Heart of the Cotswolds: England

by M. L. Buchman

  “My sister’s wedding is only half over. I should take you back for the second half to meet the groom, Geoffrey. I’m sure the two of you could be such pals.”

  He almost spat his beer out on her in shock. “Your sister is marrying Geoffrey, the Third Worm of Evenston?”

  “Fourth Worm.” What an apt description.

  “No, I hear that the eldest brother is a good bloke. It’s the younger three that are horrors, especially Geoffrey.”

  “Horrors?” Maybe she should warn her sister, not that Debbie would ever listen to her. But her mother had made her promise to take care of Debbie. It’s the only reason she’d come to the wedding in the first place. There was still a chance that—

  “No, not the way I can see you’re thinking. Just egomaniac twits.”

  “Peas in a pod.”

  He looked at her strangely. No surprise really. Nothing Debbie ever did could surprise her. Disappoint? Always. Surprise? Not anymore.

  Jane drank more of her beer, confused to discover that she was into the dregs. How had that happened so fast?

  His beer was still nearly full.

  “Well, are you going to finish that up?”

  He inspected his barely-touched beer, “Why, are you wanting it?”

  “No,” she did her best to make the yeasty burp ladylike and felt that she succeeded admirably. “I’m just thinking that you’ll want to finish that before you go to meet Geoffrey. There are some things that should not be done sober.”

  Chapter 2

  Thankfully Hal the barman was a bit of a dandy—at least by Cotswold standards. He always kept his graying hair perfectly combed and always wore a tie. Aaron tried to remember if he’d ever seen him wear the same tie twice, but couldn’t bring a repeat to mind. Hal had a spare one tucked away in the back in case of spills. It was one of his milder ones—plain, fire-engine red compared to the burgundy red, covered with the gold lions of Cambridge University he was wearing himself.

  Aaron had vetoed the idea of running up to his small room close under the eaves on the third floor to change. One, he didn’t have any clothes better than these. Two, he didn’t want to risk Jane Tully getting away. And three, it might give him time to wonder what the hell he was doing, but that hadn’t troubled him much lately. Whatever came next was fine. Whatever.

  After Aaron’s third failed attempt to knot the tie, Jane took over. It placed them toe-to-toe in front of the bar with her hands at his throat. Her breath smelled vaguely of Guinness, but she herself smelled of wildflowers. If it was a perfume, it was perfectly understated. It if was her, it was absolutely luscious. Her motions were smooth and precise despite pounding down the pint. He’d bet she would be that same way when well plowed under. It seemed she was about halfway to potted already. He figured that the gentlemanly thing to do was to go along for the ride to make sure she didn’t get herself into trouble. That was his excuse for going with her and he was sticking to it.

  Then she slipped the finished knot much too tightly around his throat and he hoped that he merely survived the evening. He eased it out and then noticed a small black horse stitched into a yellow background in the center of the tie.

  He looked up at Hal.

  “If a sorry sod like you,” Hal aimed a blunt finger at the center of Aaron’s chest, “is going up to the manor for that posh affair, you better do something to pretend you have a bit of class now, hadn’t you?”

  “But Hal, why do you have a Ferrari tie?”

  Hal laid a finger beside his nose. “You never know, mate. You never know.” Then he offered a broad wink and turned back to the next pint he had to draw.

  Jane was tugging at his arm and he had no choice but to follow along.

  After the first few steps, Aaron wrenched his hip around and informed his bad leg that they would not be limping tonight. He’d be damned if he was going to look any more broken in front of Jane Tully than he already was.

  She stepped out of the pub and turned the wrong way for the manor house. The sun was bright and he had to stop and blink hard to adapt his eyesight. After the noise of the crowded pub, the village was impossibly sedate. The sun would be setting soon and there was a freshness to the warm spring air. The busy truck traffic and the day tourists had petered out for the evening and Fosse-on-the-Wold was small enough that the locals simply walked to get anywhere.

  She didn’t complain when he turned her about and they passed the pub going in the other direction.

