Can't Tie Me Down!

by Janet Elizabeth Henderson

  “I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out between us,” Mairi said, and was surprised to find she meant it.

  The sparkle returned to Amir’s eyes. “Are you sure this chemistry is so very important in a relationship?”

  “I’m sure.” Mairi grinned at him and pushed back her chair. “Now, you promised me a walk on the beach before we head back.”

  “It would be my most great pleasure,” Amir said, and in a gallant gesture, offered her his arm.

  Chapter 14

  Keir had his head under the Beetle’s bonnet when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Want to eat chocolate and watch Lethal Weapon?”

  Mairi.

  He took a second to calm his riotous heart before he came out from under the bonnet. She was sitting on his desk, swinging her feet and still wearing the clothes Amir had brought her.

  “Your date’s over early.” Keir grabbed the rag beside him and wiped his hands.

  She shrugged. “It was long enough, and the food was good.”

  His stomach actually lurched at what he was about to ask. “Is he the one? You planning on marrying Amir?”

  “No, but somebody should. He’s really pretty adorable.”

  Yeah, Keir didn’t like hearing that one bit. “If he’s that adorable, how come you aren’t jumping on the Amir train?”

  “No zing.”

  Now that warmed his heart and made him perk up. If there was one thing he and Mairi had in spades, it was zing. “So, Lethal Weapon, then? Which number?”

  She arched her eyebrow at him. “I can’t believe you asked that.”

  “All of them, then,” he said as he sauntered toward her. “I hope you’ve got plenty of chocolate. It’s going to be a long night.”

  “Have you seen my kitchen? There’s only chocolate up there.”

  Keir didn’t say anything, because he had noticed the excessive amount of chocolate that had been delivered. It made his one lonely pack of potato scones look pathetic.

  “Come on then, let’s go watch Mel Gibson blow stuff up.” Before he could second-guess himself, he put a hand on either side of her waist and lifted her from the desk to place her on her feet.

  He’d half expected her to complain about him manhandling her and was surprised when she didn’t. Instead, she slid past him and headed for the stairway up to her apartment.

  “I need to lock up here. I’ll be up in a minute,” he told her.

  “I’ll put the kettle on. If you come up before I’ve changed, make tea.” She disappeared up the stairs, leaving Keir to stare after her.

  This felt different. It felt...friendly, and it was freaking him out a little. For two years, Mairi had threatened him with everything from calling the police to setting fire to his bike if he came into her home. Now, she was inviting him in to watch movies. And his weak and pathetic heart couldn’t help but hope this meant things were changing between them, in a way that wouldn’t end when the geek boys left. That maybe, just maybe, he was breaking through the wall she’d built and actually getting to her. It was almost too much to hope.

  Keir quickly locked the garage, then washed up in the small bathroom next to his office. There were oil marks on his jeans, but the navy t-shirt he wore had managed to survive his work unscathed. With one last check to make sure everything was secure, he bounded up the stairs to Mairi’s house.

  There was no sign of her, but the first Lethal Weapon DVD was on the sofa, waiting to be loaded into her ancient player. The rest of the world might have moved on to streaming movies, but money was too tight for the Sinclair sisters to abandon their small collection of movies on disc.

  He popped the DVD into the player, got it set up ready to start, then made two huge mugs of hot, milky tea. By the time he was placing them on the crate they used for a coffee table, Mairi had surfaced from her bedroom.

  “Thanks,” she said as she picked up the mug.

  She wore a pair of gray pajama shorts with an oversized sweatshirt that had a faded picture of Snoopy on the front.

  “I remember that sweatshirt,” Keir said as she curled into the corner of the sofa, tucking her feet beneath her.

  They’d bought the sweatshirt together in a backstreet shop in Glasgow one summer’s day while they’d been wandering around the city. Mairi had thought the bright pink sweatshirt with the massive Snoopy was super cool, so Keir had bought it for her. She’d put it on right there and worn it for the rest of their day together.

  “I wear it to bed when it’s cold,” Mairi said, not looking at him. “It’s good for sleeping in.”

  Keir didn’t know what to make of that. He’d thought that everything from their relationship had been thrown out—along with him.

  “Grab those Thorntons chocolates, will you?” Mairi pointed to the huge box propped beside the door, and Keir did as she asked.

  She opened the box and put it on the middle cushion of the sofa, so they could share. Or, so it would act as a barrier between them. Keir started the movie, tossed the remote to Mairi—who would have a meltdown if she didn’t have control of it—and made himself comfortable on the other end of the sofa.

  By the time Danny Glover had said he was “too old for this shit,” they’d made a decent dent in the chocolates and relaxed into the couch. Out of the corner of his eye, Keir saw Mairi scratch her head, and he remembered the comb. Without a word, he got up and retrieved it, along with the detangling spray.

  “Come here.” When he sat back down, he tossed a cushion onto the floor between his feet.

  Mairi eyed the cushion, and him, with suspicion. “What are you doing?”

  “You’re still scratching at your head. Knowing you, you probably still think there are bugs hiding in there. I thought I’d comb it out for you and check it was just as empty as your head.”

  “Funny. But I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Although, he could tell she was tempted.

