Forgiven--A Second Chance Romance

by Garrett Leigh

  We set off for the hill. Luke moved like an athlete, but I struggled. My legs shook, and my wheels wobbled, and the peak of the slope seemed a thousand miles away. Panting, I kept my gaze fixed on Luke’s back, wondering if he’d turn around and come back for me, but he didn’t, and the irony kept me going until I was twenty feet from the summit.

  By then, Luke was at the top. He hopped off his bike and set it aside. He turned, and the sun was behind him, making him seem almost seraphic, though the light was cast in such a way I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me.

  I pedalled harder, relishing the lactic acid filling my legs, channelling the chaos in my life into my burning muscles. I’d always enjoyed this kind of pain—the productive discomfort that kept my world turning, driving forward when the devil had other plans. That Luke was waiting for me at the finish line now made me feel like I was dreaming. Pain became pleasure, and when I finally reached the top of the hill, I was giddy with endorphins.

  My bike clattered to the ground as I wobbled to a stop. Luke caught me and lifted me clear, and I whooped with laughter as he spun me around. “Oh my God, I just about died.”

  “No, you didn’t.” He whirled around one more time before setting me down. “You’re alive, baby.”

  I was. I’d been living my whole damn life, but despite the cloud hanging over me, it had been years since I’d felt so free.

  Dizzy, I threw my arms around Luke’s neck and kissed him, losing myself to the sensation of his perfect lips on mine, his velvet tongue darting cheekily into my mouth. My world narrowed to just him, blocking out the ramblers and families around us. My body craved him as much as it ever had, but I didn’t need him to fuck me like we’d been doing the last few weeks. I needed him to love me, to lay me down and show me without words that everything we’d forged was real.

  Like he’d read my mind, he pulled away with a deep chuckle. “I wish we were at home.”

  “Why?”

  “So you’d know.”

  His half sentences had always frustrated and completed me in equal measure, but there was no rush of irritation now. He got me, and I got him.

  We kissed one more time, then retrieved our bikes. We pushed them to a shaded tree and sat down to enjoy the view, Luke leaning against the wide oak’s trunk, me between his legs, my back to his chest while he nuzzled my neck. For long, blissful minutes, I was able to forget there was anything else, but eventually, reality returned like a creeping vine.

  “What am I going to do?”

  Luke sighed into my hair, then drew back to look at me. “I don’t know. The policewoman—what’s her name, again?—said she was going to look into your ex, right?”

  “Her name’s Rebecca. She’s going to look into Laurent, but only as far as to see if he’s been in the UK recently. If he’s in France, there’s not much she can do.”

  “But if he’s in France, he’s not vandalising your van.”

  “I know.” I’d been trying not to contemplate that. I could handle Laurent being a weirdo, but the idea that a stranger was behind this was truly terrifying. “Rebecca said we’d cross that bridge if we come to it, but I don’t think we will. It has to be Laurent. Why would anyone else want to do this to me?”

  Luke said nothing, just trailed his fingers down the back of my neck, but somehow his silence was deafening.

  I turned to face him. “What are you thinking?”

  “About what?”

  “About all this. We keep talking about it like it just affects me, but it doesn’t. Whoever was driving that car the other night would’ve killed you if you hadn’t moved, and your van was damaged too.”

  “It’s not me getting dodgy post, though.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Luke slid his wandering hands down to my shoulders. “I don’t know what to make of it all, but I do think what’s happened to me is connected to whoever is harassing you. It has to be, so the logical assumption is that it’s someone who’s jealous—who feels some ownership over you.”

  I nodded. “So it makes sense that it’s Laurent.”

  “Maybe. But why would he be so clandestine about it? Up until a few weeks ago, you were still his wife, right?”

  “Right.” The thought left a sour taste in my mouth. The more distance I had from my disastrous time in Paris, the more I could see it had been doomed from the start. Laurent had been arrogant and needy, and I’d been young, hurt, and carrying irrevocable love for someone else. “But he’s a brat. He hurt me because I never gave him what he wanted. Maybe he still wants to hurt me.”

  “What more did he want from you?”

  My heart. “Everything. I married him because I thought it made sense. Eventually, he probably figured that out.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Laurent anymore, and by the look on Luke’s face, neither did he, but we couldn’t push our troubles aside entirely. If we did, the declarations we’d made over the last few days wouldn’t mean anything. “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I’m sorry this has messed with your life so much. I can’t handle the thought that you’re not safe.”

  “I’m safe, Mia.”

  “Are you, though? What if he tries to run you down again? Or does something to your van that you don’t notice and you drive—”

  Luke pressed a hand over my mouth, his signature move, apparently. “Any of those things could happen to you too, but I’m telling you right now, if that dude comes at me to my face, it’s not me who ain’t safe.”

  I believed him—I’d seen Luke fight, and there was a reason no one in Rushmere had ever fucked with him—but we weren’t talking about pub fights, or bare-knuckle brawls in the quarries. Whoever this was didn’t fight fair, and Luke couldn’t protect himself from something he didn’t see coming.

