Page 56 of The Next Chapter

Seb: My nana smoked thirty a day and lived till ninety.

Me: That’s an anomaly! It’s not the norm. I sent you the Reddit post about how a sample size of one isn’t a sample size, remember? Try that gum, please. I’ve got to go, this race idea could really help Lola.

Seb: LILY BROWN, DO NOT, I REPEAT DO NOT TAKE ON A HOTEL MAKEOVER THIS SUMMER. YOU HAVE ENOUGH ON!

I ignore him. Of course I’m not going to try to save the hotel. That would be ridiculous. Plus, it looks to me like Lola just needs a good business plan… I do love business planning… But no, Seb is right. I have enough on maintaining my web of lies.

I quickly pull on my running shorts and a strappy top. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather wear leggings or, better yet, a sleeping bag to run in with Noah, but it’s hotter than the surface of Venus out there. It’ll be like running through soup as it is.

Skye is meant to be the misty isles, that’s what I’d read in Noah’s book. But I haven’t seen one bit of mist yet. Just the baking sun.

I grab my suncream and step out of the cottage at the same time that Noah leaves his. He’s changed too and now he’s wearing shorts with a light blue loose-fitting sports T-shirt. Full coverage would have been better, for obvious reasons. But I don’t want him to die of heat stroke. That would be unfortunate. I’ll just have to keep my ogling to a minimum. It’s hard to run and ogle as it is.

I start absolutely dousing myself in suncream.

‘Are you happy to set the pace?’ Noah asks while I’m mid-dousing.

I nod.

‘That’s a lot of suncream,’ he comments.

‘I’ve been in the shade all morning and you can never be too careful when it comes to skin cancer,’ I reply. ‘Want some?’

‘Okay thanks.’ The edges of our fingers brush as I hand over the bottle. I don’t look up in case I give myself away, but I catch him stealing glances at me while he puts a few splodges of the factor fifty cream here and there. Possibly because I am very much enamoured with him applying the cream. What can I say? I find his dedication to protecting his skin from the sun’s UV rays very sexy. Very sexy indeed.

I do a few more covert stretches, mainly to distract myself. Noah seems good to go, straight off the bat.

I set off, heading down towards the loch, taking it steady. I might not be able to scale mountains with any sort of finesse, but I can do this. I usually do this, three times a week.

The path starts out fine. A little narrow maybe, and it’s not a nice bit of tarmac like I’m used to, but it’s decent enough for a fun run.

‘I think head left and go round that way,’ Noah says from behind me. I can hear his footsteps thump thump thump onto the ground. There are a few people down by the edge of the water, on its pebbly shore. I see Lola there, talking to a man I vaguely recognize. I raise my hand at them as we turn to run with our backs to them.

Underfoot, the path changes. It’s now a thin strip of depressed grass that I stick to like glue, falling into a rhythm as I hear Noah behind me, breathing steady.

I’m tempted to accept that running here in Skye, where I’m not dodging trams or careering around bikes, I can relax into it.

It’s beautiful. I think Noah’s idea for the race would be a good one. Lola could charge an entrance fee. She could offer drinks after. If she did need money towards the hotel repairs, this could be a start. I mean, I would come, if I didn’t live a million miles away.

I focus on the sound of our feet hitting the ground. I’m slow, I’ve accepted I’m slow. So, I can just be. Concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, albeit at a steady pace, and just get out of my head for a while.

Of course, this doesn’t happen. Instead, I’m zeroing in on my slowness. So slow. Noah must have expected me to be crap, surely. I wonder what he’s thinking right now and whether it’s about how slow I’m being.

I focus on his breathing in the hope that it’ll give something away.

It doesn’t.

Come on, head, be quiet.

We round the top of the loch. Looking behind me, I can see the hotel in the distance. It’s still so weird to think that’s where Lola lives. Like, that’s her home. I couldn’t have got it more wrong.

The run-down hotel by the loch and the handmade clothes I hadn’t factored at all. I have to say, the real Lola is far less terrifying than the Lola in all those magazine articles. The Lola in the orange minidress. It’s hard to be angry at someone who stitches daisies into their own dungarees. But without the anger I feel lost, unsettled. Far from being quiet, my head is a cacophony of noise.

Soon, mercifully, the heat starts to make it difficult to concentrate on anything else. There’s a rustle behind me and I turn around to look and whoa, big mistake. Noah has taken his T-shirt off and he’s running holding it in one hand. I whip my head forward so fast my neck clicks. That’s going to hurt later. That’s what no one tells you about being thirty. One sudden movement and you’ve got yourself a deep tissue injury.

Still, at least the pain in my neck distracts me from the thought of Noah running behind me, with his T-shirt off. Not that he’s super stacked or anything, he’s just so tight. With my legs, there are certain parts that are absolutely superfluous to requirements. My legs would work fine without that lump or bump. But the way his muscles all slot together like a jigsaw. Well, there are no lumps or bumps, put it that way.

And now I know that the tattoo that I’ve seen peeking out under his T-shirt sleeve curves around his shoulder and down past his collarbone and what the hell, I’ve never had a thing for tattoos before. Colin was resolutely anti-tattoo and I mostly agreed with his sentiments.