Heart of the Cotswolds: England

by M. L. Buchman

  It did smell deliciously male though. Just like…

  Then she focused on the narrow space by the foot of the bed.

  Aaron! (Aaron Aaron) some ridiculous part of her brain echoed though she wasn’t sure why. He was stretched out on the floor with a pair of rolled-up pants for a pillow and a jacket pulled over him for a blanket.

  And she was in his bed wearing bra and panties and a t-shirt she didn’t remember putting on.

  “Jane, you ignorant slut.” The old Saturday Night Live line didn’t feel any better than the first time she’d heard it. Debbie had discovered it online, of course, and used it at every opportunity since. Jane was surprised her sister hadn’t worked it into last night’s toast. No, because then she would have had to say Jane’s name. Having her sister proven right about the ignorant slut part wasn’t helping matters.

  Jane remembered a kiss. At least she was fairly sure that she did. A kiss of cherry and dark chocolate. There had definitely been moonlight involved, or at least in her fantasy there had been.

  And a second kiss. One that had more flesh taking part in it. A kiss in between a low voice coaxing her out of her dress, which she suspected hadn’t been hard, and into this t-shirt, which she vaguely recalled protesting. She’d bet good money that her protests last night had nothing to do with team affiliations.

  What was the protocol in this situation? Aaron Mason had…

  Jane, you ignorant—

  She opted for the chicken’s way out.

  Ducking out into the hall, she changed from t-shirt to dress at the top of a narrow, extremely steep stairwell that threatened to pitch her overboard at every breath. She dumped the Boston Red Sox shirt against the door where he’d find it, and bolted.

  Three floors down the twisting stair, she stumbled into the shadowed pub from last night where she’d first met him. Jane slipped through the closed pub and out into the dawn light. She’d have run, if she could. Her head and her stability, even on mid-heels, was having nothing to do with that. How much had she had to drink?

  Too much because her memory was blurred? Or not enough because she’d woken up with the vague memory of a roaring kiss that ran heat all up her body even now?

  If that sliver of a memory had survived her drunken episode, what had the kiss really been like? Too bad she’d missed it.

  Aaron worked on the wall. The ancient dry-laid stone fences crisscrossed the Cotswold landscape in every direction. With no mortar to hold them, building a traditional stone wall was as much art as science. Rebuilding one was art, science, and a great deal of manual labor.

  First, the old, tumbledown wall—torn apart by ivy in some places, by weather and shifting soil in others—had to be disassembled. It was always a surprise to him what a great mound of stone came out of a wall four feet high and eighteen inches wide. The Cotswold walls, unlike the gray fieldstone ones of his parents’ Vermont farm, were made of three walls, not one. The two outer layers were of laid stone, then there was a several inch gap in the center that was filled with all the smaller limestone rubble—each piece of which was handset rather than dumped in.

  He’d been working with Trent, a lifelong mason, for almost three months now and the walls still felt wrong. A Vermont wall was anchored with one- and two-man stones—named for how many men it took to lever one into place with a pry bar. A good wall was all about well-placed smaller chinking stones to keep the bigger ones in alignment. Here the stones were consistently a few inches thick, moderately flat, and rarely more than a foot square—one- or two-handed stones.

  Trent had no use for “all that metric crap,” not for wall building. Aaron had teased him for using something as modern as the English foot rather than the Roman pes. The old man’s face was lined enough that it had been hard to tell if he smiled at that or not.

  “You really are American,” Trent greeted him from across the wall Aaron was working on.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s Saturday. No Englishman works on a garden wall on a Saturday unless he’s some Londoner down for the weekend looking to get his hands dirty. Only an American does that when stonework has been his doings for all the rest of the week.”

  Aaron merely shrugged as he knelt down to scrape the bottom of the shallow trench into the right shape for the first stone. His knee and hip stung after last night’s abuse, but pain was an old friend and he didn’t feel the need to be sharing that with Trent.

  “Nothing better to do on a Saturday.”

