“For what?”
“For this,” he said, and laughed.
Chapter 14
Always barefoot, Tilly moved with a grace James found calming and sexual at the same time. Had she trained as a classical dancer? Back ramrod straight, knees bent, she balanced on the balls of her feet as she retrieved an oven mitt from the floor.
He could watch her for hours.
Tilly straightened up and smiled over her shoulder. James smiled back, the silence between them a balm for his exhausted mind, which, even as it accepted the completion of the trip without catastrophe, spat out darts of anxiety about the plane ride home.
The plane’s going to crash; you’re going to die.
James tried to shake the thoughts loose, but they kept recycling. Over and over. The never-ending repetition of OCD. And he was so friggin’ tired.
At least Tilly wasn’t a chatterer. He couldn’t deal with other people’s voices right now. Women who yakked nonstop grated on his patience, not that he had much to begin with, but every word Tilly spoke mattered. She was an extraordinary woman, but God Almighty—she slapped the salmon on the broiler pan, no olive oil, no chives—she couldn’t cook.
James picked up the magazines scattered across the kitchen table and sorted them into a pile. A pile that created order, that gave his hands purpose and stopped him from interfering. Please, God, she wasn’t going to boil the carrots into baby food, was she? He turned over a Mini Boden catalog, so much smaller than the other catalogs, and placed it, front cover up, on top of the pile. He nudged it to the right, back a bit, no, a little more to the right. Perfect.
Muttering something about the heat, Tilly stripped off her denim shirt and tossed it toward the nearest chair. James told himself not to stare, but the red bra strap peeking out from under the skimpy tank top was a lure no man could possibly resist. And yet why did her right shoulder blade stick out more than the left one?
Instinctively, he stepped toward her and traced her S-shaped spine.
Tilly turned, her eyes, the color of frosted sea glass, watching for his next move. “No one’s ever noticed my scoliosis before,” she said quietly. “How did you know?”
“Your right shoulder blade juts out.” His eyes moved down. “And your waist’s lopsided.” How had he not noticed that her torso was asymmetrical? Asymmetrical! The daydream from the plane, in which he’d imagined making love to this perfectly imperfect woman, warped into a waking nightmare. He grabbed at his hair and began twisting.
“Unbelievable,” Tilly said. “I think of my curved spine as a private deformity.”
“You didn’t have surgery as a kid?” His voice sounded flat and strangely normal. That was something, huh, to feel one way and act another. The legacy of a lifetime of practice. He yanked his hand from his hair and buried it in his pocket. Just-a-guy gesture. A regular, non-fucked-up guy gesture.
Tilly gave a sad smile. “Surgery wasn’t an option. My mother freaked at the idea of me going under the knife, so I wore a spinal brace until I turned eighteen. Big mistake now I’m a manual laborer.”
Of course, the spinal brace explained the posture. “Was it painful?”
“Mostly just annoying.” She arched her back. “Although in the summer the leather corset rubbed my hips raw.”
This time the urge to touch her was stronger and undeniably carnal. James retreated to behind the table and clenched and unclenched his fists.
The plane’s going to crash; you’re going die. You deserve to die. You’re a letch.
“I hated the attention the brace brought.” Tilly stretched. “It’s hard to be anonymous when you bend like a robot, but Sebastian protected me well. That’s how we met—the local oiks were teasing me and Sebastian leaped in. He has this thing about social injustice. Then he and Rowena built a pyre on my eighteenth birthday, doused the brace with gasoline and pouff.” She threw up her hands. “Burn, baby, burn. The best present a girl could wish for.”
And it came from Sebastian. Fuck, how could he, James, compete with the guy who had loved her at her most vulnerable? He didn’t want to act like a jerk when he met this Sebastian tomorrow, but even his name made James want to scratch off his own skin. And Tilly used it constantly. What kind of a name was Sebastian anyway? It sounded like a character from a Gothic novel.
“I guess we were both damaged teenagers,” he said.
