Then she smiled at me. “But your choice led you to a successful place. There’s a wedding soon but it’s not yours yet? A brother maybe?”
Jackson. He was getting married soon.
“But there are issues with something to do with work. Someone is being a bully. You might have to encourage someone else to make the right call because that will be the only way it’s ended.”
Her fingers trailed across the cards, telling me more about the present. Then she warned of an elder man’s health, a younger’s man’s wellbeing and then her face broke into a smile.
“Babies,” she said. “There are babies, or a baby.”
“My brother,” I half laughed. “Him and his wife to be – we predicted she’d be pregnant within a year of them getting married.”
The girl shook her head. “Sooner than that.” She looked at me knowingly.
“I think you must be confused.”
“If I am, then my grandmother was wrong about me having inherited the gift. There’s one last thing and I don’t know what it means, I just have the words.”
“What are they?”
She looked at me, her expression serene and the youthfulness having resumed through her features.
“Tell him.”
I found Killian sitting outside, reading a second-hand book he’d picked up from a store nearby. He had a fresh coffee and looked more relaxed than I’d possibly ever seen him.
My stomach churned with the things that she’d told me, although my brain kept on with its mantra ofjust a bit of funover and over, hoping I’d believe it. But I knew I needed to tell him and sooner rather than later, before this became the monster that ate me up from the inside and I was the shadow of the woman I needed myself to be.
“Has your path been illuminated?” His eyebrows raised as he saw me.
“You could say that. She was vague, but quite accurate in her vagueness,” I said, sitting down next to him. “I’ll think about it some more later. But it was fun.”
“Liar.” The word came out quietly and quickly. “The look on your face suggested in was more torture than fun, Claire.”
“True,” I said. There was no point in lying. He knew I had something to explain and not once had he tried to rush me to do so, even knowing it would possibly rearrange his world. “She told me to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
I slapped him on the back. “Nice try. Not here. Not yet.”
“Then when?” He turned to me. “Claire, whatever you say is not going to change what I want, which is you, in case you haven’t figured that out. I’ve been wanting you since I was twenty and quite clearly it hasn’t changed. I know your reason for breaking it off with me back then is huge; I get that, but it’s also in the past and the past has made us what we are. We wouldn’t be here now without it.”
I leaned against him, feeling his strength and hating myself for needing it. “I know,” I started. “Things happen for reasons that we don’t know about at the time. But this is big. It isn’t something I’m ever going to get over.”
He nodded. “I haven’t put any time pressures on you to tell me. Fuck knows it’s been less than a week since we started being civil to each other…”
“That’s unfair, we managed many conversations beforehand.” We had. Yes, there had been the whole show of verbal sparring in front of my brothers especially, but there had been times late on at night when we’d just sat up and talked. There had been times too when he had carried me to bed because I had drunk too much or had been too tired, and on a couple of occasions I’d woken with him asleep in the same room.
“You’re right. But even so, I think for us to properly look at where we’re going, you need to tell me why.” He spun round, straddling the bench where we were sitting so he could look at me. “Claire, I know what you’re going to tell me is going to hurt. But I can deal with it without hating you.”
“How did you know that was what I was afraid of?”
“Maybe I saw the tarot card reader as well once.”
We headed back to the cottage, his arm around my waist as we walked back to the car and then the occasionally grip of my hand as we drove back. For the rest of the day he gave me space. I lounged on the patio reading a book while he went down to the cove to surf, returning just before Hollywood hour, when the light was at its glorious best, casting warm shadows across the scene.
He stood in front of me, his wetsuit already half dry from the walk back and his hair damp and salty from the sea. Every muscle was visible through the wetsuit: hard, defined and sculpted. I knew how it felt beneath my hands, beneath my skin and I itched to touch now, to make his body respond in the way I knew I could.
“Killian,” I said, licking my lips, my legs parting automatically.
