CHAPTER 6

“I CAN’T BELIEVE I DID this again,” Isobel wailed, as she scooped her shirt from the floor. It was ripped down the front. “I can’t wear this. Where are your shirts?”

Callum didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t even seem to register she was still there. He’d turned into a statue that blocked his front door. His open front door. Yeah, she’d had sex with a virtual stranger, in full view of the world. She was just oozing with class.

“Fine! I’ll find them myself.” She strode away from him, into the house. She also needed to find a bathroom and get cleaned up.

Because she’d had unprotected sex.

Again!

Had she learned from her teenage mistake, the way any other reasonable adult woman did? No. Because here she was at thirty-two, jumping the local bad boy without even sparing a thought for the consequences. She had no one to blame but herself. He’d stopped to make sure she wanted to carry on. And what had she said? Get in me now! Because she’d been thinking with her hoo-ha and not with her brain. If she’d been thinking with her brain, she might have remembered that she already had two kids and didn’t need a third.

She slammed open doors until she found the main bedroom. There was hardly any sign that Callum actually lived in the house. The furnishings were sparse and there were no personal knick-knacks anywhere. She yanked open drawers until she found a shirt. One of many identical grey Henleys. What the hell was that? Only a serial killer dressed in the same thing every damn day. She froze for a second. Had she had sex with a serial killer? Up against the wall. Without any protection.

She spun around and saw the perfectly made bed, which irritated her even more. Only someone with a deeply disturbed mind could be that neat. It was a bad sign. One of many she should have picked up before she jumped the man. Furious, Isobel bounced on the bed until it was a mess.

Better. She felt much better.

There was still no sign of Callum when Isobel strode into the bathroom. She turned the shower on to warm up as she surveyed the mess she’d made of herself. Her skirt was tucked in on itself and she’d been flashing her backside at Callum as she stormed through the house. Not that it mattered. Because really, was there any way she could add to her humiliation? She’d had sex with someone who was practically a stranger. In his hallway. In broad daylight. With the door open.

As steam filled the room, Isobel stripped and threw her trashed underwear in the bin. She stepped into the shower and let the heat take her away for a second, before her hand covered her abdomen. She did the math and figured out that it wasn’t the best time to fall pregnant. It was still possible, but it wasn’t probable. She clung to that hope with the smidgeon of sanity she had left.

“You aren’t on the pill.”

The rough voice startled Isobel, and she screamed.

“Are you insane?” She glared through the glass at Callum, who was standing, legs apart and arms folded, glaring back at her. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“You aren’t on the pill,” he said again. “And we didn’t use protection.”

She could have sworn he paled under his tan.

“No. We didn’t. But don’t worry. I-I’m sure I’m n-not pregnant.” Okay, so that was an outright lie, but still, what else was she supposed to say? If I am pregnant, there’s a good chance I’ll put my head in the oven and leave all three kids to you. Yeah, she didn’t think that’d go over well.

His eyes narrowed. “You stutter when you lie.”

It wasn’t a question, so she ignored him. Instead, she shut off the water, grabbed a perfectly folded towel from the rack and wrapped herself in it. Even his towels were equidistant from each other. Another thing that irritated her.

“Do you have OCD?” she asked.

His eyes went wide before they narrowed again. “No. But I’m beginning to think you might suffer from attention deficit disorder. Focus. We didn’t use protection.” For one second his calm demeanour cracked and he looked harried. “That’s never happened to me. I always use protection. Always.”

“Not this time, you didn’t. Guess I’m just special that way.”

His eyes hardened at her flippancy. “You could be pregnant.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No. I won’t allow it.” She couldn’t be pregnant. She just couldn’t.

The temperature in the room seemed to drop about forty degrees. Callum stepped right into the small bathroom, taking up all the space, and his hand wrapped around her bicep.

“Do you plan to abort my baby?” His tone was death.

She blinked up at him as the words sank in, and then she yanked her arm from his grip. “What? No! I plan to not be pregnant in the first place. I can’t be. It can’t happen. Not again.”

