“What about you?”
“I live downstairs.”
Unless I’d missed a whole separate wing of the house, there was nothing downstairs but the kitchen, a living room, and a tiny walk-in shower, but I let it go. For all I knew, Joe spent every night with a girlfriend up the road, and it was none of my business.
And I wasn’t even curious if that girlfriend existed.
Later that day, after I’d unpacked my bag and set up my laptop at the large desk in my room, I wandered downstairs to ask directions to the nearest supermarket. Stupidly, I’d forgotten to bring a box of groceries with me.
Sal was in the kitchen, fussing with something on the stove. “There’s a Morrisons up the road, but it’s closed now.”
“Closed? Ah, shit . . . it’s Sunday. Damn. I took Friday off work so I’m all out of sync. Are there any smaller shops nearby that I could grab some supplies from?”
“Depends what you need.” Sal heaved a huge pot of potatoes to the sink and drained them. “The Londis in Holywell does a few bits, but old Dora’s a pisshead. She doesn’t stay open much past five whatever day of the week it is.”
My stomach growled as it considered going to bed empty. Sal laughed and reached around me for a potato masher. “Daft boy. Eat with us. There’s plenty to go around.”
And there was. Sal put a giant pie on the table, with a mountain of mash and more peas than I’d ever seen. Gravy followed, and just when I thought she was done, a loaf of fresh bread appeared from the oven.
I expected a hoard of staff to roll in when she bellowed out of the back door that dinner was ready, but only four new faces pulled up chairs at the kitchen table: two teenage girls, Jemima and Lacey; an even younger boy called Toby; and an old geezer in his sixties who everyone, apparently, called Uncle George.
The two girls looked at me and giggled. Sal swatted them with a tea towel. “Ignore ’em. Boy crazy, those two.”
I’d been accused of the same when I was their age, so I spared them a grin as I took a seat between Lacey and Uncle George. “Hey. I’m Harry.”
“We know,” Lacey said. “We saw your blog.”
I cringed. “Oh god. Really?”
For all I had a six-figure following, it still surprised and unnerved me when my real life collided with the online mask. I rarely showed my face on my blog for the sake of my physiotherapy patients, but the rest of it was all me—my life, as I lived it. Sometimes I regretted splashing it all over the Internet, but then I’d remember that regrets cancelled out the lessons I’d learned from my mistakes.
Or something like that. Over the years, I’d learned that I was a better teacher than the mess in my head deserved.
I left Lacey and Jemima to their giggling and turned to Uncle George. “I’m Harry. Nice to meet you.”
“George.” The old man turned to face me and held out his hand. “None of this ‘uncle’ nonsense. Can’t think why this young lot harp on about it.”
There was humour in his faded eyes that I’d hopefully understand over time. I peered at the newspaper he was reading. The headline alarmed me until I realised that the paper was a month old.
“Terrible business,” George said when he saw me looking. “What humans can do to each other.”
“Who cares what humans do to each other?” A new voice—female—came from behind me. “There’s too many on the planet anyway. It’s what humans do to horses that we care about.” A petite, dark-haired girl who looked and spoke exactly like Joe slid into the seat opposite. She picked up a fork and pointed it at George. “And don’t go lecturing me on empathy again. I’ve heard it all before.”
“Then you should know it already,” George returned mildly before returning to his paper.
The exchange was fascinating . . . and kind of lovely. In the city, anyone younger than thirty tended to stick together, like herds of sheep following the latest craze and trend. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten dinner with such a diverse age range. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten dinner with anyone that wasn’t Rhys or Angelo and Dylan. Shit. When had I become such a loner? And how was that even possible when I never seemed to have a minute to myself?
Sal dished up. Perhaps my size had given her the wrong impression about my appetite, but I was a little horrified when she heaped my plate with more carbs than I’d usually eat in a week. I wondered if there was a dog around that I could pass some off to on the sly, but Joe’s arrival distracted me from the ghost of my calorie-counting, protein-obsessed uni days.
