by Jagger, Kait
Particularly when, just over a week after Miss Gregory’s return, she came into the office one afternoon to find her asleep at her desk, head resting on her folded arms, her face wan and vulnerable in repose. Fragile, the PA thought, retreating to her desk on cat’s feet. To no great surprise, her employer emerged from the office shortly thereafter and admitted defeat. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs for a nap,’ she said, practically swaying on her feet. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’
After that, it became a pattern. Miss Gregory would arrive at her desk at the crack of dawn, work till just after lunch, then retire to the private wing of the house. And then she would return in the evenings, working for a few hours each night. The PA knew this because she would often come in to emails from Miss Gregory – things she needed, copies of emails she thought would interest the PA, ideas she wanted to run past her – like little gifts in her inbox.
And one night, when the PA stayed late to attend a wine-tasting session at the Stables restaurant and tripped rather tipsily back to her desk to retrieve her things, she heard Miss Gregory in her office, talking to someone on the conference phone.
‘Come to Mom and Dad’s on Cape Cod,’ came a raspy American accent over the speaker. ‘You know how much Mom wants to wrap you up in cotton wool and feed you Oreos and ice cream.’
A silvery laugh and a sigh from Miss Gregory. ‘I can’t, Nan.’
‘Why not?’ The PA heard a hardening in the American woman’s voice. ‘Someone needs to mother you.’
‘I promised Stefan last year that I would never leave him again…’ The PA’s ears pricked up at this; mention, at last, of the elusive Marquess of Lionsbridge, who the PA gathered remained in Stockholm, recovering from his injuries.
It didn’t sound like the American thought much of him. ‘So you sit there, like some kind of loyal hound waiting for her owner to return.’
‘I’m hanging up now, Nan.’ The PA knew Miss Gregory well enough now to hear the leavening affection in her voice, confirmed by her parting words. ‘I love you.’
The PA quietly reached for her bag, but then she heard Miss Gregory call her name and went to the office door, planning to say goodnight. Her boss – for that was the way the PA liked to think of her – was sitting at her desk dressed in leggings and a tank top, squeezing a small red ball in her right hand. Underneath her top, the PA saw a jagged, vicious scar and flinched before she could stop herself. Miss Gregory quickly reached for the scarf on her desk and covered her shoulder, explaining, ‘The GP has given me exercises to do. There’s still a bit of numbness in my hand.’
She asked the PA to sit, then, and questioned her about the wine tasting. About other things, too; her schooling, her family, about whether she liked being a PA and what her long-term career ambitions were. It was… pleasant, the PA thought to herself, just talking to her like this about non-work-related things. Miss Gregory was only four years older than her, but so self-contained that it usually felt like more. Not tonight, though.
‘Do you think you’d like to continue working here?’ Miss Gregory asked eventually.
‘Absolutely,’ the PA said. Too quickly, she realised, recognising how eager she sounded. Ah well, in for a penny, she thought, and added, ‘I love it here, Miss Gregory.’
‘Oh, I think you can start calling me Luna now, don’t you?’ her employer said in an amused voice. She went on to say that although she didn’t really need full-time PA support, she’d been talking to the head of HR and her press secretary about a shared assistant role. ‘An executive assistant, is what I’m thinking, with a direct reporting line to me, but providing support for Arborage’s other two directors and my management team.’ She nodded toward the anteroom. ‘That’s the Marquess’s space so we’ll have to move you out of there, but there’s a desk you can use in the press office.’
Miss Gregory smiled. ‘Obviously, I don’t want you to become everyone’s go-to girl, so we’ll have to monitor it for the first few months, but does that hold any interest for you?’
Yes, the PA said, it did. And then her taxi came and she left, feeling happy, relieved, and as though she knew Miss Gregory better now. Though, when she thought about their conversation later, she realised she was only inferring this from Miss Gregory’s responses to her questions; her smiles, and nods of understanding, and occasional pursing of her lips in amusement. Her employer had revealed nothing about herself. Nothing.
