I lost my breath the moment it opened.
Beautiful. That was what he was. There was no denying it, and… and I agreed not to lie to myself. I was attracted to him like a moth to a flame.
I knew I was about to burn myself in all the worst ways.
“Hello again,” he said, slightly dipping his head. “That was a bloody good bout. I knew you were tough, but damn.”
I smiled, shutting the door behind me, and waved off his compliment. “It was just another day in the rink.”
He made a chortling noise in his throat. “You make it sound like it was a walk in the park. How many forty-minute matches did ye compete in today, because I have to be honest with ye… The wheels in my head are still spinning. Pun intended.”
I laughed as we headed down the front steps. “Four today, one tomorrow, and then however many it takes the next day to make it through the quarterfinals to the finals.”
“Jesus.” He rubbed his hands up and down the back of his head. “And here I thought men were tough.”
“That’s what you get for thinking,” I teased, nudging into him. Wishing I hadn’t, because it made him look at me in a way that made me want to break too many rules to keep up with.
LONDON WAS COLD.
It consistently felt like glaciers took turns breathing down my neck. Like tiny paper cuts slicing into every inch of my exposed face each time a breeze moved past me. I felt my share of winters before, but the constant blast of arctic air felt like the sun decided to go on vacation.
“It’s not like your winters at home, yeah?” Ed asked as we followed him and Charlie toward the destination they claimed would knock our American socks off.
My teeth chattering like a machine gun and my flat gaze was my answer to that.
“It’s not so bad,” Cherry said as she walked in stride next to Violet.
“Yeah. Nothin’ a little whiskey can’t fix,” Violet added, smirking back at me.
If only I had a bottle. It would surely be gone.
We rounded the corner, Ed keeping a safe distance next to me, and then he and Charlie stopped and turned with lemon-wedge-sized grins.
“Well, ladies, our tour stop today would be the glorious Big Ben!” Charlie announced, directing our eyes up.
“Of all the places you could show us, you take us to a clock tower” I asked, looking up at the iconic monument, wishing I felt whatever it was you were supposed to feel when standing in front of a structure so culturally important.
All I felt was the bitter cold touch of the wind and the dry itch in my throat.
“This isn’t just any clock tower, lass. This is the clock tower,” Charlie said, chest out and arms up in glorious pride as we all gazed up at it.
He and Ed started spouting off facts as cars and double-decker buses whizzed by us in a blur. I wondered where the passengers were going. If they were late for a meeting or secretly meeting up with a lover.
Or if they were just as lost in life as I was.
My eyes drifted from the building to the people walking around us, heading in every direction. Their chatter filled the air with the sort of energy you felt when in the midst of a tourist trap. The giddy anticipation. The overzealous need to take as many pictures as you can. Probably more than you’d ever look back on.
I realized in all my panic of seeing Ed again, I didn’t even bring a camera. Looking over at Ed, who was pointing out a memory of his to the group, made me wish I had. That I could capture him in his natural state. The way he spoke so animatedly with his hands and body language, engaging any who were in his vicinity. The way the cold wind laced through his hair like invisible fingers. And how his cheeks reminded me of the McIntosh apples I’d pick with Maggie and her dad when autumn came around.
“Earth to Hannah,” Charlotte said, waving a hand up in down in front of my face.
I looked at her, blinking.
She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of earshot near a guy with a beanie snapping angled pictures of Big Ben.
“You need to tell him.”
Shit.
“Charlotte, there’s nothing to tell.”
She wasn’t fazed. “Oh, like hell there isn’t. You’re literally looking at him with that ooey-gooey look girls get when they’re in love. Not to mention you changed at least three times this morning, and you even—”
She grabbed a lock of my hair, her smile full of teeth.
“You even did your hair,” she added, as if that was a telltale sign for love.
“I changed because I wasn’t sure how cold it would be, and I did my hair because I simply felt like doing my hair. Can’t a girl do her hair without being in love?”
She batted her lashes at me.
“And I don’t even know what ooey-gooey eyes are. I was looking at the clock tower,” I lied, feeling like every ear around was tuned in on us. “And keep your voice down.”
I found my gratuity in the cold as I touched my burning cheeks.
She glanced over her shoulder at our small group, and then turned back to me, waving me off. “They can’t hear me, and that’s not important anyway. What’s important is that you don’t blow this second chance.”
I needed to nip this in the bud.
“We’re just friends, Char. That’s it. We both came to an understanding last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a clock tower to stare fathomlessly at.”
I moved past her, trying to keep my stomach from moving up into my throat. Ed watched me walk back, a slightly curious look in his eyes. I smiled, trying to assure him all was good, but I wasn’t sure he believed it as his words trailed off and he let Charlie take over explaining all the hellish things they did in that area when they were younger.
“You okay?” he asked as Charlotte walked around me, muttering tell him before joining Charlie.
“I’m fine,” I said, smoothing my hair down and rubbing a phantom itch from my nose. “Charlotte was just asking me about my plans for dinner later.”
He eyeballed me, eyebrows raised. “And here I thought I’d be the first one to break a rule.” The corner of his mouth lifted in the cutest kind of way.
