‘So who is this?’ Joanna had wound herself around Jackson the moment she’d seen him, practically dragging him inside and out of his coat, and kissing both of his cheeks feverishly. But even in the first throws of love, Joanna was not blind to a new male specimen standing in the hallway.
The handyman stood looking rather awkward, with his hands in his pockets, glancing around at the house, finding a particularly fascinating bit of cornicing to focus on as the women rather obviously studied him. He was a little younger than Stephen, probably more or less Lydia’s own age, with longish, dark curly hair and eyes as black and deep as the waters of the lake at the bottom of the garden. A growth of stubble added just the right finishing touch to his windswept look, which, even in his sensible country-person snow wear, had quite an impact on the girls.
‘Blimey, you’ve brought us Heathcliff!’ a slightly tipsy Lydia found herself saying out loud, drawing the attention of the handyman from the ceiling to her flushed face. ‘Er … um. No offence, or anything.’
‘None taken,’ he said, with a smile, his accent pure Cumbrian. ‘But you need to go back down south a hundred miles or so, if you want real Brontë Country.’
Lydia was surprised, and then in turn horrified that she was surprised he’d even heard of Wuthering Heights. As if he might be as wild and feral in all respects as he looked, and hadn’t bothered going to school as he was too busy out killing deer with his bare hands, which as it happened wasn’t such a terrible image.
‘Are you sure you’re qualified to look at my boiler?’ Katy asked him, the whiskey making her perhaps a tad more confrontational than was polite. Joanna and Alex cracked up, giggling like schoolgirls. ‘Because, I have children in this house, and despite their father’s insistence on poisoning them with additives, I do not wish them, or any of my friends, to be killed in an explosion.’ She finished off her statement with a rather wayward point in the general direction of the boiler, followed by a little hiccup.
‘Sorry, mate.’ Jim clapped the handyman on the shoulder. ‘Wife appears to be a bit rat-arsed.’
Lydia liked the handyman’s twisty-mouthed, repressed smile. He was trying very hard not to laugh at them, which oddly enough only added to his allure.
‘I’m Corgi registered, for installation and maintenance,’ he told her politely. ‘My name’s Will, Will Dacre. I’ve got my paperwork, if you want to have a look?’
He rooted about in his tool kit, and produced some papers, which Katy took off him and scrutinised for several seconds before turning them the right way up and reading them again.
‘Will’s doing us a big favour,’ Jim told his wife, depositing Jake unceremoniously on the floor and dropping a heavy arm around Katy’s shoulder’s, knocking her a little off balance. ‘Not only did we have to drag him away from his lunch, it took us about an hour to walk back, and only partly because we are quite drunk. The snow is mental, plus Will here reckons it’s going to chuck it down some more in a minute. So the very least we owe the man is a drink and a hot dinner.’
‘Do you understand the weather, Will?’ Joanna fluttered her lashes, letting loose her hold of Jackson a little. ‘Does your country upbringing mean you are terribly in tune with nature?’
‘No, but I do have a weather app on my iPhone,’ Will said. That twisty, trying hard not to laugh smile appeared again.
‘So anyway, be nice to him, wife!’ Jim commanded Katy.
‘I suppose he looks qualified,’ Katy said, eyeing Will suspiciously. ‘And don’t call me wife.’
‘Right, men, draw your torches, let us commence to the cellar and fix shit!’
‘Don’t let him touch anything,’ Katy warned Will. ‘That’s how it got broken in the first place. ‘I’ll make you some coffee.’
‘Alcoholic coffee!’ Jim shouted, as Stephen blew Lydia a kiss and followed the others towards the cellar door.
‘Oh, my God,’ Alex said. ‘We are all going to die.’
‘Still, the handyman’s a bit of a shag, isn’t he?’ Lydia commented, her tongue loosened by whiskey, just at the precise moment Will walked back in to retrieve his tool kit. The girls hooted with laughter, Katy snorting through her nose, Joanna doubled up as Lydia stood there, two bright spots of colour igniting on her cheeks.
‘I’ll take that a compliment,’ Will said, picked up his back and headed back to the cellar.
