Heart of the Cotswolds: England

by M. L. Buchman

  “Oh, lunch. I brought lunch. I hope you’re hungry. I brought enough for three but I passed Trent on the lane. Does he always look that grouchy? Or is it just me? I thought the food might act as a bit of a bribe since I’m going to be living here and…” Now the babbling had moved outside and it took all of her willpower to squeeze it off to a slow trickle, and finally silence.

  “I am hungry and he’s headed off to Moreton. He hates Moreton. And if he hates you, then he hates me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because he keeps trying to push me in your direction.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” Why in the world had she asked such a question. Just shut up, Jane!

  “Not from my point of view.”

  Jane tried to wrangle her jumpy nerves into some semblance of order, at least enough for her to think. Aaron wasn’t complaining about Trent pushing him toward her. Which, unraveled, meant that he did want to be closer to her despite the unholy mess she was at the moment.

  Thankfully, years of living with Debbie had trained her well. Keep all emotion hidden behind a calm exterior. If she didn’t, her little sister would use it as a focus of full-on attack.

  She was half amused as Aaron quickly built them a low rock table on the lawn and they sat down across it with all of the dignity of a king and queen. Or at least a king and queen who didn’t mind getting slightly damp butts from the drying grass.

  As she laid out the lunch, Aaron started to put on his t-shirt.

  “What’s that scar?” A jagged line the length of her hand angled upward across his ribs.

  He stopped, which may have been the real point of her question (though she wasn’t sure) as he had such a nice chest. “Knife fight in a bar.”

  “You were in a… That doesn’t sound like you at all.”

  “Kandahar, Afghanistan. A cleared Afghani worker turned out to be Taliban and tried to slice a couple of us over cold sodas.”

  “I thought you said a bar.”

  “Dry country, so no alcohol on base—at least not legally. But it had everything else: loud country music, a floor that stuck to your boots, crappy food, a lumpy pool table with cues all warped by the heat. Everything a growing boy could want from a bar.”

  “Except for the guy with the knife.”

  “Except for him. And no beer.”

  “What happened to him?”

  At her look, she was sorry she asked and focused on setting up the containers on the stone table.

  He went back to tugging on his t-shirt.

  “What about that scar?”

  He gave up and flopped his t-shirt over his shoulder, then looked at the circular mark on the other side of his chest. “Libyan nutcase dumb enough to shoot me just because I was trying to kill him.”

  “And…” She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her and why she so needed to know all of this. It seemed ghoulish. Like all those movie scenes, “show me your scars and I’ll show you mine.” Except hers consisted of the time Debbie had thrown a hammer at her, claws first, and the time she’d cut her foot on an old railroad tie while walking barefoot on one of the steel rails. Debbie had pushed her off, of course.

  Aaron eyed the small scar she’d pointed to just above his right hip. “Now that one really sucked.”

  “Compared to being knifed and shot? What was worse than those?”

  He left her hanging while he uncovered the containers and took his first forkful of oyster beef.

  “What?”

  “Terrible. I hate to even think about it,” he shivered but his smile gave him away as he picked up a skewer of chicken satay.

  “Oh. Appendectomy,” she guessed and he confirmed it with a laugh. At least something about him was normal. “Couldn’t you use your super-soldier powers to will it out of existence?”

  “I was a kid of twenty-two, serving in the regular Army. What did I know about super-soldier powers?” Then his scowl turned bitter. “Sure lost those,” he tossed the chicken back down.

  How could he think so little of himself?

  Easy, Jane. Just look in the mirror. Well, she’d gotten pretty sick of not thinking much of herself as well. Her year had been hell and Debbie’s wedding had only capped that off. Enough already.

  “Come here,” she said softly.

  “I am here,” Aaron shrugged.

  She leaned forward. “No, here.”

  He leaned in, still sulking.

  “Closer.”