  By training he was a very light sleeper, but still Jane had slipped out without rousing him. Of course he didn’t usually lie awake half the night telling himself not to climb into bed with a drunken woman.

  Jane had been a vision in the unexpectedly simple, white cotton underwear that she’d worn beneath the stunning dress. A vision that had wrapped her arms around him and offered a full body kiss. He’d let himself get lost in the feel of her skin, of her body and lips pressed against him, so soft, so alive. He’d forgotten what that felt like to hold a woman so close as if to never let her go. In her moderate heels, they’d matched in height. Barefoot, she was shorter, softer, more vulnerable, and it had fed his need for her until it was almost intolerable.

  A slight shiver had run through her: from being mostly naked in his cool room, the narrowness of her escape from the wedding, or some backlash from all the alcohol she’d kept finding despite his best efforts to divert the flow. He didn’t know, but it had been enough to break the spell. She’d been incoherently argumentative when he pulled one of his t-shirts over her head. He’d thought to reach under and undo her bra, but didn’t trust himself. It hadn’t mattered, Jane had been asleep before she hit the sheets.

  And he’d sat in the chair for hours watching her as the moonlight shifted across the bed through the unshuttered window.

  There’d never been a woman in this room, not with him at least. Bridget had offered a time or two—though he was fairly sure that she’d just been sassing him. The longer he stayed here and watched her and the barman, the more he suspected that Hal was a very lucky man. There hadn’t been a woman for Aaron since before the night in the Yemen desert that had ripped him from his one true calling and slammed him into a hospital and rehab for endless months.

  And there’d never been a woman like—

  “Doing a bit of dreaming there, boy.” Trent sat down on a pile of the old stone and began hand-rolling one of his vile cigarettes.

  Aaron selected a couple of good-sized stones for the base layer. They were particularly rough on the bottom side, so they’d grip well against the hard-packed soil.

  “Heard you were up to the manor.”

  Small town, small news moved fast. He knew that from growing up in the five-hundred-person town of Jay, Vermont. Fosse-on-the-Wold was no bigger. Hal, Bridget, or any of the dozen locals who’d been in the pub when they left could be the source. Aaron grunted a stone into place.

  “Might have heard there was a pretty lady on your arm most of the night.”

  Aaron wondered at the news source for that. One of the waiters? Half the town had been called in on the preparation for the event, could have been anyone. He found a stone that he knew Trent would have used, it was a good enough fit. But Trent would never let a trainee like Aaron use because it wasn’t the perfect stone. He tossed it aside and prowled the pile until he found the best one, half hidden by where Trent had placed his foot on it. He yanked it free and set it in place. A nice tight fit.

  “Not prying into your affairs, mind.”

  Yeah, right.

  “But it seems about time you had one, boy.”

  Not with a woman like Jane Tully. And not with a woman that had bolted away from him the moment she was sober enough to think straight.

  A massive bird blew out of the brush at Jane’s feet with more commotion than a rabid Atlanta Braves fan would make if the team ever made it to the World Series again.

  She jerked to a halt, her eyes crossing at the pheasant—beatings its
wings hard to get away from her. She hunched for a moment, half expecting the roar of a shotgun like in all those English manor movies, but the pheasant flew on unmolested.

  She bent down, placing her hands on her runner’s tights, and hung her head. No point in checking her pulse rate now (it would be right off the charts). She remained head down until her headache returned to merely catastrophic. The aspirin hadn’t dented it and the orange juice with dry toast wasn’t helping much either.

  Run through the pain.

  What a stupid plan, Jane Tully.

  She checked her watch. Officially one of her slowest miles…ever. And that was despite running her most upbeat music list (at a very low and soothing volume).

  No, wait, she’d recalibrated her phone’s running app to kilometers on the flight over. That was before she found out England still used miles for distance even though almost everything else had made the transition to metric, and she hadn’t reset it back to miles yet.

  Kilometers were shorter, which meant it was an okay mile. No, the other way round. It was worse than her worst mile ever. She might as well be crawling for all of the progress she was making across the Cotswold countryside.

