Heart of the Cotswolds: England

by M. L. Buchman

  When the meal came, she could only stare at it suspiciously. “What’s that?”

  “It’s what you ordered, love.” Bridget’s smile said that she was enjoying the moment. Aaron would be pleased to know that there was no uniquely wonderful bond between women working in Jane’s favor here.

  “Help me out?”

  “It’s whitebait and chips. Small whole fish, battered and deep fried. And chips, what you’d be calling French fries. I gave you tartar but there are them as like brown sauce—though I can’t see them as being in their right minds as this is fish, not meat.” Bridget’s amusement continued to grow. “Go on now. Try one. They’re long past biting back.”

  Jane took a fish no bigger than her pinkie by the tail. She ignored the fact that it seemed to be watching her through the breading, dunked it in the tartar, and bit it off. It was tender and gently fish-flavored, with a satisfying crunch about it. It was good. She swallowed carefully. Her stomach didn’t seem to mind her first solid food of the day either.

  “Hard night last night?” The waitress didn’t seem to be in a hurry to run off despite the thickness of the evening crowd.

  “Today wasn’t exactly a winner either,” Jane agreed. There was the cottage, but there was also the hard rebuff from Aaron. What had she done to offend him? Actually, she could think of several things. Drunken slob who’d dragged him into the lion’s den. Then she’d toyed with him (it wasn’t like her but it was the only thing that explained the drunken partial memory of his kiss). And how had she thanked him this morning? By running away at her first chance. “Actually, mostly an awful day.”

  “Whoof!,” Bridget agreed with some sympathy. “Don’t you know it. The morning after is never a good one, is it? Always seems worth it at the time though. A good night’s rest on your ear will set you to rights.”

  Jane decided it was the best opening she was going to get, “You don’t have a room available by any chance?”

  “On the weekend? What with the big fancy do of a wedding in town? Not ruddy likely. But I’ll check with Hal.”

  Jane also wanted to ask about Aaron, but couldn’t figure out how to do so before Bridget moved off. Maybe she could find a sleeping bag and stay in that fairy-tale cottage.

  Away from Aaron. Except he was there at the cottage as well. Or had been.

  By the time she’d dared look out the windows again, Aaron was gone. The unfinished wall mocked her.

  Normally when a man rejected her so thoroughly, she turned tail and ran. It was so much easier that way. Don’t fight the traces, just let them go entirely. But even as she’d walked away from him this morning, she’d known it was wrong.

  Any normal man, she would have dismissed as yet another abysmal Jane Tully failure. Aaron, however, had already proved himself to her last night. He’d taken no advantage of her state. He’d taken care of her. Aaron had protected her from the Worm Sons (his very apropos name for them still made her smile), her sister (a feat of unimaginable magnitude), and herself (despite her attempt to dive headlong into total drunken destruction).

  He—

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Aaron, of course. And angry enough that he’d lost any hint of English. He was pure, Vermont, pissed male. For some reason she found that comforting.

  “Eating something called whitebait.”

  “It’s a fish.”

  “Noticed that all on my own.”

  He grunted. He didn’t look any happier, but at least she’d stymied him back to alpha-male grunts. That she knew how to handle.

  She topped up her tea, added a splash of milk, and selected her next bit of fish as if nothing was amiss.

  Without asking, he plummeted into the seat across the table and thumped his beer on the table. That’s when she spotted her planning error—she was out of sight from the fireplace and the door, but not the bar. She’d remember that in the future.

  She saw the wince as he shifted in his seat.

  “Does it hurt a lot?”

  He shrugged.

  “Because of your work today?” She certainly wasn’t going to sit here in stone silence at her own table simply because Mr. Unsmooth had turned into Mr. Grumpy.

  “Some. Last night mostly.”

  “Because you were hiding it from me. Because you didn’t want me to see you as less of a man.” It hadn’t taken long to figure that out. She didn’t make it a question.

  He didn’t argue.