He didn’t look at me. Just accepted a plate as full as mine and dropped into the seat beside the new woman in the room.
She elbowed him. “All right?”
Joe grunted in response, apparently preoccupied with a stack of envelopes, so she turned her attention to me. “Hi, Harry. I’m Emma. I took your booking.”
I smiled, hoping she wouldn’t notice me hiding potato under my pie. “Nice to meet you. You were right about the room. It’s perfect for writing. Lovely views.”
In my peripheral vision, Joe’s head jerked, but I forced myself to keep my eyes on Emma, noting that her eyes tightened a notch too. “It was my grandpa’s room,” she said. “He loved the big windows. Said he could keep watch over every creature on the farm.”
“I love it, too,” I said. “It’s such a calming space.”
Joe got up from the table, his chair scraping the flagstone floor. This time, I gave in and looked at him. His back was turned to me, but tight shoulders were my bread and butter, and the urge to put my hands on him was again so strong that I choked on the tiny mouthful of food I’d put in my mouth.
Emma’s gaze flickered to Joe too, but her expression was unreadable. Perhaps it was a family thing.
I wiped my mouth and drank some water. No one seemed to have noticed my foot-in-mouth moment or that I was struggling to look away from Joe as he pulled a six-pack from the fridge and popped the top on a can of Stella.
He turned as abruptly as he’d left the table and offered me a can with a jerk of his chin. I shook my head. “I’m good, thanks, mate.”
He grunted and gave the can to George. Then he picked up his plate and left the room.
His departure did odd things to me. Things I couldn’t quite decipher, let alone explain. I’d met people like Joe before—aloof and moody—but I’d always seen a glimmer of something else in them. A light, perhaps. A way in. It had taken me weeks to get Angelo to talk when we’d started working together, but I’d absolutely believed that he would . . . eventually. Joe was different. Not a client or even a friend—but his silence still bothered me.
A little while later, Emma swapped places with George. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to meet you. I had grand plans to greet you with some homemade cake or something and show you around, but I bottled it at the last minute.”
“Bottled it? Not that scary, am I?”
“No. It’s not you . . . it’s—never mind. I’m sorry you got stuck with Joe. He’s not always so rude.”
So I hadn’t imagined it. Or the strange compulsion to defend him. “He was perfectly pleasant to me. Showed me the house. There was no cake, though.” Like you would’ve eaten it.
Emma took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking enough to mirror the horribly familiar disquiet in my own gut. I stared at them, wondering if I was imagining the buzz of anxiety coursing through her, and pushed my half-empty plate away. Great. I’d been here five minutes and I was already having some kind of meltdown.
“Do you want to see the horses?”
I jerked back to the present. “What?”
“The horses,” Emma repeated softly. “I can give you that tour now, if you like?”
I didn’t know much about horses, but curiosity got the better of me, and lacking any better ideas, I nodded and got to my feet. “Lead the way.”
Outside, I felt much better. The jitters I’d worked so hard to escape floated away on the summer breeze, and I gazed around the working yard
with new eyes. Buildings I’d mistaken for barns were clearly stables, their half-doors open, revealing a horse or two in each one.
“We don’t double many up,” Emma said. “Most of them are too cranky to share, but Tauna and Carric bunk up together. They’ve never been apart.”
“Are they rescue horses?”
“Kind of. They don’t belong to us, though. They’re Dex’s. He’s got a place in Plymouth, but it’s too noisy for these old girls, so he keeps them here. Pays us enough for the space to keep the water on.”
“Sounds like a good bloke.”
Emma smiled. “He is. His fella has a Michelin-starred restaurant attached to their stables, so his place is rolling in it. Dex has bailed us out so many times I’ve lost count. The least we can do is take care of his girls.” She clicked her teeth and one of the elderly horses ambled to the half-door. It fumbled its whiskered lips on the wood until Emma gave it a treat from her pocket. “Do you want to give her one?”
