It was insane to let the words of a stranger make him feel so good. Anytime Blake spoke, he drowned out the nagging, hateful voice Kade let occupy his head.
He was going to have to be careful or he was going to say something stupid—do something stupid, even, like drop to his knees and cry and wail about how much he fucking hurt, how much he hated what he had become, how much he hated that he’d let Niall wound him so deeply, how much he hated that he had been so reluctant to walk into that supermarket the day before, when it seemed to have brought him so much good. Blake had been a good distraction the night before, but reality was tapping him firmly on the shoulder now. The sound of the kitchen clock ticking was louder than Kade remembered.
He turned his back to Blake in case those emotions were playing out on his face and made a mental note to go back to the doctor as soon as possible. Maybe he needed that Valium the doctor had tried to force on him after all.
“I’ve been swimming with sharks. Well, sort of,” Blake said.
Kade pedaled back through the last few minutes of their conversation before he worked out what Blake was on about. That damned bucket list again. Swim with sharks. It was on the list, the item after that glacier surfing nonsense that Kade was going to have to Google.
“How do you ‘sort of’ swim with sharks?” Kade asked, as he poured the boiled water from the kettle into the cafetière, glancing at the ticking clock on the wall so he could count down six minutes, his preferred amount of steeping time.
“Oh, you know…”
Kade looked up at him. It was highly likely that he did not know, but he kept his mouth shut and waited. Blake rested his palms on his thick thighs, rubbing at the soft denim. Kade tried and failed not to look at how that denim was pulled tight across Blake’s crotch.
“I went shark cage-diving. It was incredible. So exhilarating.”
‘Exhilarating’ didn’t sound like the right word to him but Kade kept that thought to himself. “Where was this?” That sounded like a reasonable question.
“Just off Rakiura.”
Kade drew a blank on the name.
“Stewart Island. New Zealand.”
“Oh.” Never heard of it.
“Yeah, the guy I was seeing at the time was studying marine biology and he was involved with a project tagging great whites. The scientists were trying to learn more about migration patterns, but the ship they went out on also did cage-diving tours. One day, when my boyfriend went out to help with the research, I went too, and they let me spend some time in the cage.”
“Did you see many sharks?”
“Just the one.” Blake’s face seemed to light at the memory. “It was incredible. He was five meters long, at least—a big, bulky male with scars all around his mouth. It looked like he’d been through the wars and won single-handedly. They say you really get a better view of them from on-deck, and that’s probably true, but there was just something about being in the water with that shark, looking him in the eye when he was only a couple of meters away from me, wondering what on earth he was thinking about me. You know?”
Kade managed not to shake his head. He had no means of relating to that experience at all. After a beat he nodded, even surprised himself by smiling.
“Sounds incredible.”
Did it? Kade wondered if the surprise at his own words was showing on his face. He remembered the cafetière and looked up at the clock. It had been more than six minutes. Kade sighed and pushed down the plunger. He felt Blake crowd him, but he didn’t have time to react before Blake was wrapping his arms around him from behind, spreading his hands wide across Kade’s belly.
“Hey.” Blake nuzzled into Kade’s neck. “I didn’t mean to upset you. You’ll get there soon, I’m sure. There’s plenty of time.”
“Huh? Oh, the sharks? Yeah, I know. I just forgot about the coffee.”
“Okay.” It didn’t sound like Blake believed him, which was a shame considering it was the most honest thing Kade had said all morning.
He leaned back into Blake for a few moments before starting to move the mugs, cafetière and other paraphernalia onto the breakfast bar with Blake still locked tight against his back as he did so. It made the act take longer than was necessary, but Kade didn’t want Blake to let go.
Sitting opposite Blake, Kade winced at his first sip of coffee. He really didn’t like the grounds to soak longer than six minutes. He plunged another spoonful of sugar into his mug and stirred. Blake drank his coffee black, and Kade wasn’t in the least surprised. He watched Blake swallow, watched the muscles in his neck move and tense, and he was harder than he should have been before he even realized it was happening.
