The Country Lovers

by Walker, Fiona

  ‘No,’ she kept hers as calm as she could muster, ‘that is because you’re a bastard, Bay.’

  His eyes glittered, fine lines at their edges now and on the forehead above, like music staves. Happy music always played in Bay’s head, Pax remembered – Fats Waller or Louis Armstrong – old-fashioned and jazzy, ready to get the party going. He’d made her entirely happy once. Its simplicity was intoxicating.

  Tell me what to do, Bay, the voice in her head pleaded before she could stop it. Tell me what will make me happy again. Please just tell me.

  She could feel the heat of his body as he lowered his mouth to her ear again. ‘This bastard isn’t ever going to give up on us, you know.’ She felt his fingers thread through hers, raising her ringless right hand to kiss, blue eyes watching her over it with such old-school intensity she wanted to laugh. Yet it caught in her throat because her heart hurt. It literally hurt.

  Tell me what to do! I’m begging you.

  ‘For God’s sake stop looking at me like that, Pax.’

  Hearing voices and laughter, Pax sprang back as Blair and Luca appeared from the arch together, long strides matching, lopsided and mile-wide smiles lined up for comparison, one set in stubble, the other a white-blond beard, both surprisingly genuine.

  ‘Here come Russell Crowe and Gandalf.’ Bay propped a bottle under his arm and straightened his collars, eyes flicking across to meet hers, conveying an urgent farewell.

  ‘Give the lady her wine back!’ Blair called with gravelly amusement.

  ‘Everything okay here?’ Luca’s voice, soft and light by contrast.

  ‘Marvellous! Two old friends getting reacquainted,’ Bay said smoothly, still looking at Pax as he handed her the bottles, mouthing, meet me. ‘We go back a long way.’

  Pax gave a barely perceptible shake of the head, turning away.

  Eager to get going, Blair was already striding towards Bay’s Land Rover. ‘I’m going back a long way – back home, so we’d better make tracks.’

  But Bay – whose manners had always been immaculate – was now shaking Luca’s hand to introduce himself. ‘Your reputation precedes you. I do hope we’ll see you riding out with the Wolds soon.’

  Hugging the wine tightly, Pax counted the seconds until she could be alone with it. One small glass, she promised herself afresh. A dressage measure; just to take the edge off.

  12

  Ash must have been a good soldier, thought Bridge. Talking her through each stage of tidying up her messed-up face with minimal fuss, he was thorough, unhurried and no-nonsense, doing everything by the book from antiseptic swabs to rubber gloves. Not many men looked as unremittingly macho in disposable latex, at least not on their hands.

  Any doubts she harboured about the dangers of receiving unqualified medical treatment – and there were a great many she was too hypnotised to voice – were eclipsed by the sheer presence of the man, as reassuringly in command as a comic strip superhero. Bridge found the combination of trust and fear A-Class, the high making her banter too sharply.

  ‘My face is in your hands, Mr Turner. You do fillers and eyebrow tattooing too?’

  Unsmiling, Ash clearly took his task too seriously for jokes. He’d made her wash her wounds first, scrubbing his own hands at the sink alongside her, field hospital coming to Cotswold cottage. Then he’d carefully cleaned the remaining clotted blood away from her forehead and lip, deliberately exposing the deepest cuts and abrasions, which stung like hell. He treated each with antiseptic, deft and precise. Finally, working quickly, he neatly swabbed and glued, barking at her to stay still.

  ‘It gloody hurts!’ she complained, mouth wedged open by his thumb which, despite the supreme pain and expediency of the situation, still felt regrettably erotic. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Don’t be a wimp,’ he gave her a stern sideways look.

  ‘Ig goo say arly is omming ere?’ She sounded like a dentist’s patient having a filling, but he was obviously practised at interpreting bashed mouths.

  ‘She’s working up at the Gunns’ place. She’ll call you later.’

  ‘Eaning iv Ganine?’

  ‘And helping with the neds.’

  ‘At’s goog.’

  Bridge focussed hard on the thought of Carly. Carly was kind. Carly was her friend. Carly had somehow figured out that her need for Skully’s services were greater than turfing and had sent her husband in as medic. Her hands must be hot. She needed Carly. She’d be gentler than Ash for a start.

  ‘Ucking ouch!’

