“By then, you will have made amends.”
“Andy,” he deadpanned. “I’m not going to do that to her. She deserves something uncomplicated, and right now, I can’t give her that.”
“So the intervention didn’t work at all.” Andy leaned against the desk glumly. “Men. It’s all right. I’ll write her a strongly worded email.”
Fraser had given up trying to have a normal conversation. He tipped his head back, lids drooping shut.
“Fraser, have you been writing fairy smut?”
“Fairywhat?” Jack asked.
Fraser snapped his head up in bewilderment, finding Andy staring wide-eyed at their laptop screen.
No, not theirs. Harper’s.
“I know you’re into fairies and all, but this is extreme…”
He jumped up quickly, which only set his finger throbbing again. “That isn’t mine. It’s Harper’s!”
“Oh, cool! I’ve been wondering what she’s working on.” Andy began scanning over what must have been her manuscript.
Jack peered over Andy’s shoulder. “Is this what lasses are into nowadays?”
“Yep. That’s why you’re not having any luck recently. You don’t have wings.”
Jack rolled his shoulders back as though mildly insulted.
An uncomfortable feeling writhed in Fraser, and he went to bat them both away, but Andy tore the laptop off the desk and stepped away to keep reading. “This is actually really good. It’s a wee bit self-inserty if you ask me, though. A princess in an enchanted forest? Let’s see if we get an appearance from a handsome lumberjack, eh?”
“Andy, stop it!” he scolded. “That’s personal. She wouldn’t want you reading it. She wouldn’t even letmeread it.”
“That’s because it’s very obviously a love story about the two ofyou!” Andy scrolled further, pulling a face. “Ick, that’s some smutty smut.” But they kept going until Fraser would have risked losing another finger to stop them. “Oh my god.”
“Andy—”
“Okay, what I can glean from this is that she wants to stay here after all. This is one big ‘fuck big city dreams, I want to live in the woods’ story.”
He faltered at that, heart pounding. “Really?”
“Yup. The princess is trying to find her way back to the place where she was born.” Andy narrowed their eyes. “The goal is to live there again with her family after getting taken from them as a kid. But… when she gets there, she isn’t happy, because it means she has to leave the handsome fella who helped her on her way.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” he muttered, though his heart pitter-pattered as though maybe it did.
“It means something. Trust me.” Andy looked up at him. “Either she’s going to realise it first, or you’re going to have to get on your horse and go to save her yourself.”
Jack frowned. “You have a horse?”
Fraser ignored him, pinching the bridge of his nose as it began to sting again.
This wasn’t a fairy tale. He couldn’t let himself believe that it was.
But he wanted to. God, he wanted to.
32
Harper strutted into the pristine lobby with her head held high, but it didn’t stop her knees from wobbling like they were made of jelly. After four weeks immersed in nature, the return to Manchester had taken some getting used to. Had trams always been that loud, or had she just grown too used to gentle birdsong?
One thing she hadn’t missed was the pigeons of Piccadilly Gardens. She tried to wipe the white patch of poo from the shoulder of her blazer as subtly as possible while checking in at reception, then made her way up to Brentworth’s floor in the shiny elevator. Anxiety was cold and heavy as clotted cream in her throat, but not nearly as delicious. Here, nothing had changed. Evenshelooked the same in the pristine mirror, her eyes tired and her hair slicked back into a neat ponytail that would make her head ache soon enough. And if that didn’t, the artificial lighting would. Being here only made her long for her pyjamas, which she’d lived in since coming home.