“Me?” I eyed the horse—Tauna, apparently—with a healthy dose of apprehension. She seemed gentle enough, but I’d never been this close to a horse in my life, and her teeth were huge. “Um, okay.”
Emma passed me a cube of something grassy. “Hold your hand out flat and keep your thumb tucked in. If you don’t want to do that, you can balance the treat on your fist.”
Her gaze was playful, so I figured that only idiots took the second option. I held my hand out to Tauna, expecting her to come at me with her teeth, but of course, she didn’t. She took the treat like it was made of glass and bumped my hand with her nose. A thank you? Who the hell knew?
Not me.
Emma took me around all of the stables and paddocks, including a couple of Shetlands who’d recently retired from the beach and a pair of donkeys who’d arrived from India a few months ago.
“Ronnie and Reggie,” she said. “Joe and George think they’re hilarious when they’ve been on the whisky, but the names stuck.”
I couldn’t help smiling as I studied the donkeys. “They’re more delicate than I thought they’d be, and much prettier.”
“Were you expecting Eeyore?”
“Probably.” One of the donkeys came over. I was an expert at treat giving by now, so I held my hand out and fed it a grassy cube. “What’s in the field with the hill?”
“Shadow. He’s our only stallion, but I don’t take visitors up there. He’s too volatile.”
“Hormones, eh?”
“Something like that. He was Grandpa’s last horse from the old stud we used to have years ago. Never handled by anyone else. Even Joe struggles with him—” The landline phone attached to Emma’s back pocket rang loud enough to send the donkeys skittering away. She reached for it, but it cut off. “Someone’s picked up in the house. God knows who. Joe’s horrible on the phone.”
Emma stared out over the fields and paddocks. Her shaking had eased as we’d walked around, and she seemed calm enough now for me to take a chance. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Sal said something about you being better online than in person, and you seemed pretty freaked out about meeting me today. Do you have an anxiety disorder?”
“Wow.” Emma shook her head slightly. “You’re the first person around here to ever work that out for themselves. It took me years to explain it to this lot.” She jerked her head towards the house. “Not that they aren’t sympathetic, of course.”
“I think it’s difficult to imagine if you haven’t experienced it or studied it yourself.”
“You’ve studied it? I thought you were a personal trainer?”
“I’m a physiotherapist, actually. PT is part of that, but the work I do is more holistic.”
“Holistic Harry.” Emma nodded.
I snorted. “That’s my blog. And I started that as therapy for myself.”
Emma’s eyes widened slightly, but any response she may have made was cut off by Joe coming up behind us, his face far more animated than I’d seen so far.
“Police on the phone,” he said. “There’s a pony loose at Crantock Beach.”
“What?” Emma glanced around quickly. “It’s not one of ours.”
“That’s not why they called. It’s running riot and they need someone with a horsebox to come out and catch it. George is coming with me, but we’ll need to put Ava in with Mani and get a stall ready.”
“On it.” Emma nodded like this kind of thing happened all the time. Perhaps it did.
Joe spared me a glance as he turned away, and I sucked in a breath. His dark blue eyes had been on my mind since I’d first seen them this afternoon, but they’d been flat then—dull, even. Now they glittered, alive with whatever it was that got him out of bed in the morning, and I couldn’t look away.
I tracked him even after he’d turned his back on me and returned to the house. And I saw his face later that night when I closed my own eyes and tried fruitlessly to sleep.
Chapter Three
Joe
The farm was never entirely quiet. At night, the horses called to each other, and the foxes screamed in the fields. Sometimes, I blocked it out and slept like a baby. Others, I lay awake all night, staring at the living room ceiling, but tonight turned out to be one of the nights when I didn’t even make it to my makeshift bed on the couch.
Instead I walked our newest arrival around the yard, watching like a hawk for any signs of colic.
“Why?” Harry asked me from his perch on the doorstep—apparently he didn’t sleep much either. “Stress?”
“Nah. Some tourists on the beach gave him their posh picnic—as in, all of it. Greedy fella’s necked half of Waitrose.”
