. I’ve got to go,’ he said in a rush before disconnecting the call.
‘I’m really sorry about that,’ he apologised, apparently unaware that his hand was still encircling my wrist.
‘No. It’s fine. I didn’t want to intrude.’
Green eyes that had turned worryingly chilly were now growing warmer.
‘It’s your home. I think I’m the one who’s intruding.’
I took a single beat to see if I wanted to think twice before answering that and then decided that if you were going to lose your mind, there were worse ways to go.
‘Except it doesn’t feel like you are.’