Page 3

Three

TAM

I was right about his eyes. They’re blue and jewel-bright. Full of life and laughter, even though every time I see him, he’s trudging to his front door as if he’s been awake for a week and a half.

He’s on nights .

Bhodi Jones.

AKA the hot bloke who lives in my annex.

AKA the hot nurse from the hospital car park.

AKA the thunderbolt driver I’d clocked the day before he got here.

Three strikes of coincidence that blow my mind, but I haven’t had time to think about much. Not since the Instagram post that smashed up my wrist worked its magic and I have a dozen new orders to complete by the last post in December.

And to be clear, just because I haven’t had time to think about Bhodi Jones and his electric eyes, doesn’t mean I haven’t done it anyway. My wrist hurts and picturing his face dulls the pain. Also, I can see him from the spare room window because that beautiful fucker never closes the blinds when he sleeps during the day and I’m too weak not to stare.

Like now, as I rise to refill the ink pot I’ve been working with—a task that’s a pain in the arse now I’m working up here, instead of down there , where he’s passed out on top of the covers, his pale arm dangling off the side of the bed, his messy blond hair and cut torso?—

Stop it .

Honestly, I’m trying. But he doesn’t make it easy, and it drives me to wonder how I’d have spent the last three days if I hadn’t had so much work to do. If I’d have stared at him more .

You’re his landlord. Be-fucking-have .

I raid my ink stash for a fresh pot of holly-berry red and return to my table. My wrist throbs something rotten. It hasn’t turned black and fallen off yet, but fuck me, it hurts, and if I take any more ibuprofen I’ll give myself a fucking ulcer. A cold fact that makes it harder to believe the injury will magically heal itself, but it’s all I have until my brain unknots.

Keep busy .

Right.

Work.

I go back to handcrafting place cards for the town mayor’s Christmas ball. Red and green custom calligraphy. Easy money, but dull, and if I have to write one more double-barrelled toff name, I’m gonna grind my pen nib into my eyeball.

Maybe.

If I don’t get derailed pondering what time my lodger is going to wake up today. Or fretting that he might be cold. He hasn’t lit the burner and the weather has turned lethal since he arrived a few days ago. Frost on the grass, ice on the roads. It’s hard to believe it rained for two weeks straight before he got here.

Actually, it’s hard to believe he is here. That if he wasn’t so distractingly hot, having a lodger would have zero impact on my life, just like Sab said.

I should’ve done this years ago.

Oh well.

Stealing glances at Bhodi, I work all morning. Then I go outside and contemplate the fence my mouse-sized dog somehow managed to destroy in his eagerness to get to Bhodi. I mean, now I’ve seen him up close and felt his warm hands on my skin, I get it. But that doesn’t help me fix the fence with one working hand.

I’m still glaring at it when Sab calls. “What?”

“Grinch.”

“What do you want?”

“How are you in a mood already? C’est à peine l'heure du déjeuner.”

It’s barely lunchtime. “I’m not in a mood.”

“You’ve been in a mood for days . Hang on…”

He ends the call and FaceTimes instead. I roll my eyes, but I know better than to ignore him, and I don’t want to. Sab’s my best friend. If anyone can screw my head back on, it’s him.

Somehow, I forget that means he also sees straight through me in less than a second. “What’s wrong with you? Did you die twice since I last came down?”

It’s a bad joke, but we’ve been rolling with it for six long years, and it lacks the punch it once had. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“C’est des foutaises.” Bullshit . Sab leans forward. He’s in the big van— my van. The oversized heap of junk he won’t get rid of in case I ever want it back. “What happened? ”

I open my mouth to repeat the lie, but Rudy interrupts me, kicking up a racket at a delivery driver picking his way up the path to the main gate. The little shit is ferocious enough that the driver hesitates, but I need the canvas boards he’s carrying for the job in my diary for tomorrow, and my schedule’s packed enough now that I don’t have time to chase missing parcels.

“Hang on.”

That’s for Sab. The toe of my boot is for Rudy as I gently nudge him into the house, shutting him in.

He’s unimpressed—Rudy, I don’t know about Sab. But they both have to wait as I meet the driver halfway, reaching for the boards before I remember that I can’t fucking hold them.

The driver sees my predicament and helps me out, carrying them to my front door for me to retrieve one by one when Rudy isn’t doing his nut. But every silver lining has a cloud and I don’t have to look at my phone to know my nosy brother has heard every word I’ve exchanged with the friendly Evri man.

