It was just a body. A sack of flesh that carried around the heart of a person. That was the only bit that really mattered.
Would I be less attracted to Alistair if his belly was soft beneath my fingers instead of hard? If he had stretch marks like lightning strikes from bringing another human in the world?
I didn’t even need to think about it.
But a decade’s worth of insecurities couldn’t be healed overnight.
Alistair’s breath hit the back of my neck, his warm fingers finding the hidden zip easily. Even with a family setting up a beach blanket a hundred yards away, the whirr of metal felt intimate. I took a breath, then let the dress fall.
“I’m wearing the life jacket,” I declared, turning slowly, hands curling around my waist.
Not that Alistair looked. He kept his eyes determinedly on mine. Only breaking away to pull a tube of sun cream from his bag and hold it out to me.
“You aren’t going to offer to put it on for me? Give the villagers a show?” It was a half-joke. An attempt to fray this cord straining between us.
He shook his head. “I have you all to myself for another, what? Another five – six? – hours. I have too many plans to spend that time in a police cell.” And then he did look. My dimpled thighs, my soft belly with its stretch marks. His blue gaze searing with promise. “Red is your colour, Lang.”
My stomach flipped. Then flipped again as we stared at each other.
I got the sense he was waiting for me to contradict him. Blow him off. Remind him everything we were doing here was all for show.
I just poured sun cream into my palm. “Very well.”
Once I was all sun-creamed and strapped into my life jacket so tightly I resembled an extremely buxom woman in a period drama, Alistair held the kayak steady with his foot and helped me climb into the slippery seat.
I landed on my arse. Hard.
“You okay?” he asked without laughing.
“Yep.”
The corner of his lip curled just enough; I knew my bravado had failed me. His thumb swiped over my chin. “Ten minutes, remember.”
“Ten minutes.”
Truthfully, I shouldn’t have worried. Five minutes after pushing away from the shore, turning back was the last thing on my mind. “You can see the whole island from out here,” I said, shielding my eyes with the hand that wasn’t white-knuckling the side of the kayak.
We couldn’t have been more than two hundred yards out, but the people on the beach looked the size of Legofigurines. The rolling hills were dappled in gold. Green pastures, dotted with wildflowers that burst in pinks and purples, spilled down to the rocky cliffs. Kinleith looked sparse. Tiny. A handful of whitewashed cottages clinging to the coastline.
“Amazing, right? I can’t believe it took me this long to get back on the water.” Alistair’s voice rumbled against my back. “This is going to sound cheesy, but I forgot how small being out on the water makes me feel.”
“Like you’re the only person in the world.” I nodded, completely getting it. “Did you come out here a lot before moving to Glasgow?”
“When I was a kid, Dad would bring us on the rare weekend he took off.” His arms, encasing mine, flexed as he slid the paddle easily through the water. “Then we hit our teens and could do this without him. Heather and I spent nearly our entire summer out here once.”
I smiled at the image, Heather no doubt driving her older brother to distraction. “That sounds like a perfect childhood.” The complete opposite of mine.
“I guess it was.” He stopped paddling, setting the metal bar across my knees. “Do you think you’ll live in Kinleith for ever?”
I glanced over my shoulder at him. “Forever is a long time.”
“For the foreseeable future then?” he pushed. “Do you ever see yourself leaving?”
“No.” I answered honestly. “When Cameron and I first split, I wanted nothing more than to run away, even knowing it was cruel to move Teddy away from her dad.”
He heard the embarrassing truth I’d inadvertently dropped right into the middle of the sentence. “You felt lonely here?”
“Yes.” Why was that so shameful? “I didn’t know anyone. I knew a few school mums in passing, like Heather, but didn’t know any of them well. Cameron’s friends had become my friends by default. So when it ended, I had no one.”