  “Trust me, this is as much for me as it is for you. Otherwise you’ll drive us both nuts scratching all night long, and after last night, I could use a decent sleep.”

  “You could just go home to your own bed. I’m sure you’d get a decent night’s sleep there.”

  “Just get your backside on the cushion and let me do my job.”

  “Fine.” She shrugged. If she was aiming for the gesture to come across as nonchalant, then she missed by a mile. “This is going to take hours, you know that, right? I have a lot of hair.”

  “Good thing we’ve got three more movies to watch, huh?”

  Mairi moved the coffee table out of the way and sat on the floor between Keir’s knees. Her back was ramrod straight as she stretched her legs out in front of her.

  “Relax,” he told her. “Watch the movie while I bug-hunt.”

  “That isn’t funny. There probably are bugs in there.”

  “If there are, I’ll find every one of them, I promise. Now shut up. This is the bit where he jumps off the building. I like this bit.”

  Mairi sat tense and straight in front of him, while he swept her wealth of hair back toward him. It was tempting to run his hands through the glorious, thick locks, but that wasn’t what he was there to do. Instead, he used the comb to section off an area of her hair, then held the end while he spritzed it with the detangling spray.

  “What’s that?” Mairi clearly wasn’t watching the movie, as he’d ordered her to do.

  “Detangling spray.” One he’d picked especially because it smelled like Mairi. Like summer.

  “You don’t exactly have a lot of hair, so how come you know about detangling spray?”

  “One of the guys in my last job.” Keir started to comb out her long, unruly hair. “He was a single parent. Did his girls’ hair every morning before school. He used to go on about how fast he could braid, and what products were best to get tangles out. He carried around a selection of hair ties and clips. Said the girls were always losing theirs and he was fed up buying new ones.”

  “So, just your typical garage tal
k, then.”

  “Anyway,” he said, ignoring her sarcasm, “you listen to that stuff for long enough, you pick up a tip or two.”

  “Which I’m benefiting from.”

  “Which you’re benefiting from.”

  “Did he tell you about wide-tooth combs being good for curly hair, too?”

  “No, that was the woman in the shop. Now, do you think you could shut up and let us watch the movie? I’m multitasking here. Doing hair and watching TV. It takes concentration.”

  With a forced sigh, she went back to watching the screen. Keir worked steadily, section by section, combing through her hair, only stopping to allow Mairi to put on the second movie. As time passed, Mairi stopped sitting stiff as a board and relaxed into the sofa. He inched his knees closer to her, hemming her in. But other than that, all Keir did was what he’d told her he’d do. He combed her hair.

  ♦♦♦

  Mairi didn’t quite know what to make of Keir’s revelation that he’d gone into a shop and asked for the right tools to help comb out her hair—and all because she was paranoid of things getting stuck in there. She was grateful. Genuinely. Even though she’d washed and combed her hair out, she still wasn’t certain she’d found everything in there. To have someone else checking through it for her was wonderful.

  Even if it was Keir.

  Or, maybe, especially because it was Keir.

  As she relaxed against the couch, with the sensation of his fingers in her hair and him slowly, and meticulously, combing each section out, Mairi admitted to herself that, sometime in the past couple of days, her feelings toward Keir had thawed. In fact, in one area, they’d heated right up.

  She’d always known physical contact with Keir was going to be her downfall. That was why she’d been careful to avoid touching him these past couple of years. Touching Keir was her addiction. And after years of being clean, she’d fallen off the wagon with that one kiss they’d shared. Now all she could think about was getting more. She needed it, like a drug addict needed their next fix. She needed the high of touching him and knew that need would be her downfall, because no matter how hard she fought it, she felt herself weakening toward Keir.

  As his hands swept through her hair, stroking her as though she were a cat, Mairi’s eyelids became too heavy to keep up. The movie played on, but it was nothing more than white noise as she closed her eyes and concentrated on Keir’s touch. Her head fell back to rest on the cushion between his legs as she gave up pretending to watch the movie.

  “You falling asleep?” He sounded amused and indulgent, like he couldn’t care less if she did.

  “No, relaxing. This is nice. Apart from my hairdresser, no one has brushed my hair for me since I was a kid.”

  Even then, it had depended on her dad’s mood as to whether her mum had the time to brush it out or not. There was a reason none of the sisters saw their parents. Their dysfunctional marriage had been hell on them all. When her dad had eventually blown his top completely and kicked Isobel out of the house—pregnant and alone—it had been a watershed moment for the rest of the girls. They knew then that their allegiance wasn’t to their parents, but to each other. As each of them hit sixteen, the age they could legally leave home, they’d followed their sister, and together, the three of them had helped Isobel raise Jack. It had been years since Mairi had seen her parents. She had heard, from friends who’d bumped into them, her dad was more than happy to have his wife to himself. Now there was no one else to make demands on the time he believed was rightfully his.

  “If you accept my proposal, I’ll do this for you every night.” Keir’s voice was like warm chocolate, soothing her after she’d strayed into the past.

  “Sure you would. Because every guy wants to spend an hour a night brushing out his wife’s hair.” To be honest, his offer was more tempting than she’d ever let on.

