BULL: MC ROMANCE (Forsaken Riders MC Romance Book 6) (130 page)

Chapter Five: Life Gets in the Way

Dixon stood shoulder-to shoulder with Caiden, both of them squeezed under the awning on the crowded pavement outside the pub. The great irony of the smoking ban was that it not only took the smoke out of the pub, but the people as well. Like the rest of Inverness, Dixon and Caiden preferred to stand outside and drink rainwater filled Strongbow than at the bar with three boring sods who found the ban to be "improving." 

Caiden had only one thing on his mind. "Why are you freezin' your arse off in the rain with me and not eating something French with your long-lost love over at that posh hotel?" 

"She's in a different league." Dixon had the pinched look of a man who bit into a lemon and found it not to his liking.

"They're all in a different league. Never stopped you playing."

"No, we were in the same league. Well, equivalent leagues anyway. Now she has her own team, buys the best players, and can watch the game from a centrally heated luxury box behind double-bloody-glazing while eating truffles and caviar hand-carried from Moscow by Russian supermodels. And doesn't care to keep that information to herself. But at the same time..."

"Aye, having a rich and beautiful woman on your arm would be a hardship. If I can help you out, mate..."

"Shut it. All I'm saying is that she's not the person I used to know." Dixon took a drink from his watered-down Strongbow and pulled a face, but did not let it stop him drinking.

“You’re not the same person either. How many people get a second chance at anything, much less a second crack at the one that got away?”

"She's only here for a few weeks"

"You could always try for a job at one of those big, shiny American chain bookstores, if it came to it.” Caiden took a swig of his drink. "God Almighty, that's awful."

“That’s the problem, I don't want to work for an American chain. I’d rather fail here than leave for money.”

“You might make enough money from selling the old place to do all right for a bit.” Caiden pulled a face as he choked down another mouthful of 75% rain and 25% Strongbow. "And you wouldn't be leaving for money, but to be with Calleigh."

“What about you, or Ms.Teasel, or The Ladies? Oh God, who in the world would take on The Ladies?”

“Fucked if I know, mate. None of us's exactly Waterstone’s material, ya’ know?”

***

Calleigh lay back against the down pillows in the middle of the hotel bed, legs stretched in front of her with her right ankle crossed over her left. Wrapped in the soft terry robe provided by the hotel, and the Sky box tuned to Dave for five continuous hours of
Would I Lie to You
and some show called
QI
was her new bliss. She had her cell phone on speaker so she could chat with Beverly while she surreptitiously nibbled on Cadbury Fingers.

"Oh, I don't have any illusions,"
crunch, crunch, crunch,
"it can't go anywhere. Even if I ignore the fact he looked panicked every time I asked something simple like, how the business was going, he was wearing a t-shirt I gave him when we were in college.'"
Crunch, crunch, crunch. "
And I'm not going to have a fling with an old flame. Not worth it."  Another Cadbury Finger was on its way to her mouth when she realized she was eating to quell her jangled nerves. The Cadbury Finger was dropped back in the package; the package chucked into the bin.

"Ugh. Who wants to deal with a Peter Pan? You've seen him, now you know you dodged a bullet. Think of all the things you would have missed out on. And all the things you don't want to give up. In the last two years we've had seven projects that came with 15 or 20% bonuses. Seven. Are you really ready to give it up for a guy in a ten year old t-shirt and a dirty bookstore?"

"There's also a café."

"Would you eat there?"

"God, no." Calleigh wanted nothing more than to get the Cadbury Fingers out of the bin. They were the only thing in there. How bad could it be? "Don't get me wrong, I really do value the relationship we had."

"Fair enough," said Beverly.

"I just don't want this to end badly." She blew out a breath through pursed lips and made her decision. "Right. I'll keep the plans we've already made, but make it clear he's stuck in the friend zone."

"Can you handle that? Seeing this guy again may be a huge mistake. Just leave it. Tell him something came up and you have better things to do in London. It could save you both a lot of heartache."