  His hand slipped from my mouth. I could almost see the cogs in his brain whirring as he searched for something more reassuring to say, but I didn’t want reassurance. I wanted it to stop. I wanted to wake up with him every day and know he’d be whole when we went to sleep at night. After ten years without him, was it really too much to ask?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Luke

  “Let’s do something else.”

  I blinked, still caught in a vortex of introspection, even though that was the very thing I’d hassled her up the hill to avoid. “Like what?”

  She shrugged, her gaze more focused than it had been the last time I’d checked. “I don’t know. Anything. It’s a beautiful day and we don’t have to work. We should make the most of it.”

  In another lifetime, I’d have agreed with her, but despite my best efforts to distract myself—distract both of us—right now, all I wanted was to take her home, lock the doors, and keep her safe.

  Mia flicked my cheek. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what? I didn’t say anything.”

  “Exactly. You’ve gone all caveman on me, I can tell.”

  Unbidden, heat rippled through me. “Caveman? Does that mean I get to throw you over my shoulder and have my wicked way with you?”

  “When have I ever stopped you doing that?”

  Point to her, though it had been a while. The last few times we’d shared a bed we’d been either too exhausted or rattled to do much more than hold each other, and part of me wasn’t ready to change that. We’d fucked a thousand times. I needed to love her. “All right. What do you want to do? We can ride somewhere else if you like?”

  “Can we ride into town and get a monster lunch from the pub?”

  I loved that she loved to eat. And I was fucking starving, so any argument I had was eclipsed by our shared enthusiasm for hightailing it home to stuff our faces.

  We freewheeled down the beacon and rode back into Rushmere. The pub was closest to Gus’s place, so we ditched the bikes in his garage and walked there. The garden was crowded, and we’d had enough
sun, so we set up camp in a quiet corner near the bar and Mia wandered off to order enough food for four people.

  She came back with two pints of cider and a bottle of wine. “Don’t judge me,” she said. “I wanna get silly.”

  I wasn’t about to complain. I claimed a cider and necked half of it in one long swallow. “What food did you get?”

  She smirked. “All of it.”

  “Feeder.”

  “Makes up for me being a shit cook.”

  I laughed. Mia made omelettes almost as good as her mother’s, but I’d seen her burn cereal. It was kind of reassuring to know that hadn’t changed. “I can cook.”

  “I know.”

  Mia poured wine while I imagined cooking for her in my house again, this time naked while we took a break from a quiet night in. It was peak fantasy, but then my mind returned to the phone call I’d forgotten to tell her about before I’d dragged her on a four-mile bike ride. Old habits told me to leave it alone. To keep my own shit to myself and focus in her. But a resolve to be a better man, for once, won out.

  “Billy called me yesterday, after we got back from your flower runs.”

  Mia sipped at her wine, then put her elbows on the table, leaning close. “Is he okay?”

  “Um, I think so. He’d just got out of surgery.”

  “You never said that was happening.”

  “I didn’t know. I mean, I knew he needed it, but he told us the wrong date so we wouldn’t be around when he had it.”

  Mia said nothing for a moment, clearly turning it over in her mind and matching it to what she knew about my dysfunctional but loving family. “Let me guess, he was an arsehole about it, but actually he was trying to do the right thing?”

  “That’s my brother, and yeah. He didn’t want me and Fran stressing about him, so he got it done on his own.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  I traced my finger around the rim of my glass. “I hate that he still feels like we can’t handle him.”

  “But?”

  “He’s wrong,” I said. “When I left, Fran couldn’t handle him on her own, and I’ll always regret that it damaged them both so much, but I’m here now, and I’ve told him a thousand times I’ve got his back.”

  “You think he doesn’t believe you?”

  “No... I think he doesn’t know how.”

  There was no one else on earth who’d understand what I meant, but she did. She laid her hand over mine and stretched across the table to kiss my cheek. “Fuck it. Let’s take tomorrow off too and go and see him.”

  “He might be a dick.”

  “Let him. What’s the worst that can happen?”

  I was too cynical to answer that question without trashing our day, so I smiled and agreed to another ridiculous plan.

  * * *

  “You want to go to the tiki lounge? I don’t even know if it’s open.”

  Mia wobbled precariously as she descended the steps of the market cross on the high street. “It’ll be open. It’s the weekend.”

  “It’s Sunday night. That’s practically Monday.”

  “Bollocks.” Mia collided softly with me, her eyes wide and misty with the bottle of cheap wine she’d put away. “I wanna dance.”

  I was powerless to refuse her. As if I even wanted to. A late lunch had turned into a lazy afternoon of drinking and reminiscing about the good times we’d forgotten in our obsession with clinging onto the bad. I wasn’t as tipsy as her, but I was as close to happy as I could remember.

  We wove our way down the high street towards the vintage cafe that moonlighted as a cocktail lounge at the weekends, and found it open, warm, and inviting with its bright colours and Eden Ahbez playing softly from a vinyl record player in the corner.

  I got a beer and something fruity and frothy for Mia. Her face lit up like a summer’s day, and she ate the cherry from the top with the biggest smile I’d ever seen from her.

