Luke sighed into my hair, then drew back to look at me. “I don’t know. The policewoman—what’s her name, again?—said she was going to look into your ex, right?”
“Her name’s Rebecca. She’s going to look into Laurent, but only as far as to see if he’s been in the UK recently. If he’s in France, there’s not much she can do.”
“But if he’s in France, he’s not vandalising your van.”
“I know.” I’d been trying not to contemplate that. I could handle Laurent being a weirdo, but the idea that a stranger was behind this was truly terrifying. “Rebecca said we’d cross that bridge if we come to it, but I don’t think we will. It has to be Laurent. Why would anyone else want to do this to me?”
Luke said nothing, just trailed his fingers down the back of my neck, but somehow his silence was deafening.
I turned to face him. “What are you thinking?”
“About what?”
“About all this. We keep talking about it like it just affects me, but it doesn’t. Whoever was driving that car the other night would’ve killed you if you hadn’t moved, and your van was damaged too.”
“It’s not me getting dodgy post, though.”
“Not yet,” I said.
Luke slid his wandering hands down to my shoulders. “I don’t know what to make of it all, but I do think what’s happened to me is connected to whoever is harassing you. It has to be, so the logical assumption is that it’s someone who’s jealous—who feels some ownership over you.”
I nodded. “So it makes sense that it’s Laurent.”
“Maybe. But why would he be so clandestine about it? Up until a few weeks ago, you were still his wife, right?”
“Right.” The thought left a sour taste in my mouth. The more distance I had from my disastrous time in Paris, the more I could see it had been doomed from the start. Laurent had been arrogant and needy, and I’d been young, hurt, and carrying irrevocable love for someone else. “But he’s a brat. He hurt me because I never gave him what he wanted. Maybe he still wants to hurt me.”
“What more did he want from you?”
My heart. “Everything. I married him because I thought it made sense. Eventually, he probably figured that out.”
I didn’t want to talk about Laurent anymore, and by the look on Luke’s face, neither did he, but we couldn’t push our troubles aside entirely. If we did, the declarations we’d made over the last few days wouldn’t mean anything. “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I’m sorry this has messed with your life so much. I can’t handle the thought that you’re not safe.”
“I’m safe, Mia.”
“Are you, though? What if he tries to run you down again? Or does something to your van that you don’t notice and you drive—”
Luke pressed a hand over my mouth, his signature move, apparently. “Any of those things could happen to you too, but I’m telling you right now, if that dude comes at me to my face, it’s not me who ain’t safe.”
I believed him—I’d seen Luke fight, and there was a reason no one in Rushmere had ever fucked with him—but we weren’t talking about pub fights, or bare-knuckle brawls in the quarries. Whoever this was didn’t fight fair, and Luke couldn’t protect himself from something he didn’t see coming.
His hand slipped from my mouth. I could almost see the cogs in his brain whirring as he searched for something more reassuring to say, but I didn’t want reassurance. I wanted it to stop. I wanted to wake up with him every day and know he’d be whole when we went to sleep at night. After ten years without him, was it really too much to ask?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Luke
“Let’s do something else.”
I blinked, still caught in a vortex of introspection, even though that was the very thing I’d hassled her up the hill to avoid. “Like what?”
She shrugged, her gaze more focused than it had been the last time I’d checked. “I don’t know. Anything. It’s a beautiful day and we don’t have to work. We should make the most of it.”
In another lifetime, I’d have agreed with her, but despite my best efforts to distract myself—distract both of us—right now, all I wanted was to take her home, lock the doors, and keep her safe.
Mia flicked my cheek. “Don’t be like that.”
“Like what? I didn’t say anything.”
“Exactly. You’ve gone all caveman on me, I can tell.”
Unbidden, heat rippled through me. “Caveman? Does that mean I get to throw you over my shoulder and have my wicked way with you?”
“When have I ever stopped you doing that?”
Point to her, though it had been a while. The last few times we’d shared a bed we’d been either too exhausted or rattled to do much more than hold each other, and part of me wasn’t ready to change that. We’d fucked a thousand times. I needed to love her. “All right. What do you want to do? We can ride somewhere else if you like?”
“Can we ride into town and get a monster lunch from the pub?”
I loved that she loved to eat. And I was fucking starving, so any argument I had was eclipsed by our shared enthusiasm for hightailing it home to stuff our faces.
We freewheeled down the beacon and rode back into Rushmere. The pub was closest to Gus’s place, so we ditched the bikes in his garage and walked there. The garden was crowded, and we’d had enough sun, so we set up camp in a quiet corner near the bar and Mia wandered off to order enough food for four people.
She came back with two pints of cider and a bottle of wine. “Don’t judge me,” she said. “I wanna get silly.”
I wasn’t about to complain. I claimed a cider and necked half of it in one long swallow. “What food did you get?”
She smirked. “All of it.”
“Feeder.”
“Makes up for me being a shit cook.”
I laughed. Mia made omelettes almost as good as her mother’s, but I’d seen her burn cereal. It was kind of reassuring to know that hadn’t changed. “I can cook.”
“I know.”
Mia poured wine while I imagined cooking for her in my house again, this time naked while we took a break from a quiet night in. It was peak fantasy, but then my mind returned to the phone call I’d forgotten to tell her about before I’d dragged her on a four-mile bike ride. Old habits told me to leave it alone. To keep my own shit to myself and focus in her. But a resolve to be a better man, for once, won out.