“How did he end up on the beach in the first place?”
Now that was something I didn’t know. The young male was in good nick—healthy and clean. Well fed. How he’d wound up galloping around Crantock Beach was a mystery, so I didn’t answer Harry’s question. His gaze on me as I looped the yard was unnerving, and I wished he’d fuck off already. I was tired and had less patience than usual for nosy questions.
The front door opened and closed, signalling that perhaps Harry had taken the hint. I sighed and knocked my head lightly on the gelding’s rump. He snorted cheerfully, like he had done since we’d caught him, and I scowled at him. “What are you laughing at, eh? We’re gonna be up all night hiking round this shithole. Couldn’t leave the sausage rolls alone, could ya?”
My grumbling earned me another good-natured grunt, and we set off round the yard again. Half my mind was on the dinner I’d abandoned in favour of ranting at the cats about broken tack, but the other treacherous half drifted to the stranger sleeping in my grandfather’s bed. Despite poking around his blog, the dude who’d rocked up was nothing like I’d thought he’d be. For starters, I’d expected him to drive a wankmobile—a white Range Rover or a scraping-the-ground-lowered Subaru. Not a navy-blue Ford Focus. And his face didn’t fit my assumptions either. His cut body had prompted me to picture some slick twat with a Peaky Blinders hairdo, not the rugged—he even had a beard—dark-eyed bear who apparently didn’t like my mum’s cooking.
And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
The gelding and I had done another three laps of the yard when the front door opened again. I’d successfully ignored Harry when he’d first appeared around midnight, but as luck would have it—or not—this time, I was passing the steps as he was descending.
He was clutching a plate with a sandwich on and a chipped mug—my chipped mug—of coffee. “To keep you going,” he said. “You seem like you’re in for the long haul, and you didn’t finish your dinner.”
“Neither did you.”
Shadows flickered in Harry’s warm brown eyes, but he blinked them away so fast I wondered if I’d imagined them. Then I wondered why it mattered. Or if it mattered.
For some reason it did. “Sorry,” I said. “I mean . . . thank you. I’ll eat in a bit. Just got to get this idiot settled.”
Har
ry nodded, his small smile as open as the rest of his features. “Are you going to be okay?”
Are you? “Of course. This ain’t the first horse to do the overnight yard marathon, and sure as fuck won’t be the last. Go to bed, mate. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Harry disappeared inside without another word, and I continued on my way with the gelding. My imagination tracked Harry’s footsteps up the rickety stairs even as I turned my back on the front door and slipped back into the soothing pulse of hooves on the cobbled ground. I’d been alone in the house for so long it was hard not to see him as an intruder, but the arrival of his rent in the farm’s bank account had swallowed most of my resentment.
His shy smile had swallowed the rest.
Harry wasn’t in the kitchen when I wandered in from the fields the next morning, looking for breakfast and a couple of hours kip before morning muck outs began. His car was gone too.
Emma glared at me from the stove. “Scared him off already?”
“Would it matter? Got his money, haven’t we?” I opened the fridge and retrieved the milk. “Where’s Mum?”
“At the market, probably. It’s Monday.”
I frowned. “She didn’t take the van.”
“Maybe she walked.”
It was possible, but Sal’s favourite market was four miles away, and the skies had darkened overnight, eclipsing the sunshine we’d had the day before.
I poured myself a bowl of cereal and thumbed my phone to life. I’d tapped out half a text when a car pulled up in the yard.
Harry’s car.
Harry and Sal got out, laughing like they’d known each other twenty-four years, not hours. Emma appeared at my shoulder and peered out of the window with me.
“That’s cute,” she said. “I think she has a crush on him.”
I elbowed her in the ribs. “Not funny.”
“I wasn’t being funny. Mum deserves a bit of jam in her life. Why can’t she have a toy boy?”
I suppressed a growl as Sal and Harry came inside carrying boxes of weird green shit that looked suspiciously like cabbage.
Whisper (Skins Book 2) Page 3