The next morning Miss Gregory suggested that the PA sit in on her weekly conference call with Arborage’s other two directors, a man named Gus who was based in Loch Lomond and one called David, who split his time between the estate and his farm in Norfolk. Miss Gregory introduced the PA, and tartly warned the two men not to monopolise her services, crinkling her eyes at the PA across her conference-room table. ‘Right,’ she began. ‘I… erm, I don’t think Stefan will be joining us so let’s crack on—’
‘I’m here,’ came a man’s voice on the line.
Miss Gregory started in her chair, lifting a hand to her chest. ‘Hi,’ she said, sounding a little reedy to the PA, who watched closely as Miss Gregory pulled herself together, gave herself a little shake, and got down to business.
The call lasted for just over a half-hour, and the two other directors did most of the talking. Stefan, the Marquess, asked the occasional question, and the PA could hear a slight Nordic inflection in his voice. She also saw that each time he spoke, Miss Gregory shifted infinitesimally closer to the conference phone, like a divining rod to water.
At the end of the call, the two other directors signed off and the PA rose, asking if Miss Gregory would like a cup of tea.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, her voice wavering slightly. On her way out, the PA looked back into the room, where Miss Gregory was still looking at the conference phone, now ominously silent. She reached her hand out to it, her fingers hovering in the air, then pressed the disconnect button. Her shoulders slumped and the PA felt a sudden rush of anger toward the Marquess, this invisible man on the other end of the phone, who had said not a word to his fiancée, asked not a single question about how she was.
Her boss was distracted for the rest of the morning, and by afternoon she was positively agitated. Returning with Miss Gregory from a meeting at the farm shop, the PA fell in behind her along the hallway to the office, listening to her on the phone with the estate’s travel booking company.
‘What about the later flight?’ she was saying. See, the PA thought to herself, this is why you need a PA, to do things like this for you. ‘Check business class, then,’ Miss Gregory said, heels clicking against the marble hallway, abruptly becoming muffled as she crossed the carpeted floor of the anteroom. ‘Okay, see if you can get me on standby,’ she began, and then came to a full stop. Peering over her shoulder, the PA saw a man with dark blonde hair sitting on Miss Gregory’s sofa, dressed in a black suit and blue dress shirt.
Miss Gregory made a low noise like a moan and began to move toward him, seeming to lose the strength in her arms as she did. First her phone, then her notebook, then her tablet slipped from her hands, bouncing one after the other onto the carpet as she rushed to the settee, falling to her knees before the man, taking his hands in hers and kissing them.
The man inclined his head to her and the PA quickly looked away, knowing that she shouldn’t be witnessing this. She heard Miss Gregory’s voice, sounding higher than usual, speaking in a combination of English and what the PA could only assume was Swedish. And then the man’s deep reply, also in Swedish. And then nothing.
The PA went to her table, where a box with her things sat waiting for her move to the press office. She picked it up. Again she felt a surge of fury toward the Marquess, for surely this must be he, this man who sat there regal and imperious, expecting Miss Gregory to kneel before him. If it was the last thing she did, the PA thought, she would prove herself to her boss, make herself indispensable, if only to be
in a better position to protect her from him.
The silence got to her as she moved to leave, so the PA risked one last look into the office. To find Miss Gregory on the Marquess’s lap, her heels abandoned on the carpet and her knees tucked up against his chest. His hand was wrapped in her ponytail and he had her bent against the arm of the sofa. He was kissing her, practically devouring her with his mouth, it looked like to the PA. His other hand was moving possessively up Miss Gregory’s ribcage, and her fingers rested just inside his open shirt collar.
He broke off then, pulling her close. And as Miss Gregory buried her head in his neck, the Marquess looked up, saw the PA watching, read her expression. And silently relayed two words in an answering stare of blast-furnace intensity:
She’s MINE.
