by Avery Flynn
“On that cheery little thought,” she mumbled to herself and took the left toward the stone stables that had been converted decades ago into a residence that in reality was more for storage than anything.
Of course, that meant that it probably hadn’t been cleaned since before she’d been born. Good thing she was armed with allergy tablets, cleaning supplies, and a flask of tea—in other words, ready for battle. As soon as she turned the corner, though, and spotted the windows flung open with music blaring out of them, she stopped in her tracks. Who in the bloody hell…?
“Hello?” she yelled, going inside, repeating herself a few times as she walked through the sparkling clean sitting room.
Nick walked out into the room, wearing only loose basketball shorts and a tool belt slung low on his waist. He had small towels tied together like slippers on his feet, a duster in one hand, and a canister hoover strapped to his back like a knapsack. The tool belt was stocked with different bottles, towels and wipes hanging from the slots where the hammers and stuff should go. It was almost enough to distract her from his drool-worthy abs. Almost.
“Whoa,” he said, shooting her a grin that woke up every butterfly in her stomach. “I didn’t expect you for another few hours.”
“What’s on your feet?” Brilliant query, Brooke, you git.
“Duster slippers.” He lifted a leg so she could see the dirt-covered bottoms. “So easy to mock up. Totally effective. Killer profit maker. This puppy was one of my first inventions.”
“But why are you…?” She circled her hand in his direction, encompassing his entire look because putting it into words wasn’t something her brain was ready for.
He shrugged, seemingly totally unbothered by getting caught looking like a demented cleaner. “I ditched Gramps and got bored.”
Her stomach tightened. That couldn’t be good. The blowup between the two of them had to have been of epic proportions for Nick to go to ground. “You’re hiding from the earl?”
“No.” He crossed his arms across his substantial chest. “I don’t hide. I avoid when the confrontation isn’t worth the headache.” The statement came out like she’d just accused him of licking the bottom of his shoe. “He’s got some muckity mucks over at the house, and I don’t want to deal with them, so I ghosted.”
Since the earl’s son died, visitors to Dallinger Park weren’t plentiful. Well, except for a rather unpleasant few. “What did the visitors look like?”
“From what I saw as I hustled it out of there, one guy was tall, bald, and paunchy and the other one looked the same but with a full head of hair and had either his daughter or third trophy wife with him.”
Just brilliant.
“Daughter.” Portia Haverstam was as mean as she was beautiful and made Brooke’s life a misery whenever she visited for the afternoon with her father, Lord Kanter. There was no way she was going back to the big house unless forced. “Can you make a pair of those cleaning slippers for me?”
Nick’s grin did things to her. “Why, Lady Lemons, are you hiding out? What if Gramps needs his secretary?”
“I don’t hide.” Two could play the denial game. She held out her hand, palm up. “I’m working.”
“Whatever you say, sweetheart.” One brown eyebrow went up, but he handed her the glass cleaner and a cloth. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
Three hours later, the sun had dipped below the horizon, the former stables were sparkling, and Nick Vane had disappeared. She couldn’t complain, though. The man had worked his rather nice arse off. Brooke blew a drooping strand of hair out of her face and tried to ignore her growling stomach. If she gave it another hour, she’d miss the horrid Portia Haverstam, her irritable father, and their annoying crony, Andrew Warren. Her gut rumbled again.
“Put a cork in it, belly,” she muttered to herself.
“So I’m guessing my timing is impeccable?” Nick asked as he stood in the doorway, holding a heavy tray loaded down with fish and chips, a box of Cadbury Roses, and a few cans of beer.
Her stomach pledged at that moment to marry him. Settle, belly. “You’re a godsend.”
Nick strutted in, putting the tray down on the freshly hoovered carpet in front of the dark fireplace. “We’ve worked. Time to feast.”
And they did. She teased him about the amount of ketchup he dipped his chips in. Of course, he just responded that fries were ketchup delivery devices and that vinegar she was sprinkling on hers was a travesty. The teasing continued through the meal right up until the dessert, when he unwrapped a blue-wrapped caramel Cadbury Rose, popped it into his mouth, and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head with bliss.
“What in the hell do you do with chocolate over here to make it taste like that?” he asked, reaching for another.
“Why, Mr. Vane,” she said with a laugh, grabbing a piece of her absolute favorite Golden Barrel Rose, marked by the gold wrapper, for herself. “Have you finally found something about England that you like?”
He stopped unwrapping a Hazel Whirl Rose with its purple-and-orange-tipped wrapper and gave her a look that should have melted the chocolate in her hand on the spot. “Oh, I found something I liked about this island the minute I stepped off the plane.”
Hello to the flock of racing pigeons that had just taken flight in her chest. Saving herself from trying to answer that, she reminded herself of all the reasons shagging him was wrong—you know, he’s her boss’s heir, he’s only grudgingly going to be here six months out of the year, nothing could ever come of them being together (except orgasms, her mutinous body reminded her by turning her nipples to hard pebbles)—Brooke shoved the barrel-shaped chocolate filled with caramel in her mouth and barely tasted a thing.