“You know what else I saw on your list?”
Kade buried his groan in his coffee. I’m going to burn that fucking list. “What’s that?”
“Kayaking. Have you ticked that off yet?”
“I went when I was a kid, up on Loch Tay.” That much was true, but that didn’t explain why kayaking would be on his bucket list.
“But I guess you want to go again?”
Kade shrugged then reminded himself that he didn’t want to appear boring in front of Blake. “Yeah, maybe stay out a bit longer, you know. Go out onto deeper waters. I think, maybe ’cause we were kids, the instructors made us keep to this kind of shallow bit close to the beach and told us we couldn’t go any farther out than a certain tree. If you did, you got in trouble.”
Blake was nodding. “You know, if you fancy it, we could go kayaking on Loch Lomond today. I run a water-sports business. I’m based up there, right on the edge of the loch, close to Tarbet. It would let you tick something else off your list, and…I’d really enjoy spending more time with you.”
Kade took a moment to process all of that information.
A water-sports business? That wasn’t really a surprise—flip-flops in November and all that. It wasn’t like he had been expecting Blake to say he was a priest. That Blake wanted to spend more time with him? That was a surprise. The horrible little voice in his head congratulated him. Well done for successfully hiding how boring you really are. Kade shook the thought away as best he could.
His own reaction to what Blake had just said was more of a surprise. Twenty-four hours earlier, he had been planning a nice, quiet Sunday morning alone with the papers, perhaps listening to some football on the radio, having a spot of toast for breakfast, maybe followed by some vegetable soup for lunch and might even push the boat out in the evening and have a bath.
Now, he was sitting in his kitchen, drinking bitter coffee, drowning in a pair of blue eyes he couldn’t seem to stop staring at. And he wanted to say yes.
Yes. Let’s go to Loch Lomond and take two flimsy fiberglass kayaks out into the middle of a vast stretch of water in winter and see how long it takes for us to kill ourselves.
Maybe he’d drunk a lot more than he realized the night before, but regardless of the reasoning or lack thereof, Kade really wanted to do that.
Blake said, “I have all the equipment. And if you wanted, I could drive you back down in time for work tomorrow. If you have work tomorrow?”
Kade shook his head. He watched Blake deflate a little and went through a moment of confusion then another of panic. He always seemed to say the wrong thing. Then he realized…
“No. I meant, no, I don’t have work tomorrow.” Since he and Niall both worked in the same office, Blake hadn’t been able to face going in since the breakup. His doctor had signed him off for six weeks, citing work-related stress, hence the offer of Valium. It was the first time in Kade’s life he had ever been off work long term. “I-I’d like to go kayaking with you. I really would. I don’t have any gear, though…”
“That’s fine. I’ve got all that covered. You want to grab a bite to eat first? I could take you out for breakfast.”
Kade shook his head. He was starving but not for food. He got off the stool and wandered around to where Blake was perched. He dropped his hands onto Blake’s thighs and spread
the man’s legs so he could step between them. “It’s still early,” he breathed against Blake’s lips. “Why don’t we go back to bed for an hour or so?”
Kade let Blake lead the way.
Chapter Seven
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
They took the subway to the edge of Glasgow, where Blake had left his car. He drove an old Land Rover Defender, kitted out with metal bonnet plate, ladder and snorkel like something out of a 4x4 driving experience advert. The paintwork might well have been green, but the rust around the wheel arches and windows and the caked-on mud everywhere else made it difficult for Kade to swear to that.
Blake swung open the back door and Kade tossed in the rucksack he’d packed earlier. Blake had insisted he bring multiple changes of clothes, assuring Kade with a smirk that it was because Kade was guaranteed to end the day with a fair quantity of Loch Lomond soaking through his clothes and not because Blake was secretly paving the way for Kade to stay more than one night.
As he hoisted himself into the passenger’s seat, Kade was just grateful to be with someone who laughed and smiled so easily. Strangely, he also felt grateful to be out of his flat and away from the city. Distraction, he supposed.