“I guess so.”
“Here.” He reached for her gin and tonic. “Go sit with your mother. I’m taking over the cooking as payment for the—” he gulped “—the gardening lessons.”
Tilly hesitated and then took the glass. “I would argue with you, but there’s little point, given that I loathe cooking. You sure about this?”
“I can cook—you can’t.” Shit. Was that too honest?
“Amen, brother.” She toasted him and left the kitchen.
Don’t look at her waist, James, don’t look at her waist. But he did anyway.
James grabbed the edge of the table. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted—to meet his fear head-on? But now the lines were fuzzy, blurred by desire and jealousy. And Tilly’s asymmetrical waist. Images attacked him. First, he saw Tilly ripping off her tank top to reveal a red satin bra, while a faceless man called Sebastian reached for her breasts. Then he saw her lopsided back.
James pushed away from the table and smacked his hands on either side of his skull. He needed to tear through the open back door, into the golden light that reminded him of the Mediterranean evenings from the only vacation he’d ever taken—twenty years ago. He had started the trip with a lover, but after she grew tired of his excuses for avoiding the beach, he had finished it alone.
He could leave now and Tilly would never know the whole ugly truth about him. But he was falling, fast and hard, and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop.
* * *
“Are you bonkers?” Rowena yelled over Monty. “You want to unleash a stranger who doesn’t know a pair of secateurs from a chain saw on Mother’s walled garden?”
“Pretty much,” Tilly yelled back.
“Quiet.” Rowena slapped her hands on her knees and glared at Monty. “Or I’ll send you to the knacker’s yard.”
Monty stopped barking and cowered behind Tilly.
“If there’s one thing that pisses me off,” Rowena said, “it’s a badly trained dog.” She patted Tiddly on the head, then Winks—or was it Winks, then Tiddly? They had been sitting like onyx statues for the past five minutes, ignoring Monty as he’d ricocheted from chipped terra-cotta urn to chipped terra-cotta urn, spraying pee and barking. “Your mother spoils that animal. I keep telling her, ‘Give me two weeks, Mrs. H, and I can lick him into shape.’”
Two weeks. Tilly tottered as she craned to look up into the clear, pale sky—a one-dimensional mural hanging so low it could, surely, fall and crush her. At Creeping Cedars she could see only snatches of the sky through the trees, but it felt vast and distant, like an ancient wonder. The sky over Bramwell Hall was, to quote her mother’s new favorite adjective, nice, an uncharacteristically bland word for her mother to lean on. After all, her mother had taught Tilly words had power. But gazing up at the sky, Tilly understood. Nice was a word you used without investment, a word that allowed you to hurry through, a word like fine. Tilly had used fine to deflect every postfuneral how-are-you-doing question. After all, most people didn’t want to be bogged down in truth. They wanted to express sympathy and move on. Although she wasn�
�t sure that applied to James. His questions were heat-seeking missiles, targeted to strike and explode.
Her mother, however, was sticking with nice. And humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” as she hobbled around the house, recycling her possessions with color-coded labels that meant “keep,” “give to the girls,” or “donate to the village jumble sale.” At the rate she was working, her mother would have packed up forty years of her life in the next two weeks. And Tilly, what would she be dealing with?
“Amazing what you can do in two weeks,” Tilly said. Monty shoved his snout into the back of her knee. “Save a dog, save a garden.”
“My answer is no. N-O.”
Tilly longed to retaliate with, God, you sound as imperious as your mother, which would be a stupid, self-defeating thing to do.
A flurry of birdsong erupted in The Chase and died. The air hung leaden and still, the day already a scorcher, which was nothing to smile about. Heat in England meant non-air-conditioned misery as everything, including tempers, became dry and brittle. Worse, her mother would draw the curtains to banish the sun, and Woodend would be sealed in stale darkness.
