by Nancy Warren
Meg bit her lip, her face reddening.
“I’m sorry, love, I should have had a doss out the window before I blundered out the front door at ten in the morning.”
But instead of consternation or embarrassment, which he was expecting, Meg burst out laughing. “I told her you were over fixing the faucet in the bathroom, the one that sticks.”
“And when I got home, my buttons were done up all wrong.”
She laughed louder, holding onto the bar for support. Suddenly, he found himself joining her. “So,” he said at last, “do you think she’s guessed anything’s up?”
“Totally, she called me on it. But, you know, she’s really excited. She thinks she made the match.”
“Do you mind very much?”
“Of course not. I’ll be leaving in a couple of months. It doesn’t matter to me.”
She’d be leaving, of course, but not for a good while yet, so he put the notion of loss out of his mind. “I want you to come to my house. I want to make love to you in my bed and sleep beside you all night.”
“Will we get any sleep?”
“Only enough to get us ready to go again. What do you think?”
“I think it’s the best offer I’ve had all night.”
Chapter Nine
They walked out of the pub and down a village road lined with the low stone walls that were so prevalent in this part of England.
He held her hand in a loose, warm grip and they didn’t speak. She was still savoring the amazing sex; she suspected he was, too.
She hadn’t slept with a ton of men, but with enough to know that what happened between her and Arthur was special. There was something about him that inspired her trust and that left her free to let herself go.
The night was cool, but after the heat of their passion, not unpleasantly so. There were few lights still burning in the village, and other than a cat skulking under a bush doing whatever it is that cats do at night, they were alone. Their footsteps shushed along the road. They turned again and she saw a pair of carriage lamps burning in a wonderful two-story stone house. She was surprised when that was the house he led her to. Inside, her astonishment grew. Had she expected some slovenly bachelor flat in a basement? She supposed she had.
“Oh, how beautiful,” she cried when he flipped on the lights inside and she saw that the place had been furnished with antiques and paintings on the walls that, even to her inexpert eye, were obviously the real thing. “How old is the house?”
“Late seventeen hundreds. It was the parsonage. It fell into disrepair so I was able to pick it up quite cheaply a few years ago. It’s been my hobby ever since, fixing it up and furnishing it to period.”
His pride was evident and she found that endearing.
When he led her upstairs, her steps were quick, knowing that pleasure awaited her.
“I’ve got two rooms up here that I haven’t got to yet, and then I’ll be done.”
She walked into the master bedroom and fell in love. With the window seat that needed a woman’s touch. A pretty cushion, she thought, so you could sit in there and read a novel with a cup of tea. She loved the angles of the ceiling, the slight unevenness of the floorboards. He’d kept the room masculine, but she thought a few more touches of the feminine would make the room perfect.
A few more things like the vase of roses on the mahogany drum table would give the room more balance. She had a suspicion that the roses were there for her, and that made her heart skitter.
“The bathroom’s through there,” he said. “I converted one of the bedrooms.”
“I take it this isn’t authentic to period?” she teased as she took in the marble shower enclosure, the huge tub, and the gleaming sinks.
She walked back into the bedroom, losing herself in imagining, as she’d done since she was a child.
“Tell me you’re not picturing a grisly murder in my bedroom,” he said, watching her in some amusement.
“No.” She shook her head. “I was picturing this house with the vicar and his wife and several children reading, or sewing. Taking tea in that lovely room downstairs. You know, I get the feeling that this house has held a great deal of happiness, don’t you?”
He didn’t look at her as though she were crazy, but as though he finally had found someone who got it. “First time I walked into this house it felt…content. I bought it soon after.”
It was too big a house for one guy. She felt that it must be waiting for him to settle down and have some kids so the sounds of laughter and young voices would fill the house once again.
But, long before that, she suspected the walls were going to echo the sounds of their passion when she saw him advance on her with that look in his eyes she was beginning to know well.
His predatory look.
She’d already had two orgasms tonight, and now she was firing up like a woman who hadn’t seen action in months. How did he do that to her?
Then he put his mouth on hers and she knew exactly how he did it.
Chapter Ten
When they woke the next morning, the sun was shining. In the daylight, the old parsonage was as perfect as it had been the night before. The gardens needed work. He kept the lawn mowed and the hedges trimmed, but she could see that the rosebushes needed pruning and the beds were empty of color.
She’d put a wrought-iron table and chairs right there, she thought, looking at a flat patch of grass that would make a perfect place for a stone patio. Mentally, she added a rose arbor, a small stone fountain, or maybe a birdbath in that corner under the mock orange.
Whoa. What was she doing? Inserting herself into the scene?
Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad. This wasn’t her house, even her country, and this man certainly wasn’t hers. Well, not in the long term.
With regret, she turned away from the window to find him watching her with an odd expression on his face.
“What?”
“You look good in my house. Right.”
How bizarre that they should both be thinking the same thing at the same time. On such a subject.
