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And that kiss! Liam hadn’t dared to think he would ever be allowed to kiss Sophie, but he had, and it had been perfect. He grimaced at the memory of her freaking out and how appallingly he’d handled it. Why did he have to go and offer to take her straight home? If they’d talked, perhaps he could have worked out what was wrong and then made her feel better about it. Perhaps she would have stayed. He hated himself.
What was he thinking? The afternoon had gone exactly as he’d imagined it would – it had been perfect. He had no idea where Sophie’s wave of panic had come from when they were kissing. One minute it seemed like she couldn’t get enough of him; she was so close he was inhaling the smell of her shampoo and feeling the curve of her back. And then … the look on her face was etched in his mind – an abject look of terror or panic. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong. All he’d wanted to do was to take her in his arms and make it all OK, but for some reason, he was the problem.
He couldn’t wipe the picture of Sophie’s dejected expression from his mind. She had looked so small and vulnerable. He wanted to protect her from whatever it was she feared. Liam reran the scene over and over in his head. How could he have handled it better? He hated to think of her up there in her flat, alone and upset. If only he’d said or done the right thing in the moment. If only he’d known what the right thing to say or do was.
The biggest surprise was that Emily hadn’t crossed his mind at all.
Chapter Twenty-One
Two weeks until Christmas
Sophie drifted through Monday in a daze and it was home time for the children before she knew it. She asked her teaching assistant to watch her class during collection to avoid seeing Liam. She was in limbo, both painfully embarrassed at what had happened but desperate to see him, to speak to him and try to work through whatever had stopped her when they kissed. Hiding in the staffroom, she made herself a hot chocolate – it had been that sort of day – and ran back to her classroom to hole herself up and do some planning, undisturbed.
After working through the literacy prep for the coming week and tidying up the Christmas poetry display, she thought she’d got away with it too, but just as Sophie was beginning to relax, Kate came around the door.
With only a couple of weeks to go before she popped, Kate was a giant. A ten-year-old child’s seat just wasn’t going to cut it, so Sophie watched as she risked flopping down onto a beanbag in the book corner. She didn’t crack a smile despite how ridiculous Kate looked.
‘So, I’m guessing your radio silence means it didn’t quite go as planned?’ Kate said, breathless from her seating ordeal.
‘Not quite, no.’ Sophie stapled things aggressively to the wall without turning to look at her friend.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Silence.
‘No, not really.’ Sophie cut a length of border paper from the roll, then climbed up the stepladder and attached it along the top of the display with more angry staples – an appropriate fiery red. She’d been aiming for festive.
‘Well, I do,’ Kate said. ‘What happened? Or didn’t happen?’ There was a mischievous tone in her voice.
Sophie could see that Kate was trying to lighten the mood and calm her down.
It worked. Sophie sighed, her shoulders sagging. She turned and joined Kate in the reading corner, slumping down into the other beanbag. She let out a deep breath and stuck out her bottom lip like a child.
‘Oh God. You’ve got it bad,’ said Kate. She looked concerned and reached across to squeeze Sophie’s knee. ‘What happened?’
‘It started well,’ Sophie said. ‘He picked me up. We rehearsed all afternoon, and the songs were sounding great. In fact, I’d say I almost felt confident about the concert.’
‘That’s a big deal coming from you,’ Kate said seriously. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’
‘We put up his Christmas tree – the first time he’s done it since his wife died.’ Sophie looked away from Kate’s face, her eyebrows rising higher and higher on her forehead. ‘And then he kissed me.’ Sophie dealt the final blow and waited for Kate’s reaction.
Kate’s mouth opened, then closed. Then opened again. With a sharp glare from Sophie, she shut it and mimed locking it with a key, which she threw out of an imaginary window.
Sophie continued. ‘And then I stopped kissing him and ran away.’ Kate tutted involuntarily and put a hand over her mouth. ‘Sorry.’
‘I panicked,’ Sophie said. ‘And then he said he should take me home. Which he did.’ She looked down at her hands and picked the quick of one of her nails.
‘Oh,’ Kate said, looking down too.
It was an anti-climax Sophie hadn’t wanted to share, and Kate probably hadn’t wanted to hear.
‘What happened? Why did you freak out?’
Sophie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I spent all afternoon wanting to kiss him and when we did, I just panicked. I kept thinking back to my ex-boyfriend, back to what happened.’
‘Because you still love him?’ Kate asked, sounding uncertain.
Sophie hadn’t brought up her previous boyfriend with Kate. Her one serious relationship had ended before they met, and she’d left it to her past. The reason she’d moved to Cranswell was to escape what had happened.