The church bells pealed out their Sunday morning tune, and Tilly sighed. Her mother would be waiting for a lift to Matins, cardigan buttoned, reading glasses in one pocket, a pound coin for the collection in the other. But rushing Rowena was like snuggling up to a copperhead and saying, “Give us a kiss.” Tilly remained quiet, silence the only weapon she had left.
When Rowena spoke, her voice was low and steady. “Clearly you have forgotten the tantrum Mother threw when I forgot to shut the gate, and bunnies chomped on every…fucking…plant. What you’re proposing makes Peter Rabbit look like a founding member of the gardening club. You let a novice within sixty feet of the walled garden, and Mother will take me off speed dial faster than you can say, ‘Boycott French cheeses.’”
“Rowena, love—” Tilly maintained eye contact, despite the thunder flies swarming over her chest. Minute invaders that didn’t bite or sting, thunder flies could tickle you into madness, as they were threatening to do to Tilly at that very moment. “Your mother’s pride and joy is more wasteland than garden these days. But if I could restore it, well—” Tilly gave up and scratched manically “—she doesn’t have to know it was me, does she?”
The quick movements of Rowena’s green eyes betrayed her: She was thinking. Time for Tilly’s ace. “She might even call on your actual birthday this year.”
“Okay, Ms. Clever Clogs. And suppose your protégé kills the David Austin roses?”
“I’ll call your mother and fess up. Either way, you win.”
Rowena’s eyes grew wide and sparkly, like a child at a pantomime. She fanned out her long-tiered skirt and released it; crinkled silk swished around her psychedelic Wellington boots. Wellies, in this heat? “You mean I swipe your role as Ms. Goody Two-Shoes, and you become the slutty, cannabis-growing, non-grandchild-producing daughter.” Rowena tugged a flaccid elastic band from her wrist, grabbed her hair and bunged it into a fat ponytail. “I might even be forgiven, twenty years late, for flying out of my bedroom window after sniffing glue and flattening Mother’s favorite rhododendron. Brilliant. I absolutely adore this plan. Go.” She waved Tilly off. “Destroy the walled garden with my blessings.”
“Thanks,” Tilly said. “You’re a doll. Pimm’s at one, by the way, and lunch at two, cooked by your soon-to-be sous-gardener.”
“A new man in the village.” Rowena twirled the end of her ponytail. “And one who likes to cook. Is he sexy?”
Tilly shrugged. “He has ni— His eyes. There’s something about his eyes.”
Rowena tossed her ponytail over her shoulder. “You’re telling me he has nice eyes? Hardly a hunk endorsement.”
James, a hunk? Not exactly, but he was sexy. Sort of. Tilly concentrated on untangling the dog lead from around her legs, relieved, for once, that Monty had tied her in knots.
* * *
“You do know your stealth bomber’s rubbish.” Tilly yanked the paper plane from the box hedge and handed it back to Sebastian.
“At least it made a landing. Which is more than can be said for your alien astro blaster.” Sebastian nodded at the remnants of paper plane dribbling from Monty’s jaw.
“Enemy interception,” Tilly said. “How can a girl predict that?”
A warm thrill flickered in her gut, then disappeared—tucked away but waiting. Tomorrow morning she and James would attack the walled garden, and nothing could darken her mood. Not a diseased breast, not a brooding ex-lover, not a dog that was moving on from eating paper planes to crunching on a stinky rabbit carcass. James had been right about one thing: She needed to garden. Actually, he’d been right about many things, such as how crappy she was at cooking. Although she did feel bad that he was stuck in the kitchen preparing Sunday lunch for a gaggle of people he didn’t know. But, as he had explained over and over—and over—why should she trawl through hell with a task he could complete effortlessly?
“I win!” Isaac bounced with more energy than any person had a right to exhibit on a hot day. “My Saturn V went the farthest. I win!”
Archie continued to pound a flattened daisy with the toe of his sneaker. Tilly had yet to find his Spitfire, which had nose-dived into the spirea on its maiden voyage. She suspected Archie had intended this to happen. After all, she had watched him bowl; he had his father’s targeted aim.