  His smug smile said he was sure that he was about to get a kiss. He was close enough she could feel his body heat and suddenly wished she’d let him put on his t-shirt. To smell the mixture of sweat, limestone, and earthy male that made her want to devour him. Well, the kiss had been Plan A, but she didn’t want him to get too smug. Instead, she leaned to the side and whispered into his ear.

  “Shut up and eat your goddamn chicken.”

  His burst of laughter made her ears ring, but also told her she’d made exactly the right choice. “You’d make a hell of a drill sergeant because that’s totally Army thinking.”

  And it was.

  Shut up and eat your goddamn chicken. Stop worrying about all the things that he couldn’t do anything about. His knee was blown. All the physical therapy in the world wasn’t going to get him back into Delta. Even a new knee wouldn’t do it, there’d been too much muscle and tendon damage.

  So sit beside the beautiful woman in an idyllic garden, shut up, and eat your goddamn chicken. In other words: move the hell on.

  Somehow Jane Tully understood that.

  “Who are you, lady? Because neither beautiful woman nor Faerie Queen begins to cover it.” Besides, she was killing him in that light t-shirt and shorts. They ended mid-thigh, but still they showed that she had forever-long, runner-amazing legs.

  “Faerie Queen?”

  “Okay, should have kept that image to myself, but it fits.”

  “Especially because I have a fairy-tale cottage.” She held out her hand, palm up, and unfolded it to reveal a house key she’d been clutching like a dirty secret. It caught the sunlight and glittered gold in her palm. He could see by the angry red lines how hard she’d been holding on to it.

  Remember that, doofus. She’s fighting a battle with her own crap too.

  But he couldn’t speak.

  She’d been at the B&B less than a week and now she was moving out. He’d known her for seven days but he knew her better than any other woman all the way back to high-school Mary. And Jane knew more about him than…well, apparently even himself.

  Eat your goddamn chicken and move the hell on. The perfect advice of a moment ago now roiled in his gut.

  His thoughts were in turmoil, but he could see her waiting for a response.

  “Already?” He managed, but knew it wasn’t enough. “That’s so fast. It’s amazing.”

  “Thanks.” Apparently he’d said the right thing. He’d been talking about the unwarranted speed of everything—faster than a crashing helo—but she took his words as congratulations and he wasn’t about to correct her.

  Chapter 8

  “I’m not a weakfish,” Jane protested. She’d never liked taking that from other men and she certainly wasn’t going to take that from Aaron. She’d be damned if she was going to stand aside like some helpless female while he did the work himself.

  “Right. Sorry. Lift in unison—on three.”

  She’d also never met a man who could shift his mental framework so agilely. It was also, she now knew from experience, a mistake he wouldn’t make again.

  On three, they lifted either side the upside-down armchair out of the MINI’s back seat, flipped it over, and set it upright on the ground.

  “Where does it go?”

  “Third floor. And the stairs are as narrow as the ones at The Queen’s Guard, maybe worse. Are you sure your leg will be okay with this?”

  “Sure. It’s strong, taking the weight isn’t the problem. I forget to pay attention and twist it—that’s when it stops being fun.”<
br />
  Despite her protest, there was no way she could move the chair herself, so she took him at his word, bent down, and lifted her side. With two people, it wasn’t very heavy and they had it up the stairs in a matter of minutes.

  “Wow!” Aaron’s single soft comment when he turned his attention to her third-story aerie was all of the compliment she needed. “This room is so perfectly you.”

  Jane could only nod in wonder. If he thought that, then he truly saw her—despite all of his “beautiful woman” and “Faerie Queen” nonsense.

  “Paint in a light yellow, maybe daffodil. A small desk of dark wood,” she blurted out to cover her surprise.

  He tapped the sloping ceiling toward the back of the room. “Put in a small gable here and you’d have a great view of the front garden, the lane, and the spring with its watering trough. It would also bring in some more light.”

  “That’s a little out of my league.”

