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.”
“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.
She stopped at Stag Cottage only long enough to drop her bags and change into walking clothes, then she headed out, needing to think.
Her path took her, as it often did, beside the river. The walking path was a favorite. There was a pair of swans that hung around, and she took out the whole wheat bread she’d brought specially and tossed them a few pieces.