  Debbie and Geoffrey were thankfully off on a Debbie-designed honeymoon and wouldn’t be back for weeks from “Dear Charlie’s” motor yacht currently circling Italy. Debbie had said it was eighty meters long. Two-hundred-and-sixty feet hadn’t sounded likely, until her sister listed off the swimming pool, grand piano, jet skis, movie theater for twenty, servants (of course), and other amenities that every newlywed couple needed to find a happy start together.

  Jane would worry about finding somewhere else to stay after she survived her run. As consolation she noted that, if she didn’t survive the run, it would save her the effort of finding another place. She certainly couldn’t stay at the manor, with Debbie gone and the wedding over. Especially not with the other two worm sons still in residence. That had become abundantly clear this morning over breakfast when Worm Two had tried to grope her despite their mutual hangovers. She’d felt no need to explain why he was curled up in a fetal position on the hard stone floor when a servant came in with the breakfast he’d ordered.

  Jane’s own wedding would be simple. A few close friends. Good food.

  No champagne.

  Any attempts to recall how much she’d had to drink always blurred after her arrival at the pub. Most of the evening blurred at that point.

  Except for one thing.

  Handsome, alpha sexy men never paid attention to her, except the ones hoping she’d be an easy lay (which she never was, not even when she tried to be). And they never ignored Debbie’s come-all-ye-with-a-Y-chromosome pitch.

  Yet, Aaron didn’t blur. He…

  And she was right back where she’d started, looping together the bits and pieces of last night that she remembered. She flexed her left hand. It was as if the entire night had been focused down to the memory of her hand tucked in the crook of his elbow. Everything else was a mash-up of varying unclarity, but she’d bet she could account for every single change in his mood through her left palm.

  Except for the kiss.

  That too was a blur, of a different kind.

  She started up the lane once more—at least she supposed it was a lane because it was paved, but it was hard to imagine anything bigger than a MINI Cooper car fitting on it. Sheep might travel three abreast, but not four.

  Right. Maybe that’s why it was such a slow mile (because it couldn’t be her raging hangover). It was because of all of the impossibly cute lambs, prancing about under the wild-cherry blossoms.

  She was running (perhaps too strong a word for it) through a land of rolling hills, English houses of yellow stone, perfect gardens, and everywhere she turned were sheep and lambs. Black-faced, freckle-faced, and plain white sheep, each with a number spray-painted on its side in neon colors. The lambs too, some barely old enough to walk, already had numbers of their own as well. It was as if they were born with neon numbers already in place. The older lambs either chased her along the other side of the rough stone fence or scattered at her approach, all in response to some sheepy instinct she didn’t understand.

  Like last night when Aaron’s lips had—

  Damn it!

  Looping again.

  Glimpses of a cottage in the distance had her trotting (still too strong a word) down one lane and up another to reach it, but the cottage teased and held its distance. Most of the Cotswold houses were straightforward, square-set places. One or two stories, a slate or tile roof; they were beautiful with age and charm. Occasionally one was done in thick thatch, but they were rare. This one promised more. A fanciful window seen between two maples. A small spire that peeked over a nearby shed.

  Spotting a narrow footpath that appeared to be heading in the right direction, she turned down it. Birdsong roared out of the bordering hedgerows that blocked any view to either side. It was loud enough to overpower her running playlist.

  “Birds!” Last night’s laughter came back to her and she turned the playlist off. Aaron beside her. His strong arm keeping her steady. His—

  The hedgerow ended as abruptly as if it had been torn away.

  And she was back on that same lane where the pheasant had startled her earlier. Somehow she’d come full circle, completely missing the cottage the first time. She must have been blind because it was right there.

  The cottage was far cuter than anything she’d imagined. Perhaps it had been transported here while her back was turned, because she couldn’t think of how else she could have missed it.

  Sure you can, Jane. Head down. Playlist on. More concerned about your time and distance than—

  She struggled to shut out the words but they wouldn’t stop.