She smiled and tried to lighten the mood. “I was planting a flower garden in my head.”
“That’s another thing I haven’t had much time for.”
He came up and touched her shoulder. He was always doing that, dropping little touches as he passed. It was like this second conversation going on between them on a much deeper and unspoken level that had nothing to do with the superficial words.
It felt like he was saying, You’re special, I care, as though he needed that briefest physical connection between the major ones.
If she’d thought about it before, she’d have said that some guy touching her all the time would irritate the hell out of her; but it wasn’t true, and she found she was starting to do it, too. For such a new relationship, they already had patterns of behavior that were astonishingly intimate.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Mmm. Please.” He poured a cup and added a drop of skim milk and half a spoonful of sugar into the china mug before handing it to her. She stared at him. “You know how I like my coffee?”
“Bartender’s trick. Memorize your best customers’ drinks. Brings them back.”
“Am I one of your best customers?”
“The best.”
“You make good coffee.”
“Thanks. I’m also handy with a fry-up. I can make you breakfast or I can let you scamper back to Stag Cottage to get to work. Which is it?”
She blinked at him, comprehension dawning. “Is that why you rushed out of my place yesterday morning? So I could work?”
“Of course. You made such a bloody production about not having the time for a bloke that I reckoned my only hope of another shag was to make myself scarce.”
“Oh.” She felt foolish, and was fairly certain her cheeks were pinkening. “I thought you were racing off out of there to keep things casual.”
He came up to her, up and up until they were pressed hip to hip, and
he glared down into her eyes. “Then you are a very silly woman.”
She’d been called a few things in her life, but silly, in that utterly endearing way, had never been one of them.
She felt silly. Deliciously so. “Well,” she said, nudging him with her hips until she got a gratifyingly firm response, “I’m not so silly that I’d turn down breakfast.”
On top of her earlier surprises, she discovered that the man could cook. No bangers and beans and chips this morning, but an omelet with spinach and feta cheese. She squeezed oranges for juice, and they ate at the round table by the window.
Of course, the sailcloth table mats would have to go. The round table begged for a linen cloth, in a pink toile, perhaps.
She could see them sitting here, sharing the paper years from now. But she could also see him in her modern West Coast house. He’d never been there, but she could see him as clearly as though in memory. It was the spookiest damn thing she’d ever experienced.
After breakfast, she wasn’t ready to leave him. She said, “I need to drive into town to the Internet café. Could I beg a ride?”
“Absolutely. It’s my day off. I’m at your service.”
When they got to town she felt good walking by his side. He told her a few stories about the shopkeepers and some of the people they passed, nearly all of whom knew him and then glanced at her curiously.
She had an e-mail from her agent, which she’d half thought might be there. She clicked on it. No matter how many books she wrote, she worried over each one. She thought this book was good, but what if she’d been fooling herself? What if her writer’s block had become so bad she’d completely lost her judgment?
Before she could come up with any more what-ifs, she opened the damn thing.
Hi Meg, This is the best thing you’ve ever written. The villain is delicious. Much love, Herbert.
Relief washed over her. And a sense of absolute satisfaction took its place. Herbert had no idea. Oh, yeah. The villain is very delicious, she thought to herself. Her great fear, that somehow she’d lost her own judgment, that after her uncharacteristic dry spell, she was writing dreck and unable to distinguish it, was relieved.
She even had the secret satisfaction of knowing that her sneaking suspicion that this was her strongest book yet was shared by someone whose opinion she trusted.
Today was a very good day.
“What’s put that smile on your face?” Arthur asked her when they met outside once more. “Apart from me, of course.”
“My villain is delicious,” she informed him.
“I hope that means he’s less terrifying than the awful bugger in the book I’m reading.”
She chuckled in delight. “No, it means he’s much, much worse.”
“How can someone so young and full of light write such evil?”
She shrugged. “I have my nightmares on the page.”
“I’d best get you home so you can get a few more written down.”
And so their days fell into a pattern. They slept together every night, either at Stag Cottage or at the parsonage, though increasingly, it seemed, she found herself in the parsonage. The place comforted her almost as much as Arthur’s arms wrapped around her in sleep comforted her.
She went to the darts nights, and improved enough that she could usually hit the board, or not stray too far, though after that first one, the bull’s-eye continued to elude her. She and Maxine had lunch or coffee, or simply walked the estate. The days grew cooler, more rain fell. Fall progressed and an early frost reminded her that winter, and the end of her time here, was approaching.
Her work was going well. Too well. The book that wouldn’t start now raced to its end, long before she was ready.
She had two weeks until her time was up. Then a week. Arthur took her to London, where Christmas decorations were another reminder of how little time was left. They shopped in Soho and Carnaby Street, Oxford Street, and Knightsbridge. She bought gifts for home, and in Liberty of London saw the toile tablecloth she’d pictured on Arthur’s kitchen table. She bought it, and napkins and a pottery jug in a matching shade of dusky rose, where a person could put a couple of tulips from the garden, early roses, or a handful of wildflowers.