Kade hadn’t ever had much cause to cross the river and head into the great outdoors, but he was more excited than nervous. They said—whoever ‘they’ were—that nature was good for the soul. As long as it got him out of his own head for a while, Kade figured it wouldn’t be a wasted trip, regardless of what else happened.
He settled in his seat and watched Blake drive. Blake’s right elbow perched against the window, and Kade wondered if that was a halfhearted attempt to stop the thing from rattling, which it did every time Blake passed over a pothole or a bump in the road. His right hand was at twelve o’clock on the steering wheel, his left lazily changing gears and occasionally coming to rest on and squeezing Kade’s right thigh. Kade wasn’t the biggest fan of being in the passenger’s seat. It wasn’t that he was particularly passionate about driving. It was because he liked to be control. Perhaps that was why it had never occurred to Kade that watching a man drive could be sexy. Then again, perhaps it was because Blake wasn’t Niall.
Niall was fastidious about hands always being at two and ten on the steering wheel. He checked his mirrors seemingly more often than he checked the road in front of him, always indicated at least one hundred yards early to leave other drivers in no doubt as to where he was going and never drove faster than five miles per hour beneath the speed limit, regardless of the road or conditions.
Blake drove completely differently, but Kade was certain Blake was in more control of the car and their position on the road than Niall ever would have been. He let himself relax, staring out of the window as the city disappeared behind them and the green, gray and purple hills that marked the start of the Scottish Highlands loomed into view.
They crossed the Erskine Bridge just after lunchtime, and Blake took the coast road that headed north into the hills. He turned off an hour or so later, pulling his car into a small car park that overlooked a pebbled beach about quarter of a mile long. In front of the small strip of beach, the loch was laid out like a vast slab of blue-gray marble. There was barely a ripple on the surface. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
Two crannog-like structures sat at either end of the beach. One, Blake explained as he jumped down from the Defender, was his house, and the other was the main hub of his business.
Around the latter structure, Kade could see an assortment of kayaks, dinghies, wooden rowing boats with outboard motors and even some boards that looked suspiciously like surfboards, although Kade knew surfing wouldn’t be possible on a loch. Windsurfing perhaps? Kade had seen people windsurfing off the coast of Newquay once when he had been on a tedious team-building event for work. It had looked like fun, and Kade wouldn’t mind trying it, provided Blake was his instructor. He put those thoughts to the back of his mind. No sense getting carried away.
Kade’s descent from the Defender was, he imagined, a lot less sexy than Blake’s. He met the man at the back of the truck and took his rucksack from Blake’s outstretched hand.
“You seriously live here?” Kade asked.
“Live and work here, yep. It’s the shortest morning commute I’ve ever had, which is saying something when you think I used to work on an oil rig. Want me to give you the grand tour?”
Kade nodded. He wanted that very much.
The circular wooden structure Blake lived in was suspended above the loch’s surface by a series of thick, wooden posts. Access was by a narrow wooden walkway from the beach.
Inside, all the living accommodation was laid out on a single level with a large, modern fire pit in the center. Almost half the space was made up of a living area with a big, comfy leather sofa and a few beanbag chairs lying around, along with a dining table and a few bookcases.
The second biggest section of space held Kade’s bed. It was on the other side of the fireplace, directly opposite the front door, and it looked big enough to sleep four people. Kade decided not to think about that.
The kitchen was small but immaculately finished, and Kade assumed that the boxlike room separated from the main space by three partition walls was the bathroom.
“Bloody hell,” Kade said. He dropped his rucksack beside Blake’s, but he didn’t move any farther into the room.
“You like it?”
“It really is a modern-day crannog, inside as well as out.”
Blake laughed. “Yeah, I love crannogs. You know how you said you’d been kayaking up at Loch Tay? I visited the reconstructed crannog up there the summer I first came to Scotland and I just fell in love with it. I designed this place myself.”