  ‘Chin up, beautiful. I’ve taken worse myself enough times.’ His accent, pure Comptons, all Cotswold marl and folklore, did nothing to dispel the squirming shame of pain combined with lusty crush.

  They were in the bathroom, which had the best light, still steamed up from her shower. In common with most of the old cottages on Back Lane, it was downstairs in a lean-to extension built off the kitchen. Perching on the bath rim, Bridge was uncomfortably aware that she and Aleš had enjoyed sex in it late last night, lube and intimate toy just out of sight behind the shower curtain.

  ‘You ight a lot then?’ She remembered Mo’s dark talk of high-grade gypsy bouts. ‘Are-uckle?’

  He didn’t answer, eyes close to her skin, focussing on his task. He smelled of menthol shampoo and gum, undercut with the sort of testosterone that was lethal around married women.

  ‘Uz arly ot ind that you ight?’

  ‘You’re not to talk to Carly about fighting.’ The silver eyes fixing hers were gun barrels. Then they moved back to their task, and she could relax, studying his brows at close range, perfectly shaped in a way no man-salon could emulate. There was a bell-bar piercing in one, a thin scar through another. Aleš, who had brawled throughout his teens and twenties, had eyebrows scarred like tyre tracks. Maybe Ash landed more punches than he took.

  ‘Is are-uckle ighting hard?’ she persisted, captivated by the alien world of gypsies slugging it out in secret.

  ‘I don’t fight.’ Ash didn’t blink. ‘I train.’

  She pulled her chin back so he was forced to let go. ‘And mule drugs.’

  The silver guns held her hostage. ‘You want me to finish this or what?’

  She shut up, wincing as he took hold of her chin again, patching up her shredded lip.

  He focussed on his work, head tilting, thick black curls flopping over one steely eye. ‘As soon as Skully figured your old man’s the big Polish bastard, he was happy enough for me to do the honours. He’s crap at this anyway. Thanks to him, Jed looks like Thanos. You’re too pretty to deserve that.’

  As if having him in her house with his thumb in her mouth wasn’t disturbing enough, being called pretty tipped the scale. Bridge stared fixedly at the mouldy air vent to dispel the thrill.

  ‘I don’t get you.’ He reached back for another cotton wool bud, dipping it in antiseptic. ‘If your old man didn’t do this, why hide it?’

  ‘Egoz gy horse did it. And gy old gan has it in for gy horse.’

  The gun barrels levelled on her again. ‘He has a point. Useless buggers, horses.’

  She glared back, antiseptic stinging like mad.

  He raised one perfect pierced brow. ‘You going for a job at the school today, Carl says?’

  ‘Gat goo.’

  ‘That too,’ Ash translated, bemused. ‘You’ll walk it, scar-face.’

  ‘Ost gy onfidence,’ she admitted, appalled to find herself welling up.

  ‘Everyone knows Mrs Bollock’s a lush,’ he stage whispered. ‘Needs someone to tell her what day it is.’ He pressed a latex finger to her throbbing lip to hold it together while the liquid dried.

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘Keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘I’m not telling anyone.’

  ‘I mean,’ he looked at her through his lashes, and she almost fell back into the bath, his sex appeal intravenous, ‘keep your mouth shut while this dries.’

  Lifting his finger, he blew on her lips, as practical as nail-artist sister Janine
drying acetate. Bridge’s head, heart and pelvis spun like a trio of glitter balls.

  Stop thinking it, Bridge! He’s forbidden fruit.

  Beyond the obscured glass window, one of the neighbours’ dogs was barking to be let in, an unfamiliar yapping. It wasn’t any of Flynn’s pack of terriers, who always travelled with him in the back of his farrier’s pickup. He’d be taking Petra’s mare’s shoes off now, she remembered. Carly was holding the Gunn kids’ ponies.

  Ash’s thumb was still on her lip, his eyes on her face, and she felt a pulse start throbbing somewhere it wasn’t allowed.

  Stop it, Bridge! You’re mother to two beautiful children. You and your loyal husband made love in this very bathroom last night. Talk to him about his wife.

  ‘Carly says you might be training to be a farrier?’

  ‘Keep your mouth still.’

  ‘Talk to me about it, then.’

  He sucked his teeth. ‘Not much to say. I prefer training in the gym. End of.’

