“Like what, Gulliver?” She toyed with me.
“Bare.” I cupped her breast through her T-shirt. “I don’t want anyone else touching you like this either.”
“Including me? Can I touch myself?”
My cock hardened tortuously. “Only if I’m watching.”
Now I was torturing myself. And her.
Maybe that was the plan I was making. I pulled my hands away.
“These pictures are stunning. Let’s look at them tomorrow.” I walked away, wondering where the fuck I’d downloaded such self-control from.
She frowned at me. “You made me promise we wouldn’t pretend this didn’t happen.”
There was hurt there and I felt like a tool for a moment.
I nodded. “I’m not pretending. Those photos are perfect. You’re perfect. Touching you like that was fucking amazing and I want to do it over and over again, but we have time. So much fucking time.”
Her eyes widened. I stepped closer to her, my hands going to her shoulders, grounding myself, hoping I was grounding her.
“Is this because of the baby?”
I shook my head. “It’s because I never stopped wanting you even after I had you.” I kissed her, softly, as sweetly as I could, then I turned and walked away, needing a very cold shower.
I tried to come up with a master plan. I wasn’t the only creative in my family; Finn was inventive with his businesses and the drinks he made; Roe was creative in terms of app design and problem solving. My creativity was in telling stories, so perhaps the most useless of skills given that they didn’t solve any real-world problems. I could construct a killer plot, develop characters over a series of books so that any reader was invested in them and not just the murders they solved, but working out how not to jump into a relationship with Iris with both feet, and thus spilling the entirety of the water out of the receptacle was not a practiced strength.
I sat on the edge of my bed looking out over the Strait, a boat passing by at some speed. The fence Finn and I had almost finished building looked good, a fence that would forever bring memories of Iris and her camera.
She was editing the photos, lost in them, when I left her in the kitchen, making sure she had a cup of tea and a bowl of olives which were her catnip at present.
I needed a few minutes to pull myself together and work out how to play this.
I’d known since New Orleans that I felt more for her than I’d done anyone else. I hadn’t put a label on it because that would’ve closed things off to growing or changing and I hadn’t known how she felt about me. I still didn’t.
I knew there were feelings that were more than friendly, but I didn’t know if those were there because she was carrying my child, a thought too heady for me to process properly. I wanted to woo her; I wanted her to fall in love with me and I wanted to give her a chance to develop those feelings if they were there rather than it be a hormone infused toppling that ended poorly.
So I needed to be creative – which meant there was only one way for me to work this out: what would a pair of characters do? This was still tricky as I was only writing this story from one point of view, so I didn’t have a writer’s omnipresent perspective.
I thought of my detective inspector, one of the central characters in my series. He’d been in love with his detective sergeant since the first book, only there’d been other factors at play which meant they’d never been able to get together – he thought one of the reasons was that his feelings weren’t reciprocated. I knew they were.
What advice would I give him?
I watched the water.
I heard a bird singing.
I remembered the dates and the brief flings and short relationships where I’d been the bad guy for ending it, breaking hearts like they were nothing more than chipped pottery.
I had no intention of breaking Iris’ heart although there was every chance she’d break mine.
What advice?
Don’t do anything uncharacteristic. Don’t do something that’s not you. Don’t do something that’s forced.
Don’t look like you’re trying too hard.
My heart was still thumping away in my chest. I didn’t like that feeling; it made me want to be reckless, so I picked up my phone and dialled a number that wouldn’t be expecting this call.
