Hearts On Ice

Hearts On Ice Part 21

It was a full two weeks before Nate stopped waking up with a dream about Hettie still fresh in his mind.

After leaving her house, his emotions had oscillated from frustration to disappointment and back again like a perpetually swinging pendulum and he hadn't been able to get his head straight, no matter what he told himself.

She'd done such an about-face—one minute she couldn't wait to get him out of her sight and the next she was throwing herself at him as if he was the last egg in the basket. He didn't know what to think. Had it been a purely mercenary move to avoid trouble, or had she genuinely been pleased to see him? He had no idea, and it frustrated the hell out of him.

In fact frustration had been the name of the game since he'd last seen her; his body still primed for another bout of mind-blowing sex. The intensity of being with Hettie had him all worked up. He'd loved her directness and transparency. She was straight and honest, but at the same time a total mystery. An itch he longed to scratch.

He'd taken to growling obscenities at himself whenever his thoughts wandered her way. A few of his colleagues had noticed and given him some gyp about it. He passed it off as irritation with his ex-girlfriend to avoid the unwanted attention and they seemed to buy that, but he was aware he needed to pull himself together if he didn't want to land himself with an even more embarrassing nickname.

He tried focusing instead on following up on his transfer and making the best of the time he had left at this station.

He liked the officers he worked with here, they were a cheerful bunch on the whole, even if their response times to incidents were a little underwhelming, but every one of them worked their arses off to keep the community happy and working as it should. He liked that. He'd come across too many officers who rode through their careers as if everything were someone else's problem, relying on others to clear up their messes. Anyone like that would stick out here like a drunk at a tea party.

Today was his day off, so he pulled out his backpack to check the parachute, intent on getting another outing in while the snow was still on the ground. As he opened the rucksack it gave out a puff of air laced with the pure scent of Hettie's home and his stomach did a slow dive. His senses pummelled him with such a huge wave of nostalgia he had to sit down to deal with it, his hands shaking and tense in his lap.

There was something about that smell that did for him. It was the scent of warmth and comfort and belonging. It was all the things she chose to fill her home with: fresh, delicious food, her subtle, flowery perfumes and powdery lotions, and her uniquely sweet scent that had lingered on his lips after he'd kissed and tasted her.

He sat there, inhaling deeply from the bag like a total lunatic, until the scent had dissipated in the cold austerity of his flat.

*

Hettie dropped her shopping bags onto the pavement by her feet to give her poor fingers a chance to recover. They throbbed and tingled as the blood flowed back into them.

She always managed to buy too much food, forgetting she still had to carry it back to her car. That was the price you paid for buying locally and refusing to use the supermarkets with their trolleys and easy parking.

Hawes had a decent selection of food shops—a bakery, a greengrocer and a small family-run grocery store—but they were under constant pressure from the giants that swarmed around the towns nearby like huge greedy locusts, intent on hoovering out the hard-earned coffers of the locals. They would kill the local economy eventually, and then where would they all be? Trapped in a world of corporate greed.