‘What’s wrong with that? It got me out of Bledburn, didn’t it?’
‘And now you’re back here, because everything in La-La-land stopped being La-La. Stopped going your way. So you didn’t want to play any more.’
Stung, she sucked in a breath.
‘Is that what you think of me?’
‘Controlling? Well, aren’t you? Just a bit?’
‘Jason, I’m tired. I’ve worked flat out for years. I deserve a break.’
‘You’re tired of moving people around like pawns,’ he said. ‘You want a break from that. Let someone else take the strain.’
‘Like you, you mean?’
He held up his hands, one carrying a scraper.
‘I’d be up for it,’ he said.
‘Fine, I’ll give you my office number and you can take care of all the calls and texts then.’
‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it.’
‘What do you mean, then?’
‘Well, all right,’ he said, putting down the scraper and folding his arms with a frown. ‘If you want to know. The other night, when we had our little clash, you didn’t seem too unhappy with how I dealt with it. Right?’
She looked at her feet in their battered Converse boots. ‘Right,’ she muttered.
‘I’d say it came as a relief to you. And maybe even something that’d been missing from your life. Am I reading it wrong?’
‘No,’ she said, still focusing on the curls of old wallpaper around her toecaps.
‘So perhaps you’d like to get a bit more into it?’
She looked up.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, not so much the handcuffs and floggers and stuff, unless you’re into that, but the submission thing. You seemed to like giving in to me, like it took a weight off you.’
‘That’s how it felt,’ she said, more to herself than him. ‘Like a weight coming off. Not having to be responsible for everything. I never thought I’d want to give up control to anyone but … It’s weird.’
‘We’re all a bit weird, duck,’ he said, and she smiled at the local term of endearment. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn’t make you any less of a power broker in your outside world. But if you want to leave that at the bedroom door, well, why not? I’d be into it. And I think you’d be into it, too.’
She looked at him wonderingly, taking him in. For all his paint-spotted scruffiness, he looked like a man who could handle her. She’d never really seen that in a man before.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, looking away for a minute. ‘You’re not sure if you can trust me, and I don’t blame you but—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t thinking that. Which is strange, because I should, shouldn’t I? But it never even occurred to me.’
His expression made her want to cry.
He held out his hands.
‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I want to give you a hug.’
She walked into his arms and felt herself enfolded, encompassed, safe. This piece of Bledburn flotsam was so much more than he seemed. On paper, he looked like the worst prospect ever, but when she looked at him, when she touched him, he was everything she wanted.