Page 104 of You, As You Are

“Because you want to be heard,” Iain said gently, his words going straight to the sore spot on her heart and healing it. “I hear you.”

It was no use trying to push back against the welling tears or the sniffles, or the feeling like hands were splayed around her ribs, fingers pushing each one down into her chest. Silently, she let the single drop of water from her eye roll down her cheek and dampen her pillow.

“Why are you so … so different?” she demanded to know before she could stop herself. Even if they weren’t actually dating, no man had treated her the way Iain did.

He sighed. “Because I’ve been beaten down into the ground and made to believe things I wanted to achieve weren’t possible for someone like me.” Maisie’s chin quivered as she tried not to make a sound. “I won’t make anyone feel less than they are, not even a little bit.”

“Except yourself.” She wasn’t afraid to call him out; Iain didn’t deserve to punish himself the way he did. “If you wouldn’ttreat someone else that way then you shouldn’t treat yourself like that either.”

His final sigh echoed through the cabin. “I know.”

When she’d woken up to grey-blue light glowing around the closed curtains, Iain wasn’t there. And neither was Ted. But something in how Maisie had woken on his side of the bed with her arms and legs sprawled out like she’d had the entire thing to herself all night suggested why he’d jumped ship. If she’d woken with a man who wasn’t her partner stretched and curled all over her, then she’d have silently extracted herself from the situation too.

Assuming the duo were off letting Ted do what Ted needed to do, she’d readied herself and gone to the canteen to get them breakfast: a couple of pastries and some kind of DIY jam and bread package to toast with their cabin’s tiny toaster. On her return, wind made her regret not tying her hair up before she’d left, with curls flying into her face without a hand spare to shift them.

Ted’s snout pressed against the door’s glass like a guard dog, abandoning his duties at the sight of food when she trudged back up the cabin steps. Blindly, thanks to her curls, Maisie managed to slip inside without letting Ted out, with breakfast tucked beneath her chin and her breasts acting as a handy ledge for the paper bags.

Music caught her ears beneath the pit-pat of Ted’s claws on the hardwood.

Was that …jazz? Her phone was in the thigh pocket of her leggings, so it definitely didn’t come from that.

“Oh,Ted, get out of the way,” she hushed, navigating her way through a curtain of red hair to the kitchenette while trying to keep the mild muddiness of her boots contained to as few steps as she could. Her hip found the countertop, and she deposited their breakfast.

Finallyshe flipped her hair out of her face and found where the low sound was coming from. The bathroom door was wide open, a hazy yellow glow bouncing off the white tiled walls. It sounded like a waterfall gushed in there while steam flooded out into the rest of the cabin, and her roommate was nowhere to be found.

Tugging off her coat and tossing it on the bed, Maisie took one sidestep. What kind of idiot went outside and left the shower?—

Her jaw dropped with a gasp. Rooted on the spot, she stared at where condensation had smeared away on the shower’s glass wall, revealing that she’d been wrong.

Iain was definitely here.

A verywetand very …nakedIain, lathered in white suds of shower gel and running his hands all over his blocky muscles, eyes closed and turning under the overhead stream of water.

The cabin suddenly became a log-fired sauna, and Maisie was the poor fool too underprepared to take the heat that sweltered under her skin.

Rugby players really were something else entirely.

At least, this one was.

Her focus had never been so solely on one sight in her entire life. Droplets rolled down Iain’s chest through dark, trimmed hair, following the hard-earned rivulets his physicality had so unfortunately graced him with, and the unhinged urge to lick them off didn’t even catch Maisie by surprise. Excitement pooled in the neglected space between her stomach and her thighs, her pulse lowering down south with it.

“Shitting hell …” she exhaled, her head going light from the sight in front of her.

Iain’s chin spun to his shoulder. “Maisie?”

“Fuck.”She bolted out of the door as best as her unsupported breasts would allow – it was thewrongmorning to have abandoned a bra for another few comfortable hours. Ted flew hot on her heels, and Maisie was halfway down the decked steps when she realised. “No—no—go back inside!” she whisper-shouted at the creature. Ted dropped his jaw in a defiant grin.

“Maisie?” Iain shouted, the music now silent. “That you?” Pipes squeaked inside of the cabin as if he’d cut the water off.

Maisie twisted back and forth between the open path through the forest and the steps that led her back into unchartered, and frankly awkward, territory.

“Shit. Come on.” She didn’t even have a lead for Ted, but she’d walked with him enough to trust he wouldn’t run off anywhere.

The mutt accompanied her bumbling escape. She’d rather be caught dead than caught drooling over Iain in the shower when he hadn’t even known she was there. There was something seriously wrong with her if one glance at him had stunned her so completely.

Iain’s naked, dripping, sculpted torso likeOceanusin Rome was the only image behind Maisie’s eyes as she stumbled over twigs and stones on the trail. Her fingers went to her phone and pulled it from her leggings, needing to call someone before she spiralled into a complete meltdown.

According to the group chat she shared with her friends, Bash was up in Manchester visiting Faye, so calling her was off the cards – Maisie didn’t want to disturb their time together. Freddy was a great friend, but not the right one to listen to her spew about having too many sweat-inducing feelings forthe man she was supposed to only be friends with. Which left Sienna.

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