‘Why did Adam send me here?’
I wanted to shock him, and I had.
Josh rocked back in his chair as though from a blow he hadn’t seen coming.
‘You already asked me that, Lily. And I already told you I have no idea.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe you.’
He gave a shrug that was meant to look casual, except it missed the mark by miles.
‘I don’t know what else to tell you. I have no secret that I’m keeping from you.’
I wanted to believe him. I really did. I wanted to believe I’d travelled all this way on a wild goose chase. But I wasn’t convinced. If Josh had proved nothing else, he’d shown that he was actually very good at keeping secrets from me. Huge ones. The biggest of which had threatened to blow my entire world apart. Josh might have conveniently forgotten that he’d hidden the fact that he was inlove with me until the very worst moment that he could ever have revealed it. But I hadn’t.
His pillows were much firmer than mine. But that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t sleep.
Despite changing the sheets, the bed still smelled of Josh. And even that wasn’t the reason I was still wide awake hours after I’d eventually given in and agreed to sleep in Josh’s bed – words I’d never imagined I would find in my vocabulary again.
I was exhausted from the events of the day. I ought to be comatose by now, and yet hours after I’d extinguished the storm lantern’s flickering flame, I still couldn’t sleep. Fletcher, on the other hand, had no such problems, and was quietly snoring away by the foot of the bed.
I’d tussled with Josh over who would sleep on the settee and who would take the bed, knowing all the while that I was wasting my breath. It had been the same with the shower.
‘The water in the tank will be cold by morning. If you want a warm shower, it’s now or never.’
There were many reasons to have passed on that one. The most pressing was tangled up in my reluctance to get naked in the place where Josh got naked. I had intended to decline the offer, but I could feel the grime of the day sticking to me like a second skin. I also had a sneaking suspicion that I no longer smelled great. It made saying ‘no’ impossible.
I took the quickest shower in recorded history, grateful that Josh had volunteered to take Fletcher outside for his late-night toilet trip while he checked the workshop was weathering the storm.
I rinsed the suds from my body, aware that by the time I turned off the taps the temperature was considerably cooler than when I’d stepped beneath it.
‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve stolen all the hot water,’ I babbled as I exited the bathroom and unexpectedly bumped into Josh in the hallway. I’d dressed hurriedly in my pyjamas, and even though they were the button-up-to-the-neck type favoured by octogenarians, it felt wrong and uncomfortable to be having a conversation with him in my nightwear. I clutched the buttoned edges tightly together, terrified of displaying even an inch of skin, somehow forgetting that, long ago, his eyes, hands and tongue had travelled over most of it.
Josh shrugged. ‘I’m used to taking cold showers.’
I really hoped that was because of the unreliable power supply, because any other reason was strictly off limits.
‘Have you got everything you need?’ Josh asked, sounding for once almost as awkward as me.
‘Apart from electricity, phone signal and a way out of this forest, you mean?’
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said, sounding nowhere near as confident as I would have liked.
He turned to go, and later I really wished I’d said nothing more than ‘Goodnight’. But I didn’t.
‘Thank you, Josh.’
‘What for?’
There were almost too many options to pick. I went for the obvious one. ‘For giving us somewhere to stay.’
His dark brows drew closer together. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t do that?’
Something in his tone made me shiver. I shrugged. ‘I guess we don’t know each other at all these days.’
Josh gave a small sound that was almost a laugh. ‘That’s generally what happens when you say you never want to see someone again.’
How did we get here again?