  ‘To be a fitness instructor or for bare-knuckle fighting?’

  ‘Stop talking.’

  She nudged her eyebrows encouragingly.

  ‘Sign up to be my first customer, if you like. You could do with a workout.’

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Shoeing neds is back-breaking. Flynn don’t smell great, neither.’

  Ash, by contrast, smelled fantastic, all that mint and testosterone seeing off her bathroom’s ageing reed diffuser. She sniffed appreciatively.

  He tilted his head back to admire his handiwork. ‘You’ll do. You can talk now.’

  Belligerently, Bridge said nothing.

  ‘You’re a funny one.’ The corners of his lips curled just slightly – or it could be a trick of the light. His face had a mask-like quality, as though his feelings were buried deeper than an arms dump. ‘C’mon, say something so I can see this lip move.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Whatever uses it. F words are good.’

  ‘You want me to talk dirty?’

  ‘Consonants that make your smackers pop: B, P, F, M, W.’ He pronounced them phonetically, his lip movements exaggerated.

  ‘All right, Henry Higgins,’ she laughed. ‘Body perfect farriers make women horny.’

  ‘That a fact?’ He was giving her that look again, the one that made all her forbidden bits prickle.

  ‘Too right it’s a fecking fact. Look at myths right back through history from the Iron Age, and you’ll find the blacksmith’s always bang there at the centre; bang, bang, bang on his anvil, the big hero, seeing off the devil, shoeing the gods’ horses or making kings’ magical swords. Why do you think we strike while the iron’s hot and go at it hammer and tongs? I don’t want to ride roughshod over your plans, Ash, or see you with too many irons in the fire, but let’s cut to the quick, farriers were the first mortal celebrities and superheroes – still are round here. Great arses, big trucks, cute dogs, all fire and sparks and wads of cash. If you want your average Cotswold wife at your feet offering you riches, forget being a personal trainer, shoe her fecking horse. Your wife’s not wrong. Even your name’s fecking perfect, Ash. You could make a killing round here, the war hero in the leather apron. Shame you can’t see it.’

  ‘Okay, you can stop talking now.’ He gave a quick smile and a dismissive nod.

  ‘Sure?’ She felt she was just getting into her stride.

  ‘It’s holding fine. You always that gobby? Should have glued your lips together.’

  ‘You can fuck off.’ Feeling her face grow hot, realising she must have banged on wildly, Bridge reached up to her mouth with tentative fingers. Whilst still trout-pout swollen, it was remarkably smooth.

  ‘Kissable…’ Ash admired his handiwork with the detachment of a tattooist who’s just inked MUM on a bicep.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said with feeling. ‘That’s amazing. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Let’s say it’s a favour I’ll call back in.’

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘I’d better get going.’ As he stood up, the shower curtain shifted and, with a clatter, Aleš’s favourite sex toy was knocked into the bath, a shiny purple anal plug.

  Ash raised his perfect pierced eyebrow once more.

  ‘Rubber duck.’ Bridge brazened it out, springing up to lead the way out through the bathroom door.

  He followed.

  Racing through the cottage as though it was on fire, her libido flapping and buzzing like a trapped aviary in her jogging trousers, Bridge now found her fantasy figure all too bloody real. And she was blushing, that wretched giveaway face-stain of hers. She needed make-up on and she needed it fast.

  ‘I’ll show you out.’

  ‘You do that.’ He overtook her at a leisurely walk, turning in the door, his bulk barring her from the latch. ‘Put antiseptic on it every day.’

  She nodded. ‘Thanks again!’

  ‘And don’t go kissing anyone.’ He reached up to test the patched-lip with his thumb. It rested there too long, his eyes almost crossing as they watched its tip tracing the moist delineation between dry pout and wet mouth.

  Without thinking, she sucked it. The sexual rush was fantastic.

  The thumb was removed.

  ‘If you ever do that again,’ he said very slowly, ‘I can’t promise I’ll be this good.’

  After he’d gone, pickup engine snarling away towards Broadbourne, she leant against the back of the door, breathing deeply. Bloody, muddled-up spell.

  ‘Bridge!’

  She looked around in shock. A ghost?

  ‘Get over here! I can here you fecking panting.’

  Bernie was still on FaceTime.

  ‘I’ve had a shower and a run since you answered this call, you cow. Show me your face.’

