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‘I trusted you. I relied on you. And you buggered off and left me when I needed you the most, you bastard.’ Her breath huffed out and he saw her exhaustion, not just from the plane journey, or the hike, or the jet lag.
This was bone-weary emotional exhaustion.
The realisation brought with it the memory of their squalid eighth-floor council flat in Hackney. The unreliable lift that stank of piss and the half-hearted use of cheap disinfectant. The gang of teenage boys who hung around the stairwell and sucked their teeth when he struggled up the stairs with Lizzie’s buggy. The broken fluorescent light in the bathroom he’d never gotten round to fixing. Lizzie squalling as if she’d been scalded at two in the morning, in the cot from the charity shop they’d jammed up against the dresser in the corner of their bedroom.
Remorse flowed through him, radiating out from the stinging pain in his jaw.
He opened his mouth, but the apology died on his tongue. There was nothing he could say to take that exhaustion away. Nothing he could do to make it better now. And nothing he would have done not to escape then, so giving in to the urge to say sorry sixteen years too late would just be so much self-serving bullshit.
So he said nothing and waited for her to say her piece, each word scoring his conscience.
‘I had to pick up and carry on and build something from absolutely nothing, because I had a child who needed me.’ She thrust a thumb into her sternum, punctuating the hot air with the rasping breaths of her outrage. ‘And I learned not to trust every snake oil salesman who came along, because I had to. Don’t talk to me about guts when you didn’t even have the guts to stick around.’
Halle clenched her fingers into a fist to ease the blazing pain in her palm. She wasn’t sure where the sudden burst of emotion had come from. But his smug words had been the trigger. That and the fact she’d been on a knife-edge of spiralling tension for days now.
Something that’s also his fault, because he’s the one who insisted on us sharing a bloody cabin.
She shook her hand trying to ease the sting. Who knew slapping someone in the face made your palm feel as if it had been branded? Maybe she should have taken into account his rock-solid jaw, and that day-old stubble that had the consistency of sandpaper. But for once there had been no forethought. Only reaction. The volcano, which had been bubbling under her breastbone, had erupted, spewing out her emnity towards him like molten lava detonating through a rock fissure.
He manipulated his jaw, as if checking she hadn’t dislocated it. ‘I guess I had that one coming,’ he said. As always, a master of understatement.
The red stain where her hand had connected with his cheek bloomed under the skin.
The lava turned to ash in her mouth, and her knees trembled, the rawness in her throat making it hard to swallow. ‘Ya think?’
She scrubbed her upper arm across her face, brushing away the salty sweat making her eyes sting.
‘I didn’t stick around because I couldn’t,’ he said, his tone soft in the still air. ‘You have no idea how monumentally screwed up I was back then,’ he added. ‘All thanks to stuff in my life that had nothing to do with you.’
She guessed he was talking about his family. The dysfunctional, screwed-up family, full of underwear thieves, whom he had always refused to talk about and had avoided introducing her to. She’d accepted his explanation then—that she wouldn’t understand, that she was better off not knowing them because ‘they’re all arseholes’—but now she wondered. Why had she always let him decide what she was strong enough to know about, what she had the maturity to understand—and all the things she didn’t?
But did she really want to go there? Now, after all these years? The slap had been a simple knee-jerk reaction to his dumb comment—and the frustration of the past few days. Why would she want to open up old wounds that had taken such a long time to heal?
He brushed his thumb across the hollow under her eye and let it linger for a second too long, before digging his hand into the pocket of his hiking shorts.
Once upon a time—maybe even yesterday—she would have apologised for hitting him so hard. Physical violence had never been her style. But he didn’t look as if he was expecting an apology. And if she was being entirely honest, she didn’t really think he deserved one.
He repositioned the backpack on his shoulders. ‘Let’s go find that waterfall. Looks like we could both do with some cooling off.’
‘Only if you’re absolutely sure it’s safe.’
His lips quirked, the grin imposs
ibly sexy. The bastard. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for Uzi-toting grizzlies.’
Woods in rural England, on the rare occasions when Halle had been called upon to walk through them, were comforting ancient places, scattered with wild flowers, the tree bark musty with moss, the wildlife never much bigger than a bee. Woods in Tennessee weren’t woods at all, but wild untamed forests, both predatory and provocative—with a spectacular and arresting other-worldly beauty she hadn’t expected. And which she hadn’t taken the chance to appreciate until now.
As they ventured off the sun-brightened logging trail, Luke pointed out a sign, looking like a Disneyland prop, which directed them the 3.2 miles to Cherokee Creek Falls, but had the good grace not to gloat.
Despite the sign, Halle remained vigilant for the first ten minutes, scanning the dense forest of firs and oaks and pine trees, in case a black bear should pop out, eager to bite their heads off. Gradually, though, she relaxed and began to marvel at her surroundings.
The delicious quiet—punctuated only by the intermittent sounds of buzzing insects or distant water—beat with the rhythm of her own footfalls and the patient plod of Luke’s hiking boots ahead. Her palm stopped stinging where she’d sandpapered it on Luke’s jawline, and her heartbeat finally tracked back to the familiar thump-thump of her normal pulse rate.
The disconnected feeling lingered, as if she existed in a fog—her body clock out of sync with the time of day—but it became a warm, comforting fog instead of the hot, blistering, bone-melting fog of earlier.
She scanned the trees, only occasionally distracted by the sight of Luke’s tall athletic form striding down the trail ahead of her. The forest’s shadowy depths provided some much-needed shade from the mid-morning sun while holding secret caches of natural wonders, most of which she couldn’t identify with any degree of certainty. The oak and maple trees, the azalea blooms and ferns weren’t hard to name, even the gnarled thorny branches of the odd hawthorn bush, but easily the most prolific and spectacular plant—a branched shrub festooned with lime evergreen leaves and dying clusters of spiky white and pink flowers—was unrecognisable but incongruous in its profusion. Bushes of the stuff appeared in every break in the trees as the trail climbed slowly upwards, framing some awe-inspiring glimpses of the Smoky Mountain range, which spread out in a panorama of rolling peaks and misty dips.
After twenty minutes of patient plodding, the trail opened into a wild meadow, which stood like an oasis of vibrant variant green, edged by an array of showy dark pink blooms on its far side. The rambling bushes reminded Halle rather bizarrely of the gardens of a stately home she’d once visited in Wiltshire.
