He pulled his seat belt on. “I’m fine.”
“Your eyes are sunken and your skin is the color of concrete. I may not be a doctor but I’m not a fool. I hope you’re not one of these stubborn men who refuses to take painkillers. My father does that, too.”
“Ah, a real man doesn’t feel pain.” Really, he should throw the fucking drugs in the trash.
“Are they not what you need? We can risk buying more.”
“The kind of painkillers you get at a Boots wouldn’t do shite for this.”
“Is that an admission youarein pain?”
“It’s a commentary on how we’ve collectively set up a social system that is built to protect ourselves from our own stupidity. Speed limits, drug restrictions, warnings on cigarette packets... All to stop the lemmings falling off the cliff, yet still they find a way to fall.”
She shook her head. “Every time,” she said, under her breath.
“Every time what?”
“Every time I ask you a serious question, you turn it around or compensate with abstract notions or humor.”
“I compensate for everything with humor. Otherwise I’d be the dourest guy around.”
“The whattest guy?”
“Dourest.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“D-O-U-R-E-S-T.”
“Ah,dourest.”
“That’s what I sai—”
She’d already got out of the car. She walked around the bonnet and opened his door. “Out! I’m driving. And how is it your accent is getting stronger and we haven’t spoken to a single Scottish person?”
Was it? God help them if he regressed in any other way.
* * *
TWOHOURSLATERthe drizzle had given way to fog so thick Samira could be driving a submarine. She cleared her throat, louder than necessary, but in the back seat Jamie just shuffled, mumbling. She’d been holding off waking him, though shemighthave been braking a little too hard and singing along to Blondie a little too loud, in the hope he’d wake without it looking like she was spooked. But now she was spooked enough not to care.
“Jamie. Jamie!”
He moaned and rubbed his face. “Where are we?”
“No idea. I swear this road is narrower than the car. Your phone reception ran out half an hour ago, so I lost GPS. I’m using a...a real map that was in the glove compartment. On a piece of paper. I have to keep refolding it. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere but I’m reasonably confident we’re moving.” She tapped the speedometer, which hadn’t passed twenty miles per hour in thirty minutes. “And I’m eighty percent sure we’re headed to this loch and not Denmark, though at one intersection I had to get out of the car and walk right up to the sign before I could read it through the fog. At least any CCTV cameras will have a hard time making out our plates—and there are very few cars silly enough to be out on the roads. I’ve only almost crashed into three.”
“Wow, have you been saving up all those words for...” He checked his watch. “Two hours?”
That was just the beginning of her wild thoughts. The novelty of having someone to share them with hadn’t worn off—and Jamie wasn’t just anybody. She hurriedly adjusted the rear-vision mirror. Since she couldn’t see anything through the back window, she’d angled it to him, though in the dark her imagination had been forced to fill the gaps—his lanky body flopped over the seat, his broad chest filling and emptying. She’d imagined feeling it rise and fall against her cheek—the musky warmth of his sweater, the thud-thud of his heartbeat, his arm slung around her, his hand resting on her lower back...
Those hands. Strong and rough but dexterous. A surgeon’s hands but a soldier’s, too. He would nuzzle her hair like earlier, urge her face up toward his, take her lips...
Concentrate on the road.
“Just don’t drive us off a bridge,” he said. “Tess will think it a Hyland conspiracy.”
“Trying my hardest.”