  “You want to sit on the shark couch?”

  “Sure.” I slipped an arm around her waist and half dragged her to the shark-adorned couch in the darkest corner of the bar. “It’s every man’s fantasy.”

  “Knob.” She slapped my shoulder, but there was no menace there, just a softness I craved like my lungs craved air. Perhaps she was happy too.

  We cuddled up on the couch, letting the mellow vibe of the bar merge with the buzzed contentment of too much food and booze. Without her hand tickling up and down my thigh, I might’ve fallen asleep, but her touch pushed that shit out of reach. I pulled her on top of me so she was straddling my waist, her rounded thighs covering the bulge in my cargo shorts. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  She giggled. “I know. It’s fun. I still want to dance, though.”

  “Later.” I wove my hand into the hair at the nape of her neck. “Kiss me first.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Mia

  Knocking at my bedroom door woke me on Monday morning. I rolled over and threw a pillow across the room. “Piss off, Gus.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m coming in, so put some fucking clothes on.”

  Thankfully, I was still wearing underwear and the T-shirt I’d had on the day before, so I didn’t move when Gus barged in. “What do you want?”

  “Um...to tell you the policewoman from the other night is downstairs? Are you kidding me, Mia? I already knocked five times and told you already.”

  Shit. I sat up faster than my piña-colada-bruised head really wanted to. Vague memories of Gus calling my name filtered through the haze, but I’d honestly thought I’d been dreaming. “Fuck. How long has she been here?”

  “Ten minutes. Why do you have a cocktail umbrella in your hair?”

  I had no idea. The hours Luke and I had spent at the tiki lounge were a blur. Beyond rum-fuelled dancing and a cocooning sensation that we’d always be so blissfully happy, I could barely recall a thing. The only clue that we’d stumbled home to my bed together was a stray black sock on my bedroom floor.

  Warmth and fondness warred with the hefty dose of reality waiting for me downstairs. I shooed Gus out, scrambled for some clean clothes, and fudged myself presentable before venturing down to the living room.

  The policewoman—Rebecca—stood to greet me. “Sorry to barge in unannounced. My preliminary enquires didn’t take as long as I thought, and I wanted to go over a few things with you.”

  “Wow.” I took a seat in an armchair. “I only saw you on Friday. I thought it would be a few weeks before we spoke again, if nothing else happened.”

  “Has it?”

  I shook my head. “All quiet.”

  “That’s good.” Rebecca pulled some papers out of a folder, angling them so neither Gus or I could see them. “Perhaps we are looking at something random then, or that the incidents you’ve reported are unconnected to each other.”

  Gus’s brows drew together. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, I’ve spoken to various agencies and I can’t find any obvious record of Mia’s ex-partner harassing anyone else, and as far as I can tell with the reach I have, he’s still in France and hasn’t recently travelled. That’s not to say he didn’t send the packages you reported, but it’s unlikely he was here on Friday night, or the week before when the car appeared to be following Mr. Daley.”

  Appeared to be. I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Was she taking the piss? Luke was the least dramatic person in the whole world—romance aside, obviously—did she really think he’d imagined a car stalking his every move, then gunning towards him at fifty miles an hour? “So what do I do? Just wait for something else to happen?”

  “Technically, yes. I can’t investigate your ex any more than I have without just cause, and to be honest, I’ve overstepped already. My boss only let me go to Interpol because of a training initiative we had in place this week. Ordinarily, it
would’ve been a wait-and-see strategy in the first place.”

  “That’s insane,” Gus said. “What has to happen for this to be taken seriously? A horse’s head on the doorstep?”

  “Not quite.” Rebecca tapped her pencil on her notebook. “But unless there’s a threat of assault, or to life, my resources are limited. I realise that’s not what you want to hear, but I can only tell you the truth.”

  I understood. After all, what had we really given her to go on? The only thing that connected the car following Luke to me was the fact that our vans had both been vandalised on the same day. The rest of it was either his problem or mine.

  Ten minutes later Gus saw Rebecca out, then came back into the room. “This shit is ridiculous.”

  I sighed. “Don’t get worked up. There’s nothing else she can do.”

  “I know that. But telling you to ‘be safe’ is hardly doing much to figure out who’s doing all this.”

  “Maybe she’s right, though.” I turned my gaze to the window, cataloguing the vehicles parked on the street. “Laurent obviously sent me the package, but if he never left France, there’s no way he did the rest of it. Maybe it is a coincidence after all.”

  Gus didn’t seem convinced, and for once I was inclined to agree with him, but I couldn’t find the words to do it. What was the point? If this turned out to be way darker than any of us had imagined, this conversation wouldn’t change anything. I wouldn’t look back on it and think fuck yeah, he was right. I’d still think he was an overbearing dick—a loveable dick, obviously, because he was the brother I didn’t deserve.

  Inexplicably I giggled. Gus stared at me like I’d grown horns, then turned on his heel and left the room. I let him go, and let my mind wander too, searching for the happy I’d brought home last night. My legs ached from the bike ride, and my head was fuzzy from the booze, but despite its fractured state, my heart was full.