by Kait Jagger
‘Augusta had faith in me,’ he concluded. ‘Where everyone else saw folly, she saw potential.
‘So, years later, when she tried to warn me away from you, telling me how vulnerable you were, how much your parents’ deaths continued to affect you, I had no reason to doubt her intentions. I swear – you will not believe this, but I swear Augusta herself thought she was saying these things to protect you.’
Luna gave him a hard look and Stefan raised his hands. ‘The point is, I believed her. I trusted her. And I give you my word, Luna, it never occurred to me that she could be lying about Florian.’
He looked her in the eye for a moment, as if gauging how well his account had gone down so far, then continued, ‘So, there I was, wanting many things. Wanting you. Wanting Arborage. And wanting most of all, I admit it, to protect my business. My baby. But Augusta insisted that I cancel my plans for expansion into East Germany in order to give Arborage more of my attention. And so it began. Me running between Berlin and Stockholm and Arborage. The subterfuge and secret discussions with Augusta and always her pressing me to cut my work commitments when that was the last thing I could do.’
He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled through his nose. ‘But these are not excuses. There are no excuses for the way I abandoned you. When Augusta temporarily handed control of Arborage to Florian after Christmas, I assumed she did it as a slap in the face to me. A little reminder that the family business wasn’t mine yet.
‘But why weren’t alarm bells ringing in my head when I learned she’d also asked you to… service him? I knew how much you detested him. I’d seen the way he looked at you. Why didn’t I question it?’
‘You didn’t know what was happening,’ Luna said, unwilling to allow him to shoulder all the blame. ‘I didn’t tell you.’
‘You shouldn’t have had to!’ he practically shouted. ‘It was my responsibility to protect you. I think of what that man put you through, how he almost…’
Luna placed her hand on his on the table and shook her head. ‘I don’t blame you for that. I blame Florian.’ Then added harshly, ‘And Augusta.’
His response was similarly blunt: ‘I blame myself.’ They sat not speaking for some time after that, until he broke the silence.
‘You told me in the garden that you needed to come first in my life, not third after Arborage and work. I…’ He stopped himself, as if dissatisfied with the direction he was taking. Appearing to visibly hit reset, he scooted his chair closer till his knees were resting on the outside of hers, taking her hand from the table and holding it in his own.
‘If you had asked me a year ago,’ he said in a lighter tone, ‘when I thought I would meet a woman and settle down, I would have said… well, if I was honest I would have said I hadn’t given the matter any thought. My entire adult life had been focused on my business, and women were for friends, or colleagues, or sex. Nothing more.
‘Oh, maybe,’ he conceded, ‘maybe if you had really pressed me, I’d have said I hoped to meet a nice Swedish girl when I was thirty-three or thirty-four. And she would be a… solid girl.’ He toyed with Luna’s fingers. ‘A pretty girl, of course,’ he smiled, ‘but maybe a slightly boring girl, who would understand how much my work meant to me and accept that my time for her was limited.’ His smile broadened.
‘And then you met me,’ Luna said.
‘Then I met you,’ he agreed. ‘And you were so unlike anything I had ever imagined for myself that for a while I kicked against what being with you demanded.’ Shaking his head, he clarified, ‘Not what you demanded, Luna, but what loving you, loving you properly, demanded.
‘I made bargains with myself,’ he said, removing his hand from hers and standing it up on its side on the table as if to indicate a line in the sand. ‘I said, “Okay, Stefan, you can be with Luna, but you cannot think about her at work.”’
He inched his hand forward on the table. ‘And then I found myself thinking about you at work.’
Eyes crinkling, he continued in his Stefan-talking-to-Stefan voice, ‘“Okay then, you can occasionally think about her at work, but you won’t change your schedule for her.”’ He slid his hand forward some more. ‘“Okay, you can occasionally think about her at work, and occasionally change your schedule for her, but under no circumstances will you discuss her with your work colleagues like some kind of lovesick schoolboy.”’ He rolled his eyes and said, ‘I think James honestly thought I had gone mad, the way I went on about you. Me, who never talked about women.’