  “Okay, then how about I do it every time you think there’s something lurking in there?”

  She laughed, and it pushed away the last of her maudlin thoughts. “That’s pretty much every night anyway.”

  “You’re right. It’s too much of a sacrifice for the pleasure of being your husband. I guess you’ll just have to take on one of the guys outside.”

  He was playing with her. She smiled at the thought. It had been such a long time since Keir had teased her, and she found she’d missed that too.

  “Now, if I really was running that fake Facebook page, I’d have posted a list on there, of my requirements for a husband. And on that list would have been nightly hair brushing.”

  “You have more than one requirement? This I’ve got to hear.” He was grinning. She could hear it.

  “Okay, but consider yourself warned. No man could possibly match up to this list.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Well, apart from the hair brushing, I’d expect my husband to be an expert barista, who knew how to make the perfect coffee every time.”

  “That’s me,” Keir said.

  If Mairi had the energy to open her eyes, she definitely would have rolled them at him. “My husband would keep the fridge stocked with all my favorite foods,” she continued.

  “I’ve already put a pack of potato scones in there.”

  That opened her eyes. “You did?”

  “Breakfast,” he said with a wink.

  A strange warmth flooded through her, and Mairi closed her eyes again. It took a second to remember she was listing her husband requirements. “He would be willing to pick up and travel somewhere exciting at a moment’s notice.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to travel anymore?”

  “I lied.”

  “Fine, well, I can do that too. In fact, I have a backpack in the boot of my car, all ready to go.”

  She laughed, and it felt good.

  “You want me to prove it?”

  He took his hands from her hair, and she grasped his knees to stop him from getting up. “Don’t you dare stop combing my hair until you’ve done it all.”

  He settled back down and carried on where he’d left off. Mairi settled back too, but her hands stayed on his knees; she was loath to break the contact and lose his warmth.

  “What else?” he said, his voice a little husky.

  “He would never shout at me.” Visions of her father berating her mother came to mind.

  “I’d never do that,” he said solemnly.

  Mairi cleared her throat. “And then there’s the sex. My husband would make me orgasm at least ten times a day.”

  “Easy,” he said.

  That one word sent a flash of heat throughout her body. She blinked hard and willed herself to move on.

  “Most importantly, he would never, ever tell me what to do.”

  It had become difficult to focus on what she was saying. Her thoughts had strayed to other areas. Like how it would feel to run her hands up those thick, muscled thighs of his and feel his strength beneath her fingertips.

  “Damn,” Keir said softly, but with definite amusement. “I was close. You’re right, there is no man out there who’d fit that list.”

  Mairi forced a sigh. “And this is why I can never get married.”

  “Now I understand. Thanks for clearing it up.” He took his hands from her hair. “Done. You are bug-free.”

  She looked up at him. “Really?”

  “Would I lie about something that important?” He rested his hands on his thighs, inches from hers.

  “You didn’t find anything at all in there?” Her eyes wandered to his mouth as she waited for the answer. Keir had amazing lips. Soft and firm, with plenty of places to nibble.

  “Nothing but hair,” he said.

  “Okay then.” Mairi forced herself to drag her eyes, and her thoughts, away from his lips. Her head was light as she got onto her knees and shuffled around to face him, aware she was still hemmed in between his thighs. She put her hands back on his knees to steady herself—at least, that’s what she told herself she was doing. “Thanks.
”

  “Anytime.” One low, husky word that went right through her.

  His eyes had darkened, and she saw the same out-of-control desire that she felt swirling inside her. Slowly, oh so slowly, he slid his hands down to cover hers, leaning forward as he did so, bringing his mouth to within inches of hers. Mairi’s heart thundered in her chest and she bit her lip to stop herself from launching herself at him.

  “I need to kiss you,” Keir whispered.

  It was as though lightning had struck her. A powerful surge of electricity ran through her body, leaving everything in its wake alive and needy.

  “Please, don’t tell me no.” He lowered his head toward hers.

  Mairi’s fingers tightened on his legs as a little voice in the back of her head asked her what she was doing. “Keir?” she whispered.

  The air between them seemed to crackle and dance.

  “Say yes,” Keir said against her lips.

  Mairi stared into his eyes as the well of hunger she’d trapped inside since he’d left, burst free. They’d been building to this place ever since he’d moved back to Arness. She just hadn’t seen it until that moment.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  With a look of pure triumph, Keir closed the distance between them.

  Chapter 15

  Keir felt like he’d been lost in the middle of the Sahara and Mairi was water. He drank her in, letting her fill the dehydrated places inside him. The places that had shriveled without her.

  Mairi didn’t hesitate; she wrapped her arms around his neck and poured herself into the kiss. It was a desperate, brutal kiss, filled with longing and regret. A kiss to make up for years wasted. A kiss to release all the frustration and need that had been building since everything had gone wrong for them.

  And Keir reveled in every second of it.

  He slanted his mouth over hers, taking the kiss deeper and swallowing the moan of pure pleasure that erupted from Mairi. He needed to get closer. He needed more of her. Keir clasped his hands on her waist and lifted her, leaning back into the sofa until she straddled him.