They chatted a bit longer, finally hanging up as the 8:00 PM episode of
QI
kicked off. Fifteen minutes into the banter of Alan Davies and Stephen Fry the room phone rang. She was half-tempted not to answer, but her paranoia that it could be something important won out. She was too well trained by her corporate bosses, she thought.

“It’s me. Dixon.”

“Hi?” She had not meant it to sound like a question. The urge to stuff her mouth with Cadbury Fingers was almost too much to resist. She could hear laughter and men’s voices in the background as he spoke.

“I need to make a run to a bookshop in Ullapool. Would you like to come along?”

Calleigh hesitated, biting her tongue as she thought about it. A walk around town was one thing, a cross country drive another. There was no escape if she decided she had made a mistake somewhere around Aultguish. 

Dixon started to chew his thumb nail as the pause dragged on.

“Yes,” she said with her eyes squeezed shut and her fingers crossed.

“Brilliant!”

They hung-up after a brief negotiation was entered into and a compromise reached regarding pick-up time. 

Calleigh’s stomach flipped with that stupid-giddy feeling she had not felt since going on her first date with the cute boy from her 10th grade Biology class.

She grabbed the package of Fingers out of the bin and polished off the box.

***

Dixon pulled a fist pump, hip thrust combo as he pocketed his mobile.

“Your look a right bastard when you do that,” said Caiden.

Chapter Six: Letting Love In

They had been in the car ten minutes when Calleigh tossed the friend zone policy out the window. It was replaced by the more vacation friendly policy of
we'll see. We'll see
was a much more flexible policy which included in its no-go parameters her hotel room and...well, mainly her hotel room, that was off limits. But she decided everything else was on the table. What else could be done in the face of a man who remembered how she took her tea ten years after the fact and had a cup waiting for her in the car? Her friend zone policy had not been built to withstand that kind of flanking maneuver.

Or that she finally felt like she had come home after ten years of aimless wandering.

Rolling green hills gave way to breath-taking bare juts of hard stone. The A835 was an easy drive through the rugged Highland country, which allowed them almost two hours to talk before they arrived in Ullapool.

Calleigh told stories of herself and the ridiculous things she had gotten up to over the past ten years. She explained moving between companies as the industry changed and companies came and went. They even talked about their most recent romantic failures.

“
High Fidelity
? The John Cusack movie?”

“Well,” Dixon’s head bobbed side-to-side as he hemmed and hawed, “the Nick Hornby thing, actually. But, yeah.”

Calleigh laughed. “Sorry,” she said, as she tried to control herself. “She left you over a book you didn’t write and because your flat smelled of soup?”

“Well, that was what she said, but it was more than that.”

“Like ten year old t-shirts and a lack of career mobility?”

His eyes narrowed as he stared at the road. “Yeah.”

“Screw her then. Career mobility is overrated.”

He did not know how to take that as it came from the most traditionally successful person he knew, so he just let the thought simmer while the conversation moved on to other things.

***

The seaside fishing village of Ullapool, hemmed in as it is by Loch Broom and the mountains of An Teallach and Beinn Derg, was beautiful. From the moment she saw the whitewashed buildings which lined Shore Street, they called to her with their doors of red, blue and yellow.

By lunch they had fallen into their old patterns, as though ten days rather than ten years. They laughed as they talked through lunch; and held hands as they walked along Shore Street.

The bookstore was a tiny local place on a side street, crammed to the rafters with fresh, new titles, stationary, art supplies, and maps. The door was left open as people and their dogs wandered through, the carpet spotless to spite the constant traffic.

Dixon and she had stuffed themselves into an office carved out of a storage closet to drink bottomless cups of tea and chat with the owner about everything from the Scottish Referendum to National Book Tokens, before there was even a hint of business.

Then the owner shot to standing and said, "Well, come along then. I'll get you what you came for." He led them out of the office, and through the shop to the children's section, where he opened another closet door. This closet was packed with cardboard boxes full of used paperbacks.