  His attempts to draw her out were lost in nerves—her nerves. She suddenly turned into Miss Flighty Female Window Shopper, wanting to stop and look in every window. Before he quite lost all respect for her, she stopped abruptly and spoke in a completely different voice.

  “Oh, that is pretty.”

  He glanced into the window of the hardware store. She was looking at a roll of floral wallpaper. Not his thing, but it was well done. Pale colors, elegant design.

  Aaron figured out that she had no interest in any of what she was cooing at and had been deploying delay tactics. He broke her free before she turned both their stomachs and headed down Sheep Street—an alleyway so narrow between towering stone walls that they had to walk single file. It had been used when Fosse was still a major wool market. The sheep had been run into the town square on market day and the lane was narrow enough that the sheep, too, had to go single file and could be easily counted.

  Regrettably, by following the footpath that led out the end of Sheep Street and through a small wood, they approached the back of the manor rather quickly.

  “Are you sure this is the way? I didn’t come this way.” Even half-soused, she was steady on her feet, walking with fast, determined strides until they reached the two tall hedgerows that met above them in a green-arched canopy. She slowed way down and looked at it in wonder. “It’s like a fairy tale.”

  “You must have come round by the drive and the road. Much longer that way.” And he wished he’d thought to take her back the same way to have more time with her. Perhaps sober her up a bit as well.

  “Birds,” she said, looking upward into the branches and only staying upright by her strong hold on his elbow. Crows and turtledoves and sparrows and wrens and who knew what all were making their standard cacophony whenever someone walked too close to their hedgerow nests.

  “Birds,” he agreed and led her on. A pheasant strode across the path with a carefully considered grandeur.

  Jane watched it wide-eyed but offered no comment until it was well gone. “Bird,” she whispered again.

  “Bird,” he concurred. Their slow pace was giving Aaron time to have second thoughts. “I haven’t crashed a wedding since third year of high school.”

  She started walking again, as if trying to move with the pheasant’s studied nonchalance. She did an exquisite job of it.

  He wished he could figure out how to stare and walk beside her simultaneously.

  “You’ve crashed a wedding before? Debbie always did things like that. I was the good daughter.”

  He’d bet she was. He’d also bet that well-started-on-the-way-to-drunk wasn’t normal for her either. She was handling it with a certain Alice in Wonderland quality of how new and odd everything was.

  The sunlight was dappling over her hair as they came out of the hedgerow tunnel: warm gold in shadow, brilliant in direct sunlight. What the shadows of the pub had suggested, the late afternoon light revealed. Her features weren’t merely fine, he’d call them patrician—highborn from fine stock. She walked through the woods in a dress that probably cost more than all of his clothes together, and maybe his car back in the States as well. An elegant nymph or Faerie Queen. Basically, way the hell out of his league.

  “Tell me about the wedding you crashed.”

  “Uh…” Right! Think about something else than her warm voice and the way her hand on his arm felt. “Me and a mate. Seventeen. Looking for any way to get free beer. He got the beer. I ended up making off with the prettiest bridesmaid instead.”

 
; “Were you good to her?”

  “And her to me.” They’d dated for all of senior year. Mary had gone to Vassar and he’d gone to Iraq with the US Army. Even the breakup had been easy—they both knew it wouldn’t have lasted. At least that’s what Mary had said and he’d believed her; she’d always been smarter about that sort of thing.

  “Why do you talk a bit as if you’re from England, but your accent says Vermont?”

  That was something he didn’t want to answer. “I’ve been in England a while,” which covered almost none of the reason. “Because I can never again be who I was. So, I’m desperately pretending to be someone different.” Now there was an uncomfortable truth.

  They arrived at the wedding from the back field of the estate, cutting off any response she might have made.

  The Evenston estate had been, unimaginatively, Banks Manor when it belonged to a banker. Mr. Banker had been caught embezzling from his hedge fund. The manor had sold at fire-sale prices ten years earlier because the recession that had swept through Europe had affected the very wealthy as well as the common man. But not the earl—a cautious man, he’d invested carefully and snapped up the twenty-six-bedroom manor and seven hundred acres around as his new primary residence, restoring its name to simply Fosse-on-the-Wold Manor. He had set aside the sprawling northern dairy estate—bequeathed to his family by a grateful Queen Elizabeth I for services in battle—to his eldest son.

