He smiled, a gap-toothed beam filled with gratitude that instantly made me feel guilty for being irritated with him. ‘Fanks, Charlotte. Can you open the window too? It’s hot.’
I gave him a thumbs-up and did as he asked, moving the curtains to one side to do so. Then I turned back towards him. ‘Snuggle down now, mister.’
Joshua wriggled his feet and curled up, allowing me to pull his duvet up and over him.
‘Sleep tight, Jo Bug.’
He closed his eyes. ‘I will. I like the candle, Charlotte. You saved me.’
I smiled down at him. ‘I’ll always save you, Jo Bug.’
The dimples in his cheeks, identical to my own, appeared. ‘Don’t kiss that boy. It’s yucky.’
I laughed softly and kissed his brow. ‘We’ll see, Jo Bug,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll see.’
Unbelievably, Matthew Thomas Dwight was still in the garden waiting for me. He was lounging back on the swing seat when I approached, his eyes half-closed and his arm draped across the cushion I’d vacated.
‘I’m sorry.’
He looked up, a lazy grin spreading across his face that made my heart trip. ‘That’s okay. Is everything alright with your brother?’
‘Yeah.’ I paused. ‘He doesn’t think I should kiss you. He thinks it will be yucky.’
The grin on his face changed to something entirely different. ‘And what do you think?’
I sat down next to him so close that our legs were pressing together. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’
I leaned in to find out.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Sometimes I think it was maybe only twenty minutes, other times perhaps two hours. We kissed and curled into each other. He played with my hair with one hand and groped at my breast with the other. But say what you like about Matthew Thomas Dwight, when I gently moved his hand away, he understood he was pushing his luck too far. Such explorations would have to wait until another night.
If things had been different, that late summer evening on the patio while my parents were out at dinner would have been nothing more than painfully sweet and beautifully memorable. Unfortunately for all of us, in the end it was merely memorable – and for all the wrong reasons.
It was the smell that first alerted me, something akin to the heady smoke from a bonfire tickling at my nostrils. From the garden, there appeared to be nothing wrong with the house and I didn’t dwell on it. But Joshua’s bedroom, with its open windows and breeze-dancing curtains stretching over to meet the single naked flame from the candle on his desk, was at the other side of the house.
It was only when the flames began to spread, twisting their way across the second floor and jumping from my mother’s ethically sourced wall hangings to the antique furniture, that the sledgehammer force of what was going on smacked into me. Until that point, I had been too busy kissing a boy to notice that my little brother was dying.
I pushed Matthew Thomas Dwight away with such force that the swing seat clanged against its metal frame. With a spreading, sickening nausea that made my legs turn to jelly, I sprinted for the house.
I made it to the foot of the stairs but the fire had already taken root. You couldn’t even begin to imagine the heat. I ran up three steps and then backed down, an invisible wall of hot air pressing at me in stark warning. Fear for Joshua thudded through me and I propelled myself upwards once more. Some dim thought filtered through my brain that this was too much of a risk; it was too much of a gamble and I’d never make it. But if I didn’t, neither would Joshua.
I doubled back, panicked logic giving purpose to my movements. While Matthew Thomas Dwight lunged for me and tried to haul me back out of the kitchen, I grabbed a tea towel and threw it under the cold tap. I elbowed him in the stomach to stop him then twisted the towel round my head, covering my nose and mouth as if I were a sodden, trembling harem maiden.
‘You can’t. It’s too dangerous,’ Matthew shouted.
I shook my head, unable to speak, and ran back. This time I was determined to do it, even though the fire was raging more fiercely than before, a screaming thing that demanded victims and vengeance before it could be satiated.
I pushed up past the third step this time. I could do this. I had to do this. The noise now was immense. How could I not have noticed it before? The fiery roar was so loud that I barely heard the glass shattering as the windows exploded outwards. The smoke that had grown so thick on the first floor was drifting downwards and I was forced to flail my way up blindly. Even with my eyes tightly shut, tears streamed down my cheeks.
I hauled myself forwards, gritting my teeth against the heat. There was another scream of fire. My eyes flickered open to see it lick out towards me with devastating speed, a myriad of tongues descending onto my head. I fell backwards as other stronger, more capable hands grabbed at me and pulled me back into the soothing, searing agony of the cool night air.
Chapter One
It’s not about the money. Or the cards. It’s not even about the other people you’re facing off against. Poker is all about the thrill. Hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs … whatever. Balancing everything against a tantalising knife-edge and turn of a hand that could go either way makes my pulse rocket. I have to take my thrills wherever I can get them.
I scanned the table. There were only three of us left in and no one was giving an inch. It amuses me that if you ask a typical layperson to imagine what a high-stakes poker game looks like, they’ll