The PA stepped backward, turned her face away, and quickly left the room.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For two days they went to bed, recusing themselves from the outside world, switching off their phones, seeing no one, ordering meals up from the staff kitchen when they got hungry.
They spent the first day alternately napping, talking and kissing, cleaved together as if each drew life and breath from the other. Lying face to face in the attic bedroom’s wrought-iron bed, they gently undressed each other, tracing one another’s scars. And dealt with other wounds.
‘I was sick,’ Stefan said softly. ‘Sick here.’ He touched his head. ‘And sick here.’ He touched his heart. ‘I had to make myself well before I could come home to you.’ He paused, considering his next words. ‘I thought because I had failed to protect you—’ Luna made a chirp of dissent, but he forged on, ‘—that I was less of a man. But,’ he pressed his forehead to hers, ‘sometimes being a man means letting you do the protecting.’
He twined a strand of her hair with his finger and confessed, ‘I met with a colleague of Christian’s a few times. To talk things through. Does it… make you think less of me, that I needed that?’
‘I – no,’ Luna said vehemently. ‘You think because counselling didn’t work for me that I’d—?’ With shaking hands she reached for his face, kissing him and stroking the hair away from his brow. He exhaled a shuddering sigh and kissed her back.
Later, after she’d crawled on top of him to lie listening to his heartbeat, he said in a lighter tone, ‘I have also had a few visitors, over the past weeks. Supporters of yours eager to remind me of my obligations.’
Luna’s head sprung up. ‘Who? Who? I want to know who my backers are.’
‘Astrid… James, who practically challenged me to a duel in your honour. And Pappa, of course, who I think secretly wishes that he was your Pappa too.’
‘Aww…’ Luna smiled, feeling a little mushy inside.
‘Even a Salonen visit, I had,’ Stefan said eventually, cautiously. Mika, was Luna’s first, pained thought. It must have shown on her face, because he shook his head. ‘Matthias.’
Luna rolled her eyes. ‘Somehow I doubt he came to sing my praises.’
‘He did not,’ Stefan confirmed. ‘Matthias says that you are dangerously reckless, a risk to yourself and others.’ A moment’s silence. ‘He says that his little brother is in love with you, and that you have broken his heart.’
Luna’s eyes met Stefan’s and a wordless communication took place, ending with him pulling her back against his chest, wrapping his arms around her. ‘Anyway, Matthias basically suggested that I should go home and take my woman in hand—’
‘—before she blows up a bank,’ Luna supplied acerbically. ‘Or brings about the fall of Western civilisation.’
‘Something like that,’ Stefan confirmed, his chest rumbling under her ear. He rolled her over then, and reached his arm under her neck, cradling her to him, whispering words of praise for her bravery and strength, her steadfastness in the face of adversity. He lapsed into Swedish, speaking of his terror at the threat of losing her, his joy at being reunited with her.
‘My love, my beauty,’ he murmured, and slid his hand to her cleft. ‘Min käresta, min sköldmö…’ Luna closed her eyes and pressed her nose to his throat, feeling weightless and safe, for the first time in weeks. His fingers fluttered upon her in butterfly-wing touches, followed by smooth, certain circles.
God, he made her feel so lovely, like he lived to patiently, skilfully caress her, to watch as her brow puckered and her mouth fell open in a soundless pant, rejoicing in the moment when his touch took her over the threshold from longing to pleasure. Like he wanted nothing more than to place his mouth on hers when she came, to take her long, moaning cries into himself, to absorb her satiation and feed it back to her.
Thus began what the two of them would later refer to only as ‘the twenty-four hours’, a solid day’s worth of lovemaking in every permutation and combination their healing bodies would allow, till they were sore and drenched in bodily fluids, wrung so dry that they had to phone down to the staff kitchen for liquids, sparkling Swedish water for her and Lucozade for him, which they drank while they carried on fucking.