  Aaron felt that Fosse was a sensible choice for the earl’s second home as the town was already thick with tributes to the sixteenth-century queen, from the name of the pub to the portraits worked into the stained glass windows of St. Stephen’s Church.

  He could spot no sign of the recent transition—everything looked as if the earl had been in residence here down a centuries-long lineage. To the west lay rolling fields filled with sheep and lambs. To the north was a broad field divided into neat half-acre pens. Each pen held a beautiful racing horse. They pranced along the other side of the immaculate white fence as he and Jane passed by.

  “Ooo. You’re so pretty,” Jane spoke to the horses.

  Aaron’s attention was fixed to the south, toward the wedding gathering. He did a rapid risk assessment—not all of his skills had been lost. A hundred and twenty…three people, with perhaps ten percent more inside based on the current dynamics of the situation, milled about on the vast back lawn. Eleven children, under the careful control of two harried nannies. Tables set out under white umbrellas. A croquet court. A vast table of food, watched over by two carved-ice pheasants each the size of a small elephant.

  Jane was among the upper third here for the cost of her dress, but only barely. The worst dressed of this lot still wouldn’t be found in any department store. Money seemed to drip off many of the women.

  The center of power was obvious even at a glance. A very proper-looking older man must be the Earl of Evenston. Men and women stood with him in a rough circle, but they all left a slightly greater space around the one man. None of them had military training, a part of him he’d thought long dead noted. It would be a trivial task for a sniper to pick him out as the leader. This is a wedding, not a battlefield, Aaron reminded himself. At least he hoped not.

  That’s when he picked out the bride—obvious in her stand-out designer gown. Lavender, so clearly not the wedding gown, merely the post-wedding, pre-whatever-was-next-on-the-agenda, showing-off-her-newfound-wealth gown.

  “Bet that cost more than a bob or two.”

  “Seven thousand British pounds.”

  He couldn’t quite read envy or disgust in Jane’s voice. But definitely worth more than his car—even fifty thousand miles earlier when he’d bought it from the used lot over in Rutland. Hal hadn’t been kidding about him being completely out of his class, and a red Ferrari tie wasn’t going to make the least bit of difference. Time to gear up, soldier.

  The key players were all in the earl’s inner circle. His four sons and their own women were in play as well—the third son literally, as he had his hand on the ass of one of the bridesmaids while his wife stood on his other side. The gesture would only be visible to someone arriving through the woods. The bridesmaid was leaning in, not away.

  “You,” he turned to Jane, “are not to leave my side. If you need to go to the toilet, I’ll escort you to the door and wait for you. Are we clear on that?” He was not going to have the First or Second Worm of Evenston putting his hands anywhere on the tipsy Jane.

  “Yes, sir,” she shot him a mock salute—that he almost returned.

  “I’m not a sir, I work for a living,” the standard Army enlisted reply slipped out before he could stop it. So much gone. Now he really did work for a living. Manual labor. How the mighty had fallen.

  Well, he warned himself, it is time to dig deep, soldier. His right hip was hurting from his efforts to hide his limp. He wasn’t going to be able to sustain that all night without some painkillers. His unfinished beer would have been enough to offset a workday, except it was still back at the pub. But this would take something more; it had been a while since he’d worked to hide that damning limp.

  Time to confront the beast. He led Jane toward the heart of the enemy.

  “We’ll be stuck until the cake cutting,” Jane whispered breathily in his ear. “It won’t be for a while. We can still run away, maybe to Italy.” He liked the sound of that.

  “We’re on a mission, then. Operation Cake—a surgical strike, then bug out.”

  “Operation Sugar.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  She squeezed his arm like a laugh.

  Then she clenched it hard enough he almost yelped. Her nails were short, but his shirt was thin and her grip strong.

