“Not especially. I was going to ask you about where you come from . . . your family, your life in London.”
“Oh.”
“Sore subject?”
“No. I have a family—my mum and my brother. I grew up in Hackney, but we moved to Romford when I was fourteen. Rhys still lives there. My mum’s out in Spain.”
“Your dad?”
“Dead.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Harry’s eyes darkened. The shadow was fleeting but unmistakable. “I hated him.”
Why? But I didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. Because the fire in his haunted gaze when he’d protected my mum suddenly made sense. “When did he die?”
“Four years ago.”
“Was that freeing too?”
“A little.” It was Harry’s turn to reach for the whisky bottle. His hand shook as he poured double measures. “But I hadn’t seen him in years, so it was surreal, actually. I didn’t feel as much as I thought I would.”
“What about your mum?”
“What about her?”
“Are you close?”
“Not so much anymore. I love her to bits, but life pulled a weird one on us. I was her shadow for years, then I just . . . wasn’t.”
“What about your brother?”
Harry smiled, the warmth of it melting away some of the tension. “He’s my best friend . . . when I don’t want to chin him.”
I laughed. “With you there, mate, though I’ve made it this far without decking my sister.”
Harry knocked his glass to mine and his grin widened. “So we’re both pillars of restraint?”
I shrugged and tipped some whisky down, tracking it as it merged with the buzz already lacing my veins. “I try, though I reckon I dance too close to the edge some days.”
Harry shifted on the couch, his smile gone like it had never been there at all. It was clear he’d had enough of the subject, and though I was screaming inside to learn more about him, I understood.
I rubbed my face. The whisky was starting to make me feel ridiculous. Like I should give him a hug or something. I settled for nudging him. “Thanks for breakfast. And the lie in. I know it was you who left me to sleep. Emma loves waking me up.”
Harry shrugged. “I owed you a few meals, and I didn’t see the point in disturbing you when I was awake anyway. Besides, I like helping with the horses. They’re not as scary as they were—oh shit!” He scrambled off the couch. “I left the dinner in the oven.”
He darted from the room, leaving me bemused until he reappeared with two scalding hot plates, filled with the kind of food he usually seemed terrified of. Sober me couldn’t seem to hide my curiosity, but drunk me held my tongue. I claimed a plate and some cutlery and dug in while Harry did the same with a little more dignity.
“I haven’t had a roast in years,” he said after a while, his plate still half-full.
“Why not?”
He speared a roast potato and frowned at it in a way that I couldn’t decipher. “My mum wasn’t much of a cook when I was a kid, and then I kind of got out of the habit.”
“Habit of what? Eating?” I threw the words out carelessly because they didn’t mean anything to me, but as Harry’s gaze met mine, it was horribly clear that they meant everything to him.
My dinner turned to dust in my belly. I forced myself to keep eating. And to say something—anything—to give him a way out of a conversation he clearly didn’t want to have. “Mani likes you.”
Harry blinked. “What?”
“Mani. He likes you.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because he looks at you. He doesn’t bother with everyone.”
“Would it bother you if he didn’t like me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The same reason it bothers me that you have as many demons as the rest of us. “Because he’s always right.”
Harry nodded slowly. “That’s not what you wanted to say.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. You want to know why I’m such a freak about food.”
“You think I’d call you a freak?”
Harry looked at me. The whisky we’d necked had reddened his eyes, but the warmth was still there, despite the strain. “Sorry. My words, not yours.”
“It’s a fucked up word. Do you think Emma’s a freak?”
“Do you?”
“Nah.”
“You’re good with her.”
“No, I’m not. I want to shake the shit out of her.” I put my plate on the cluttered coffee table. “I did once, when we were younger.”
“What happened?”
“She hit me with a ladle and stayed in the house anyway.”
A chuckle burst out of Harry. He slapped his hand over his mouth and shook his head. “Sorry. I’m just picturing it.”
