AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“A little privacy, if you don’t mind?” she snapped at him.
He cocked an eyebrow at her as though she was daft to ask. Which, quite possibly, she was. He blocked the door, so Isobel had no choice but to turn her back on him and pretend he wasn’t there. She dropped the towel and pulled on his shirt.
“I can’t believe this is happening again. I must be an idiot.” She stopped dead in the middle of pulling the shirt over her head as a horrible thought occurred to her. “I’m not an idiot. I’m one of those women who turn up on Jerry Springer. The kind who has four million kids by four million fathers and is still having an affair with her sister’s husband and her best friend’s boyfriend—at the same time. I’m a white-trash cliché!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Isobel barely registered that he was talking, as she carried on tugging on her clothes. “The first time I ever slept with a boy, I got pregnant. I was fifteen. I could be forgiven for being naïve and in love. I even thought we’d get married and live happily ever after. But no. As soon as I told him he was going to be a father, he ran. I haven’t seen him since. So I got wise.” She yanked on her skirt. “The next guy I slept with had to marry me first, so that I could do things in the right order for once. So that I would be certain he wouldn’t run out on me after we had sex.” She spun on Callum. “And do you know what happened?”
He stared at her as though she was losing her mind. And, quite possibly, she might be.
“I’ll tell you what happened. We had a beautiful little girl together and he said he was going to Glasgow for a job interview. A promotion. A step up the ladder in his career.” She snorted. “It was rubbish. He ran and he never came back! The next I heard from him was divorce papers in the mail.”
She stomped past Callum and headed for his kitchen. He followed behind her, not saying a word when she started opening and shutting cupboard doors looking for junk food.
Isobel slammed the pantry door shut and glared at him. “There is no chocolate in your house.”
“No. But there appears to be an irrational woman in my kitchen.”
She clenched her fists and glared at him, wondering if she would have to jump to hit him in the jaw. He was so damn tall. For a second, she swore she could see amusement in his eyes before they became flat and hard again.
“I want to know the minute you find out if you’re pregnant or not.”
“I am not pregnant!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, hoping volume would make it so.
He just stared at her.
“I can’t cope with this right now,” Isobel told him. “I have a mountain of bad debt my ex-husband left in my name. A loan shark after me for payments. And a dead body in my freezer. I need to make a list. I need to prioritise. I need a plan. I need chocolate!” she wailed.
Callum cursed loudly, and then she felt his hands on her shoulders and realised he was moving her towards the table in the corner of the kitchen. “Sit.” He pushed her down into a wooden chair. He pointed at her. “Stay. I’ll make tea.”
“I am not a dog!” She was shouting again.
She wasn’t too proud to admit that she might have become a little hysterical. But, to be fair, she was having a helluva day. She sat fuming, her mind racing over her many, many problems, as Callum went about making tea. Every movement he made was efficient and controlled. Which made it all the stranger that he’d lost that control with her earlier. Her face burned at the memory. Although the dull ache throughout her body wasn’t going to let her forget what they’d done anytime soon.
“Here.” He placed a mug and spoon on the table in front of her then reached into the cupboard behind him and produced a jar of honey. “Add this. It will help.?
?
Isobel fell on the honey like Winnie the Pooh. She ignored the tea and spooned some into her mouth instead. Sugar. Better. She closed her eyes and sighed. It wasn’t chocolate, but maybe if she finished the whole jar she’d get the same high?
“I wish I drank,” she said wistfully. “Now would be a good time to develop a taste for whisky.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t keep any alcohol in the house.”
Her eyes shot to his. “Why not?”
“I don’t like who I am when I drink.”
“Oh. I just don’t like the taste.” She ate another spoonful of honey while she thought about it. “But then, I never needed to be drunk to make ill-advised decisions. Seems I’m capable of doing that stone-cold sober.”
They sat in silence for a minute, while she ate her way through the honey and Callum dealt with being one of her ill-advised decisions.
“Tell me about the body,” he said.
“Do you only speak in demands? Are you capable of asking a polite question? Like, ‘Isobel, would you like to have sex with me?’ Or ‘Isobel, why is there a dead man in your freezer?’”
His eyes narrowed. “I asked if you wanted to have sex. If I remember right, you moaned your answer in my ear. Again. And again. And again.”