After Lydia had banged her head several times against the nearest wall, and the others had mostly stopped pointing and laughing at her, they came to the collective conclusion that it was probably a good idea to sober up, at least temporarily, so that they stopped trying to throw themselves at the local hunk and at least tried to appear to be respectable grown-up women.
Katy sent Jake off to colour something with Tilly, and Alex went along to ensure that, this time, they didn’t colour in the enormously expensive reproduction wallpaper in the dining room, although she grumbled about always being the one to miss out on all the fun.
‘Right, I’ll start dinner – and Lydia, would you mind lighting the fires in the bedrooms, just in case Heathcliff down there doesn’t get the pilot light going.’
‘He can light my fire any time,’ Joanna giggled, peering out of the window where a new snowfall was being dashed against the glass by merciless winds. ‘With any luck, we’ll all be snowed in together and we can devour him whole, starting at his toes.’
‘You are doing the veg,’ Katy informed Joanna, dumping one pile of potatoes and one of carrots in front of her.
‘Doing the veg, you say?’ Joanna seemed to find it a difficult concept to grasp. ‘You know what you need? You need an EasyPeel Automatic Potato peeler, only fifteen ninety-nine, and with ten pounds worth of attachments absolutely free – yes, free, if you order before four p.m.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Katy said, ‘because I’ve got a peeler. It’s you. Get on with it, it will do you good to get your hands dirty, for once.’
‘Anyway Jo, why are you letching over Heathcliff? Aren’t you supposed to be in love?’ Lydia reminded her friend.
‘Yes, Lydia, I am totally in love. As are you, aren’t you? But how did you so succinctly put it? That Will is a bit of a shag, isn’t he?’
Lydia found that there was nothing so effective as several large glasses of very nice whiskey when it came to taking the edge off her situation. Here she was in Joanna and Jackson’s room, ignoring the rumpled bedclothes on the bed behind her and the trail of underwear Joanna had left across the carpet, and feeling really rather Zen about it. Perhaps it had been the look on Joanna’s face when she’d been talking about Jackson, or the news that he planned to take Joanna back to New York. Either way, no matter how she felt or thought she’d felt about him in the past, that moment in her life was gone now. As Lydia inserted the fire lighters in among the logs, as Katy had shown her, she thought that, perhaps, as long as she remained permanently ever so slightly drunk on very good whiskey from now until the end of all eternity, she’d eventually be fine about it, and would maybe even possibly be a bridesmaid at Jackson and Joanna’s highly alliterative wedding.
Lydia sat back on her knees, so engrossed in the tiny lick of fire creeping its way across the wood that she didn’t notice the door open and shut behind her.
‘It’s a long time since I’ve found you in my bedroom,’ Jackson said, making her jump.
‘God, you gave me a fright,’ Lydia said, beginning a smile before remembering her new whiskey-fuelled resolution. ‘Sorry, Katy sent me off to be fire monitor. I’ll get out of your way.’ The room span a little as Lydia got to her feet, forcing her to take a moment and wait to find her feet.
‘Don’t rush off,’ Jackson said. ‘Jo’s up to her elbows in potato peelings. Let’s talk.’
Lydia sighed, forcing herself to look Jackson in the face – still that same boyish smile, those intense blue eyes, the look that made you feel like you were the only girl in the world, even though there was solid proof to the contrary.
‘I just can’t
believe you’re here,’ Jackson said, looking her up and down with such close scrutiny that Lydia felt uncomfortable. ‘You look exactly the same; you look beautiful. I’ve missed you, Lydia.’
Lydia raised her eyebrows, wishing her feet would move from this spot to which they seemed rooted.
‘I know what you must be thinking, but you’re wrong,’ Jackson said. ‘I didn’t just disappear, or hide. That night, the night you insisted on going home to work on a case, I got a call from my mom. Dad had had a massive heart attack; it was touch and go. I had to go to the airport and get on a plane and deal everything else out later. All I could think about was being with my family. I never imagined it would be the end of us. I never meant for that text I sent you to be the last.’
‘Really.’ Lydia crossed her arms. ‘So what happened, then? You suffered temporary amnesia about how to use a phone and your dad made a miraculous recovery?’
