Page 8

“Okay. And you know I’ve been flipping houses again and I know you’re still running your business.” She hates the way he says it like that—like of course she wouldn’t have done anything else in the last six months. Admittedly, she hasn’t done anything else in the last six months—but that’s beside the point, isn’t it? She could have gone on an epic scuba-diving holiday to Fiji, for all he knows. Okay, she can’t scuba dive—but six months is plenty of time to learn, isn’t it?

“So that about covers the big stuff, right?” Finn asks.

She glances at the nearest cottage window, seeing movement behind the drawn curtains, though she can’t say in the low glow who it is. Finn goes to open the car door, apparently taking her silence as acquiescence. She puts her hand on his arm to stop him. She’d forgotten how solid his arms were. Or, at least, she’d tried to forget.

He looks back at her and she lets go.

“Ground rules,” she says. He frowns, and she huffs out an impatient breath. “We need some bloody ground rules, before I go in there.”

“Okay,” he says slowly. “Like what?”

“Seriously, Finn,” she snaps. “You were planning to waltz on in there without talking it through first?”

“Well, I was planning to walk in, rather than dance.” She gives him a withering look and he shrugs. “I thought we could just, you know, wing it.”

“Of course you fucking did,” she mutters.

He rolls his eyes at her tone and the action is so bloody infuriating it makes her grit her teeth. “Mel, we were together over three years. I think we can manage to convince my family we’re together for a week. They already love you anyway—they’re not going to be picking holes.”

They. They already love you. It makes her wince, despite the number of times she’s insisted to Priya that she’s put it all behind her. Them. Not him.

“No touching,” she says firmly, looking straight out of the windshield, not at him.

“At all?”

She gives a firm nod, and he lets out an incredulous laugh.

“Mel, that’s not going to work. Anyone who has spent any time around us at all will know something is up if I don’t touch you for an entire week.”

His voice is low as he says it, rough velvet rippling over her nerve endings. She hates how he is the only one who has ever been able to do that—bring on a physical reaction just by talking to her. She glares out of the window to hide it, into the pitch black. She knows he’s right, though.

“Fine,” she bites out. “No touching when there’s no one watching.”

“Deal.” She risks glancing at him and their gazes clash. “But, ah, seeing as we’re on the subject…” He clears his throat. “Where, exactly, are we allowed to touch?”

“We’ll be in front of your family, Finn,” she snaps. Snapping, apparently, is her new way of communicating. “Do you really need a guide as to what’s appropriate?” She pulls a hand through her hair. “Just keep it to a minimum, okay?”

“You cut your hair.”

She frowns at the complete change of subject. “What?”

“It’s shorter.”

“Well observed.”

“I like it.”

Her frown deepens. She’d cut it in the aftermath of their breakup—a total classic, but why the hell not? She was lucky, Priya told her, that she could pull off a short bob.

“I have a few more stipulations,” she says, perhaps louder than necessary.

He gestures for her to continue and she levels a look at him. “No talking about the past,” she says firmly. She is over him, she tells herself. But it is going to be a lot easier to stay over him if she doesn’t have to remind herself of what they used to be to one another.

He raises his eyebrows. “I think I need some more guidance on that one. Like if someone brings up the 2008 recession, do I just change the subject or…?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she says impatiently. “I don’t want to talk about what we used to be to one another. I don’t want to rehash things that may or may not have happened. I don’t want to think about any of it. Okay?”

He hesitates, and she’s not quite sure what she sees pass across his face this time. It’s the dark. It’s making him difficult to read, when she used to be so sure of what he was thinking. Although, given she had zero idea he was planning on breaking up with her, maybe her ability to read him was somewhat overstated.