  He shrugged one of his no-problem shrugs. “Except for the thatch work, I could knock that in over a weekend if you want.”

  “I don’t own it yet. I’m just renting the cottage for now, until we finalize the sale agreement. But I like the idea.”

  They toured downward through the cottage. It felt strange standing with him in the master bedroom. Thankfully, he quickly moved into the bath and began commenting on the tilework and fixtures. It was a small space, so she was glad of the excuse to stand out in the bedroom and merely look in.

  “Where did you learn all this?”

  “Last couple years of high school I worked as an assistant for the town’s fix-anything guy. He hoped I’d take over the business and taught me everything from stone walls to renovating a bathroom. Dad’s a farmer, so I grew up pretty handy as it was. There’s always something broken on a dairy farm.”

  Aaron was thumping a finger along a stretch of wall as if he could read what was going on inside it.

  “This section of plaster needs replacing. Depending on the fixtures you want, you’ll want to get some green board in here against the moisture. Needs a vent fan too, which is why you have the problem in the first place. Again easy, call it a weekend for the fixes and a week to replace the tile and fixtures. Maybe a little longer because the plumbing probably dates back to the Napoleonic wars.”

  He strolled back across the bedroom as if wholly unaffected by their proximity where her bed would eventually go. King size, she decided. The room was big enough. If Aaron could figure out how to get it up here, definitely king size.

  If Aaron? She was totally losing it. Like they were playing house together.

  She heard his feet thumping down the stairs and hurried to follow him.

  If he didn’t get out of that room fast, Aaron knew he was going to try and christen her bedroom right then and there. Wandering through the house was almost like touring Jane herself—the cottage was an intimate extension of her that was slowly wrapping itself around him, making it hard to breathe.

  He could feel how she’d alter each room from her descriptions. She had a good eye for décor, at least it sounded that way to his untrained ear. To look at her, he’d have expected elegant or urban. Or perhaps matching antiques and period pieces. But as she described each room—simple, comfortable, cozy—it was like she was describing the inner woman who was dazzling him even more than the outer one.

  What was worse was he could see what needed to be done to both update the aged cottage and bring it even more in line with her vision.

  A kitchen able to serve generous meals? Rip out everything except the AGA stove, redo the small closet as a pantry.

  The small den would become a cozy escape with a big couch, a small television, a decent library, and a refinished floor.

  Remove the wall between dining and living rooms to open it into a single space. Maintenance of the stonework of the massive fireplace. Replace the crappy sliding doors with French doors leading out to the garden. It would be a showpiece of modern living in country style by the time she was done with it.

  “It’s all doable. Take a month or so of hard work, but none of it except taking out the one wall is even a real challenge.”

  He hadn’t looked at her throughout the entire downstairs part of the tour. Only by focusing on what the cottage needed could he avoid how incredible she looked, standing here, in this place where she so belonged.

  Where the hell do you belong, Aaron?

  He waited.

  Silence.

  No answer at all. Yeah, that’s about what he’d thought.

  Fosse-on-the-Wold?

  Jay, Vermont?

  Back o’ Bourke, Australia—their phrase for where the true Outback began?

  It certainly wasn’t here with this woman.

  It took him two tries to open the damned sliding glass door some idiot had installed back in the 1970s. Go back to his wall. That’s where he belonged. That he understood.

  He had one foot out on the flagstone.

  “Aaron?” Jane’s voice was soft behind him.

  There was just enough pleading in it that he twisted around to look at her.

  Halfway there he knew it was mistake.

  Too late! His body’s momentum was already in play.

  His bad knee let go. He struggled to compensate with his other leg, but there was a stone step down from the sliding door.

  For half an instant he had the Wile E. Coyote feeling as he stepped on air and found nothing there. Then he was falling—down and backward.

  A glimpse of Jane’s jaw dropping toward a shout of alarm.