After a whispered negotiation and an exchange of PayPal information, the owner walked away with a huge grin on his face.

Dixon pulled the topmost box out the closet. "Have a few new things for the shop."

"What did you buy?" asked Calleigh as she tried to get a peek into the box.

"Everything in the closet," he said with a grin. "Let me load the car, then we’ll start back to Inverness."

Calleigh looked from Dixon and to the four foot high stack of boxes, "Right." She grabbed a box and moved it a couple of inches, planted her feet and heaved again. This time the box moved not a inch, so she turned around and sat down on the box. "I'll be right here."

***

As they cruised down the A835 back toward Inverness, Dixon explained that most of his stock was purchased from small bookshops. It was an inexpensive source of new stock for him, while he could do his part to help other local shops stay profitable by picking up their deadwood. "Everyone wins."

She had not given him enough credit. It was a slap in the face realization. She had taken one look around his shop, looked at him, and made a judgment based on her own expectations for him. She had let that prevent her from seeing the man who sat in the driver's seat of the world's most beaten Scotia. He had taken nothing more than discarded books, and found a way to build something worthwhile for a whole network of people. He was helping support all these other like-minded people, from the eclectic troupe who kept the shop and cafe running, to the many small bookshops across northern Scotland that he apparently frequented.

If I had left, I would have missed the person he has become because it wasn't who I thought he should be.

***

"I need to do something about this car." The wind whistling through the back windows had not bothered him last week, but with Calleigh present, Dixon felt he needed to acknowledge the problem, even if he really had no intention of doing anything about it.

Calleigh was taking photographs of the passing scenery through the passenger side window and shrugged. "Buy a new one."

"Just like that?" His tone mocked her.

She dropped her cell phone back into her purse and then focused on Dixon. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I say things like that. I don't even think about it anymore."

"There is nothing to apologize for. Just took me by surprise, is all." There was concern in his eyes as his gaze flicked from the road to Calleigh and back again in rapid succession. "Are you happy?"

"Generally. I think it is more a level of general life dissatisfaction than unhappiness, you know? They are different things."

He really did not know what to do with that. One moment she seemed to have everything: success, money, and the confidence to flaunt it; and then, she would say things which made it sound as if she did not want any of it. It was why he leaned over and kissed her when he pulled the car up in front of her hotel; an act of comfort, to let her know someone loved her.

And she had kissed him back. She might have kissed him a few times.

***

Calleigh waved as he pulled away from the curb, a giant, love-struck smile on her face. By the time she reached her room, she wanted to scream to herself,
What are you doing? Are you really going to do this again?
Two days with Dixon and she was right back where she had been ten years ago, in love with a man she felt she could never be with.

In full mope mode as she unlocked the door and pushed her way in, she dropped her purse on the floor and slammed the door behind her. When she flicked on the light, she found the clothes she had tossed aside upon her arrival cleaned, folded, and sitting on the end of the freshly made bed. A small, white square of hotel stationary sat on top of her blouse:

“With compliments of the cleaning staff.”

She had forgotten all about the clothes. As she stared at the note, her eyes welled up. So much in her life had become disposable. Need a new car? Buy one. Clothes too dirty to deal with? Throw them away. The only man you ever loved lives in Scotland? Leave him. Again.

She lay down on the bed and cried herself to sleep.

***

Dixon kicked the bottom of the swollen door to his flat until it gave way and let him pass. There was no point in trying to close it again, so it stood open. He was only a few steps into the flat when he stopped and looked around.

It was not a flat, really. More of a bedsit with a kitchen and en suite, an extended office where he could sleep and eat if The Ladies had not fed him already. Stacks of books, a mangled sofa, an unmade bed, and that was it. For the first time he saw his flat as an outsider. It was more than the lack of physical space; every corner, every drawer, every cabinet was filled with him. It was a place which had no room for another person, or people.

