My hands curled into fists as anger tightened my throat.
“His name was Harry. His dad wasn’t a good man either, and he’d learned how to treat girls from him. I remember his tongue felt like this slug that I couldn’t get out of my mouth.” She winced. “When I started to need to barricade my bedroom door at night and my mum wouldn’t listen when I told her I was afraid of him, I knew I had to be brave and put myself first. So I called Grandpa and told him what was happening.”
“I hope he ripped that little shit’s head off,” I whispered harshly. The thought of Sarah as a girl, cowering in her bedroom from a sexual predator living in her own home, enraged me beyond measure.
As if she sensed it, she settled a calming hand over mine. “I think Grandpa wanted to, but he is so—” She flinched, grief-stricken. “Hewasso smart. He called the police and social services instead. When they showed up, the police took me aside and questioned me. I told them what had been happening and when they relayed it to my mum, she flew at me and smacked me across the face in front of everyone. That was it. The police arrested her and social services took me from her right there and then.”
Her words were so matter-of-fact, but the pain that must have caused her. Christ, this woman had lost so much before she was even a teenager. “Then your grandparents got custody?”
Sarah nodded, her expression softening. “They gave me the life I’d always wanted. They saved me in more ways than I can explain. But … my mum left her mark on me. I … My shyness wascrippling. Maybe if we’d known better then, I could have talked to a therapist or something, but we just muddled through.” She bit her lip, withdrawing her hand from mine. “I was pretty awful with men … I mean, Iam.” She huffed out a self-deprecating laugh. “I just get so tongue-tied and embarrassed around men I find attractive. It’s mortifying.”
I didn’t point out that she no longer got tongue-tied when she was with me because I didn’t know how I felt about Sarah finding me a comfortable person to be around. “But you’ve had sex?”
She laughed at my bluntness, her whole face lighting up. I ignored a strange tugging in my chest. “Aye, twice.”
I blinked rapidly. “Excuse me, did you just say you’ve only had sex twice?”
“Are you mocking me?” She narrowed her eyes into fiery slits.
“No, little darling, I’m not mocking you,” I assured her. “I’m trying to digest the news that a supremely intelligent, beautiful woman of my acquaintance has only had sex twice in her thirty-one years.”
“Oh.” She pressed her lips against a pleased smile and then shrugged. “Well, the first time was when I was eighteen. I had two close friends in high school and they were always trying to force me out of my comfort zone, to be more outgoing. They asked me to a postgraduation party in the woods behind Ardnoch, and there was this guy. Callan. He wasn’t from Ardnoch—he was a classmate’s older cousin. Anyway, I’d had a few beers to try to loosen up and for some reason, he took an interest in me.”
Oh, for some reason, indeed. She had no clue how gorgeous she was.
“Thinking on it now, I acted so stupidly, but he asked if I’d go for a walk with him and we did. It was pitch-black, but he hada little torch key ring. We were about five minutes from where everyone else was camped and he just stopped and tried to kiss me. I told him I didn’t kiss on the mouth. So he kissed my neck.” Those two pink flags of embarrassment glowed on her cheeks again. “One minute he was feeling me up, the next … well … And I wanted to,” she reassured me. “I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to know what sex was like.”
Dear God. “Are you telling me, your first time was against a tree in the woods with a stranger?”
She wrinkled her nose and nodded. “It was bloody uncomfortable and painful.”
“And the second time?” I was almost afraid to know.
“A few years later. Before I worked as a housekeeper at Ardnoch, I was a housekeeper at the Gloaming when Gordon owned it.” The Gloaming was the local village pub and hotel. “I’d put my hat in the ring for management, and he’d sent me to this managerial course down in Glasgow. The people on the course all got along, but I was shy as usual. One night, I was bored in my hotel room and went down to have a quiet drink, but one of the blokes from the course saw me and came over. Andy was his name. He’d been trying to flirt with me for the prior two days and didn’t seem at all put off by my lack of social skills.” She grinned at herself, and an answering smile twitched my lips. “I was brave that night and asked him back to my hotel room.”
Lucky Andy.
“It was … it was nice.” She nodded. “Much better than the first time. But … he rolled off me almost immediately, cleaned up, thanked me like I’d been his waitress for the evening, and left. I felt … vulnerable. A bit sad. Like a piece of tissue he’d just used.”
“Bastard,” I murmured.
“No.” She shook her head. “We both knew what the situation meant. Especially when I told him he couldn’t kiss me onthe mouth. I just … I just hadn’t expected to feel so empty afterward. Like he’d taken something rather than me giving him something. Does that make sense?”
I nodded, my pulse starting to race for some inexplicable reason. “And that’s it? That’s the extent of your sexual experience?”
“I’m afraid so.”
It was even more impressive, then, that she wrote the sexual psychology of her characters so well. And it was a damn fucking shame that it hadn’t come from more experience. “You really haven’t kissed anyone since you were twelve years old?”
“I don’t like it,” she replied, her tone sharper than usual. “So why bother?”
Deciding not to push (for now), I shoved back from the desk. “Well, now that we’ve exchanged mutual trust, I think it’s time for a break from all this intense talk about our past traumas.”
Sarah smiled at my droll tone and gave me a grateful look. “Let’s go out for lunch.”
“Sounds good.” I stood, pulling out her chair for her to stand. “You can tell me what’s happening with Juno in the new book.”
“You want to spoil it for yourself?” she asked, switching off the gas fire.