She pushed past him, holding what clothes she had left tight against her chest, and strode into his bedroom. Callum didn’t seem to have any problem watching her dress.

“A little privacy, if you don’t mind?” she snapped at him.

He cocked an eyebrow at her as though she was daft to ask. Which, quite possibly, she was. He blocked the door, so Isobel had no choice but to turn her back on him and pretend he wasn’t there. She dropped the towel and pulled on his shirt.

“I can’t believe this is happening again. I must be an idiot.” She stopped dead in the middle of pulling the shirt over her head as a horrible thought occurred to her. “I’m not an idiot. I’m one of those women who turn up on Jerry Springer. The kind who has four million kids by four million fathers and is still having an affair with her sister’s husband and her best friend’s boyfriend—at the same time. I’m a white-trash cliché!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Isobel barely registered that he was talking, as she carried on tugging on her clothes. “The first time I ever slept with a boy, I got pregnant. I was fifteen. I could be forgiven for being naïve and in love. I even thought we’d get married and live happily ever after. But no. As soon as I told him he was going to be a father, he ran. I haven’t seen him since. So I got wise.” She yanked on her skirt. “The next guy I slept with had to marry me first, so that I could do things in the right order for once. So that I would be certain he wouldn’t run out on me after we had sex.” She spun on Callum. “And do you know what happened?”

He stared at her as though she was losing her mind. And, quite possibly, she might be.

“I’ll tell you what happened. We had a beautiful little girl together and he said he was going to Glasgow for a job interview. A promotion. A step up the ladder in his career.” She snorted. “It was rubbish. He ran and he never came back! The next I heard from him was divorce papers in the mail.”

She stomped past Callum and headed for his kitchen. He followed behind her, not saying a word when she started opening and shutting cupboard doors looking for junk food.

Isobel slammed the pantry door shut and glared at him. “There is no chocolate in your house.”

“No. But there appears to be an irrational woman in my kitchen.”

She clenched her fists and glared at him, wondering if she would have to jump to hit him in the jaw. He was so damn tall. For a second, she swore she could see amusement in his eyes before they became flat and hard again.

“I want to know the minute you find out if you’re pregnant or not.”

“I am not pregnant!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, hoping volume would make it so.

He just stared at her.

“I can’t cope with this right now,” Isobel told him. “I have a mountain of bad debt my ex-husband left in my name. A loan shark after me for payments. And a dead body in my freezer. I need to make a list. I need to prioritise. I need a plan. I need chocolate!” she wailed.

Callum cursed loudly, and then she felt his hands on her shoulders and realised he was moving her towards the table in the corner of the kitchen. “Sit.” He pushed her down into a wooden chair. He pointed at her. “Stay. I’ll make tea.”

“I am not a dog!” She was shouting again.

She wasn’t too proud to admit that she might have become a little hysterical. But, to be fair, she was having a helluva day. She sat fuming, her mind racing over her many, many problems, as Callum went about making tea. Every movement he made was efficient and controlled. Which made it all the stranger that he’d lost that control with her earlier. Her face burned at the memory. Although the dull ache throughout her body wasn’t going to let her forget what they’d done anytime soon.

“Here.” He placed a mug and spoon on the table in front of her then reached into the cupboard behind him and produced a jar of honey. “Add this. It will help.”

Isobel fell on the honey like Winnie the Pooh. She ignored the tea and spooned some into her mouth instead. Sugar. Better. She closed her eyes and sighed. It wasn’t chocolate, but maybe if she finished the whole jar she’d get the same high?

“I wish I drank,” she said wistfully. “Now would be a good time to develop a taste for whisky.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t keep any alcohol in the house.”

Her eyes shot to his. “Why not?”

“I don’t like who I am when I drink.”

“Oh. I just don’t like the taste.” She ate another spoonful of honey while she thought about it. “But then, I never needed to be drunk to make ill-advised decisions. Seems I’m capable of doing that stone-cold sober.”

They sat in silence for a minute, while she ate her way through the honey and Callum dealt with being one of her ill-advised decisions.

“Tell me about the body,” he said.

