I still hadn’t turned around, and Jack was still standing behind me, hand on my shoulder. “Where does he sleep?” I asked quietly.

“Outside, mostly. Marina only lets him stay in her camper when we’re on the road.”

“Oh,” I said, and tightened the towel around me again. When I turned, Jack’s gaze wandered from my wet temples, along the side of my cheek, and down my neck before finally settling in the region of my chest. I felt touched. Hot and flushed. I looked up at him from under my lashes, and he met my eyes then. There was something intense about the way he looked at me, but again, it could have all been my active and fatally hopeful imagination.

“Got a nice little look at you earlier,” he said, and I seriously thought I might die of mortification. My skin prickled with awareness.

“What?” I replied, my voice so, so quiet.

He didn’t say anything for a second, just hummed low in his throat, and it was the sexiest sound I’d heard, possibly ever. Then he took my hand in his. I’d taken the bandage off, but I still had a red burn mark down the centre of my palm. Holding it up, he seemed fascinated as he ran a finger down it gently. It only stung a tiny bit, and the combination of him touching me and the sting caused a strange tingling between my legs. Yep, my vagina was definitely on Team McCabe, even if my brain was waving around big red BEWARE signs like a maniac.

His mouth moved, and there was something intrigued in his expression, like he’d just figured out he’d aroused me, and it both interested and surprised him. He moved closer, eating up my space…and just stared at me.

And man, could he stare. I felt like he was telling me a silent story, and it was captivating.

“Could I get by you, please? I need to go get dressed,” I said, breaking the quiet. It could have been minutes or hours that I was standing there, but I’d never know. Time moved in strange patterns when I was around this man.

He said nothing, just dropped my hand and stepped out of the way. I hurried off at an unnecessarily speedy pace and practically raced back to the camper. When I reached it, I slammed the door shut behind me and breathed out a long sigh. It took me a second to realise I wasn’t alone. Violet and Lola sat in the living area, Violet painting her toenails violet and Lola eating a packet of potato chips.

“You okay, Lille?” Lola asked as she munched, one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, just uh….”

“Oh, no, what happened?”

“Jack McCabe.”

“Shit,” she said, glancing away before looking to me again with mischief. “Did you like it?”

“Well, not much happened for me to like, but, God, I can’t tell whether he’s indifferent towards me or hates my guts, you know.”

Violet let out a little laugh, still concentrating on her toenails.

“Oh, in that case, he probably just wants to fuck you,” Lola teased.

Now I was getting manic. “How reassuring. Last night you insinuated he might be a murder rapist, and now you tell me this! Can you see how wrong that is?”

“Is it pretty wrong,” Violet put in, agreeing with me.

“Hey, I just say it how I see it,” Lola said, raising her hands in surrender.

I pursed my lips and went into our room to get dressed. I’d just finished pulling on my jeans and a top when my phone started ringing. And, as though I’d been blessed with a sixth sense, I knew it was Mum. I still wasn’t ready to talk to her, but I figured I should get the agony over and done with.

I picked it up and brought it to my ear, answering, “Hello?”

“Lille! Where on earth have you been? I’ve been driving myself mad with worry.”

“Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Oh, I got it all right. I swear, you’re trying to put me in an early grave! I mean, a circus of all things. If you wanted to travel, I would have paid for you to go euro railing. Have you any idea the kind of people who work in circuses? And it’s not even a chain, it’s a flipping independent one, run by some eccentric hippy woman. Bernie from the office told me there was a rape in that circus a couple of years back. A rape, Lillian!”

I’d only been on the phone to her for thirty seconds, and already I could feel my throat constricting, my lungs filling with anxiety. This was the effect she had on me. I tried to summon some composure. “It was actually a murder rape, and yes, I know about it. But it was years ago, and everyone’s been perfectly nice,” I said, almost telling the truth. King certainly hadn’t been nice to me, but he was drunk at the time. I was still trying to figure out what Jack was.

“That’s even worse! You need to come home right this minute. Where are you exactly? I’ll arrange a flight for you at the nearest airport.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her I was in Caen, but I stopped myself just in time. There was no way in hell I was getting on a flight home, and if I told her where I was, I wouldn’t put it past her to come looking for me. Or worse, pay some sort of professional intervention people to do it for her. My mother was a strange lady, and you never knew the lengths she’d go to.

“I’m not telling you where I am,” I said, trying to sound as calm and steady as I could.

“Excuse me?”

“I said I’m not telling you, Mum. I’m not a child, and you can’t dictate my life anymore.”

“Fine, I’ll just have the GPS tracker activated on your phone,” she replied, like it was perfectly normal.

My voice raised an unnatural number of octaves. “What?”

“You heard what I said, Lillian.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m your mother, and I care about you. If that’s insane, then yes, I’ll accept the title,” she replied smoothly.

My pulse ratcheted up a notch as I stood from the bed, hurrying from the room with my phone in my hand. I could still hear Mum complaining down the line as I ran to a quiet spot just outside the campsite and smashed my extremely expensive smart phone into the gravel. The screen cracked, but it wasn’t good enough. I began stomping on it until it was broken to pieces. There was no way she could track me now. The thing was practically pulverised, but I still kept going. The more broken it got, the more relieved I felt that Mum wouldn’t be able to find me. My chest was moving frantically up and down when I finally stopped, trying to catch my breath, my hands on my hips. My heart stopped when someone started to speak.

“Should I call the nearest madhouse? Because that was the craziest shit I’ve seen in a long time.”

It was Jack. Of course it was.

Four

And Lille’s heart surely did falter

He was standing several feet away, an amused smirk on his face as he brought a bottle of water to his mouth and drank. I stomped towards him, grabbed the water from his grip, and returned to the phone, spilling the contents all over the cracked pieces. I felt relatively sure Mum wouldn’t be doing any GPS tracking now.

“Did you just steal my water?” Jack asked, blinking at me.

“Yes, but it was for a good cause,” I replied.

“So what happened? Did the phone call you a bitch or something? Sleep with your boyfriend? Murder your grandmother?”

I couldn’t help it — I laughed. There was something hilarious about his completely humourless tone, plus, I was slightly manic.

“No, actually. My mother was going to try to track my location on it.”

“Is your mother James Bond? And what, you couldn’t just take out the battery and the SIM?”

“I wasn’t sure if that’s all it takes.”

Jack shrugged and studied me for a long moment. I felt exposed under his watchful gaze, and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t sure if he was going to say anything at all. Then he finally spoke. “Why don’t you want her to find you?”

I sighed and walked over to the kerb before sitting down. Jack caught me off guard when he came and sat down next to me, awaiting my answer. There was something very obedient and dog-like about the gesture, which suddenly opened my eyes to another side of him. On the surface he was dark, dangerous, and deeply masculine. But right now, I could see a flicker of an intrigued little boy.