Jackson dropped his eyes from hers ‘Hardly. It was the worst time of my life. He hung in there for a while, and we got to take him home, but he was very sick. A few weeks later, he was gone … I wanted to call you, to speak to you. But my mom needed me, and there’s so much to deal with when someone dies. Not just the emotional stuff. I had to arrange my father’s funeral, support Mom while his estate was settled, try and get used to the idea that the big, brash bull of a man I’d worshipped wasn’t in the world any more. That kind of blotted everything out for a while …’
Chastened, Lydia saw the shadow of pain pass across his face as he remembered his father’s death. She couldn’t help but feel sympathetic, thinking back to Alex having to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death, emotionally, practically and bureaucratically. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered, feeling her heart melt a little at Jackson’s confession. She knew he was telling the truth about his father, at least. Or if he was lying, he deserved an Oscar for his performance. No, it must be true. After all, no one would lie about such a thing. But even now she knew what had happened, there was one thing that bothered her. ‘But why didn’t you call me … after?’
‘Well, the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, and suddenly it felt too late just to call you. After all, I pretty much just left; I know that, even if I did send you a text. Given that, I really thought it was all over for us. In fact, I planned to stay in the US and help my mom, but then I found out that my job was on the line if I didn’t come back to the UK, and Mom told me I had to come back. She knew how much I’d loved London. I’d been talking a little bit about you. She persuaded me to come back, and to come and find you.’
‘You didn’t look very hard, did you?’ Lydia said, unsettled by the way he was looking at her.
‘I did, I came to your chambers, straight from the airport. I saw you with Stephen. You looked so happy, so over “us”. I realised I’d missed my chance and that maybe I didn’t deserve a second one anyway.’
Lydia stared at him, unable to speak. ‘Is that true?’ she said at last.
‘Of course it is,’ Jackson told her. ‘I tried to put losing you behind me. I moved on. I got through a lot of women trying to forget you, Lydia. And then a few months ago, I was at this publisher’s bash, a launch for some chat show host’s novel, and there was Joanna. Beautiful, funny, sweet Joanna. Exactly the kind of woman I wanted in my life if I couldn’t have you. We e-mailed and texted for a while, and then eventually I asked her out on a date. And it turns out that she is pretty great.’
‘She is great,’ Lydia said, still reeling from what he’d told her. ‘She is one of the best people I know. So, let me get this straight, you didn’t call, or text, or even send me an e-mail because you saw me with another man? I mean, what if Stephen had been my brother, or my gay best friend?’
‘I don’t think you’d kiss either of those the way I saw you kissing him,’ Jackson said, wincing as if the memory still grated. ‘No, it was clear to me you’d moved on. And then, when I met you here … Jo’s talked about her girlfriends, about how wonderful you all are and how much I’ll love you all. She calls you “Lyds”. I never made the connection. I never guessed that Lyds was you. Until I saw you, and now …’ Lydia waited. ‘I wasn’t prepared for how I felt when I saw you standing there.’
‘Jackson,’ Lydia warned him.
‘The way I felt about you back then, it hasn’t gone away …’
‘No, Jackson, don’t do this.’
‘Lydia.’ It only took a fraction of a second for Jackson to cross the room and kiss her, but Lydia watched it all as if it was taking place in slow motion. Knowing what was about to happen, unable to react, as those deep blue eyes locked on hers, and she was lost. She felt his arms encircle her, his lips crush against hers, and although rigid with shock for a moment, all too soon her body answered his as she remembered the heat of that lost summer.
‘Hello?’ At the sound of Stephen’s voice, they sprang apart, Lydia pressing the back of her hand to her enflamed lips just as Stephen wandered into the room.
‘There you are!’ He grinned at her. ‘That Will fellow’s done the trick. Got the old boiler going again, so the house should warm up pretty soon. Looks like he’s staying over, too, as the weather’s come in something shocking out there. You want to get down there, Jack, and guard your woman. The girls are all of a flutter over him.’
‘Right, I will.’ Jackson smiled. ‘I just need to …’
‘Oh, sorry, yes, of course, this is your room! Come on, Lydia.’ He picked up Lydia’s limp hand and led her away to their room. The moment the door was closed behind them, he pressed her up against it, burying his face in her neck, his hands instantly finding their way under her jumper.