  She held up her phone.

  ‘Where d’they fecking go?’ Bernie demanded in shock. ‘You looked like you’d been bitch-slapped by Wolverine half an hour ago.’

  ‘That man’s a magician. Shit, Bernie, tell me to get a job at a nice wee school and behave myself and never do the bad, bad thing.’

  ‘Don’t do the bad thing.’ Her mirror image looked grainily bemused on screen.

  ‘Thanks.’ Cutting the call, Bridge fanned her face with the phone, not sure she could trust herself.

  *

  Cheeks bulging and cake crumbs on his chin, Lester looked uncharacteristically shifty when Ronnie swept into his ward of four, weighed down with magazines, Fray Bentos tins in the Bag for Life, Stubbs gyrating in an old holdall slung over her shoulder, his nose already threading through the broken zip and beneath her arm.

  ‘Can’t stay long,’ she said, plonking herself down on the chair.

  Lester nodded. ‘Of course not, with the Australian visiting.’

  She gave him a sharp, suspicious smile and watched him pick a chocolate chip from his pyjamas. ‘If you’re talking about Blair, I’ve not seen him since New Year.’

  She’d missed him. She missed him.

  ‘Sold the Austens that rangy filly out of our Master Imp mare. Nice sort.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Drove her up today.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Ronnie wondered if Lester’s new-found Googling skills had been on overdrive.

  Aware that he had her full attention, he tilted his head, deflecting. ‘Pax keeping well?’

  ‘Much better,’ she said briskly, wishing she believed it.

  He admired the front covers of The Field and Country Life before setting them aside. ‘Not got her on a horse yet, I’ll wager. Too busy worrying about her boy. Hardest on children, divorce.’ He gave her a penetrating look.

  She gave him one back. ‘Not if the marriage is dead.’

  The bedclothes rustled crossly. ‘Still, sensible looking into the village school for him.’

  ‘Is she?’ Ronnie was astonished.

  ‘Headmistress there is a rare sort, I’m told. Not the most discreet, but strong on old-fashioned values. Very fond of parki
n. They have actors’ and lawyers’ children there.’

  Ronnie hadn’t thought him interested in anything in the village unconnected to four legs. This new-found, garrulous Lester was a revelation, not unconnected to epic amounts of recent anaesthesia and analgesia.

  There was an unfamiliar Tupperware tub on his bedside table, lid bulging beneath its baked contents. ‘Lester, has Pip been here?’

  He sucked his teeth, reaching a hand out to Stubbs’ head, the creases on his face folding in defensively. ‘Hear the Irish lad’s been on the stallion this morning.’

  ‘Good grief, the spies are out. Tell me, has Pip got a new job? With MI5 maybe?’

  ‘Useless with a shavings fork, that woman.’ His tongue probed his cheeks for the last cake traces. ‘The Turner girl’s a harder worker. Better not leave it any longer to snap her up. There’s others have their sights on her.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Hard workers get noticed in a village.’

  ‘Well, Carly hasn’t come back to help us.’

  ‘Have you asked her?’

  ‘Pax insists we can’t afford anyone else.’

  ‘Pay her my wage; I’m no good to you while I’m in here.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lester.’

  ‘Irish fellow’s not one of those as picks up a broom for the love of it.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. And we have Pax too.’

  ‘She’ll run.’

  ‘Of course she won’t.’

  ‘Just like her mother, that one.’ He gave the bedsheets a fractious tug. ‘Did you deal with the letters?’

  Ronnie started guiltily. Those confounded letters. ‘I will, I promise.’

  He glared at her.

  ‘Pax is way too distracted to nose around your cottage, Lester.’

  ‘Give the Turner girl a job. You need time to sort your family out.’ He reached out his old-fashioned pocket diary and dictated a telephone number which she obligingly fed into her phone.

  ‘Call her, then.’ Lester looked so old and frail in his striped pyjamas, she couldn’t bring herself to argue the point.

  ‘We can’t afford more staff.’ She lifted the phone to her ear, grateful for Carly’s monotone announcing she couldn’t answer her phone. ‘Voicemail. I’ll text her later.’ Relieved, she offered the ultimate pacifier to take his mind off it. ‘Will you teach young Kes to ride when you come home? I don’t think Luca’s terribly keen.’