be really cool if you could read it and love it and tell me how fabulous I am and feed me Chocolate Fingers.
Then, somehow, her treacherous tongue actually allowed an ounce of that drivel to run free. “My blog,” her mouth said, without any permission whatsoever.
Hannah wondered if 30 was too late in life to apply for a brain transplant. Just a complete and total brain transplant. Was that a thing? No? Okay, never mind.
“You have a blog?” he repeated. “Really? Huh. Would you show me?”
Calmly, Hannah replied, “I would rather die.”
He burst into laughter. “And she calls me dramatic. Can’t you tell me something small? Like… what’s it called?”
“You want me to tell you the name of my blog?” she snorted. “What, so you can Google it and read everything? Okay.”
“I wouldn’t read it if you didn’t want me to.”
“Sure.”
“I really wouldn’t,” he insisted.
“Could we move back to the original point?” she asked. “Please?”
“Oh, fine. Party pooper. Basically, I don’t want you to take on too much. Just because I’m paying you doesn’t mean you should work your fingers to the bone.”
The irony of him saying that when he wandered around with eyes cradled by painful shadows was almost too much to bear. Ruth always described Hannah as mothering. Well, she had the most intense urge to mother Nate Davis all the way into bed.
Not like that, obviously.
He just looked really fucking tired, was all.
“Noted,” she said finally. “I will, ah… relax.”
“I’m not saying you should, or you have to. I’m saying you can. You definitely, definitely can. But I will say you have to have some fun every so often.”
“Oh, I do?”
“Yes. Like right now. Get in here.”
Could he hear the smile that curved her lips without permission? “No.”
She could definitely hear the laughter in his voice. “Hannah. Get in the fucking fort.”
“Fine,” she huffed, as though it were a great trial. As though she didn’t really want to, even though, of course, she did. She’d wanted to since the minute she’d seen it. But Hannah was a grown-up, a sensible and mature adult. Sensible and mature adults did not crawl into pillow castles.
And yet, here she was, doing it anyway. Because Nate had pretended to make her. She kind of loved him for that—in the general sense of the word, obviously. Not the… well, never mind. The meaning was clear. Totally clear. And since this was her head, and she knew how she’d meant it, she really didn’t need to have this argument with herself anyway, so there.
She knew she’d made it when she bumped into Nate in the dark. The light of his phone had gone off again, so she had zero warning before her head knocked into something that might have been his shoulder. Or his knee. No, probably his shoulder. Whatever it was, the skin was bare, and even though her bloody forehead was hardly an erogenous zone, she found herself shivering anyway.
These odd physical reactions she kept having were getting out of hand. She never had them around Zach or Evan, and they were both just as handsome as Nate. Theoretically. Objectively.
But, Hannah realised with a jolt, Nate wasn’t just objectively handsome anymore. He was actually handsome. Really handsome. As in, she would really like to find his mouth in the darkness and kiss it.
Oh, dear God.
“So,” he said grandly. “Here we are. In the lap of my children’s brilliance. What do you think?”
“It’s… beautiful,” she squeaked.
He laughed. “But we can’t see anything!”
Pull yourself together, woman. “Right,” she said, her voice closer to human than dolphin this time. “I just meant, you know, the experience. Beautiful. Ten out of ten.”
Nate snorted. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Oh, you know. Tired,” she said.
Never coming down here again, she thought. You awful, attractive bastard. What on earth have you done to me?
Every night, Nate sat in the dark and pored over medical websites until his eyes swam and the words danced way more than usual.
Every few nights, if he was lucky, Hannah came to rescue him.
It felt like being rescued, anyway, when she showed up in her enormous cardigan and gave him someone to needle and a goal to work toward. When he was alone, Nate thought about the fact that he’d run away from home, that he’d stayed in London even after Ellie’s death, that he’d rarely come back to visit, and now his mum might be… dying. And he’d wasted time thinking she’d last forever.
But when Hannah was around, all he thought about was making