‘I’ve been thinking about this all day, Lydia,’ he muttered. ‘You’re so sexy …’
‘Um.’ Lydia pushed herself off the door and slipped out from under Stephen’s hands. ‘The thing is, I said I’d help Katy with dinner. And, besides, I’ve been in this old thing all day. Let me make myself a bit more beautiful for you, and then perhaps later …?’
‘It would be impossible for you to look hotter than you do now,’ Stephen said, advancing on her again. ‘I don’t tell you enough how amazing you are, or how much I love you.’ He took her face in his hands. ‘But I do love you, Lydia. I love you very much.’
‘I love you too,’ Lydia replied, the words automatically escaping her lips before she had a moment to think about what they meant or if she were a liar. ‘But I promised I’d help Katy with dinner, so I better not let her down.’
Stephen sighed, sitting down on the bed with a sulky pout. ‘So this is payback for last night, is it? I thought you were the one who was up for a bit of sex,’ he muttered, crossing his arms.
Lydia looked at him, sitting there, slightly drunk and put out by her not putting out. As handsome, as clever and talented as he was, at that moment she could not have been further from loving him, even as a brother or a gay best friend, and the realisation made her feel sick.
‘I’ve got to go and help,’ she said, blowing him a kiss. ‘I’ll see you in a bit.’
Jackson was sitting on top of the stairs when she came out of the room. Shaking her head, Lydia tried to pass him.
‘Did you …?’
‘Just don’t,’ Lydia said. ‘Don’t say anything else to me, Jackson. Nothing. Just leave me alone.’
‘That’s just it,’ Jackson told her as she rushed down the stairs. ‘I don’t know if I can.’
Chapter Eight
In her bid to stay away from traditional Christmas food until at least Christmas Eve, Katy had used her retro oven to bake a whole salmon in a salt and herb crust, stuffed with homemade black olive pesto, and served it with a selection of roasted root vegetables, murdered by Joanna’s own fair hand.
After making her escape from both Jackson and Stephen, Lydia, utterly confused and slightly hungover, had discovered there was nothing very much to do in the kitchen after all, and so she helped Tilly set the table in the grand dining room.
�
�Sometimes,’ Tilly told her, as she lined up the knives perfectly, in the way that only a daughter of Katy would, ‘Mad Molly peers in through the window with her hair all dripping, and begs to be let back in. But you mustn’t let her come in, because if you do, she will kill you until you are dead.’
Frowning, Lydia polished the glasses as Katy had instructed her, a set for red wine, another set for white and then tumblers for water. Katy liked a lot of glasses. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Jake,’ Tilly said, suddenly rushing to draw the heavy red velvet curtain against any possible sightings of Mad Molly.
Lydia scooped Tilly up into her arms and pulled out one of the heavy dining chairs to sit down with the little girl on her knee.
‘You know Jake is just trying to scare you, because he’s your big brother and it’s sort of in his job description, don’t you?’
Tilly stared at her as if she were an idiot. ‘Jake hasn’t got a job. He’s a child.’
‘What I mean is, Jake is just making up stories. There is no Mad Molly, Tilly. She’s pretend, like Rapunzel or … Cinderella.’
‘Cinderella is not pretend and neither is Mad Molly,’ Tilly said, her blue eyes solemn. ‘She’s buried in the garden!’
‘Nonsense,’ Lydia said. ‘Honestly, I’m going to talk to your mummy about this …’
‘About what?’ Katy asked, as she came in with a tray of silver-potted, decanted condiments, looking much more relaxed now that the heating was on again.
‘Jake’s told Tilly that Mad Molly is buried in the garden! No wonder the poor child comes into your room at night! You need to have a word with him, Katy.’
‘Ah,’ Katy said, setting down the salt and pepper, precisely in the centre of the table. ‘The thing is, she is. Well, not Mad Molly, there is no Mad Molly. But, well, there is a Margaret Drake, who this half of the hotel was built for, and she is sort of buried in the garden, up the hill behind the house. It was her favourite spot, apparently.’ Katy smiled.
The Night Before Christmas Page 11