I cage a sigh as the driver returns to his van and retreat to the garden again, hoping I can distract Sab with the broken fence, but he’s not having it.

“What happened to your arm?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

“Am I?”

“Oui-oui.” Sab has the same dark brows as me. They pull together as he launches into a tirade of irritated French, calling me out for being exactly who I am.

When he’s done, I throw him a bone to shut him up. “I knocked it a bit in the garage.”

“How? When?”

I don’t feel like explaining the daft chain of events that led to the probable fracture I’m walking around with—Bhodi’s words, not mine. Or dealing with the frustration Sab’s going to inflict on me when he figures out I haven’t had it treated yet. The humiliating empathy when he figures out why .

You’re ridiculous.

I am, and I know it, as much as I know I’m running out of rope to put it right. But this shit—unpicking the mess in my head—it takes time, and doing it alone is hard. If Sab was here…

He can’t be. He’s got an actual child to take care of, remember?

“Look, don’t worry about it, okay? It’s fine.”

“He’s lying.”

I spin around. Bhodi’s behind me, on the steps of the annex, dressed for work six hours before I’m expecting him to leave for the night. Because after three days of watching him sleep off his night shifts, I’ve somehow convinced myself I know his routine. “I’m not lying.”

Bhodi grunts and moves past me, heading for the side gate I never use, and I have no working free hand to stop him. No reason to stop him beyond the fact that he’s just dropped me in it with Sab. But the back of his head taunts me, as if I have any right to feel something as he walks away from me, and I bank Sab’s outrage for later.

I hang up on my brother. A risky move if I don’t want him on my doorstep by dinnertime, but the mood I’m in, I can’t be sure I don’t want that. That I don’t need it if I’m not going to let Bhodi’s ominous warning come true.

Bhodi .

I shove my phone into my pocket and track his steps down the path to the gate. It gets to me more than it should that he might be gone already, but he’s by his car, scraping ice from the windows, not a scrap of apology in the tough gaze he sends me.

“Brother?”

“That obvious?”

“You look alike and I wish my brother talked to me like that.”

“In angry French?”

“Sadly, no.” Bhodi flicks scraped ice to the ground. “Raging cockney doesn’t have the same magic.”

“You’re from London?”

“Carmarthen, actually. My brother’s ten years older than me.”

He doesn’t sound Welsh. And my confusion must show on my face as he rounds the back of his car to tackle the rear windshield. “My dad worked on oil rigs. We lived everywhere, so I don’t sound like anything.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah? What do I sound like, Tam?”

I can’t see his face as he wraps his voice around my name, and I’m transfixed by how his jacket rides up, revealing the swathe of ink-free skin I’ve already mapped out by creeping on him all week. “You sound like a dude who just got me in trouble with my brother.”

Bhodi doesn’t say anything for a moment. He clears the windshield, keeping his back to me, and the silence, though loaded, doesn’t feel bad. If anything, I feel calmer, like being close to him settles something inside me, which is fucking ludicrous. I don’t know this dude. He’s my lodger . The one I have to explain to Sab when he calls back later and rips me a new one.

“How much trouble are you in? ”

In my daze, I’ve missed Bhodi finishing his car and moving closer. He has major bedhead. The kind that makes me want to burrow my fingers into the thick locks and count the colours. “Enough to make me think about chucking my phone off Firefly Hill.”

“Firefly Hill?”

I point to the grassy peak in the distance, dotted with only a few homes. In truth, it isn’t that high, but the sentiment stands.

Bhodi follows my finger. “The road names are amazing around here.”

“They’re deceiving. Cosmic Avenue is a shithole.”

He grins, and it’s a fucking delight. Then his gaze falls on my wrist and seriousness descends on him again. “Show me?”

I’m a stubborn bastard. Instinct has me shaking my head before I’ve truly grasped the question. But Bhodi reaches for me anyway, and my body betrays me, letting him extend my arm without protest, like it knows how much I need the sweet sensation of his fingers gliding over my skin.

His cold fingers this time, that find the pain points in my wrists with lethal precision. “Flex your fingers?”

No . I try. It doesn’t go well and Bhodi gives me the good news. “Still fractured. Still needs an X-Ray.”

“Still not going.”

“You know it’s free, right?”

“I have to work.”

“With one hand?”

“I’m ambidextrous.”