Archie should have been in school, but his housemaster had proposed “special dispensation” in the form of a weekend with his dad. Evidently, Fiona and Sebastian had told the children about the pregnancy the previous Sunday night, and Archie had fallen into the deepest funk, dragging his misery around school like leg irons.
Sebastian screwed up the stealth bomber and thrust it into the pocket of his cargo shorts. He had circled his son all morning, trying too hard, creating fancy paper planes when he might have done better with a stack of two-folds-and-off-you-go paper darts. He had lost Archie’s attention hours ago. A rare day together and father and son were communicating through glares and grunts, dealing with a crisis by steaming in opposite directions.
Tilly chewed on her thumbnail and replayed the conversation that she and Isaac had danced around the night before, when she’d explained she would be incredibly busy for the next two weeks, saving the walled garden with James’s help. Isaac, who only weeks earlier had urged her to take James on, had accepted the news with a silent stoicism, which, in anyone else, Tilly would have interpreted as jealousy. Or maybe he’d read her explanation for what it was—a feeble cover-up.
Sebastian squeezed Isaac’s shoulder. “Well done,” he said.
Archie stopped pounding the daisy, scooted around and turned his back on them, but not before flashing what Tilly used to call Sebastian’s granite face. Cold and set like a statue, it was the closest teenage Sebastian ever came to a pout.
“Right,” Sebastian said. “Time for you boys to go and ask Mr. Nealy—”
“James,” Tilly corrected him.
Sebastian ignored her. “If you can help in the kitchen.”
Archie and Isaac groaned in camaraderie.
“Don’t bother, chaps.” Rowena pushed through the French doors that led from the drawing room onto the patio. Her hair was looped on top of her head and secured with a kitchen baggie clip, and she was balancing two cans of Coke on a tray of salmon-and-asparagus rolls. “I have everything under control. I am Ms. Kitchen-Skivvy, sidekick to the infamous—but oooh he
has such a sexy arrrrrse—” Archie stifled a giggle with his hand. “Mr. Fussy-Wussy! Who insists on washing up every bloody utensil as he goes.” Rowena put the tray down on the wrought-iron table next to Mrs. Haddington, who awoke with a jerk.
“Goodness.” Mrs. Haddington rubbed her eyes. “How embarrassing. Nodding off like a doddery old has-been.”
“Rubbish, Mrs. H,” Rowena yelled. “You’re resting from the demands of state.”
Joke about it, but since when do you nap, Mum? Her mother could make a thousand excuses, but she was slowing down. Tilly hadn’t watched her father age. His decline had been swift, but his family—my harem, he called them—had stayed close, nursing him like a tag team. But what if the next time around, Tilly was the one who needed nursing? She shook her head. Not these thoughts, not today.
Rowena snapped open a Coke can and handed it to Archie. “Consolation prize, sweetie.”
Archie giggled. “Dad doesn’t let me drink Coke.”
“Good thing I’m not your father then.” Rowena handed the other can to Isaac. “Grub’s up in fifteen minutes, so shoo, the pair of you. Go do whatever vile things boys do.”
A look sparked between the kids. “Let’s go climb that big oak tree,” Isaac said, and he and Archie ran, shrieking, toward the paddock.
“Rowena!” Sebastian might well have been shooting for parental outrage, but he missed his target by yards. “Did you just give my child Coca-Cola?”
“I most certainly did. Got a problem with that?”
“Not if you share your last fag with me.” Sebastian’s lopsided smile stretched across his face, but his eyes, the color of stirred-up river silt, followed James as he came through the French doors.
“Can I offer you a refill, Virginia?” James asked her mother. He held a cut-glass pitcher of Pimm’s in one hand, and a goblet of red wine in the other. He had been skeptical about the Pimm’s, commenting that he preferred his alcohol undiluted and without a floating garnish. At this point in his life, he had said, he knew what he liked.
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