“Which part?” Iain said hoarsely as the wind took a turn to hit their faces.
“Well, being abandoned, for one.”
“What am I then?”
She glanced at his perfectly handsome face. “Unfortunate.”
Iain shook his head and hitched his backpack. “Let’s go before this thing blows away and gets lost forever.”
* Yes, I do
CHAPTER FIVE
MAISIE
“My feet might actually be dead.”
It only took half an hour, but they found Malc’s bus pass nestled in long grass at the edge of the trail and made their way back down the cliff yet again. The incline hadn’t felt so bad the second time around, but still Maisie wanted somewhere to sit down. Something to lean on.Anything.Well, almost anything.
Conversation had become surprisingly easy between them in the extra thirty minutes they’d been stuck together, but that by no means meant she was going to ask if Iain could hold up all her weight for five minutes. He’d already done that once today, and they had the half an hour walk back down the cliff still to catch up.
She passed a look at her phone for the time: twelve. They should already be back at Aberystwyth by now. The pensioners were probably sitting at a fish and chip shop in Clarach Bay,enjoying themselves at her and Iain’s expense.
Iain.A tiny part of her suspected that dropping the bus pass might’ve just been a ruse to get them to walk back along the coast together, what with the whole thing about always walking in pairs, but that felt a little extreme.
Her throat made a tired squeak at the sight of the descent once more.
Iain had already stopped. “Do you want to rest a minute?”
“Could we make it an hour?”
She was going to die.Iain would have to come through on that promise about carrying her. Maisie was tempted to pretend to faint or something just to see if he would.
He glanced at the clouds forming out at sea like he considered her suggestion.
There was no point in prolonging the inevitable, and Maisie was getting hungry. “No. Let’s just go.” If her seventy-year-old grandma could do it, so could she. But she hissed at her next step. “I think that scowl you gave to my boots earlier might make sense now.”
Iain’s glance down at her choice of footwear said it all. “You finally figured it out.”
“You could’ve just told me that walking in brand new boots was a bad idea instead of letting me learn it the hard way. I think my blisters are going to have blisters.”
“It’s better to learn through your own mistakes than have the answers fed to you.”
“Is that what you were taught growing up?” Maisie offhanded, realising too late the mother of all frowns that it put on Iain’s face.
His voice changed, filled with gravel. “Something like that.” Maisie wasn’t going to pry deeper into the vagueness that was that answer. They barely knew each other and it wasn’t her business.
She moved her bag off her back and retrieved the croissantthat she’d saved. “I think I deserve this now.”
“Go ahead,” Iain said.
The plastic ripped open, and the sound made Ted spin around startlingly fast ahead of them.
Realisation washed over Maisie. “Wait, Ted ate my other one, shouldn’t you be taking him to a vet or something?”
Iain’s indifference was mildly alarming. “You’d already eaten half. Knowing him, he’ll get an upset stomach later, if anything, so I wouldn’t walk downwind of him from now on.”
Studying his profile, she said, “You’re oddly calm.” He had been all morning, actually. When she’d slipped and almost landed on her arse, Iain hadn’t panicked. She’d been a human disaster waiting to happen, and he’d been so … composed. Granted, he was still a grump, but a grump with a twisted sense of humour like her, apparently.