wool on her fingertips. From his lapels she stroked upwards, inwards, and heavy fabric gave way to soft cotton.
His eyes never left hers as she reached the studs of his shirt and hooked her fingers into the fabric, pulling him down to her.
‘What do you want?’ Fraser asked, breaking their look at last and glancing down at her hands.
‘I think you know.’
‘Oh, I’ve got a pretty good idea. But I want to hear you say it.’
‘It’s going to be like that, is it?’ Elspeth asked with a shiver, hoping very much that it would be.
He was still looking at her as if he wanted to consume her, and she was good with that. She had too much in her head. Too much in her life. She wanted to be devoured, to devour. To lose herself in her senses, in the present. To be so overwhelmed that she couldn’t think about anything beyond the next second.
She slipped her foot out of her shoe and hooked it around Fraser’s calf, noticing the feel of every hair that slipped beneath the arch of her foot, the line of his calf muscle, taut and defined and bared to the elements.
As she slipped her foot higher, feeling the slide of his skin beneath hers, she couldn’t help imagining what she would find higher still. Wondering whether he was exposed to the elements, to her, beneath that kilt.
With the fingers of one hand still hooked in his shirt, keeping him close, she lifted the other to the back of his neck, feeling the softness of the hair curling at his collar. Meeting his eyes again, she smiled.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ Fraser asked, with a smile just the right side of smug.
‘You know I am,’ she murmured, dropping her eyes to his mouth and finding herself unable to look away from it.
She licked her lips, and watched as his mouth curved into a knowing, confident smile.
‘Good. Don’t stop.’
She had absolutely no intention of stopping. Gripping the front of his shirt tighter, she twisted the fabric between her fingers as she pulled him down to her. She held her breath as she closed her eyes, stretching up on tiptoes until at last her lips brushed against his. Sensation exploded at the touch of his warm mouth and she let out a quiet moan, revelling in every physical sensation assaulting her body.
In the press of hard wood and soft woollen blanket behind her, the creased cotton and tweed in front. The curling hair and soft skin beneath her hand. And the uninhibited mouth on hers. Tasting her, tempting her. Teasing her with its tongue and its lips.
Fraser’s arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her away from the tree into his solid chest. Elspeth let her lips trace the line of his jaw until she was close enough to whisper in his ear.
‘Let’s go.’
* * *
Fraser woke to the sensation of silk sheets beneath his body and a warm summer breeze caressing his back. And soft, soft lips pressing against his.
Elspeth.
With his eyes still closed, he wound fingers into her hair, cupped his other hand around her cheek and kissed her lazily, slowly remembering the night before. He pulled her down on top of him, but she stiffened, drawing away until his body and his bed felt cold.
‘Bye, Fraser.’
He lifted his head and blinked his eyes at the sound of high heels on deep carpet, heading towards the door, and it was only in the dawn light creeping round the edge of the curtains that he saw Elspeth’s face.
‘Bye.’
He croaked out the word and then fell back on the pillow as the door closed behind her.
He didn’t have her number.
The thought occurred to him and then he was sitting up without realising he’d decided to, and he had a foot out of the bed before he’d thought about what he was doing. Before he stopped himself, as he always had before.
No strings. They’d never actually said the words last night, but it had been clear enough in the way they had been with each other. Well, if he’d had any doubt she’d just proved it by walking out with barely a kiss goodbye.
For a fraction of a second he wondered if he could catch her before the lift reached their floor, but that summer breeze brushed him again, colder this time, and he realised what he was thinking.
He didn’t do relationships. He’d seen when he had still been barely more than a child the harm they could do. What happened to people and their lives when they followed their desires rather than making sensible, objective decisions.
He’d sworn that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Just the fact that he was even thinking of acting on a whim now was all the proof he needed that it would be a bad idea. Of all the women he might have a second date with, the one who was making him question all his carefully set ground rules was not the one to try it with.
He collapsed back, letting his arm fall over his eyes as he remembered falling into this same bed last night, with Elspeth pulling at his clothes and her body warm and supple beneath him.
Last night wasn’t going to be easy to forget. She wasn’t going to be easy to forget.
ELSPETH THREW DOWN her work bag by the door and shouted out as she walked through the hallway. ‘Mum? Sarah?’
‘In here,’ her sister called back from the direction of the kitchen.
Elspeth crossed the hallway and smiled at the sight of the pair of them at the kitchen table, the huge pan of chicken and pasta she’d left in the fridge the day before sitting between them. Thank God. She was starving. All she wanted to do was carb-load and fall straight into bed. Again. She’d not made it past nine o’clock a single night this week, and she wasn’t planning on breaking her streak tonight.
Her patients had been back to back from eight o’clock that morning, and the only food she’d had all day was a sandwich at her desk while she caught up on notes and phone calls. She was used to the workload, to the stress and the non-stop appointments, but for some reason this week it had caught up with her. Her body felt heavy, weary in a way she’d not felt since she’d been caught in an endless cycle of night shifts, studying and revision in her first years as a junior doctor.
She just had one last thing to do before she went to help Sarah with her evening routine of medication, personal hygiene and changing for bed.
She had to pee on a stick.
It was just a formality, really. Just to rule out the flashing light that her inner doctor wouldn’t allow her to ignore. She was a week or so late, but that wasn’t unusual. She’d never had a cycle she could set the clock by. And she’d never taken risks—she always used a condom. But if she’d had a patient sitting in front of her, complaining of the sort of fatigue she had been feeling, she would have ordered a pregnancy test, so it only made sense to rule it out.
She