My confidence stumbled all around my tongue. “What?” I managed to ask.
“You’re lying. That’s not what Charlotte asked.”
I jerked my head back, my blood heating up. “And just how would you know that?”
He wore a faint, almost subliminal grin. “Because when ye lie, ye do this cute little thing where you rub your nose as ye’re speaking, almost like ye’re trying to hide the words ye say.”
I thought back to when I lied and realized I’d actually done that. And he’d paid that much attention to notice. “I uh—” I started to say, searching for words I knew wouldn’t come. Not when he was right and I’d broken a rule. “Well, shit. Can we… can we just agree it was a lie and leave it at that?”
“Sure,” he answered with an easy shrug.
It took me a second to realize he had agreed to drop it. He wasn’t going to push and prod the truth from me like most would.
“So… what are your plans after this?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pocket.
“I don’t have any,” I admitted, my stomach feeling like a thousand grasshoppers were dancing around.
“Good,” he said thoughtfully, and then added, “So, ye want to go for a walk or something? Ye seem a bit bored by ‘ole Big Ben.”
“Me and architecture go together as well as oil and water.” I watched my breath wisp out in small clouds. “A walk sounds good.”
He grinned like a fool, and then jogged over to the group. A second later, they were all making kissing noises at us as he guided me in the opposite direction.
I shouldn’t have felt as if I was sitting next to a warm fire as I walked beside him. I should have headed back. Should have told him it was a bad idea, but there wasn’t an inch of my body that believed that logic.
“Do you know how to cook?” he asked, catching me off guard.
“Cook? Umm… I
guess if you count microwaving a twenty-five cent pack of noodles as cooking, then sure.”
“Microwaving noodles?”
“Yeah,” I said, almost defensively. “With my schedule, cooking is a pastime I’m not interested in. What about you?”
“Ye name it, I can probably make it,” he said confidently, his chest straight.
I tested him out. “Chocolate cake?”
“Try triple chocolate cake with custard filling and a coffee-stained buttercream icing that will knock your socks off,” he said, walking me up to the front door of a pub.
My mouth salivated. “Wow.”
“Want a pint?”
“Just a whiskey,” I replied, thanking him as he pulled out a barstool for me to sit on.
As he settled onto the barstool next to me, he flagged the bartender and ordered our drinks.
“When I was younger, my aunt would bring me to this part of the city and take me to get sweets. It was always on a Saturday, and she always wore some kind of hat that had feathers or flowers in it,” he said as the bartender set our drinks down in front of us.
“That’s sweet,” I said, thinking about Saturdays at my house.
Playing alone in my room. Being locked in after Father came home. Listening to my mother as she cried down the hall.
“Yeah, it’s weird how a sight or smell can take ye right back to a memory.”
Like how your hands make me think of that night.
“Yeah,” I said, taking a hearty sip from my drink.
“When it would snow, we’d go to her house and take sleds out back. She had a hill that dipped down into the forest, so we’d ride until our legs couldn’t make the climb back up anymore, and then she’d set out hot chocolate and biscuits.”
“You spent a lot of time with your aunt?” I was fully aware I was encouraging his rule breaking by asking him to continue. I just… I couldn’t help it. I found myself feeling like a chipmunk storing up for the winter. I wanted to hear everything so I could save it all up and take it out to analyze when I was alone.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice trailing off. “I—yeah. We were there a lot. And yourself? Did ye have a special aunt or uncle?”
I thought about the time my mother was hospitalized after my father threw her down the stairs, and no one came. Not a single card or flower had been sent. About how I took it upon myself to tape a handful of paper together and made the biggest card I could for her, which took days to draw, and how my father ripped it in half and threw it out the window on the way to pick her up from the hospital.
In reality, I knew nothing about either of my parents except what she sounded like when she cried and what he sounded like when he yelled. I didn’t have any grandparents. Never even saw a picture of my mother’s family. I only knew about Jack—my half-brother—and the only time I got to spend with him was during his brief holiday visits and when his band would pass through town.
Those were moments I looked forward to. When my dad would be on his best behavior and Jack would share all his stories about his fans and the stars he met while on the road. Jack was everything my father wasn’t. Kind. Sweet. Generous.
But then he would leave, and it would be just my mother, my father’s fists, and me again.
“No,” I said a little quicker than I wanted to. “Just Maggie, her dad, and my half-brother Jack. Those were the moments I looked forward to.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
I shrugged sadly. “I don’t get to see him much. He tours a lot with his band. I didn’t find out about him until I was nine, and he was already in college by then.”
“Well, then tell me something about those moments you looked forward to,” he said, prying information about my past from me. A past I was tethered to like feet stuck to tar.
“Ed, we agreed not to do this.”
“I know,” he said, “but I shared a memory with ye and ye didn’t stop me. That’s two rules now that ye’ve broken.” He paused. Sipped from his beer. “Just answer me this one thing, and then we’ll be even. Deal?”
I hesitated. Lost my reason somewhere between his thick-lashed, eager gaze.
“Deal.” I took another sip. Searched deep through my memories of Maggie and me, trying to find the perfect one.