Bhodi narrows his gaze, dimming the light in his eyes. “This is winding me up and I don’t even know you. How do you think your brother feels? ”

“I don’t need to think about it, he tells me.”

“What’s he going to say when you get an infection in the bone from an untreated fracture?”

I sigh, out of arguments.

Bhodi’s expression softens and he rolls down my sleeve to cover my arm, avoiding the sore bits this time and patting my hand for good measure. “Do you have a phobia?”

“Of what?”

“Hospitals. Doctors.”

Denial bubbles up my throat and doesn’t quite make it out. Instead, I say something worse. “It’s complicated.”

Bhodi smiles a little—a brief ray of sunshine that leaves me wanting more. “Most things are. But I could come with you…if you want? I know how hospitals operate and sometimes that helps.”

I know how hospitals operate too, especially the one where I first laid eyes on him, and I want to tell him that, so he understands, for no tangible reason whatsoever.

But my phone rings, shutting me down, and by the time I’ve rejected Sab’s call, Bhodi is already backing away.

“I have to go.”

“To work?”

“Yeah.” He opens the car door. “I’m covering the late shift before I have a few rest days.”

Odd relief sweeps through me that he’s not working all night again, though I can’t deny I’ve grown used to breaking up my own work day with the sight of him passed out on the sofa bed. “How late is late?”

“Midnight, probably. I don’t know. I’m still getting used to a new place. ”

I nod. Somehow I’ve drifted close enough to rest my good hand on his car door.

Shut it. Let him go . Preferably before he has more to say about my fucked-up wrist. But Bhodi’s eyes…I have a festive ink shade upstairs that’s been making me think of him all week. It’s called spruce , and I like it, but it has nothing on the glittery stare that pins me in place now.

We’ve run out of things to say. I get the message and step back, letting Bhodi close his own door. He starts the car, or tries. The ignition sputters and rattles, protesting— struggling —before it begrudgingly sparks to life and Bhodi drives away, leaving me with the diesel fog of an unhappy engine.

I don’t like that. Any of it. Broken cars are dangerous, and it bothers me more than it should that I won’t know until Bhodi comes home that he made it to work okay. That he has to drive that car again, at night and through the ice before I can fall asleep.

It bothers me so much I don’t go to bed early like I’d planned. I wait up on the couch and let Sab bully me into agreeing to get my wrist seen the next day, on pain of him marching down from Manchester and sitting on me until I stop being so fucking extra. He’s so wound up he doesn’t even ask what happened to the fence, who Bhodi was, and why he was rolling out of the annex with bed hair at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. Which has its good and bad points. I’m not sad about delaying Sab’s smugness over being right about the rental income, but Bhodi’s hot, and I can’t stop thinking about him, and Sab’s my person for talking about this shit.

He’s my person for everything.

It’s late when Bhodi’s car finally pulls up outside. I’m dozing with my phone on my chest. I sit up and it clatters to the floor as Bhodi exits his car and disappears around the house, using the side gate I had stipulated in his contract, only the battered fence gifting me a snatched glimpse of him again before he vanishes into the annex.

He doesn’t turn any lights on, but I don’t need to see him to know he’s kicking his shoes off and ditching the clothes from his upper body before he fills a glass of water he won’t drink and knocks out face-down on his unmade bed.

It’s my cue to climb the stairs to my own bed, but I can’t make myself move. I lie back on the couch and fold my good arm behind my head, watching the flames in the burner smoulder and die. Something deep inside me is wide awake, and I feel like this is me for the night. That I’ll still be at one with the fire when morning comes. But I do fall asleep in the end and wake to Rudy terrorising me for his breakfast, and a note on the doormat.

Rudy waits for no man.

I feed him, then shuffle to the front door and snag the plain card that’s definitely one of mine.

It’s covered in illegible scrawl, letters squished together and overlapping, words slanting forward and back in wavy lines. It’s so early that deciphering it hurts my brain, but the one word I can read—the scribbled name—spurs me on, and eventually, I figure it out.

Fracture clinic, 10 am. I’ll drive.

Bhodi xx

Damn. Aside from the what-the-fuck notion that the lodger I didn’t even want is already ordering me around, I should be fixated on the I’ll drive part of the cute little note I can’t seem to put down. His car’s fucked. He’s not driving anywhere until I’ve stuck my head under the bonnet. But that’s a given, non-negotiable, and maybe that’s why the two little kisses after his name sink their hooks into me instead.