He stared at her, saying absolutely nothing, hands still steady on her shoulders. She could feel the heat off his body and the pull of him, as if he had some gravitational magnetism that she couldn’t escape.
“I was going to ask you out,” he said.
She heard the temper in his tone, the growl. “What?”
“When I came back after I’d finished. I was going to ask you out. You’d been seeing that prick David Jeffries…”
“The football captain? The one who’s doing time for fraud?” she said, slightly distracted by the memory. He’d been the boy everyone in school had wanted to date. He’d also been her first, not that it was memorable. Party. Locked bedroom. Cheap booze.
“That fuckwit,” Scott said, practically spat. “But I knew you’d broken up.”
“So you were going to ask me out?” She wasn’t sure she had use of her faculties. Specifically hearing.
“Yes. I’d wanted to for years, but you were too young and then you were going out with him…”
“So why didn’t you? Jesus, Scott? Why didn’t you ask me? I had no idea…”
His eyes went cold. “You did know. Don’t lie to me Keren – Jake told me that you’d been laughing about it with one of your friends, how you’d never go out with a weird muso like me…”
“You think I’d say something like that about you?” Her temper was boiling over now, the palms of her hands pushing into his chest. “After all the years you knew me, you would think I’d ever speak about you like that? If I was going to call you a weird muso, I’d have done it to your face, like I have done a million times since, you fucking idiot of man! Why didn’t you find me and ask me if I’d said it…”
“I was embarrassed. I thought…”
“You thought wrong, Scott Maynard! Maybe you’d be best not thinking at all, because you got that so horribly, fucking wrong…”
And then she couldn’t speak anymore because his mouth was on hers, hard and demanding, kissing away every one of the words she had left. His lips were soft and his beard felt rough against her skin, reminding her that he wasn’t that boy anymore. He was a man who knew what he was doing.
Her hands trailed across his back, feeling heavy muscles. This kiss was demanding, eager, all of her rage and annoyance seeping out into it with their tongues duelling for control.
Scott’s hands travelled down her arms, onto her waist and up, cupping her breasts, making her nipples harden and wetness grow between her legs.
He pulled his mouth away. “Fuck, if I knew how fucking fiery you were I’d have told you this sooner…”
Realisation flooded through her like water through a breached dam. She raised a hand and slapped him across the face, stepping backwards into a table. “Fucking bastard,” she said. “If you tell one person that I let you kiss me I swear I’ll burn this place down!”
“That you let me kiss you? You were all over me. Your hands found places I didn’t know existed…”
“Seriously, you piss me off, give me some shit story about how Jake told you I called you a weirdo and then you kiss me? This has got Scott Maynard the prick written all over it!” She turned and walked out of the door, losing some momentum because she had to turn the lock to exit. She then paced off into the night, to her house, where she threw herself onto her couch and wondered why her body had responded as it had done to Scott, when Oliver’s kiss to her cheek had felt like that of a brother.
6
Peopling had not been a successful task. Scott had spent the week trying to avoid pretty much everyone he possibly could, which was difficult when you ran a bar and lived in a small town. It seemed that everywhere he went someone wanted to talk to him about some inane topic, even at the top of Bleak Low, a place where he was usually safe from human interaction.
He’d had Gran and the coven in to discuss tonics, half his family in to talk about Oliver, the other half in to discuss lambing season and overnight shifts. Then there’d been Alex and his colleague in, borrowing a room to talk about the attack on Lena just after Christmas that lead to her and Sorrell being stuck in the underground cave systems. Lena and Sorrell had been put in harm's way by a disturbed individual who believed kidnapping Lena would allow him to be taken back by a religious group. Scott could still remember the moment they'd realised Sorrell was missing and had gone after Lena, and the way his brother's face drained of colour. As a member of Severton's Search and Rescue, Scott had run through brief nightmare scenarios of finding the woman his brother loved dead and having to watch him crumble. He was fucking glad he'd never had to live a single one of those realities and hoped he never did. The man who'd caused all the misery was still at large. Alex and the police were working hard to find him and Scott suspected that Alex was motivated by similar internal visualizations. Neither brother had ever discussed it, but they each understood that keeping Sorrell safe was as much a priority to keeping Zack alive as checking carabiners were. Alex could use as many rooms as he damn well pleased to that end
Easter wasn’t far off, which meant Shove Tuesday traditions and the other madness that came with spring. For a moment, he’d thought Keren had sense in wanting to leave, but standing at the top of Bleak Low, he’d changed his mind.
Keren could move. If she wasn’t around anymore, he’d be able to move on. Maybe a date with Patsy would work out next time.
He hadn’t seen Keren since they’d kissed. She’d categorically avoided him, as if he was ridden with the plague at the very least. Until today. When they’d be forced to spend time in the same building because there was no way she wouldn’t be at Sorrell and Zack’s housewarming given that her, Sorrell and Rayah were the new Coven and he wasn’t going to miss it. Zack was his brother.
He passed the post office where Gran ruled Severton from and the row of cottages, known locally as the plague houses because all the residents in them had died during the Great Plague in sixteen sixty-six. There was no plague now, not one spread by fleas anyway.
Then there was the row of terraced houses, all with neatly kept front gardens, built to house the mill workers that had been employed in the small factory that hadn’t lasted very long at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Keren lived in the end house, next door to Lena’s Aunt Jean, the lunatic woman who had seemingly left the religious organisation, termed as ‘cult’ by Alex, but wouldn’t hear a negative word said against it.
It was Saturday, so the town was full of tourists and day-trippers, some looking round the churchyard where plague victims were buried, others busying themselves in the shops and cafes. Most weekends from now until mid-January would be like this; trade would be good and the community would thrive.
The walk from town to the hotel was around a mile, mile and a half at the most, and would take no more than half an hour. He passed one of the phone booths that were on a secret rotation of being repainted by Severton’s own graffiti artist. This one was orange with leopard print. The phone boxes had long since been found unremarkable by the residents of the town: only Aggie Johnson was still trying to work out who the mystery painter was.