And it smelled of soup.

***

Calleigh endured one day of half-hearted tourist activities before she accepted she was not someone who enjoyed traveling alone. She had still not replied to the facebook message from Muriel Corrie. On a whim, she thought,
Why not?,
and decided to get in touch with her.

Muriel, it turned out, had done quite well for herself. "I teach bored housewives the fine art of scrapbooking for a not-insubstantial portion of their husband's income. I love it. And I have all day to see what we can get up to."

Unsure how to feel about Muriel’s excitement, or that Dixon had already briefed Muriel on their chance encounter and subsequent cross-county tour, Calleigh hung up the phone and finished getting dressed. Many of the clothes she had brought with her from Houston, the fawn slacks, the pencil skirts, and the kitten heel knee-high boots, seemed ridiculous and impractical. She put on the jeans the cleaning staff had brought back to her, along with a sweater and a pair of sneakers still wedged in the bottom of her suitcase.

Before she left the room, she wrote a thank you note to the staff and laid it on the dresser.

***

Muriel was a vivacious woman who wore a riot of colors from her neon wrist warmers and blue and red scarf, to a shamrock green cashmere sweater. After she had wrapped Calleigh in a hug, greeting Calleigh as if she were a long lost sister, she said, “People only seem to accept the words ‘successful’ and ‘artist’ if I dress like I am color blind.”

Calleigh could not fathom why she had not liked Muriel before.

***

Muriel drove like a maniac in Vauxhall. They tore down twisting, one-lane roads filled with blind corners only to screech to a stops at the next corner. Eventually, and mercifully, they arrived at Dunrobin Castle alive. They took a long walk through the immaculate garden, toured the house, watched the falconry show twice, and then Muriel raced them back into Golspie to eat. After a quick pub lunch wherein Muriel managed to get the contact information for every lady in the room before their sandwiches hit the table, they were off again.

They trekked across the Dornoch Firth, across Comarty Firth, through Inverness, past Culloden, to Cawdor Castle. They walked across the drawbridge over the mote to tour the castle and keep, then viewed the private art collection, toured the garden, and then wandered the grounds.

They were taking tea in the small café when Calleigh blurted out, “What do I do?”

“I’m assumin’ you are talkin’ about Dixon,” said Muriel.

Calleigh put down her tea cup and laid it all out: the job, her life, Dixon, everything.

“You’re making this way too hard. Are you going to fight for what you say you don’t want? Or for what you do want? It’s that simple,” said Muriel.

Wow, when she put it like that, it was something to think about.

***

Calleigh was relaxed. Her phone was on the charger after another marathon conversation with Dixon, she was watching
Top Gear
on the
tele
, as they called it, and she was wearing her favorite pajamas.

I could stay.
The thought had come from nowhere. 
What would I do? How would we live? Would there even be a ‘we?’ Dixon hasn’t said anything about wanting me to stay.
She took a deep breath.
Do I want to fight for what I have or for what I want?

She sat on the floor next to her tethered phone and began searching the internet. Three hours later she knew: A.) “Just deciding to stay” was not appreciated by the UK government and would get her flung out after six months; B.) Her job, at least as she knew it, did not exist here; and C.) Maintaining her lifestyle, to some degree, was more important to her than she first thought. 
But is it the most important?

She put down the phone and crawled into the bed, where she lay staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

***

Hiking in Cairngorms National Park had seemed like a good idea at the time, but years behind a desk, and a pile of books, had made them both less than ideal candidates for a trek to the top of Ben Macdui. Both Calleigh and Dixon had played off their worries as they drove toward the peak, nervously laughing as they climbed out of the car to start the journey.

Each time Dixon thought of quitting and going to find a pub, Calleigh was right behind him, determination etched into her every feature. She might have changed in some ways, but she was the same person, the same girl he had fallen in love with a decade before.
I can sell the shop. I am ready to get on that plane, if she asks me to.