  “Are you always such a straight shooter?”

  “Used to be,” that wince looked far deeper than anything merely physical.

  She couldn’t stop the smile at the next image, even though she could see the pain on his face. In his eyes.

  He inspected her cautiously, then sipped his beer. “Okay, hit me with it. But that smile better not end up with me going to another wedding.”

  “Promise,” she raised her right hand as solemnly as any Girl Scout.

  He tipped his glass as if to signal he was as ready as he’d ever be.

  “Your past sucked,” Jane felt like an idiot the moment she said it. How had she assumed she knew anything about him?

  “No,” he casually sipped his beer as if this was somehow a normal conversation. “My past was awesome. My present sucks. Future doesn’t look exactly awe inspiring.”

  “Well, I’ll up you a past, a present, and no obvious future.” It still took her breath away just how much she’d lost how fast. Parents, almost-fiancé, and now…everything else. Job, career, home, confidence—all down the toilet in one neat, agonizing, year-long flush. Maybe that’s what the cottage was about, an attempt to plug the drain before anything else slid down it. There wasn’t much left to slide.

  That earned one of his more sympathetic grunts, “Sorry to hear that.”

  And there were those eyes she remembered from last night. The ones that had watched her so carefully through the whole wedding. Every time she’d turned around she’d caught him watching her. Dark eyes, observant, thoughtful. She wondered if caring lurked there as well or was that simply her inane, misguided, ever-hopeful inner self being ridiculously naive?

  “I’m still waiting on the joke.”

  She raised her teacup and tapped it against his beer, “We make a hell of a pair, don’t we?”

  No laugh of acknowledgement on that one. But the tip of his beer and wry grimace said plenty.

  Aaron didn’t know what to do with the anger that was building inside him.

  Tamp it down, soldier! Except he was no longer a soldier.

  What the hell had he been fighting for if the world gave women like Jane an unhappy life and sisters like Debbie?

  God damn it! It just wasn’t right!

  Not that he could do shit about it anymore.

  Yeah, let me toast to two lives sucking, because that’s so much better than only one.

  He could feel the Black Demon. The one born in the heat of the Yemeni desert, that had flown with him on the combat-search-and-rescue bird, and hovered so near while the pretty black paramedic had fought to save his life. It had been such a strangely intimate thing—his life-or-death moment that they’d shared so closely—yet he’d never even found out her name. Never saw her again to thank her. He’d gone to sleep in transit to some carrier, listening to the heavy beat of the helo’s rotors and watching her up to her elbows in his blood. And woken up as they shipped him out of Landstuhl, Germany, headed stateside for Walter Reed.

  But the demon didn’t come. Maybe it couldn’t touch him here. He’d mentally built up The Queen’s Guard pub as a bastion of safety—which even worked…occasionally.

  No, the real reason was obvious. The Black Demon was repulsed by the light of the Faerie Queen. It was ridiculous to make Jane Tully his talisman, but it was hard to resist because it was true.

  Bridget came over and the two women chatted about something that seemed to cheer Jane until she shone even brighter.

  “Is that okay with you?” Jane asked him a question directly.

&n
bsp; “Is what okay with me?”

  Bridget and Jane gave him the same look. Not quite the same, Jane had the decency to not roll her eyes at him.

  “I can’t stay at the manor house—the Worm brothers are still in residence.”

  Bridget laughed aloud at that.

  “Damn straight,” he agreed. If one of those slimeballs tried to touch her, he’d cut their damn dicks off and that was before he ripped their guts out.

  “But someone just had their holiday cut short and is headed back to London now. So Hal has a spare room here, if that’s okay with you?”

  Aaron decided that his knee would not appreciate him dancing a jig. The Faerie Queen resident in The Queen’s Guard? Even for a few nights? Too perfect to be dreamed of. The Black Demon didn’t stand a chance. He’d given her the cold shoulder at the cottage wall for her own sake, yet still she was here. That must mean something.