“Me and Maggie used to pass out notes with compliments to strangers,” I said, my lips blossoming like petals in the springtime. “We’d spend the whole night before writing down as many nice things as we could on little strips of paper we’d painstakingly cut out, and then stand on the corner next to the ice cream shop and hand them out.
“It’s one of my favorite memories—one I can remember in vivid detail. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can still smell the vanilla scent of the waffle cones being made. Still hear the seagulls crying overhead, hoping someone would drop something as the sea breeze whirred through the streets, carrying the scent of summer. I loved the way the sun would kiss my skin in my t-shirt and overalls, and the way my heart skipped a beat every time I handed out a compliment, hoping I’d get that certain smile.”
He chuckled. “Why?”
I shrugged a little. “I don’t know. It was fun. It felt good to make other people smile. To have them look at me with a little bit of appreciation in their eyes. That alone made me smile. Made me feel like there was a little hope in the world.”
He nodded, taking a sip of his beer before asking, “How did people take it? The compliments, I mean?”
“They’d thank us. Tell us how sweet we were,” I recounted, missing Maggie’s face. “I can still see her, Maggie, I mean. Still hear the tone to her voice. It always eased the ache in my chest. She’s more than my best friend. She’s my sister. She was my family.”
He was quiet, as if digesting all the unspoken in that declaration of mine.
“I was adopted,” he offered, bringing his cup back up to his lips.
“You were?” I asked, entirely curious. Knowing I was tilting the scales of rule breaking again.
“Yeah. My mother’s oldest sister, Flora and her husband Bob, took me in after my mother passed from cancer. Before that, it was just us in a flat the first three years of my life, so I don’t really remember much about her. From what I’m told, my father was never around. His name isn’t on my birth certificate, so there’s no way to even begin looking for him. My aunt and uncle never hid any of it from me, but they don’t like talking about it much. By the time I turned four, I was legally theirs and soon after, baptized as Edward George Henry Alcott. A mouthful, yeah?”
He shrugged off his question and softly sighed.
“You should check to see if you hold the world record,” I joked, offering a consoling smile. My heart twisted for him as I picked up on the thinly veiled notes of pain in his voice. I saw him more clearly than I ever had before.
He wasn’t so different from me. Though my father was present in the physical sense, he was really no father at all. The only man who I’d ever come close to viewing as a father figure was Maggie’s dad, who took me in more than he ever should have every time my father went on one of his rampages. Just like Ed’s aunt and uncle did for him when he had no one else to turn to.
I guess… I guess pain came in all shapes and sizes.
“So your aunt and uncle, I’m guessing you had a good childhood with them?” I asked, trying to bring the light back into his eyes.
His shoulder lifted. “They’re good people. A little pretentious sometimes, but good people nonetheless. I always went to the best schools, had the best things, and never once was I treated less than a son in their eyes. It all works out in the end, things like that. I was the son they couldn’t have, and they were the parents I needed.”
“Well, I’m glad they were there when you needed them.”
“Me too.” He smiled with pride.
The noise in the pub picked up around us, so I scooted a little closer, until my shoulder touched his. “You said your mom’s oldest sister. So you have another aunt?”
His head dipped in acknowledgement as a wide grin split his lips. “I do. Her name is Della, and she’s one hell of a lady. I think ye’d like her. She had a rough start, Della did, with her first husband.”
Like a fog settling in, images of my father’s fist and my mother’s cowering form rolled across my mind. Rough start. I knew exactly what that meant, because it was the same story with every woman who ever married a man too big for his britches.
And it made me feel like a barrel of acid sloshed over into my stomach.
“So—she remarried?” I asked, not wanting to pry for more about that first husband.
“Yeah, to a chap named Elliot. Good bloke. A patient one too.” He winked at me, clueless to the way my memories continuously hounded me like a hunter on the heels of its prey.
“I never would have guessed. You being adopted, that is.” My knee accidentally brushed against his, sending a familiar rush through my nervous system. I wanted to ask him a million more questions, but I knew I needed to stick to my rules at the same time.
He finished off his beer, and then settled back into his seat, throwing his arm around mine. “It’s not something I like to tell people.”
“But you told me,” I said, realizing how far out on a limb he just went for me.
“I did.” He looked at me in a way he promised he wouldn’t.
“I—we should probably get back to the others. I’m starving, and I’m sure the girls are too. Visions of juicy hamburgers have danced in my head for the past hour. You know, skating and all… it leaves the stomach a’ grumblin’,” I rambled, trying not to notice the charming, almost deliberate smile he wore as he watched me. “And… and if we don’t feed Cherry, she gets hangry,” I added, laughing when his eyebrows scrunched.
“What the bloody hell is hangry?”
I slid off the barstool. “Angry hunger… and you definitely don’t want to see her get like that.”
Ed followed suit, pulling out his wallet and tossing a few bills on the bar. “Well, we can’t have that, now can we? How about I take us to a pub I used to go to when I was younger? It has the best chips.”
“You mean French fries,” I said, baiting him.
Runaway Heart (A Game of Hearts #2) Page 15