They had afternoon tea at the Ritz, something she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl.
“How’s the book coming, then?” he asked her over tea and scones and tiny, delicious cakes. He hadn’t asked her for a while. She knew they both marked the progress of her book as the journey to the end of her time in England, and their time together.
“It’s going well. Frighteningly well, in some respects.” He didn’t ask her what she meant. “I’ve got my big climax between the villain and the heroine still to write. Heart-pounding suspense, terror, and then the conclusion.”
“He’s the delicious one?”
“That’s right.”
“Hmm. What happens to him?”
She drew a finger across her throat.
Arthur bit into a scone with strong white teeth. “Shame, if he’s delicious.”
“He has to die,” she said, gazing across at Arthur and wishing it weren’t so. “To release the heroine. That’s how it ends.”
They were no longer speaking of some fictitious villain and they both knew it. Somehow, he’d become as central to her as the villain was to her story, and soon both would be gone.
“No hope of saving him?” His eyes were sad and serious. She looked at his handsome, rugged face and knew she’d fallen in love with him.
“How?” she asked him.
When they returned home they were uncharacteristically somber. He made love to her as though it were the last time, and when their cries echoed around them, her eyes stung.
It was a long time before she slept. Arthur was silent and still in the bed beside her, with his arm around her, his hand curled around her breast, but she was fairly certain he wasn’t asleep either.
Of course, they’d never exchanged words of love. It hadn’t mattered. She knew he loved her as much as she knew she loved him. But what was the point of getting any deeper into a relationship that had been limited from the start?
Sometime in the middle of the night she turned to him, and found his eyes open and on her. She reached for him, climbing onto him and riding him with desperation, as though she could cram an entire lifetime into this last week.
There was no finesse to her loving; she was greedy and desperate, grabbing at his skin, scratching, riding hard, until they were both sweat-drenched and panting.
“I love you,” she cried, as though the words had been yanked out of her.
“I know, love. I know.”
When she slumped down onto his still-heaving chest, her cheeks were wet. He kissed her slowly and then held her until at last she slept.
She awoke determined to make their last few days good ones. She could mope and whine and snivel at home. She’d have lots of time.
Arthur was still sleeping when she woke, heavy-eyed and a little sore.
Well, she could make him coffee. And breakfast. She slipped into the spare bedroom where she’d stowed all her bags from their shopping trip and found the toile cloth, the napkins, and the jug.
When he came into the kitchen half an hour later, she thought she’d never seen anything so good as this scratching, shirtless man with his black hair sticking out in tufts and his boxers riding low. “Smells good,” he said. She gave him a bright smile, one that suggested No, I didn’t cry all over you and tell you I loved you last night, and handed him his coffee.
And, as he turned to sit at the table, he stopped.
“Don’t say it’s too girlish,” she begged as she saw him staring at the pretty cloth, the neatly folded napkins, and the jug containing a scatter of rose hips since that was all she could find in the garden.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “I wouldn’t have chosen it, mind, but it’s exactly right.”
“I saw them at Liberty ’s and knew it would look great.”
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“I think this house is better with you in it,” he said, still staring at the cloth. “It’s been waiting for you for a long time.” He turned to her slowly. “So have I.”
“Don’t say it, please don’t say it,” she begged.
She saw a flash of impatience along with the sadness. “How can I not say it? You know it’s true as well as I do. You belong here. You work well, you’ve made friends, we’ve found each other. Why can’t you cancel your ticket home and stay?”
“You make it sound so easy, but it’s not you being asked to give up your life. It’s me. Would you give up this? The pub? Your house? Your friends? Come home with me if I asked you?”
He regarded her. “Are you asking me?”
Her heart felt like a moth flapping around a hot lightbulb. Stupid, foolish, and determined to be incinerated.
“I don’t know. Love hasn’t worked out that well for me in the past.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” he said with contempt. “Any more than it has for me. You think you’re going to find what we have again? This”-he gestured back and forth between them-“this happens once in a lifetime if you are very, very lucky.”
“I wish I knew what to do,” she said softly.
“You’d best tend to whatever you’ve got burning on the stove.”
She gasped and turned to find the fancy oatmeal she’d made from Woman’s Weekly was scorched. Perfect.
Just perfect.
She left after breakfast but when she got to Stag Cottage she was too restless to write. Arthur had broken the unspoken agreement between them. Well, she supposed she had first when she’d blurted out her love, but surely some allowances could be made for a woman in midclimax.
He’d asked her in the cold light of day, however, bringing up not only love, but a future. A family, meals stretching for their lifetime around that toile-covered table in the parsonage kitchen. Or around the sleek glass and steel table in her Seattle kitchen with the granite counters and the stainless appliances.
Two homes. Why not?
It was such an appealing image, and so terrifying she couldn’t even bear to consider it seriously.