“Wow. I’ve never seen anything like it.” That was certainly true. Blake’s house was like something from another world. Kade looked up and found Blake watching him, a little smile teasing at the corners of his mouth. It disappeared almost immediately when Kade asked, “When did you move to Scotland?”
“A couple of years ago.” Blake turned away from him and started to rummage among the assortment of jackets hanging on hooks by the front door.
“Did you come here to set up this place or…?”
Blake was silent for so long Kade didn’t think he was ever going to answer.
Finally, he said, “No. I moved to Aberdeen to work on the oil rigs. That didn’t work out, and I ended up here instead.”
“Oh,” Kade said to Blake’s back. He could tell when it was time to change the subject, but he said, “I’m guessing that’s the highly edited version of that story.”
Blake turned around and nodded. “You could say that.”
“Well, you’ve ended up in a great place. Your house is beautiful.”
Finally, Blake smiled and seemed to forget about Kade’s questions. It looked like he had shaken them off the way a wet dog might shake off water.
“Yeah, I’ve been very lucky. You want me to take your coat? You’ll need a waterproof one when we get out on the loch, anyway.”
Kade looked at Blake. He could have sworn that the longer he looked, the more it appeared the man was blushing under his tan.
“I thought we were going kayaking,” Kade said, shrugging out of his coat and handing it over. He wouldn’t mind trying out that bed if Blake had changed his mind about what type of exercise he was after.
“We are.” Blake hung both their jackets on the same hook. “But first I want to make a little picnic to take with us. It won’t be anything fancy, but—” Blake broke off and laughed. The tension Kade had sensed in Blake only seconds earlier had vanished so resoundingly that Kade almost felt as if it had been a figment of his imagination.
Blake took Kade in his arms and kissed him, a gentle press of lips that turned into a quick swipe of tongues. He pulled away to walk Kade backward to the sofa. He pushed him onto it, and Kade was sure he was going to sink straight through it to the floorboards below. “I’m rambling and I don’t know why. Sit t
here while I fix us up something to eat then we’ll get out on the water. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t look at me like that,” Blake said as he walked over to the kitchen and opened his fridge.
“Like what?” Kade asked.
“Like all you want to do is take me to bed, because I swear, Kade, I have a reasonable level of willpower, but if you keep giving me those looks, we’re not going to be able to go kayaking.”
Kade smiled then he surprised himself again. He seemed to be doing that an awful lot around Blake. Instead of taking Blake’s words as the perfect excuse to pull out of a water-sports activity that, frankly, he hadn’t so much as thought about in easily a decade until that morning, Kade shut his mouth and busied himself with reading the titles on Blake’s bookshelves until Blake told him to go get changed. Only when Blake chucked a full neoprene rucksack at him and gestured for the door did Kade look at Blake again, and even then, he only looked at Blake’s ponytail as he followed him out onto the beach.
The water of Loch Lomond was still perfectly calm. The weak sunshine was reflecting off it, making it look like a giant mirror. It stretched out south as far as the eye could see, interrupted only by little islands and hemmed in safe and still by the ancient hills that rose up to guard it.
They didn’t bother wearing wetsuits, just as many layers of clothing as they could fit under the waterproof trousers and cagoules. Blake looked good, perfectly at home as he dragged two kayaks seemingly effortlessly down the rough beach to a small jetty at the water’s edge. Kade felt more like a child bundled up against the elements. He figured he had probably doubled in size, but given that he was certain he would soon be soaked to the skin—if not drowning in the middle of one of Scotland’s top tourist destinations—he wasn’t sure what sense there was in starting to complain about fashion choices.
Despite his somewhat morbid thoughts, he wasn’t inclined to pull out of the activity. In fact, if Ian and Paul had been there to ask him, Kade would have said that standing on the pebble beach, looking at the seemingly untouched water, he genuinely wanted to do it, was truly eager to get out on the water. They would have laughed at him, disbelieving, of course, but it was the truth. The location held a sort of ancient peace—solid, undisturbed, soothing.
The Bucket List Page 5