It’s In His Kiss

Daisy picked up Woody and Princess Belle and started walking them down the makeshift aisle she had created out of flowers pulled from the garden behind the row of garages that formed the ground floor of the apartment she and Sephy lived in on the King estate.

What he wouldn’t give right now for a dose of Daisy’s unfiltered imagination so that he could crack on with some work.

Actually, scratch that.

He had enough unfiltered, left-field, downright distracting imagination coming from her mother.

Luke stared at his screen and re-doubled his efforts to think about what types of challenges he wanted the users of his new world-building game to have to overcome, because his latest zombie evolution wasn’t cutting it for him any more. Lately, he’d get so far on development before hitting a brick wall, but he had to keep faith that the online multi-platform role-playing gaming community would love his new game as much as the Zombie Freedom Fighter series he had created.

He didn’t get why he was finding it so hard to create this new game. It wasn’t as if he was in the ‘second album’ slump of despair. He had managed to navigate that scary time by gritting his teeth and being so determined to succeed – to better the success of his first game even, that nothing could have stopped him.

So why the problem? This getting to the edge of a precipice and staring into the void beyond had started even before Sephy had thrown him a curve ball.

He tracked the mouse pad with his finger and clicked on his email inbox. If he couldn’t get into the design groove while Daisy was happy playing with her toys, he could at least deal with a few emails.

‘Traitor,’ he muttered under his breath when the arrow cursor on his screen bypassed the fresh batch of business emails and went straight to the middle of his inbox list.

Luke stared hard at the screen.

So, yeah, he thought he might know what had him so distracted from his work, and it all started and finished with the subject line: Get the cleaner in lad…Lily and I are coming for a visit!

It had to be the first time Steve and Lily Jackson had taken a break from fostering, and how had they chosen to celebrate that break? By visiting each of the brood that had flown the coop over the years, so that they could see them in their own habitats and check for themselves that they were all right.

Luke had taken great care over the years to assure them he was absolutely fine. Right up to the inclusion earlier this year of a little white lie that had put paid to the ever-increasing fretting that he was focusing way too much on work and not nearly enough on a personal life.

His fingers rubbed over his chest to ease the stab of guilt.

Yeah. Totally shouldn’t have lied like that.

Because now, if he didn’t come up with a plan and his lie was exposed, he was going to have to endure the unspoken lecture about how they had taught him differently. But worse than that, he would witness their disappointment morph into worry that they’d somehow failed him, and they deserved so much better than that.

‘Mummy!’ Daisy suddenly observed, at the sound of the front door opening, and Luke was saved from thinking about what he was going to do about the email and white-lie situation.

A couple of seconds later and Sephy King walked into her lounge.

Damn, but it was hard to stay mad at her, Luke thought, aware of his eyelids performing the slow-blink thing that they always did when he saw her.

He let the gesture slide because you couldn’t look at Sephy, register all the siren-like qualities – the oval-shaped face, almond-shaped eyes, bow-shaped lips, long jet-black silky hair, and a body that could, and probably had, made more than one man beg, and not react a little.

He was just lucky he had got it down to that small betraying tick.

Especially after what she’d so recently placed front and centre in his imagination.

‘Hey you,’ he greeted, as she came to a stop behind the sofa.

Swinging from her shoulder was the same huge soft brown leather tote exploding with vibrant-coloured interesting froufrou that had got him into trouble the other day. One of her hands clutched a tablet and large sketchbook and the other was wrapped around a travel mug. From the way she was white-knuckling the coffee receptacle, Luke guessed she was on at least her fifth refill of the day.

Dumping the tablet and sketchbook onto the sofa next to him, she let her shoulder slump so that the heavy bag could slip down to the cushions as well. With a hand now free she took the keys that she’d been gripping in her mouth, tossed them into the bowl on the coffee table and moved to flick her long hair over her shoulder with a grace that had absolutely no business beguiling him.

‘Hey you,’ she said on a long sigh, raising her ever-present drink to her lips to sip, before hesitating and obviously thinking better of it.

Definitely for the best, he thought. The snap and sizzle of energy barely kept in check was tangible from this proximity. Or was that the uneasy undercurrent running between them?

‘Did you find a model?’ he asked, really, really, hoping that she had.

‘That would be a negative,’ she said, glancing over at her daughter and taking in the Darth Vader helmet and cape with a slight shake of her head, before sliding her gaze back to Luke. ‘Was she all right for you?’

‘Yep,’ he replied, thinking they obviously weren’t at the laughing about him saying ‘no’ stage yet, then. ‘We went out for the Sunday papers and then she insisted on watching a DVD with me, before getting out every single one of her toys to perform multiple marriage ceremonies.’

‘God, don’t tell me,’ Sephy moaned, ‘Woody has committed bigamy again?’ There was an accompanying and exasperated shudder that had Luke grinning in spite of the new wariness between them.

‘You’d think Buzz would help a buddy out, but he’s obviously seeking out infinity and beyond,’ he said.

‘Actually he’s in my bag,’ Sephy confessed in a whisper. A smile chased out some of the stress as she looked again at her daughter. ‘I found him earlier when I was looking for my tape measure.

Luke wanted to ask her what the hell she had been measuring, given that she was supposed to be looking for a male model to re-shoot her ad campaign.

‘So,’ Sephy made a circling motion with her hand, as if to encompass Daisy’s Weddings R Us setup. ‘Is it only Woody who’s off to jail as soon as the honeymoon’s over, or did my daughter rope you in for a little bigamy too?’

‘Nope. No bigamy here.’

‘Phew,’ she said, blowing out an oversized breath of relief. ‘Not that I’m looking to get married.’

‘And not that I’m asking,’ he countered.

Sephy looked as if she was going to say something, but in a majestic show of self control, she walked around to the squashy armchair and plonked herself down instead.

‘Mummy,’ Daisy announced, ‘I think Luke will come back tomorrow and then you and he can get married like Belle and Woody.’

An interesting sensation spread under Luke’s chest wall as his gaze whipped to Sephy.

Her expression said it all. Comical horror that said in equal measures: ‘What the hell?’ and ‘We so need to remember my daughter has the hearing of a bat.’

Luke wondered if Sephy even realised her hand was rubbing unconsciously over her sternum, as if to chase away her instinctive recoil at the mere mention of a make-believe marriage.

Disappointment ditched its cloak and streaked naked through his head and Luke needed a couple of seconds to work out that Sephy’s reaction should mean nothing to him personally.

He was no longer a young boy facing rejection after rejection and she wasn’t rejecting him for real or otherwise.

The whole world knew Sephy King was marriage-phobic.

He didn’t know why, and probably never would. They weren’t the kind of friends to focus on their pasts and make that about who they were now. They were the kind of friends who bantered, supported and championed each other – but only with the lightest of touches.

All of which was fine by him.

At least it had been, until Sephy had had to go and break the rule she had put in place the first time they had met.

Luke cast his mind back to seeing Sephy for the first time. She had been sitting alone in their local college canteen one summer evening and instantly caught up in the pull of her, he had ended up performing a move so completely uncool, it was only sheer dumb luck no one had whipped out their phone, filmed it and stuck it up on YouTube.