Page 52 of An Island in the Sun

‘That’s because I am.’ He downed the rest of his beer and for the briefest of moments Tabitha expected him to stop the conversation and make an excuse to go and get another drink, but he didn’t. ‘You know I said that as well as needing somewhere to stay, I came back to Madeira because I was invited to a friend’s wedding?’

‘Yes,’ Tabitha said slowly, wondering where he was going with this.

‘Well, that friend – Mai – was the person who I believed was my soulmate.’ He raised an eyebrow and looked as if he was about to get up.

‘Woah.’ Tabitha grabbed his arm. ‘You’re not stopping there. You have got to tell me more.’

Raff sighed. ‘She’s five years older than me and I met her at the restaurant I used to work at during the holidays when I was back here. The age difference shouldn’t be an issue, but I was sixteen when we first met and that’s a massive difference when she was twenty-one. I totally lusted after her, but we also had a lot in common and I was older than my years,’ he looked at her pointedly, ‘you know, from being an only child and spending time at boarding school, plus I looked older too.’

‘When did you make a move?’ Tabitha asked. ‘As a teenager?’

‘Nah, I was twenty. Back from uni for the summer. We’d had four years of friendship and getting to know each other. There’d been girls on and off when I was at uni in London, but no one I felt the way I did about Mai.’

‘So what happened? You didn’t try it on at work, did you?’

‘Nuh-uh. I wasn’t that much of a lovestruck fool. We went out one evening. I understand now that she believed it was two friends having a drink, but I was thinking of it as a date. I walked her home afterwards planning to kiss her and imagining she was going to fall into my arms and invite me in for a coffee which would lead to… well, you get what twenty-year-old me was hoping it would lead to.’

‘Yeah, I get it. So what did happen?’

‘Oh, well, I did kiss her. I think her words were something along the lines of “What the hell are you doing?” Exactly what a bloke wants to hear,’ he said wryly. ‘For me, the kiss was electric; but obviously the biggest turn-off in the world for her. But what I’m saying is you don’t know until you try. I’ve never regretted it because I always think if there’d been a chance and she’d actually fancied me too, it would have played out differently. Things would have been a lot different.’ His brows knitted and he sounded wistful.

‘I promise you it’s not the same for me and Ollie.’

Raff shook his head. ‘You really don’t know if you’ve only ever been friends.’

Tabitha took a gulp of gin and leaned closer to Raff, lowering her voice despite it being impossible for anyone to hear their conversation over the thump thump beat of the music. ‘We did snog each other once, at a house party in our third year at uni. Of course it was a drunken thing at the end of a mad night. One of Ollie’s mates had copped off with a girl and they were in his bed, so Ollie crashed in mine.’

‘And…?’ Raff asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘We snogged.’

‘And…?’ he said again. ‘Bloody hell, Tabitha, it’s like getting blood out of a stone.’

‘It was weird.’

Raff laughed. ‘Weird?’

‘Yeah, in a really icky way. Honestly, it felt like I was kissing one of my brothers.’ Tabitha made an ‘ugh’ face at the memory.

‘And he felt the same?’

‘Yep.’

‘Are you sure?’

Tabitha crinkled her brow. ‘Of course.’

‘But it was you who stopped the kiss, right? And said it was weird, not him?’

Her brow furrowed deeper. ‘Well, yes, but he agreed.’

‘Or so he said.’

‘Stop it!’ Tabitha playfully whacked his arm. ‘I was there, I know what happened and how I felt. There was no spark. Honestly, I had zero desire to do anything beyond that one kiss. We hugged and went to sleep, that was it.’

Raff was still looking at her in disbelief. Her hand was still on his arm. Ollie had never made her feel anything remotely like the way she felt around Raff. She dropped her hand onto the seat between them.

‘Trust me,’ Raff said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘He’s a bloke; he wanted to do more.’

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