He took his hand off the table and grasped both of Luna’s, leaning down in his chair till his chin was almost resting on them. ‘I don’t want to bargain with myself anymore. I want to change. I want to be a man you are proud to be with.’
‘I am proud of you!’ she protested. ‘I just thought we wanted different things.’
‘Well, now we want the same things,’ he said, lowering his mouth to her hand. ‘You come first, Luna,’ he said against it, his voice raw. ‘First and last and everything in between. And Arborage, my business… none of that matters a damn without you.’
He didn’t lift his head, as if he were afraid to look at her and discover his words hadn’t been sufficient. So Luna extricated a hand from his and placed it on his cheek, stroking his dark blond curls away from his face. He inclined into it, and she was reminded again of a big game cat. Only this time she was not his prey.
He sat up suddenly, reaching for his tablet. ‘I am starting already, you see,’ he said brightly, opening his diary for the coming month and gesturing for her to take a look. ‘See, I am clearing my Fridays for the foreseeable future, to spend with you.’
‘But, Stefan,’ Luna said, eyes worried. ‘My assignment for your father. I have to finish it.’
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘So I will come to you at weekends, or we will meet somewhere in between. We’ll decide as we go along. And from now on we are going to speak on the phone every day.’ Luna pursed her lips, trying not to smile at the inconceivability of this sea change from the man who never phoned and Stefan lifted a chiding finger. ‘No, no, we will speak at least once every day.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Maybe I can even arrange to sometimes work from here. Your broadband connection seems good.’
‘Can you really afford to do this?’ Luna asked. ‘Take all this time off?’
‘Luna,’ he assured her, ‘I do not intend falling in love ever again in my life. Other things can wait for a while.’
But when her face still didn’t lighten, he said, ‘Come, flicka, tell me what’s bothering you.’
‘You’re making all these changes, sacrifices, and you haven’t asked anything of me.’
‘I’m the one who needs to do the most changing.’
‘But I—’ It would be too much to say that Luna felt unworthy of Stefan’s efforts, but listening to him talk about all the different directions he’d been pulled in prior to their break-up, and looking at him now, dark shadows under his eyes, she felt… chastened. She wanted him to know that she could be different too. ‘There have to be things you’d like me to change.’
‘Three things,’ he said, quickly enough that Luna’s lips twitched again; clearly he’d already given the matter some thought.
‘First, I understand why you felt you had to leave me in January, after we’d stood there in that garden and I was too pig-headed to listen to you. But from now on, I promise that if you tell me I’m doing something wrong I will try my best to fix it. Or we will work it through together. Please don’t just leave again. I don’t think my heart could take it.’
He laughed a little at this, but it was a pained laugh and Luna’s own heart compressed as she nodded.
‘Second thing,’ he said. ‘I hesitate to bring this up because it is one of the things I love most about you, the fact that you would sooner gnaw off your own arm than to ask for help. But I want to help you, Luna. And I swear to you, no matter how much I trusted Augusta, if you had said one word to me about what you were going through wit
h Florian, I’d have been on a plane back from Berlin so fast.’
She nodded again, and Stefan paused, as if considering the wisdom of sharing his third thing.
Bright blue eyes meeting hers, he concluded, ‘Everything you accused me of in that garden, I was guilty of. Except for one. You said, “You love me like a child loves a toy.”’
Luna remembered it. It was the only thing she regretted later; the one thing she’d said purely to wound him.
‘I don’t love you like a toy, Luna,’ he said solemnly. ‘You are not a game I have been playing in my spare time. And I know, I know that what you said wasn’t true. But I need you to take it back. Something about the way you said it…’ He pressed a knuckle to his brow, looking almost bewildered. ‘I can’t seem to get it out of my head.’
His voice broke a little on this last word and Luna felt her heart pumping.