“Stop apologising. It’s not you who fractured my cheekbone.”
Harry winced. “Ouch. That hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Yup. Nice shiner, though. I think she was secretly proud of it.”
“I doubt that.” Harry’s smile faded. “She seems to feel very guilty about her condition.”
My humour ran for the hills too. “I wish she wouldn’t. She does more for this place than anyone. Without her, we’d have no website or online donations. And the freelance marketing she does from home keeps us fed some months.”
“You all work hard, Joe.”
I sighed. “I know, it’s just never enough.”
“What is? How do you define when you’ve done enough? Because it seems to me that it wouldn’t matter how many horses you had here, there would still be more to keep you up at night.”
He was more right than he probably knew. The RSPCA were monitoring a field of ponies ten miles away. It was only a matter of time before they called on us to take them in, and the prospect of turning them away cut me to the bone. “So, what are you saying? That there’s no point in trying because we’re doomed to fail?”
“I’m saying that you’re too hard on yourself because you expect the impossible. Perhaps we all do.”
“Did you fight him?”
“Who?”
“Your dad.”
“Does it matter?”
Did it? I took Harry’s plate from him and put it with mine. The booze in my blood roared to life and my body moved of its own accord. I straddled Harry, pushing him back on the couch, and pressed my forehead against his. “I don’t know.”
Harry took a breath, one of those, soft-sharp gasps that I’d started hearing in my sleep. I braced myself for his answer, but then he kissed me, and my mind was devoid of all else but the sensation of his lips on mine.
My hands flew to his face and I kissed him back, rising up on my knees, pouring everything that I didn’t understand into everywhere we touched. Perhaps he hadn’t meant to kiss me. And maybe I hadn’t meant to return the favour, but right now, it was all we had.
Harry growled into my mouth and pulled me tight against him, his blunt fingernails scraping my bare back. I gasped and kissed him harder, my world narrowing to his chest and his heartbeat thundering a hairsbreadth away from the growing bulge in my jeans. Too much. Too fast. But I couldn’t pull back. My lips were fused to his, my skin addicted to his bruising touch, and it was only the need to breathe that eventually forced us apart.
By then, Harry’s T-shirt was somewhere behind me, his belt undone. I was shaking, and so was he. I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. So I kissed him again, losing myself in the rounded muscle of his beautiful torso—his smooth skin and ripped abs—and blocked out the fluttery sensation in my stomach. What the hell are we doing? But the bemusement in my conscience found no purchase either as I coaxed a low sound out of Harry with my tongue. Everything about him set me on fire, and what little control I possessed in spite of my father’s dud genes was long gone.
Harry’s belt buckle clanked against mine. I moved to rectify the fact that he was the on
ly one with undone jeans, but he got there first. He ripped my belt away and unbuttoned my jeans. I braced myself for his electric touch on my dick, but it didn’t happen. Instead, he slid his hands over my heated skin, his fingers digging in, and rocked up against me, the layers of denim between us the sole thing keeping me from embarrassing myself.
My heartbeat spiked and madness crept up on me. I snaked a hand between us and found Harry’s cock. It was hard, and hot, and heavy, and the scrape of my palm along his length clawed a hoarse gasp from his throat.
“Joe.”
The way he said my name was everything, but as I gazed down at him, something changed. Perspective seemed to hit him first, and then come crashing into me, and the fierce compulsion to never let this end gave way to reality.
A shudder passed through me. I let my hand drop, and Harry brushed my hair out of my face like he could ease the sting of what I knew he was about to do. He stood with me still in his arms as though I weighed nothing, and deposited me gently on the sofa. He turned away. For a moment I feared that he’d leave without a word, but he stopped at the door, one foot in the hallway.
“I did fight my dad, but not until he’d hurt me enough that I’m still fighting him now. Don’t try and make sense of these things, Joe. Just be the best man you can.”
And then he was gone, and I was half naked on the couch with wet eyes and a raging boner.