“Do you only speak in demands? Are you capable of asking a polite question? Like, ‘Isobel, would you like to have sex with me?’ Or ‘Isobel, why is there a dead man in your freezer?’”

His eyes narrowed. “I asked if you wanted to have sex. If I remember right, you moaned your answer in my ear. Again. And again. And again.”

She felt her stomach lurch. “There’s no need to be a bastard about it.”

“There’s never any need for my being a bastard. It happens naturally.” He leaned forward, into her space. “Now tell me about the body.”

The words hit her hard and her stomach clenched even tighter. There was a body. In her freezer. Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

“Don’t you dare,” Callum snapped. “You freaking out and forgetting how to breathe is how we got into this mess in the first place.” He lifted the warm mug of tea and pressed it into her hands. “Drink. Then talk.”

For once, Isobel did as she was told. The hot tea was soothing. It would have been better if he’d put milk in it, but you couldn’t have everything. As she drank, she studied the man she’d had sex with. He’d been starring in her dreams for months, with his brooding good looks and his dangerous persona. Everything about him simultaneously warned her off and attracted her to him. From his broad shoulders and bulging arms, to the lines around his eyes that spoke of experience. His nose had been broken at some point, and there was a scar on his chin that had whitened with age. Even the planes of his face were sharp and brutal. But it was all softened by the lush fullness of his lips. She blushed just thinking about those lips and the parts of her body that had already experienced the feel of them.

Callum’s eyes darkened as though he could read her mind, and the air between them crackled. He shifted in his seat, drawing her attention to the fact that his jeans had become too tight again. A secret part of her was pleased by the effect she had on him. She shook her head to clear it. What was she thinking? She had enough to deal with without adding the Arness Outlaw to the mix.

She put her mug on the table. Folded her hands in her lap and looked at him. “My sisters and I found a dead man on the beach this morning.”

There was silence for a minute. “And you thought it would be a good idea to freeze him?”

Wouldn’t you know that the first question he asked her would be a sarcastic one?

She scowled at him. “We put him in the freezer because I can’t call the police and I don’t know who he is. We were going to bury him, but the beach is hard and rocky and we were worried we wouldn’t be able to dig a hole deep enough to stop the waves from unearthing him when the tide came in. I came here to see if, maybe, you had some idea what to do with the body.” She remembered their conversation and looked away. “I lied. I’m sorry. I have absolutely no interest in tanks or camouflage. I just didn’t know how to bring up the topic of the dead body. I thought if I got you talking about the army, it would lead to talking about wars and stuff, and then you might mention some dead people you’ve seen and I could casually say, ‘Speaking of dead people, there happens to be one in my freezer.’ It didn’t go as planned.”

He had a look of pure incredulity on his face. “I can see why it didn’t go as planned,” he said dryly. “But let’s back up some. Why can’t you call the cops?”

“Oh.” Isobel blinked several times while she tried to work out whether it was worth trying to lie again. In the end, she figured it wasn’t. “I kind of did something illegal that I really wouldn’t like them to know about.”

Callum stared at her. It was impossible to read his expression. “Was this thing more, or less, illegal than stuffing a body in your freezer?”

“How would I know?”

With a sigh, he got to his feet, towering over her even more. “Show me the body. We’ll talk about this while we’re there.”

“But you won’t call the cops?” She affected the same pleading face her three-year-old used on her that worked without fail. “He came off a boat that sneaks into the cove now and again. I don’t think they’re doing legal stuff, but I don’t want the police around asking questions.”

This story just kept getting better and better.

“We’ll see.” He reached for her hand and tugged her to her feet.

“I don’t like that answer. That’s what I say to the kids when I mean no.” She tried to pull her hand from Callum’s but he wouldn’t let go. “Do you think I’m going to run? You know where I live. I’m easy to find.”

“Who knows what you’re going to do,” he muttered. “And ‘we’ll see’ means we’ll see. Nothing else.”

“This day is not going as planned,” Isobel said as she let him drag her back up the road towards her house.

“No kidding,” Callum muttered.