“Colton!” said Flora, shaking her head and starting to giggle, mostly from relief.
As if in answer, the rain battered hard against the windowpanes of the pub. Some of it was rain, right enough, and some of it was seawater from the waves coming clear across the harbor wall and hitting the glass.
“Maybe in a little while,” Colton said.
“I’ve got something,” said the barman, going into the back of the building and bringing out a huge boiler suit. Colton and Joel looked at each other.
“Of course you have to take it,” said Joel. “You’re the client.”
“What are you going to do?” said Colton.
“I have to head back,” said Flora, who didn’t really like the idea of leaving the cozy bar—it was growing more and more crowded, with folk caught in the storm looking for shelter and deciding they might as well have a snifter if they were passing, and the windows were starting to steam up. “I’ll bring you back something of the boys’ if you like. Though not a kilt,” she added.
Joel glanced around the bar, torn. Then he looked into her face. Her hair was coiled around her neck, her eyes like passing clouds.
“Okay,” he said.
Bramble headed cheerfully for the door. Flora opened it and the gale howled in at what felt like a hundred miles an hour. Bramble cowered back.
“No, come on, pup,” she said, bowing her face against the wind. “We can do it.”
“Are you sure?” said Colton. “You’ll catch your death.”
She turned round and shook her head.
“It’s fine,” she said. “This is my home.”
And she vanished with the wind, out into the whiteness of the churning sky and spray, as if she were a part of it.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Joel stood there looking at the closed door. Colton stared at him.
“I’d follow her,” he said simply. “That’s not a professional opinion, by the way. Those damn MacKenzies.”
Joel didn’t even hear him.
Every instinct told him to stay put, to fold himself up, to do things as he’d always done them. The wind banged the door. Outside was a white maelstrom, a mystery, a pure and perfect storm.
He hesitated. Colton had turned away. Nobody else was looking at him. The bar was crowded with villagers, but no one was paying him any attention.
He was thirty-five years old. He thought about his instinct to run after her on the beach, to pull her out of the crowd at the dance. He thought of everything he had to lose, the complications of life.
Even though, up here, things felt so much simpler.
He wanted . . . What did he want?
He wanted to go home. He didn’t know where that was. He glanced once more around the bar. Then he crashed out of the door.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Wait, Flora, I’m coming. Wait for me!”
The shock of the air took his breath away. It was almost impossible to believe he was in temperate, damp, muggy Britain. It was like being slapped in the face.
“FLORA!”
The wind whipped his words away. He glanced around through the rain and could just about see Bramble’s tail, still wagging, as it disappeared up the track at the far end of the harbor.
“Wait!”
He tore after her, cold and weather forgotten as his expensive shoes splashed through deep muddy puddles, as his glasses became completely useless once more and he had to take them off and stick them in his pocket, rendering the world even fuzzier and less defined than before, a world where sea and sky had completely merged—had possibly always been merged—with nothing but the thinnest line on the horizon to separate them or tell them apart. In this great white watery world, he finally made himself heard, finally saw her turn around, that light hair, that startled look on her face as he caught up with her; and as she saw him looking such a mess, so unlike his normal composed, organized, in-control self, his hair plastered down on his head, and water pouring down his neck, and his shirt completely see-through, Flora couldn’t help it: she burst out laughing.
And Joel looked at the sky and thought of all the work he had to do and everything that was late and how many billable hours he wasn’t putting in and what kind of ridiculous set of circumstances had led him to this, and wondered whether he had the faintest idea about what he was getting into, and whether he gave a rat’s ass about that anyway, and decided that he didn’t. And he found he was laughing too; and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, and thought maybe he never had.
And Flora ran on, through the rain and the wind, the laughter punching the breath from her lungs as he pursued her, and Bramble barked joyously and jumped in and out of puddles on purpose, and they finally scrambled up and through the gate, Flora more soaked than she’d ever been in her entire life, and the farmyard was empty; there was nobody there but them, and the cows and the chickens, with everyone else on the mainland.
Flora collapsed against the heavy old wooden farmhouse door, underneath the ancient lintel, panting and utterly out of breath from the exertion, the storm, and the laughter, closely followed by Joel, running up behind her, and she knew, immediately, instinctively, what was going to happen; regardless of Inge-Britt—and all the other Inge-Britts—despite Charlie, despite everything her friends had said. Even as she was still giggling helplessly about how sodden and ridiculous they were, how absurd everything was; even as she was still laughing, he had fallen on her lips and was kissing her furiously, frenziedly hard, and she was kissing him back the same, and neither of them could breathe, until there was no breath left in them, and the tiny door Charlie had unlocked unleashed a torrent.
Chapter Forty
Joel felt like he was kissing a mermaid, something from the sea. Her long, damp body pressed up against him felt absolutely astonishing, but they were both starting to shiver, from cold, and from excitement too. Flora opened the latch on the door behind her and they fell into the cozy, scented kitchen, the Aga warm, the fire still glowing in the range. Bramble shot in behind them and dumped himself in the prime spot right in front of the stove, shaking himself out madly, but Flora and Joel were oblivious.
Flora immediately started undoing the buttons on Joel’s shirt, pulling him over to the warmth of the fire. She thought about stopping herself, in her crazed hysteria, but then he drew her closer to him, his own fingers fumbling, and she knew that he wanted her just as much as she wanted him, and was overwhelmed.
She ignored the fact that she was in her childhood kitchen, was completely blind to anything that wasn’t him: his cold, clear skin against hers as he cupped her face and kissed her hard, his lightly hairy olive chest glinting in the firelight as they sank to the floor—there was no other light; the power had gone off in Mure, after all.
He broke away.
“Undress,” he said breathlessly. “Undress. Please. I have to see you. I can’t . . . I have to.”
Flora sat back a little, blinking.