‘My brother’s here.’
‘Caleb?’
‘Yeah. The original contractor bailed and so I had to call in my brother. The whole project is late because of it, and he just arrived last week so I’ve been catching him up on everything.’
Had their texts been that superficial? She didn’t even know his brother was in town. She’d almost lost him as a friend, as everything. That thought had her feeling far more panicked than anything that had happened after Beltane.
She needed to get him back.
She wanted to keep him.
‘And how do you feel about your brother being here?’
‘I’d kinda rather talk about dead relatives than live ones,’ Elliot said wryly, taking off his glasses and rubbing the lenses with the bottom of his shirt to clear the drops of water left by his hair.
Daisy laughed a bit too loud and got a censoring look from an old man with a newspaper. She mouthed a quicksorry, even though that same old man had been nearly yelling across the library just a few minutes ago, wondering where the most recent edition of the paper was.
‘Dead relatives it is,’ she whispered, leaning closer as Elliot pulled out his phone to show her the ancestry app he’d been using. ‘My great-aunt has been talking a lot about Nathan in her diary.’ Their heads tipped together, and his thigh pressed against hers and every nerve ending in Daisy’s body woke up.
Hiding from him hadn’t stopped her fromwantinghim. Elliot had somehow managed to wake up the part of herself she had shut down after David left. And that part, the part that wanted to push his hair back and run her fingers through it, the part that wanted to kiss him, to taste him again, the part that wanted to feel his skin pressed against hers, to hear the sound of his pleasure and want and need taking over,thatpart was wide awake now.
He looked up from his phone and caught her staring. His cheeks flushed pink like he knew exactly what she was thinking about.
‘That’s very interesting,’ she said, her voice unnecessarily breathy considering Elliot had been talking about Ellis Island records.
The corner of his mouth quirked up. ‘Oh, yeah?’
Daisy gave a slight nod. Their faces were so close now she could see the fan of his eyelashes behind his glasses and the stubble growing in on his jawline.
‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she said, and his smile grew.
It would be so easy to lean forward and kiss him in this dim corner of the library with the rain streaming down the window, to press her lips to his and stop pretending she didn’t have feelings for this man who’d done nothing but help her since they met. But her emotions were still a jumbled mess, and her thoughts were even worse. She didn’t know if she could give Elliot what he deserved, and she certainly didn’t want to hurt him again.
Elliot held her gaze a moment longer like he was waiting for her to decide.
‘You were saying?’ she said, letting her gaze return to the family tree on Elliot’s phone.
He cleared his throat. ‘Right so here’s where my great-grandfather’s family arrived but they stayed with a cousin named Nathan, who was already living here. I think that might be our guy.’
‘Incredible!’
They spent the rest of Elliot’s lunch break attempting to decode old census records and birth certificates. They didn’t kiss, but Elliot’s leg stayed firmly pressed to hers, his foot occasionally tapping against hers when he found something exciting, their elbows knocked together as he tapped on his phone, and more than once their heads dipped close enough to touch, Elliot’s damp hair against hers. She couldn’t help how she leaned into him, the way she craved every accidental brush of their bodies.
By the time they packed up their little corner of the library, Daisy was not thinking about the past at all. She was obsessively thinking about the present and how to have more of Elliot in it.
Daisy was falling and she didn’t know if she wanted to catch herself this time.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
It was a beautiful sunny day in June, and Daisy was wearing a navy-blue T-shirt dress and a pair of bright white sneakers. Elliot wanted to comment on the color change, but he decided against it. Maybe she didn’t want to explain why she’d re-incorporated color back into her wardrobe. Maybe he wanted to pretend it was because of him. She’d certainly made the color come back into his life.
They were walking down Main Street after a quick stop at the café. Daisy had an alarmingly large iced coffee in one hand and her great-aunt’s diary in the other. She was filling Elliot in on the latest events from the diary. Her excited voice floated on the warm, early summer air.
‘So, Aunt D has finally stopped refusing Nathan, who she now calls Nate, did I tell you that?’
Elliot shook his head as he sipped his smoothie. She hadn’t told him that yet, but she’d told him lots of other things. They were back to hanging out together, and he’d seen her nearly every day over the past two weeks.