‘So I need you to—’ he began.
‘I take it back!’ she cried, half-rising from her chair and throwing her arms around his neck. ‘I didn’t mean it, I take it back.’ She slid to her knees on the floor in front of his chair, clasping her hands around his waist. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I take it back.’
He gathered her to him, kissing her hair, and Luna pressed her cheek against his chest, hearing his heart pounding in answer to hers.
They tidied the kitchen after that, Stefan washing the dishes and Luna drying them. When the last dish was put away, he turned to her over the sink and said, ‘What would you like to do today, flicka? I clearly need to take you shopping for food first.’
Luna finished drying her hands on a dishcloth and turned to him.
‘And then maybe you can take me on a tour of the local area?’ he suggested.
Luna stepped closer to him.
‘Show me some of these magical sheep of my father’s?’ he grinned.
Luna drew so close to him that their chests met.
Taking her point, Stefan sighed and buried his hands in her hair. ‘But not yet,’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ Luna echoed, closing her eyes and pressing her nose into his neck.
Chapter Eight
Luna was lying in front of the wood burner, her naked body bathed in firelight. Sitting cross-legged next to her, and also naked, Stefan was applying steroid cream to the scratches on her chest.
‘So I bought some cream at the chemist,’ she was saying, ‘but that turned out to have lanolin in it, and then I started breaking out in boils.’ Stefan’s fingers delved into a particularly sensitive scratch and she shuddered, arching her back slightly at the pleasure of being tended to.
‘You never considered just… not wearing wool?’ Stefan asked, eyes dancing. Luna drew her gaze away from the light blond hair on his forearms and frowned up at him speculatively. ‘No,’ he answered on her behalf. ‘No, you did not. You said, “I will wear this jumper even if it kills me, because I need to prove my deep and abiding love for Shetland wool.”’
Luna’s frown deepened and she replied, ‘Well, when you put it that way…’ Beginning to see the humour in his portrayal of her, she screwed up her mouth and pressed the back of her palm to it, stretching her other arm over her head and wriggling slightly on the braided rug.
‘When I put it that way you sound a little… overzealous?’ Stefan suggested, dabbing a bit of cream onto Kayla’s love bite on her neck, just for good measure.
‘Committed,’ she corrected him.
‘Crazy?’ he countered.
‘Devoted to my work,’ she concluded. And began to laugh, amazed to hear the sound of it, here in the house where no one laughed.
It was the end of a pleasurably unproductive Sunday. Stefan had insisted on taking her shopping, buying more food than, Luna protested, she could possibly eat. On their way home she took him on a short detour, directing him to the hill overlooking the rocky shore where she’d driven her motorbike the previous week.
The weather was calmer today, overcast but comparatively warm, so they sat on the bonnet of his rented car, Luna telling him about her first, vomit-inducing ferry crossing from Aberdeen to Lerwick, then pointing out the various sheep in the adjoining fields.
‘That’s a smirslet,’ she said, nodding toward a sheep with a black face and white muzzle, before pointing to a dark sheep with white spots. ‘And that one’s a sponget.’ To which Stefan had nodded seriously.
When they arrived home, Liv emerged from the bungalow with a basket of washing. Something about her manner, the keenness of her expression, made Luna wonder if she and her laundry had been waiting for this opportunity.
She pegged out her washing on the line as they began unloading groceries from the car. Smiling at Stefan, Liv said, ‘I see you have convinced Luna to buy food,’ adding teasingly, ‘You may have a long wait for her to cook it for you.’
Stefan, bless him, chose to respond seriously. ‘No, I am cooking for Luna tonight.’
‘And you are visiting for long?’ Liv enquired, fishing now.
‘Till Tuesday.’
Luna lifted her head from the boot, where she was retrieving the last bag, and looked at Stefan quizzically. She had assumed he would have to fly back on Monday morning.