Chapter Eight
Harry
“What on earth are you doing up there?”
Emma wobbled precariously on the rickety ladder. “I’m looking for the bran mash. Tauna lost another tooth overnight, so she’s going to need soft food from now on.”
“Are you sure it’s up there?” I steadied the ladder and gazed up at the cluttered shelves in the feed store. “It’s not with the other sacks of, uh, stuff by the door?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Emma said. “Joe usually measures up the feeds, but he’s not here.”
I knew all too well that Joe wasn’t around—I’d heard him tear off in the van at the crack of dawn—but I had no idea where he’d gone, and his kiss still bruising my lips kept me from asking. That and stopping Emma from breaking her neck. “Fuck this. Get down. I’ll look.”
Emma shot me a death glare but slid down the ladder anyway. “You’re in a mood.”
“Am I?” I climbed the ladder and heaved myself onto the dusty platform that served as the lowest shelf. “Can’t say I’d noticed.”
“Are you hungover? Because Joe was. He looked like shit when he stopped at the bungalow to give Mum some money.”
That Emma trusted me enough to jabber on like I was part of the family warmed my bones, but the thought of Joe looking like shit turned my whisky-scarred stomach. I’d left him dishevelled and bemused on the couch, and gone to bed with the world and my dick on my mind, but I’d woken to a brain obsessed with only him, and the longer he was absent, the more distracting that became. “Was he okay?”
I didn’t look at Emma, but I sensed her frown. “Why are you asking me that?” she said. “Has something happened between you two?”
“Like what?” I read the label on a half-empty sack and then discarded it. “There’s nothing but oats and molasses up here.”
“Grab some molasses and don’t change the subject.”
I passed Emma two tubs of molasses and climbed down from the platform, brushing dust from my clothes as I hit the ground. “I’m not. I just don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean the fact that you and Joe live in the same house but hardly ever speak. I can deck him for you if he’s making your life miserable by being a grumpy little shit.”
“He’s not grumpy. He’s—” He’s what? I couldn’t find a word that quite fit Joe. Mysterious. Raw. Kind. Funny. Rude. They all fit, but none told the whole story. “We do speak.”
“Uh-huh.” Emma eyed me. “I can still deck him. I’m sure he deserves it for one reason or other.”
“Not going to break his cheekbone again, are you?”
Emma’s face fell. “He told you about that?”
I nodded. “Last night. We had a few whiskys.”
“Oh god. He’s a nightmare when he gets on that stuff. He either thinks he’s the funniest man alive or cries because he’s worried that he’s just like Dad.”
“Is he? Like your dad, I mean?”
Emma’s frown deepened. “That’s a tough question. My brother’s a complex beast.”
I’d figured that much out for myself, and I had a complicated brother of my own, but I followed Emma to the tack room in the hope that she’d continue.
“Ah, here it is.” She tugged a huge sack out from behind a teetering tower of saddles. “What on earth has he put this in here for?”
“He’s complex, remember? You may never work it out.” I took the sack from her and lifted it to my shoulder. “Where do you need this?”
“Back in the feed store. Poor old Tauna needs her breakfast.”
We returned to the feed store. Emma mixed a bucket of bran mash and molasses with warm water while she pondered my question about Joe. “He is like Dad sometimes—impulsive and daft. They’ve got the same soft heart too, like Grandpa, but he’s a better man than Dad . . . stronger, I guess. He works so hard, day in, day out, doing the same stuff over and over again, just to keep this place standing. Jonah doesn’t have that in him. Never has.”
She seemed to speak to herself as much as me. We took the bucket of overdue breakfast out to Tauna and her stablemate, Carric.