  He knew he was setting himself up for the long fall, but one glance at Jane’s happy green eyes, sparkling in the pub’s soft light, was too powerful to deny.

  “Sure. Sounds fine,” he managed past the dry throat that even the Donnington SBA couldn’t slake.

  “I have to go get my things. There isn’t much, but it would be easier if you…” Jane trailed off and glanced uncertainly down toward his lower extremities though the table was between them.

  “I can walk and carry just fine.”

  She winced and Bridget looked ready to kick his ass. He hadn’t mean it to come out as a growl but it did anyway.

  “I’m glad to help,” he sounded better on the second attempt. “If you don’t mind me letting my knee do what it wants to.”

  “You hereby have my permission to limp in my presence at any time,” Jane delivered her benediction regally. She was so perfect that he couldn’t help smiling.

  Despite a pleasant enough dinner together, the walk had started awkwardly. Jane could feel herself trying to not watch Aaron’s limp and she could feel Aaron feeling her not watching, which made her feel…like a bewildered fool.

  But by the time they reached the shadowed footpath to the manor, she’d grown used to it. It wasn’t like he was horribly deformed (which was how he made it sound). Aaron simply limped.

  “How did it happen?” Only too late did she realize what an intrusive question that was. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to—”

  “Have you ever read a Houthi flag?”

  “Houthi?” Then she recalled a news item before she could sound too naive. “Yemen. Rebels. Their flag has words?”

  “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

  “Not very friendly.”

  “We were in-country to clean out the head man of a terrorist camp that they were cosponsoring with al-Qaeda. The simple raid became a fifty-minute firefight. I was second to last man out.”

  “Who was last?”

  “The female medic who saved my life. I got shot up at the last moment by a twelve-year-old kid who picked up his dead father’s AK-47 when no one had eyes on him. One of the helicopter crew chiefs killed the kid. At least I was spared that.”

  Jane didn’t know what to say. Her dusty stonemason was so much more than she’d ever imagined.

  “Were you a SEAL or one of those other things?”

  That earned her a brief smile despite the grim topic. “One of those ‘other things.’ Sergeant in Delta Force on loan to the SAS for a year. I spent an amazing year fighting beside the best soldiers the Brits ever produced. Delta was originally based on the SAS and the two worked together pretty closely. Still do.” His last words were filled with that pain again.

  Straight shooter?

  Used to be.

  The pain of being an outsider.

  “You miss it.”

  “Like breathing.”

  Jane thought about that. “I’ve never had anything good enough to miss that much.”

  “What do you do?”

  She wasn’t ready to answer that, but neither could she deny his honesty. The shadowed oak-and-beech tunnel of the footpath was ending. Unable to face her own past in the bright evening sunlight, she stumbled to a halt only a few steps from the end of the shadows. The bird song, which she hadn’t been noticing, roared to life around her. She startled as a pigeon bolted out of the hedgerow and noisily flew off from no more than an arm’s length away.

  Aaron didn’t flinch in the slightest though the bird launched from close by his shoulder. Nerves of steel. He stopped and waited, listening. Since when did men listen?

  “I was a project manager.”

  She saw his look of uncertainty.

  “I know. The most non-specific job title ever created. I specialize, specialized,” and she could feel her own version of Aaron’s pain at the past tense, “in fixing complex office systems. Sometimes computers, often workflow, always personnel.”

  “What little I know of you, I’m guessing you were good at it. What happened?”

  “I co-owned a very small, very lean company with a woman I’d always thought of as a mentor. It turned out that we had very different definitions of the word integrity. Suddenly I was alone at the center of breached contracts, massive debts, and a never-ending stream of undeliverable promises that I hadn’t even known about.”

  And still she could see Kathie’s face exactly one week before it all broke apart. I just got an offer from Nintendo for a full-time job that I couldn’t resist, but you’re doing great. I know you’ll knock ’em dead, darling. And Kathie had been gone. She’d thought seriously about calling Nintendo to warn them of the snake in their midst, but had finally taken the high road out of town.

