Either way, it proved what Rae had already known: Martha wouldn’t be comfortable with them starting something, casual or otherwise. She wasn’t even that keen on them being friends. There would be no more kissing or fornicating. At all. Besides, he had no more excuses to see her now that Dad’s ankle was healing and she’d gotten the ball rolling with the farm.
‘Good. Look, Vik wants to go to the pub for a pint, so I’ll have to love you and leave you. Turn your bloody phone off silent, okay?’
‘Okay!’ Rae waved and hung up, then threw her phone on her bed facedown as anxiety swallowed her up.
She’d thought that managing the farm would be her hardest task this summer, but it turned out that she hadn’t even scratched the surface.
14
Struan never expected to find himself joining a book club in his early thirties, but Eiley’s weekly gatherings were one of his few opportunities to socialise during quieter seasons, so he’d fast become a regular. With the tavern growing busier every day, their host had decided to create a temporary meeting space in her bookshop, where Struan was currently trying to cram his long legs between the pillow-littered couch and the low coffee table. He sat beside the woman who had forced him to join in the first place, Harper, a bubbly butstubbornauthor who had only lived in Belbarrow for a couple of years.
‘You need shorter legs,’ she groaned, sidling to make room for Dot, the town’s unofficial organiser of almost everything. If Harper got any closer, he’d be squished against the window like a pancake, but she didn’t seem to mind the fact as she gave him a final shove.
‘Maybe we should just go back to the tavern,’ Struan suggested, crossing his legs despite the discomfort it brought to his balls, also in danger of becoming crêpes. His reflection in the window was pretzel-like, but it was the view of Main Street beyond,that left him most agitated. He’d woven between those same shops with Rae last weekend, trying to pack as many conversations as he could between sample deliveries. Despite living in Belbarrow his whole life, being next to her had felt like touring a new place: he’d wanted to make the most of every second, learn all of her narrow side streets and alleyways while he had the chance. He hadn’t realised that until after, when she’d rejected him and he’d gone home to his empty house to stare at the ceiling, the taste of tayberries refusing to leave his tongue.
He’d fucked it up. Of course she wouldn’t want him that way. She was a hotshot chef, for Christ’s sake – and his sister’s best friend, no less. Martha had been trying to set him up with people for years, but never once had she proposed Rae as an option.
Because they didn’t make sense. His life was in the mountains, where everything was simple. Where he could be useful. Hers was in Sydney, Tokyo, Barcelona, wherever she planned to jet off to once the summer was over. He’d be punching well above his weight.
She hadn’t texted him since, and he wasn’t brave enough to face a second rejection. Besides, she’d set the rules. They weren’t allowed to be alone together. It felt an awful lot like saying, ‘Stay away from me.’
‘We could barely hear each other over the noise last week,’ Eiley said, perching on a stool at the head of the coffee table. Her porcelain features were far more elfin than her sister’s, Cam, with more shades of gold in her hair and freckles dotting her rosy complexion.
‘We don’t talk anyway. We drink,’ Dot pointed out, already flipping through the pages of her book. It had been her pick this week, probably not for the first time considering her copy ofMrs Dallowaywas both worn and decorated with pink annotation labels. Struan’s, on the other hand, had been borrowed from the library and skimmed over at most. One of the non-Harper reasons he came was to try to improve his concentration skills, but Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness storytelling had gone straight over his head. He’d gotten distracted by the birds on his window in minutes.
Dot was right: book club was mostly an excuse to get tipsy at 5 p.m. on a weekday.
Harper flicked her blond hair, the lavender-scented waves whipping into Struan’s face. He rolled his eyes. He loved the woman, but she’d been an endearing pain in his arse from the minute they’d met back in February, when he’d come across her and her fiancé, Fraser, in a rather compromising position during a hike on Valentine’s Day. With their clothes lost somewhere down a ravine, they’d been ‘huddling for warmth’ by the falls, apparently. He’d helped them out with spare clothes and hot tea, and the rest was history.
‘Well, actually,’ she began, a wide grin spreading across her bonny features, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to sit out the drinking part for the next few months.’
‘Oh, God. You’re up the kyte,’ Struan said without thinking.
She turned and gave him a chastising slap on the chest. ‘That’s a very strange way of sayingcongratulations.’
‘Is that what you were doing on the hills? Did I witness a conception?’
‘Shush!’ She flushed, sinking lower in her chair.
Eiley giggled. As Fraser’s other sister, she’d likely known for a while now, and she sparkled with joy in a way Struan rarely saw of the reserved bookshop owner.
Dot bounced out of her seat to hug Harper, tears flooding her cheeks. ‘Oh, congratulations, dear. What wonderful news!’
‘Thank you so much, Dot.’ Over Dot’s shoulder, Harper gave Struan a pointed glance. ‘That was the reaction I’d been hoping for.’
He smirked. Of course he was happy for her, and gave her shoulder a soft squeeze to make sure she knew it. Still, heavy lead landed in his stomach. It was strange, having such a restless brain and body but never really feeling like he was going anywhere. Stuck on the same looping trails while the rest of the world veered somewhere new, a bit like a hamster on a wheel. He didn’t want kids, but he wantedsomething. Something that made him as happy as Harper was now. What if he spent the rest of his life this way, never meeting the right person, never finding a family that was his to keep?
Only in the orchard, exploring Rae’s body, had those worries quietened. He’d been a participant for once, not a passer-by in someone else’s narrative. He’d found synchronicity in the rhythm of her breaths, the softness of her moans, and his body had woken up, brain chatter lulled, in a way it only ever usually did during adrenaline-fuelled emergency rescues.
He’d had a hold of something, but it had slipped through his fingers before he’d had time to understand what it was.
‘I’m going to have to find a new club,’ he joked once the gushing settled. ‘I can’t do this sober.’
‘Oh, be quiet. You love us. We all know it,’ Harper chided.
‘I’d love you more if you weren’t cutting off my circulation.’ He shook the pins and needles from his thigh, only half joking. If they were going to do this, they needed more furniture, preferably built for people over the age of ten.
‘So, now the news is out, can we start wedding planning?’ Eiley questioned, clapping her hands excitedly.