‘I’ve moved a few meetings,’ he explained simply, for her benefit. She tilted her head at him, and for a moment, Liv, the washing line and the entire outside world faded away, with her eyes on him and his on her. After some seconds he remembered himself, saying to Liv, ‘And I will be visiting regularly from now on, to fatten Miss Gregory up.’ He smiled his very best smile, his honeyed one, and Luna wondered fleetingly if it made Liv’s stomach flip the way it did hers.
Despite her best intentions at that juncture – to ask Liv where Malcolm was, to take Stefan along and make introductions, show him Malcolm’s flock – she found herself instead following him into the cottage, drawn to the broad line of his shoulders by an invisible thread connected to the hollow in her chest. Under the lintel and into the hallway, where they simultaneously dropped their bags and Stefan turned around, drawing her swiftly to him with one arm and shutting the door on the outside world, and the washing line and Liv’s startled face with the other.
It happened again while he was cooking later. ‘Spaghetti bolognaise, in honour of your neighbour,’ he joked as he browned beef on the Rayburn. Luna, meanwhile, was struggling to open a bottle of Valpolicella with the lone corkscrew in the cottage, which she’d never had occasion to use before, Dagmar not being much of a drinker and Luna having confined herself to the occasional drink at the Fisherman’s Rest.
Eventually she gave in, holding the corkscrew and bottle out to Stefan, who opened it within three seconds. Somewhere between him opening it and handing it back to Luna, however, their eyes met and locked. Stefan placed the bottle on the work surface and they came together in a rush, chests heaving against one another with unspoken emotions. Luna’s hands trembling as she reached for his nape.
She reached for his hair again now, as she stretched out beneath him in front of the fire.
‘I like this,’ she said, referring to its new length. ‘When did you decide to grow it?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘No time. No time for anything, the way things have been at Arborage.’
Luna hesitated. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
He sighed. ‘Do you want to hear about it? I wouldn’t if I were you.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, worrying even as she said the words that maybe it wasn’t. She had tried hard over the past two months to think about Arborage as little as possible.
‘Things haven’t been great,’ Stefan said, lifting his eyebrows like this was a massive understatement. ‘After you left I was, quite frankly, in no fit state to focus on work, or Arborage, or anything. So I told Augusta that we should postpone implementing Project Mercury. Suffice it to say that she did not agree.’
Project Mercury was the plan Stefan had been working on over the past few years to modernise Arborage, reorganising its management structu
re and winding down unprofitable areas in the estate’s portfolio. Luna could well imagine that the Marchioness wanted no further delays in implementing it, having only waited as long as she did in order to eliminate her brother-in-law Florian from the equation.
‘I came back from a weekend trip to Stockholm,’ Stefan was saying, ‘to find that she had sacked Laurie from the farm shop and Elaine from Events, and told Nigel that we would be expecting him to become a private contractor or his services would no longer be required.’
Luna raised her eyebrows in surprise and Stefan said, ‘Yes, exactly the way it shouldn’t have been done. And then John’s condition deteriorated so I was left to clear up her mess. Three days of convincing Nigel not to quit on the spot and walking him through how to set up his own gardening business, not to mention hiring a new farm shop manager and cobbling together a contingency in Events.’
She refrained from telling him that, based on the evidence she saw at Jem’s party, that contingency wasn’t working very well; it was clearly the last thing he needed to hear.
‘And now it’s becoming a power struggle between me and her. She doesn’t want to loosen her grip on the reins, but she’s distracted. I make a decision while she’s with John in hospital, only to find it countermanded when she returns. I swear there have been times when I’ve seriously considered just walking away, leaving her in the bed she’s made, because more than anything I’m angry with her. I sit in the office with her and she gives me that irritable look of hers and I want nothing more than to wring her neck.’
Luna sat up and retrieved the metal prong for the wood burner, opening its doors and throwing two more bricks of peat on the fire. Behind her, Stefan continued, ‘But then I see her standing beside John’s hospital bed, and I think of James and all she has lost. And is about to lose.’