  —than having a life.

  Even Larry the fornicator had told her that when she’d seen him in court that last time. His calling her a “chilly bitch” was now permanently inscribed on the court’s records. As if she was the cause of his seeking underage girls for sex. He was a complete sicko, but it didn’t stop his words from rattling around in her head.

  She had a heart. She knew it! Even if she wasn’t sure where she’d left it along the way.

  The cottage’s stonework was obviously very old. There was a roughness to the stone, and thick green lichens growing like living paint swatches that newer work didn’t have. Facts that she wouldn’t have recognized before Aaron’s tour of the manor house last night.

  Maybe she didn’t mind so much how often he was invading her thoughts, because every time they were oddly good memories.

  The cottage. She’d been right about the fancifulness. It had leaded glass windows of diamond panes. A corner turret climbed upward, too small for a stairway, perhaps even too small for a single chair, but it would flood the interior with light throughout the day. The door was darkly stout with swirling ironwork; if it was circular, it would have belonged in Hobbiton. The entry was framed by two ancient yew trees and looked like the entry to Tolkien’s Mines of Moria but back in happier times. She inspected the door lintel but could see no elvish runes that might say, “Speak, friend, and enter.” Still, it felt as if the words were there.

  The roof was thickly thatched, creating deep curves and welcoming hollows. Atop the main thatch was more fanciful work making an ornate design. A pair of thatch ducks stood atop the peak and a line of thatch ducklings waddled across the ridge to join them. More birds.

  A pheasant was perched at the other end, silhouetted against the achingly blue sky. She watched it for a long moment before she decided that it too was made of thatch. Just as she turned away, the pheasant burst to life and flew away.

  It was as if her world, as if she was somehow…broken. Charleston, South Carolina, had always made sense. Sometimes an awful, painful sense, but she’d known how it worked. Now she had improbable, spirit guides offering her confusing signals that felt like messages if only she could interpret them. Pheasants and dusty White Knights. One who
kept spooking her and the other who didn’t.

  “Go away, Aaron,” she tried once more to banish his near-black eyes and slow smile from her thoughts.

  Focus on the cottage. The garden was carpeted with yellow daffodils, white snowdrops, and purple aubrieta. Heavy coils of ancient rose vine climbed across the front facade. The lightest hint of green made it easy to imagine how spectacularly it would bloom in just a few months.

  Jane looked up and down the lane. Cherry trees shone in brilliant displays of sun-catching pink, a beech and some maples just leafing out in bright green. A large stone trough stood on the other side of the road; a pipe jutted out of the low rise behind it and splashed water into a tub of stonework that probably predated the Norman Conquest of 1066. The water looked clear and cool, a natural spring.

  Someone had placed a bench near the spring.

  Unable to run any farther, she staggered over and sat down. The bench afforded a view past the cottage and out over the rolling grass-green hills. Fosse-on-the-Wold crested along the next rise. She sat for a long time gazing at the view and the cottage before she noticed the sign.

  “For sale.”

  She couldn’t understand the words, as if they were in a foreign language. Every time she’d seen those words in the last year, she’d lost something: her business, her townhouse, her parents’ home and all of the memories from growing up there. In some strange fit of madness, she’d even sold her ten-year-old VW diesel and bought a one-way ticket to the Cotswolds. Not because she was planning to stay in England, but rather because she couldn’t think of any reason to go back.

  Yet this pretty little cottage had these same words on it.

  “For sale.”

  She pulled out her phone, cleared her running app, and dialed the phone number.

  “Now you’re acting like an American.”

  “Maybe because I am one.” Besides, wall building was hot work and Aaron didn’t give a damn. He mopped his face with his wadded-up t-shirt, then tossed it aside. Trent was right, Aaron had never seen a shirtless Brit; but he was too hot to care. He dumped half his water bottle over his head and went back to work. He fetched a couple more rocks, barely resisting the urge to topple Trent from his perch.