Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
“I should go,” Max said, stepping back and finally dropping his hands from my face.
I nodded, but he’d already turned away and was opening the front door. The lump in my throat matched the tenseness of my stomach muscles, and I pressed my hands against my tummy as he stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind him.
I leant back against the living room door frame, staring at the door. The wavy glass in the windows meant my view was distorted, but I watched as the higgledy-piggledy shape of his person slowly disappeared from my view.
That kiss.
That wasn’t planned.
That wasn’t part of some cockamamie plan to inspire my romance novel.
That was real.
That was an honest-to-God, heat of the moment kiss. The kind that happened before you knew what you were doing. Where your body moved before your brain did.
It was a kiss I could still feel tingling on my lips, one I knew I’d relive every time I closed my eyes tonight.
It was the kind of kiss I’d written so many times—the one that came with high stakes, sparked something in the relationship, made a difference to someone.
And I’d experienced it myself for the first time in my life.
The kiss.
The one that had most certainly changed everything between us.
The one I’d relive in my mind a thousand times before I saw him again.
The one that had me well and truly fucked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ELLIE
Chaos Is A Way of Life
“Kev, you need to slow down.” I trapped my phone between my ear and shoulder as I poured hot water from the kettle into my mug. “I can’t hear you.”
“Aaron proposed to me!” he screeched down the line.
I almost dropped the bloody kettle.
“Hang on. Hang on.” I put the kettle back on the base and held my phone properly. “Aaron proposed? Are you getting married?”
“Yes! No! I don’t know, Ellie!”
Oh, good.
I needed a hysterical brother when I was having my own chaotic era.
“Kevin, you need to breathe. I need you to breathe.”
“I’m breathing. I’m breathing.” The line crackled to say he was, in fact, breathing. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? Surely you answered him.”
“No, not really,” he replied slowly. “Actually, I think I stared at him for several minutes in complete silence before he left.”
“Left? Where did he go? You live together.”
“I don’t know!” His voice was creeping up in decibels again. “His mum’s, maybe. Or his dad’s place. He doesn’t live far away. I panicked, Ellie!”
“Breathe, Kevin!”
The line hissed and crackled again, so loudly that I had to pull my phone away from my ear for a second. Ooft. This was a tough phone call.
Not because of the content, but because Kev was a drama queen at the best of times.
Seriously. If there was a spider? The entire country would know in five minutes.
I took my cup of tea outside so I could sit on the front steps. I’d seen Winston for all of ten minutes this morning before he’d disappeared once again, but since Max hadn’t been bothered yesterday, I left the door open behind me.
Apparently, my cat now had the freedom to come and go as he pleased.
That seemed like a dangerous thing to allow him, if I was honest.
“Are you all right?” I asked my brother after a few minutes of silence. “Tell me what happened.”
He exhaled heavily down the line. “We’d just refilled all the babies’ water for the night and locked up the rescue barns when he asked if I wanted a glass of wine. We’d had a long day so I said yes, but when he came back out, he gave me my glass and dropped to one knee.”
Ooh.
“He asked me to marry him, I panicked, and he left.”
Wait.
What?
“You did what?”
“Ellie! Help me!”
“Did you not answer him at all?” I asked.
“I didn’t. He must have come back this morning because everyone had been fed, but God knows what time he was here. I was up at seven like always.”
I grimaced as I sipped my tea. Only Kevin. “Have you tried calling him?”
“No. I didn’t know what to say. I’m not sure he wants to talk to me.”
“I wouldn’t want to talk to you.”
“Ellie! How can you say that?”
I snorted. “Well, I wouldn’t. He asked you to marry him and you didn’t even answer him, Kev! Crikey. A ‘no’ is better than that.”
“I called you because I thought you’d be helpful!”
“A terrible idea,” I replied. “And that’s bullshit. You called me because you knew I’d tell you how it is. If you wanted to be mollycoddled, you’d have called Mum.”
He muttered something I couldn’t figure out.
“You know it’s true. You fucked up, and now you have to fix it. You can’t run from this, Kev.”
“I think we need some time apart,” he said glumly.
Oh, no.
I knew what he meant by that.
“No. You cannot run up here away from your problems.”