  The twist continued and pain slammed into him from his knee. He managed to turn far enough to catch himself with his hands moments before his face smacked into the rock path, but his bad leg kept going and he cracked his kneecap hard against the step he’d missed.

  “Shit!” Aaron’s shout of pain and frustration was hard enough to choke him with the dirt he blew off the rock. Trying to roll over, he fell off the garden path and into a flower bed. The way his luck was running, he was just surprised it wasn’t full of thorny roses.

  Aaron had refused both an ambulance and her offers to drive him to the hospital, but he did take two of the ibuprofen she kept in her purse. She considered offering him one of her emergency Valium (acquired specifically for dealing with Debbie the-sister-spawn-from-Hell and Larry the-jailed-jailbait-hunter Jenkins).

  Aaron’s protests that he’d “be fine in a minute” were completely belied by his one attempt to stand. He might be able to bear the pain, but she couldn’t bear watching him go through it and had slid under his arm. Together they managed to get him sitting on the living room floor and she instantly regretted taking her one chair upstairs.

  “Hold on.” She rushed back to the car and brought in her other supplies for setting up temporary housekeeping, which included the air mattress.

  Aaron was sitting there with his pants around his ankles, inspecting his knee, which was already twice the size of his good one. Thankfully he was a boxer shorts guy rather than a tighty-whitie type. Still, maybe she should be the one to take a Valium.

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to have to cut them off.”

  “Good thinking,” she swallowed against a dry throat. A mug, she hadn’t thought to buy a mug. She took her pot to the sink and filled it part way with cold water. After taking a long drink herself—she should dunk her head in it to cool down—she took it back to him. “Thirsty?”

  “Uh, thanks.” Aaron made no comment about her sole drinking vessel. The water dribbled around his mouth as he drank, that gave her an idea.

  She took her towel to the sink and soaked half of it. Then she brought it back and wrapped it around his knee.

  “You’d make a good field medic.”

  “Why? Because I can wrap a towel around your knee?”

  “No. Because you take best advantage of whatever tools you have on hand: pot, towel. Out-of-the-box thinking. It’s a good survival tool.”

  “Is that what you do? Survive?” She t
ook her hands off the towel and sat back, more importantly, away from Aaron. She leaned against the raised stone hearth.

  His thinking shrug said maybe.

  “Is that really enough?” Jane knew she was asking for both of them.

  “You trying to convince me that it’s not?” Aaron shifted his knee, grunted, and eased it back to where it had been. Any sensible nurse would have known to use the blanket or one of the sheets to spread across his underwear-clad hips.

  “I’m trying to convince myself that it’s not enough to merely survive,” and Jane wished she could do that. How many years had survival been all she was doing? Debbie, Larry, high-stress career? Alone? When Larry and eventually his clothes had gone out the door, it had been a relief. Now she was far less certain that mere survival still counted as the victory she’d thought it was.

  Aaron scooted over to lean against the opposite wall. Thankfully, he grabbed one of the sheets and flipped it over his lap as he did so. They weren’t that far apart. Until the wall came down, the living room would be close to the cramped end of cozy.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  For something else to look at, Jane inspected the room, started thinking about the house. Every one of Aaron’s suggestions had pointed out a flaw in her “perfect” cottage. She could see them now, like broken bones. But he’d also told her what it would take to fix them even if she didn’t understand half of what he said. Removing the wall he leaned against had included phrases like jacks, king studs, and LVLs (whatever they were). But he’d also offered time estimates on every project.

  “Do you do all the big jobs first or fix up one room entirely, and move on?”

  Aaron tried to make sense of Jane’s words. The ibuprofen was kicking in and—as long as he didn’t move his knee—the pain was dropping away. Which led him to paying attention to other things, making the blanket across his lap the most essential element for his survival. Having Jane minister to him, kneeling so close that her hair brushed over his bare thigh, had definitely changed the direction of his thoughts. The distance across the living room wasn’t nearly enough, but it was the best he could manage at the moment.