“You’ve never answered my question about why you’re still here in Bowhaven,” he said.
Okay, that was not what she expected to come next. It was like he had a special superpower when it came to putting people at a distance. “I have told you. I love this place.”
“Why?” He ate the hazelnut chocolate he’d unwrapped.
“Because it was the one place I knew where I’d be safe when everything went to shit on the front page of the tabloids.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m gonna need more information than that.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She’d never had to actually tell the story before. Thanks to the reporters, everyone already knew—or thought they did. Trying to find the words to sum up the whole distasteful mess was harder than she’d expected.
Nick started to pick up their dishes and put them back on the tray, his movements stiff. “It’s okay, you can just tell me to mind my own business.”
Shit. That was not what this was about. “I’ve never told anyone before. I never had to.”
He gave her that disarming, charming smile of his. “You don’t have to.”
She turned away and exhaled a deep breath. By the time she’d counted to ten, she’d settled her features enough to give him the lowdown. “I met Reggie at a pub in Manchester. He came in with a bunch of his mates and I tripped and spilled my entire pint on him. Instead of getting mad, he made a joke and bought me a pint to make up for, as he’d said, being in my way.”
God. He’d been so fun and relaxed. The stories he’d told had made her laugh and the kind of life he led as a footballer made her experiences up until then seem so dull.
“Long story short, we started dating. Oh, I’d heard the rumors about him and the fact that he couldn’t keep his cock in his trousers, but he’d convinced me that he was a changed man—that he’d changed because of me.”
What an utter fool she’d been.
“Everything was fine—at least as far as I knew—right up until the prime minister came to a match. That’s when Reggie met the prime minister’s daughter. After that, she started going to matches on her own and, unbeknownst to me, meet
ing up with him in the locker room for a quickie. When I showed up after a practice, the team trainer sent me back into the locker room. That’s when I found them.”
Her memory from that moment was only in flashes. Reggie down on his knees in front of the other woman’s spread legs. The look of ecstasy on her face. How wet Reggie’s mouth had been when he’d turned and seen her. The blinding flashes from the cameras.
“I must have screamed or yelled or something because the next thing I knew, the reporters who’d been at the practice were there in the locker room. It was just the kind of embarrassing moment involving minor celebrities that the tabloids love to cover. The fact that it involved a regular girl from a small village—a total naive country girl—just made for more fodder. They camped out on the street in front of my flat. It was horrible. I couldn’t take it and I came back to Bowhaven.”
She’d made the drive home on autopilot, as if she’d been called back to the one place that still felt safe from mockery and humiliation.
“And when the reporters came here on Reggie’s tail when he’d shown up supposedly to win me back—more likely it was to fix some of the bad PR—the villagers formed a kind of blockade. No one talked to Reggie or the reporters. No one gave interviews, shared old photos, or gave away my location. They were there for me in my worst moment. Now that they’re having a bad moment, I want to do what I can to repay them.”
Brooke had always expected that telling that story for the first time would be like reliving every humiliating second of the whole thing all over again. It wasn’t. Sure, it wasn’t painless, but sharing it with Nick was…nice. Kind of like letting go of a weight she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying around. She was lost in the strangeness of the moment when he reached out to her and intertwined his fingers with hers.
“I’ve never wanted to punch out a total stranger so much in my life,” Nick said, his eyes dead serious.
“Don’t worry,” she said with a wry chuckle. “Riley landed several good shots.”
He raised his beer can in salute. “I owe that man a beer or twelve.”
Something about his concern as they sat nearly hip to hip on the rug gave her a warm, secure feeling, the kind that reassured one after they heard a noise in the dark. It felt good. Too good. The wrong kind of good. It ticked her off, made her prickly. This man of all people, this bloody American heir to an earldom shouldn’t be the one to make her have that reaction.
“Why should you care?” she asked, her posture stiff enough to make her lower back ache as she sat on the rug and stared into the cold, dark hearth. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“What can I say,” he replied, his words carefully neutral. “I’ve always been a sucker for the underdog.”
“How very Captain America of you,” she said, stuffing another untasted chocolate into her mouth. “So you know my big secret; it’s only fair for you to tell me one of yours—and since I already know all about your parentage, you can’t make growing up an American earl-in-waiting as it.”
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the reality of what she’d just said, the casual cruelty of it, slapped her across the cheek. He’d been abandoned by his father and his mother had died when he was still a child. Shame burned her gut. “Nick, I’m so sorr—”
“Don’t worry about it.” He crushed his empty beer can and laid the mangled aluminum on the tray with the rest of their dinner dishes.
“No, really.” She reached out and curled her fingers around his arm, the familiar shiver of awareness cutting right through everything else. “I shouldn’t have—”
Something dark and thrilling flashed in his eyes that stole the words out of her mouth and made her pulse thunder in her ears. The next thing she knew, one of his strong hands was cupping the back of her head and he was pulling her in for a kiss.