On the second night, when they’d finally finished having sex every way they could manage, they took a bath together and Stefan lit a fire in the sitting room. They sat down next to each other on the worn velvet settee and linked hands, Luna’s cheek resting on his shoulder. Content not to talk. Replete.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Luna was jogging along a gravel path adjacent to the Orangery. There was a spring in her step, due partly to the fact that she was wearing entirely new running gear courtesy of Stefan, who’d confiscated her University of Manchester hoody and trainers after one particularly muddy spring run. (‘There is never a time when I don’t fancy you, but these…’ he sniffed, lifting a sodden shoe between thumb and forefinger as though it were contaminated with radioactive fallout, ‘these must go.’)
Though it pained Luna mightily to admit it, sometimes clothes did make the runner. She looked and felt the part now, wearing the form-fitting three-quarter-length running tights and contrasting racerback bra top he’d bought her, plus a pair of eye-wateringly expensive running shoes. (‘The kind that, you know, people who run wear,’ he’d explained patiently, like maybe she wasn’t aware they made trainers for that.)
On the opposite side of the broad expanse of green lawn before her, Stefan and a cadre of Arborage security guards had just emerged from the maze, racing at full belt. He’d been training with them since his return in March, working to regain his fitness, and these jaunts had the side benefit of increasing early-morning ticket sales as the Marquess of Lionsbridge’s ever-growing fan base vied for opportunities to witness him in his natural habitat. A whole new hashtag, #welcometomyhome, had been spawned featuring photos and video footage of him that, Stefan complained only half-jokingly, made him feel objectified.
Checking her watch, Luna reckoned she had another twenty minutes or so before he finished his circuit, so she slowed to a walk just past the Orangery, slipped behind a sign marked private – no entry and crouched under the chain hanging across the path.
If she were compelled to choose a single favourite spot on the estate, it would be here, Arborage’s kitchen and nursery garden. A series of six interconnected greenhouses, plus an orchard and five acres of carefully planted beds bordered by railway sleepers, the garden supplied fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs to all of Arborage’s on-site restaurants, as well as the farm shop. It had been the Marchioness’s pride and joy and now Luna hoped to add her own stamp to it with a hydroponic garden that would be connected to the estate’s new fishery tanks, converting waste from the tanks into fertiliser, cleansing and recycling the water. A project both she and Stefan were ‘nerdily excited about’, to use Caitlin’s words.
For now, though, on a sunny June morning, all she wanted to do was walk amongst the rows and rows of flowering thyme, lavender and rosemary, occasionally rubbing her hand along a leaf of sage or basil, inhaling the fragrance on her f
ingers. Many of the cut flowers that decorated the main house were also grown here and this was possibly the best time of year to do what Luna did next: enter the original walled garden dating from the eighteenth century, now given over entirely to the cultivation of Arborage roses. Pink and delicate, rather like a damask rose, they were now in full, fragrant bloom.
Luna sat down on a bench under one of the garden’s brick walls, tilted her face to the sun and closed her eyes, listening to the hum of honey bees, the distant sound of lawnmowers, the occasional chat between garden workers nearby. Feeling, quite frankly, that she was in the most beautiful place not only in England but the entire world, she reflected on the many roses and occasional thorns that filled her life at present:
Rose: Lady Wellstone had emailed the day before to say that Regina was expecting puppies and would she like one of the litter? Yes, she most certainly would, Luna replied immediately, spending the subsequent lunch hour daydreaming about silky spaniel ears and melting spaniel eyes, coming up with a list of possible names commensurate with Regina’s distinguished lineage: Cornelia, Julius, Lucretia…
Thorn: She had yet to run this past Stefan. But she was sure he’d be just as delighted as she about the prospect of their first pet together.
Rose: Following a two-pronged campaign by Luna involving first Stefan and then Lady Wellstone, the Marchioness had also agreed to take up the position of chair of Arborage’s board of trustees. Similarly, Helen had accepted Luna’s invitation to head up a newly established Arborage Volunteers Association.