Page 53 of Booked for Summer

He caught the curve of her mouth. ‘Careful. If you keep that up, you and he might become friends.’

‘I don’t do friends.’

Again he felt those eyes on him. ‘Why not?’

He briefly considered veering off the road and pretending he had a flat tyre. ‘It wasn’t a conscious choice. More the way things worked out.’ Memories from his childhood swarmed through his mind like wasps, stinging as they went; shunned by classmates, ridiculed for his cheap clothes, laughed at when asked about his family, where he lived.

‘But that was at school,’ she said softly, guessing correctly. ‘What about after that?’

He shrugged. ‘I stopped trying. It was easier that way.’

‘What do you mean, easier?’

Easier than being rejected.He let her question hang in the air.

A beat later her hand covered his on the steering wheel. ‘Well, you have a friend in me.’

Emotion burned a trail through his chest and lodged like a rock in his throat. He couldn’t even speak past it. All he could do was wrap his fingers around hers and squeeze.

He’d come to apologise, yet here she was, in pain from injuries he’d caused, comforting him.

With a flash of terror, he realised his attempt to keep his distance had totally failed with Jade. His heart was letting her in, whether he liked it or not.

ChapterNineteen

Gingerly, Jade climbed the steps up to the studio flat, very aware of Liam’s presence behind her. He’d given her a week’s ultimatum, then caused her to fall off her bike. It was enough to stay angry with him, wasn’t it?

Okay, she’d not ridden a bike for over ten years. And he’d only been at the lighthouse because he’d wanted to apologise for the ultimatum.

Yep, she was basically screwed. If she couldn’t hold on to the anger, she had no defence against the new parts of him she was slowly unravelling. The soft underbellies to his hard shell. He had no friends because he’d stopped trying… Her heart had frigging melted at that, leaving a gooey mess of emotions in its place. She’d not needed his answer as to why, it was obvious. Everyone carried a threshold for pain, beyond which they couldn’t tolerate it.

It didn’t helpher,though, because she’d suffered her own pain, let men into her heart only to find Prince Charming was actually King Prick.

In the few weeks she’d known him, Liam had already swung from one to the other. It was impossible to know where he would finally land. There was also the small matter of him being her boss, of them being at loggerheads over the bookstore. And of her home and her life, her real life, being over three-thousand miles away.

So staying angry was really her best bet of surviving her time out here without having to go through another epic heartbreak.

‘I told you, I can manage,’ she protested as he clasped her elbow and led her towards the sink like she was a frail eighty-year-old.

‘And I told you, I’m not leaving until I’m satisfied you’re okay.’

She gingerly put some weight on her left ankle and grimaced. A beat later he was typing into his phone.

‘Who are you messaging?’

‘May.’ He glanced up at her. ‘I want you to be checked by a medic.’

Oh, my God. She snatched the phone from his hands. ‘Are you totally insane? I’ve slightly twisted it, that’s all. If you want to make yourself useful, you can get me some peas.’

‘Let’s clean your elbow before we start making dinner,’ he muttered, turning her so she faced the sink. His chest a warm, hard wall of delicious muscle behind her.

‘The peas are for my ankle,’ she retorted, giving him a glare over her shoulder, only to find his smoky grey eyes smiling straight at her. ‘Okay, you knew that. You were making a poor joke.’

‘A reasonably amusing joke,’ he corrected, turning on the tap.

‘By your standards, maybe, but they must be pretty low because I have it on good authority that Liam Haven doesn’t joke.’

‘Let me guess: Jeremy.’

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