“Joe was wild when we were young,” she went on as we rubbed the old mares patchy coats down with bundles of clean hay. “Mum couldn’t keep him indoors. He was always off riding Mani or climbing up buildings and stuff. He loved to surf too, but then Dad started messing things up at the stud farm, and Grandpa got old. Joe picked up the slack, and he’s been doing it ever since. As long as the farm is still going, I don’t think he’ll ever get his life back. And some days, I don’t think he even wants it. I’m the anxious one, but Joe gets so down when he’s tired. I think he’s lonely, so I’m glad he has you, even if it is just for the summer.”
Emma’s speech was long and rambling, but I absorbed every word and filed them away in the “Joe” part of my brain. The part that had also taken up residence in depths of my heart I’d thought were barren. That Joe was ever lonely tore me up, but what could I do? I was only here for the summer, and I didn’t have enough rope for the both of us.
The pattern of Joe disappearing at dawn continued all week. By Thursday, I was beginning to feel a little paranoid. I sat at my desk, staring out of the window, texting Rhys periodically, though my mind was wholeheartedly on Joe. For the last three days, he’d come back around eleven, but it was midday now, and there was still no sign of him.
I licked my lips, as I had about a million times since our drunken sofa encounter, like I could still taste Joe on them. Part of me was embarrassed for practically throwing myself at him, but the majority of my Joe-themed daydreams were taken up with recalling the scorching heat of his touch that night and fretting over the fact that we’d barely locked eyes since.
Which was my fault as much as his. I’d taken to skipping Sal’s dinners and eating alone when everyone had gone, and by then, Joe was often asleep—or, at least, I assumed he was. I didn’t have the balls to stick my head in the living room. Bloody idiot. And I didn’t understand why. My demons had plenty of lairs, but my sex life wasn’t usually one of them. Not that I’d had sex with Joe. Or was planning to.
Shit. My brain felt like it was about to explode. I thought about going for a run or a drive, but for the first time in forever, I wasn’t in the mood to pound the streets, and my car was still in the garage. Which left work. Lots of work. And I was already behind.
It was lunchtime when I heard Joe’s van coming up the lane. I was still in my room but found myself at the top of the stairs as he pulled into the yard. When I got outside, Lacey and Jemima were piling out of the van, giggling and
clutching brown envelopes.
Lacey leapt on me. “I got three As!”
“Um . . . Okay?” I gave her a hug and then set her back on the ground. “That’s great. What for?”
“A-levels,” Jemima said, coming up on me too. “It’s results day. I got two As and a B, so I got into Exeter uni!”
“Wow. That’s awesome. Where are you going, Lacey?”
“Liverpool,” Lacey said. “Joe wrote me a character reference to help me get into veterinary school, and now I’ve got my results, I’m definitely in!”
The girls were on cloud nine. I hugged them both again and then retreated to the kitchen with Sal, who was making them a cake. “They’ve done really well.”
“They have.” Sal smiled fondly. “Don’t know how, though. They spend all their time here when they’re not at school. Their parents must’ve forgotten what they look like.”
I laughed. The younger staff seemed to work when I was busy in my room, but I often smiled when their laughter floated up to me. They ran rings around Joe, and the brotherly affection he gave them in return was wonderful. “It was nice of Joe to take them to get their results.”
“Tradition,” Sal said. “He’s taking Toby for his GCSEs next week. And I think the young ’uns like riding around in the van. Gives them street cred or whatever it’s called these days.”
I was willing to bet that it was the hottie behind the wheel that gave Toby and the girls the kudos in town, but I let it go. What did it matter? It had been a great day for the girls, and I was happy for them.
So happy, that the scent of whatever Sal was baking caught my attention. “What is that? It smells amazing.”
“Banana cake—it’s their favourite. Healthy, too, before you start lecturing me on saturated fat. It’s got olive oil and everything.”
“Not that bad, am I?”
Sal pinched my cheek. “’Course not. I’m only messing, luv.”
But her words stayed with me all the same. Preaching good nutrition was part of my job—a vital part—but balancing that with old demons was hard, and if Joe’s quizzical frowns around mealtimes were anything to go by, I was losing the battle.
Whisper (Skins Book 2) Page 8