  “I lost the business, the career, and any interest in ever doing that job again,” Jane could feel her voice go flat but couldn’t stop herself.

  “When was this?” Aaron’s soft question drew her back. He had listened. He had heard.

  He might be the first person who ever had, at least since Mama died.

  Kathie had betrayed her and left. Her parents lost to a car crash six months before—Mama surviving only long enough to make her promise to look after her sister. Larry the almost-fiancé professor had never been much for listening to anyone talk except himself. She’d been too much of a workaholic to have any real friends. Her sister Debbie was…Debbie.

  “I closed the final bank account last Wednesday, reported the business closed to the state and IRS tax bureaus Thursday, and caught the redeye from Charleston, South Carolina, to Heathrow for the Friday wedding.” And it was too much, too raw. She tried to hold it in, but couldn’t. Not from the man watching her so intently—anchored in some impossibly deep core of inner stillness. Definitely not from herself.

  Aaron didn’t know much about women who cried, but back in high school, Mary—the bridesmaid he’d met at the wedding he’d crashed—had taught him one thing to do. She’d had a hard family: alcoholic and seriously dysfunctional (she’d had to explain that). His own dad was a dairy farmer and his mom a nurse—both steady and practical. Not the warmest people, but not cold either.

  When Jane began crying, he didn’t judge her for it—the pain was too obvious, too raw. Instead, he took a step in and pulled her into his arms.

  Mary had been right, a crying woman wanted to be held.

  Jane kept her arms crossed over her chest as if her heart hurt, but she wasn’t pushing him away. Instead, she lay her face on his shoulder and wept. He was glad for the distance her crossed arms enforced between their bodies, but she still felt incredible as she sagged against him. He rubbed his hands up and down her back, appreciating its fine lines and the fitness of the musculature currently shuddering with the sobs. She wasn’t making a big deal of it, no weeping and wailing for Jane Tully, just crying quietly.

  He’d never understood why it made him feel so strong to hold a crying woman. Strong was sliding into a denied zone with nothing but your wits, night-vision goggles, and an HK416 combat rifle. But holding a woman while she cried made
him feel very—as she’d called it—male. He never felt so male as when holding a woman in pain. And holding Jane Tully was a whole new dimension on that one.

  Slowly she ran dry, managed a shuddering breath, then another.

  “Thank you,” she whispered against his neck.

  “No worries.”

  “That’s Australian, not British,” Jane’s whisper tickled against his skin.

  He shrugged. It was, but he’d adopted it years before because he liked the feel of it.

  “You’re going to have to decide who you are someday.”

  Aaron knew exactly who he was—who he had been. But she was right as usual. Who he was now? Present tense? He’d be damned if he knew.

  “You can let go now.”

  “Do I have to?” No longer crying, Jane was no less pleasant to hold close. Her long fall of hair ran slick over the backs of his hands as they traveled up and down her back. The feel of—

  “No, you don’t have to. But you should.”

  So he did. And felt the emptiness in his arms immediately.

  Jane was red-eyed as he wiped away the last of her tears for her.

  The intimacy of the moment was too reminiscent of when she’d wiped the cake icing off his nose and chin last night beneath the moonlight. He stepped back, running into the hedgerow and once more upsetting the nesting pigeon who had returned to its depths while Jane cried.

  “I got your shirt all wet,” she dabbed at his shoulder with her bare fingers.

  Aaron glanced down at the small damp patch. “I’ve had worse.” For one thing, it wasn’t the dark red of fresh blood. “I think I’ll survive this wound.”

  Before she could ask what he meant by that and he was forced to tell her something she wouldn’t want to hear, he offered her his elbow. She slipped her hand into place and a calm slid over him. Somehow everything was all right as long as she held onto him.

  Arm in arm they proceeded along the footpath and out into the sunlit backyard of the grand manor. Sure, it was an architectural hodgepodge, but the place was growing on him.