  “There you are, sis. You know that I’ve had the servants looking just everywhere for you,” Debbie whisked across the lawn like the Wicked Witch of the West. The belled skirt made it look as if she slid rather than walked. Jane glanced at the perfect lawn but couldn’t spot the inevitable trail of slime her sister left wherever she went.

  “Fat chance,” Jane cursed herself for going straight to nasty but Debbie brought out the worst in her.

  Debbie had never cared crap about where Jane was. Though now that she had servants to order about, maybe she had sent them looking for her sister, just so that she could issue commands.

  Besides, Debbie wasn’t paying any attention to her. Instead she was looking at…

  At…

  Jane turned to look at…him. Hadn’t she asked his name? She must have. She’d invited the man to her sister’s high society wedding so he must have a name. This so wasn’t like her.

  Unsure of what to do next, she turned to Debbie to explain…something. Except Debbie was still looking at…him. With a look Jane knew all too well.

  Jane grabbed tighter onto his arm. How many boyfriends had Debbie ripped away from her with her deep-red hair, her pumped-up breasts, and her low-cut dresses? Mom never really saw. The Debbie she’d always described was frail, uncertain, and in desperate need of protection from the cruel world. The Debbie that Jane knew was a spoiled, cast-iron bitch who would have sold their mother to the devil for the price of a new pair of Jimmy Choo pumps. Jane tried to count how many boyfriends and potential boyfriends Debbie had stolen and felt a twirl of vertigo at how fast the number climbed.

  “Hi,” his voice had dropped about half an octave lower than it had already been. Very dangerous. Very alpha-male sexy.

  Jane had never dated alpha-male sexy—not her type. She had tended toward intelligent, often professors. Had! She’d never make that mistake again. Squinting at the various men who were turning to watch the fun, none of them were even half as alpha-male sexy as her nameless escort. Maybe she should give him a try.

  But it was too late.

  He held out his right hand to Debbie. Jane’s hand about his right elbow also moved forward. She started to remove it because that was just too silly. Then he reached across with his left hand and clamped her han
d into place as he shook Debbie’s. His grip keeping her in place wasn’t merely strong; it was powerful.

  “I’m Aaron Mason. Thank you for having me.”

  Aaron. Aaron. Aaron. Jane repeated it in her head a few more times to be sure that she had it down. Mason. Aaron Mason.

  “My pleasure,” Debbie drawled out in her best I-don’t-care-if-it’s-my-wedding-day-come-fuck-me-in-the-hydrangeas voice.

  Jane braced herself for it. Waited for the gut slam of yet another man being caught by purchased breasts and her coy moue practiced in the mirror since birth.

  Aaron extracted his hand from Debbie’s, but didn’t let go of his left hand clamping Jane’s to his right elbow. Possessively. As if he actually meant to stay beside her.

  Debbie’s eyes narrowed, reading the same signals, which meant Jane wasn’t merely imagining them.

  Her sister’s look said this wasn’t over yet, but the committee-to-repulse-boarders moved in and trumped Debbie’s next move.

  “Debra, darling.” The groom began his approach. Debbie had always hated being called Debra, but she hadn’t trained the Third Worm of Evenston yet. He was accompanied by one of the bridesmaids, who was obviously hoping to count coup on the nuptial night, and another of the worm sons. They came across the perfect green lawn like a flock of descending vultures to rend her and Aaron’s (Aaron’s) flesh. The earl and the eldest son, Jane noted, hung back, doing their best to be polite about the whole thing.

  “Am I going to get you in trouble?” She kept her voice down to a whisper. Aaron (Aaron, Aaron) worked in this town and these were powerful men.

  “The best defense is a good attack,” he patted her hand without releasing it and turned to face the onslaught.

  Aaron avoided the fight by trumping their move. Moments before the unwelcoming committee reached his position, he stepped aside, almost losing Jane to the manicured lawn. He’d forgotten that she wouldn’t be trained to read his body language like a Special Operations soldier could—remember to give clearer signals.