More bitterness lanced my scratchy throat, but I ignored it and retrieved my sketchbook from my bag. Men fucking me over was a thing of the past. I would make this work—I had to. There was nothing else.
The dogged determination I’d inherited from my mother propelled me for most of the day. I sketched, planned, scrubbed, and cleaned, and by the time five p.m. rolled around, my morning heartburn was a distant memory. Hunger clawed at my insides, and my eyes stung. Beer for breakfast after a sleepless night, and a full day’s work on top had left me a trembling mess, and I needed food fast.
I’d spent years trying to forget everything about Rushmere, but as I locked up the shop and stepped outside, the scent of the nearby chippie called to me like an old friend. I turned my face upwind and a legitimate craving for Mr. Wong’s famous curry sauce hit me like a truck.
I checked my purse for English money and jogged across the road, my feet carrying me of their own volition. The single-minded quest for a cheap dinner was all-consuming, and I was in the fish and chip shop before I could blink, tripping over the step in my haste and stumbling into a broad back.
Dazed, I jerked my head up, and caught sight of Gus at the counter, handing something to the body I’d barrelled into. “Sorry—”
The word died on my lips, along with the last surviving piece of my fractured heart. Familiar brown eyes stared back at me, hard-won forgotten, but never forgiven. Full lips began to mouth my name, but I reared away, evading the work-hardened hands—beautiful hands—that reached for me.
No. I’d endured enough. And he wasn’t supposed to be here. Luke Daley was supposed to be on the other side of the world on a fucking warship, so why the fuck was he standing in Rushmere’s only chip shop with my goddamn little brother?
Chapter Two
Luke
Mia Amour. Her name had haunted me so much my bunkmate had once found me sleep-scrawling it on our cabin wall. He thought it had meant something—that I was writing a message from another dimension in a language he didn’t understand—but the reality had been far more simple: even on the other side of the world, I couldn’t get her out of my head.
Somehow, though, over time, I’d forgotten what her eyes did to me. How they could root me to the spot with a single glance and empty my mind of anything but her. Mia. I counted my heartbeats as they thundered in my ears. One, two, three, four. And then she tore her stormy blue gaze away from mine and walked out of the chip shop.
I reached for the empty space she left behind, and my faculties slowly returned to me as her footsteps echoed in my shell-shocked brain. As drawn to her as I’d always been, I drifted after her, but when I got outside, she was gone.
A thousand emotions warred in my gut, but the age-old frustration was so familiar I felt sick. Fucking Mia Amour. Deep down, I’d always hated her as much as I’d loved her, because there was no one else on earth who could make my heart pound like she did, my palms sweat, and my fingers tremble.
Cursing, I hauled myself back into the van. Gus followed a moment later, an open bag of chips in each hand. “Where’d you get to? It was your turn to buy tea.”
I tossed him a crumpled-up fiver. “Why didn’t you tell me your sister was in town?”
“Oh fuck.” Gus held out a bag of chips, then set it on the dashboard when I made no move to claim it. “Are we really doing this?”
I gave him a flat look.
He sighed. “Fuck’s sake. Why would I tell you? You two aren’t exactly friends, and you haven’t been a couple since I was fourteen and nicking Mayfair Lights from her school bag.”
Shit, had it been that long? Why was it that just a glimpse of her face could set me back a decade? The weight in my chest increased and I started the van, gunning the rickety diesel engine with a roar. “Either way, a fucking heads-up would’ve been nice.”
“But why, though?” Gus pointed a chip at me. “You want her number so you can catch up on old times?”
I wondered if he’d actually give it to me. Then pictured myself calling Mia and her reaction to hearing my voice for the first time in ten long years.
A legit shudder passed through me. I was done torturing myself for putting my family first, for giving up my entire life to keep a roof over my mum’s head, but that didn’t make the obvious anger in Mia’s eyes easier to bear. Her temper had fascinated seventeen-year-old me—sometimes I’d wound her up on purpose, just to revel in her flushed skin and sharp tongue—but I didn’t have the stones to take it now. My Mia angst tolerance was at an all-time complacent low.
“Luke?”
I spared Gus another glare. “What?”
“Can I eat your chips?”
* * *
I drove back to work in a daze and pulled up outside the cottage we were roofing. Gus hopped out of the van and promptly disappeared to his own house down the road, leaving me to scale the scaffolding and check that the wind hadn’t fucked with the work we’d already done before I called it a night, but as hard as I looked, I found it difficult to care. Taking over the business from my uncle had made sense when I’d shipped out of the Navy with no desire to continue with anything I was leaving behind.
Right now, with Mia on my mind, nothing made sense. Christ, I could even smell her. Like the millisecond she’d been pressed against my back had been all night. You sad fuck.
A gust of wind dislodged a tarp. I tacked it back down, my mind still entrenched in the past.
Mia gazed up at me, her usually sharp eyes wide and nervous. “Be gentle.”
“I will,” I whispered. “We can stop if it hurts.”
I hadn’t hurt her that night, or the hundred nights that had come after, though we’d grown less gentle over time. Those stolen nights, creeping through her window as soon as her mum was in bed, crawling under the covers and loving each other until the sun rose, had been my only sanctuary from the pit of despair my own home had become. I’d promised to be her sanctuary too. To protect her from the pain my family had endured, but of course I hadn’t. News of Mari Amour’s death had reached me far too late, and by then Mia had been long gone.
Like you.
Goddamn it.
I finished tidying up for the day and descended the scaffolding. Craving solitude to brood in peace, I felt my tiny house in the quiet part of town call my name, but it was Monday and if I didn’t show my face at my mum’s, there’d be hell to pay.
My mum—or Fran as we’d grown up calling her—was in the kitchen when I let myself into the ramshackle three-bed semi I’d grown up in. The whole house smelled of her special Monday soup, but even though I’d given the chip shop a miss, I wasn’t hungry. Never was for Fran’s terrible cooking.