Since You've Been Gone. Anouska Knight

      I couldn’t hold myself away for long. My hands were already reaching up to slide desperate fingers through the short ruffle of his hair, to grab what I could and take hold of all that dark splendour before pulling his head far enough away to reveal those arresting blue eyes.

      He was so beautiful, a perfect combination of light and dark, in all things. From his character to his features he was the best of both extremes. His pale eyes were staggering against the near-black chestnut of his hair and depending on his mood could hold all the warmth of a Bahamian lagoon or the foreboding of a frozen lake.

      He looked back to me now, those eyes the colour of ice water as they burned voraciously at me. He made my breath catch in my throat as though it wasn’t supposed to be there—not looking at me but into me, to the promise of the gratification I would give him. I knew from those eyes that only dark thoughts were governing Charlie now, and it excited me.

      The first wave of warmth began to build in me, deep and low. It chased all threads of cohesiveness away and I broke eye contact, searching the air around him for any sign of the next moment my pleasure would find me out again. He responded to the shift in my breathlessness as though he could smell the change creeping its way through me.

      Another roll, building and building below … warm between my legs spreading outwards through that part of me and up through my core, towards my breasts, to my neck where Charlie’s hands chased it. It was coming to claim me. The thought of it overpowering me, sweeping me away on a torrent of pleasure was enough to send me spiralling into its grasp. I struggled to keep rhythm with him now. The choreography was gone as we neared the final act that would see us both explode into our sweet trembling crescendo. I wanted to share it with him, for him to see in my eyes what he did to me, but Charlie was in his own fight, his broad shoulders tense around me as he thundered fiercely through me harder and faster and—

      I lost my hold on his hair and felt my body being yanked away from him, away into my ocean of pleasure. I wanted to drown in all that sensation, again and again and again, but not without him. He has to come too! Desperately I raked my fingers along the centre of his back, down the tanned musculature he’d unintentionally honed through years of working in the forest, and finally, I succumbed to all that he’d offered me.

      The last thing, the only thing, I heard besides the frantic labouring of our lungs, was my name on his lips.

       Holly …

      Cold realisation.

      Morning is the cruellest time of the day. Between the hours of five and eight a.m., grief and remembrance live.

      Cruelty’s not confined to those hours, if only that were the case I could just engineer my sleep pattern to skip the daily ordeal, but the truth is any part of the day can be as crushing when you wake on the battle line between dreams and reality, only to find you’re always standing on the wrong side.

      I clamped my eyes shut before they tried to find the clock on the dresser, burying myself back beneath my duvet to savour the last echoes of my dream. Sleep, Holly … get him back. But even thinking pulled him away.

      Charlie had died two days after his twenty-seventh birthday. It had been twenty-two months since I’d last felt his touch, and five minutes since I’d last heard his voice.

      

      CHAPTER 3

      The cake sitting downstairs was not the sort of thing an eighty-year-old lady should be looking at. I needed it out of the house and in the van, before Mrs Hedley, our neighbour, could poke her head out of her front door.

      It took minutes to throw my clothes on and run a brush through my hair before loosely pinning it back in a scruffy bun. I liked scruffy buns, I liked anything that began with scruffy. Easier, quicker, done. Dave watched me as I applied a touch of powder in the mirror of the dresser, disguising the signs under my eyes of my recent sleepless nights. I’d savoured last night, every precious second I’d had with Charlie, but I still looked washed out.

      I slipped on a pair of navy ballerina pumps, shut Dave up in the kitchen, grabbed my things and the cake and crept out over the gravelled path. I shouldn’t really be wearing jeans to deliver to a stately home, but they were indigo and it had gotten dark as I’d changed. If I was lucky I’d just be in and out and my clothing would remain irrelevant. I was also delivering outside of shop hours and at nearly eight o’clock on a Friday night, they were lucky I wasn’t in pyjamas.

      The darkness of the yard made avoiding Mrs Hedley a little easier, and getting the cake safely into the back of the van a little more perilous. Peril was the name of the game when it came to delivering cakes and a van as old as my dad didn’t help that.

      I’d just clicked my belt into place when Mrs Hedley opened her door and waved to me across the yard.

      As soon as I wound down the driver’s window, I instantly regretted it. You could roll the thing down all right, it was getting it to slide back up again that was the trick.

      ‘I’m just popping out, Mrs Hedley, I’ll only be an hour or so. Don’t worry when you see the lights coming back up the track,’ I called. As if. We were secluded here but Mrs Hedley was the scariest thing in these parts.

      She started waving so I started driving, steadily over the dirt track towards the main road, fighting all the way with the jammed handle.

      It had never worked. We’d had Charlie’s truck to use between us, but I needed something for deliveries. I had my eye on a nice clean little utility van, but Charlie said I needed something to help my business stand out from the crowd. Those innocent blue eyes of his had made easy work of convincing me that a Morris Minor was the best van for me. It was a cartoon of a vehicle, in deep burgundy with CAKE! emblazoned on both sides in bold gold lettering. I must have been mental. Cakes needed suspension. This van did not have suspension.

      After five minutes of crawling my way steadily over the stones and divots of the track, I finally made it onto the smooth of the road. It was a straight run to Hawkeswood Manor Hall, about half an hour’s drive from the cottage, less if I didn’t detour around the forest. Which I would. I didn’t use that road any more, not since flowers had appeared tied to the trees.

      Once out on the road, I relaxed, as the ride became a much easier one. Smoother, but definitely not much faster. Charlie had said that not managing more than fifty before the engine started screaming in protest was all part of the van’s charm. Charm had a lot to answer for around these parts. The van was just one more in a long line of Charlie’s daft ideas, like adopting a dog who ate more than we did, and driving into work on his day off when he should have been eating breakfast with his wife.

      A car approached from the other direction, giving me a chance to check the cake when their lights fell across the van. There were no streetlights here as the forest began to thicken out along the roadside.

      All good so far, Hawkeswood was about another fifteen minutes away.

      At the week’s start, Jesse and I had just begun the Monday morning ritual of divvying up jobs for the days ahead when the first customer of the week, a Mrs Ludlow-Burns, had walked into Cake.

      ‘Testicles,’ she’d said tartly from the other side of the counter, ‘on a plate. If you’re up to the job?’ Her cool grey eyes had deviated then, first inspecting the displays around her, then giving all of Jesse’s six-foot-something of male glory a considered once-over. Wide and athletic, he towered over the woman, but despite the pearls and tweed she was by far the more intimidating of the two. Outside, a chauffeur had stood waiting dutifully beside a Bentley, which shone more violently than the sun. ‘And I’d like for them to be large,’ she’d added, holding up two gloved hands to make her point.

      ‘Human?’ I’d asked. It was all I could think to say.

      She’d gone on to produce a pristine shoebox, Dior set in gold against the crisp white of the lid, inside a pair of brand new black