“No more sorrys,” he said, his lips so close to hers. “You don’t want my sad story.”
She had half a second of “oh shit” before his lips touched hers and she forgot everything else in the world. God. This man was an artist with his mouth. She felt the kiss all the way from her lips down to her toes and every place in between. Her thighs clenched when his tongue curled around hers, teasing and tempting her into doing every bad thing she could think of—and she had a great imagination. Then, just as the desperation for more had begun to build, he pulled away.
“Sorry,” he said, rolling up from sitting to standing in one fluid motion. “I shouldn’t have done that. I lost myself for a minute. It won’t happen again.”
Her mushy brain couldn’t process the words over the take-me-now demand her body was putting out. So she sat in silence and watched as he grabbed the tray covered in empty dishes and strode to the door, no doubt to deliver it to the kitchen in the big house. She’d been the one to say they shouldn’t have a repeat performance; that’s why he’d backed off. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d lost her ever-loving mind with that decision.
…
True to his word, Mace arrived the next day in the first rental car in a caravan of small buses and vans that drove down the high street and caught the attention of every villager in town. Nick was fixing the wonky fryer at the chip shop when the first strains of grinding gears filtered in through the open window.
“Do they not have manual transmissions in America?” Paul, the chip shop owner, asked as he peeked out the window at the parade of cars making their way in jerks and fits up the street.
Nick shook his head at the sight. “You mean stick shifts? Yeah, we have them, but not very many.” Another groaning protest from one of the cars’ gears sounded and he turned back toward the fryer. “Okay, so I’ve upgraded you so you’re on an automatic timer that will lower the basket at the touch of this button and lift the basket out when the time is right so you can take orders and still check and make sure everything’s done to your liking.”
Paul gave the contraption now attached to his prize fryer an assessing look. “So no more having to fish them out from the big vat of fat? Or dealing with the splash back when I drop them in there because all I have to do is hit the button?”
Nick nodded. “You got it.”
The shop owner rubbed the tips of his fingers, shiny from the aftereffects of minor grease burns and gave Nick a rare Yorkshire appreciative grin. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“How about you tell me more about your dog’s habits.”
As if the corgi knew he was the center of a discussion, the little beast began to prance around in the cordoned-off section of the kitchen closest to the door leading to the fenced yard and farthest away from the fryer. Still trying to work out the kinks in the voice-calming doggie collar, he’d gotten a few names from Brooke of villagers with dogs who hated to be away from their owners. She’d recommended Paul, who had a fryer problem that had been the perfect distraction to stop Nick from thinking so much about Brooke since that kiss. He’d been planning to wait, to get her to admit that scratching the itch that had them both so out of sorts wasn’t just a good idea, it was the best idea. However, something about the quiet intimacy of that dinner in front of the cold fireplace, the fact she’d trusted him enough to tell him the story about that asshole Reggie, and her sweet falling all over herself after she thought she’d poked some mythical wound in his psyche had gotten to him. And he’d repaid her by kissing her—giving in to the want gnawing at him that hadn’t gone away. So here he was, a man in a chip shop trying to put a woman out of his mind by diving into any work he could find.
“Webster’s a good boy,” Paul said, dragging Nick’s attention back to the distraction at hand. “But he gnaws on the table leg a bit while we’re gone.”
The dog, obviously thrilled to be discussed, was doing that waggle thing only corgis could do that made their butts vibrate.
“That’s why you take him to work?” Nick asked, trying not to
laugh at the dog’s excited antics.
“Yep.” Paul nodded. “He’s right as rain whilst faffing about in the little garden back there as long as he can see me through the glass in the door and hear my voice.”
“Have you ever left voice recordings for him when you leave?” There had to be something in that experiment that he was missing; he just couldn’t put his finger on it.
Paul looked at him like he’d just swallowed a handful of dirt. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Would you try it out for me?” Okay, it was a weird request, but he needed to figure this puzzle out. He grabbed the ancient tape player/recorder and cassette he found in the village secondhand shop from the table next to the fryer. “Just for a few days and let me know what happens.”
“What am I supposed to say to him?”
Nick shrugged. “Whatever you want. It’s just your voice that matters. I’ll come back by in a few days to find out how it went.”
“I’ll give it a go,” Paul said, taking the player-recorder as Webster did the wiggle-waggle thing in front of the door leading to the yard.
Nick left Paul tossing a ball in the yard with Webster behind the chip shop and made his way toward the Fox. He’d barely had to get the door open to confirm that he’d find Mace inside. The place was packed with locals and strangers who had to be movie folks packed in together like sticks of gum in a new pack. They weren’t kidding about Americans being loud. The volume in the pub had gone up significantly, but no one seemed to mind. Even the old dudes who camped out at the table by the bar like the grumpy guys in the balcony in the Muppet movies were smiling. The possibility of financial security tended to have that effect on a person. He could speak from personal experience. The difference in the set of his mama’s shoulders when she walked in the house on payday as opposed to a week later was always noticeable.