Heart of the Cotswolds: England

by M. L. Buchman

  “Two weeks since the first time we had sex,” he began working on the glorious task of teasing her body to life.

  “Is that what we did?”

  “Sure.” Something in her tone should have told him he’d just entered dangerous waters, but he caught it too late.

  “Aaron.”

  He just wanted to listen to her heart, cradle her breast, and breath in the wonder of her. Then sex.

  “Aar-on!”

  Distraction. He needed to stage a distraction until he figured this out. “Do you have any idea how amazing you look in a toolbelt?” And she did. Her hair back in a tight ponytail, plaster dust on her nose and cheeks around the filter mask he’d bought her. The shorts and tight t-shirt that were her choice of work clothes. She was an apt, if wholly inexperienced assistant.

  “Not half as good as you, I’m sure.” He heard a wistful softness slip into her tone. Getting back on track.

  “But guys wear toolbelts all the time,” he’d never understood what it was that always made women talk about guys with toolbelts. “It’s not like it’s anything special. But on you? Damned hot.”

  She toyed with his hair as he listened to her heart.

  He let go of her breast and slid his hand down to trace the line of where her toolbelt had ridden low across those fine hips. “Very hot.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that if you want any tonight, soldier.” It was her drill sergeant tone and he knew that there was no getting around it. Crap!

  “Okay, what did I miss?”

  “Sex is somehow crass. It makes me feel cheap.”

  He almost said that she would be the most expensive woman ever…but caught himself before he did because it sounded totally wrong. Even protesting that she wasn’t cheap didn’t sound right. He was getting a little better at thinking before speaking. But he didn’t see the way out of it.

  Her heart rate was slowing rather than accelerating. Not a good sign.

  “Well, if it isn’t sex…” he took a deep breath. “I’m not exactly comfortable with calling it something else.” He took courage from the fact that she still hadn’t stopped brushing her fingers through his hair.

  She sighed. “Neither am I. But ‘sex’ still sounds cheap.”

  “Mutual pleasuring.”

  Her raspberry noise sounded very strange transmitted through her breastbone.

  “Making happiness.”

  “That’s good, but it should be about more than sex.”

  “How about if I just show you what I mean rather than trying to say it?” He slid his hand down from her waist.

  “You know…”

  He sighed and returned his hand to rest on her hip.

  “We also haven’t slept apart for a single night of those two weeks.”

  Aaron blinked in surprise. “We haven’t! Is it a problem?”

  “Not for me. You?”

  He shook his head. It was strange though. He was used to relationships between deployments. Of course in Delta, being between deployments meant a shift from a state of brutal battles to a state of brutal training. Between long hikes, overnight scenarios, and all the rest, he hadn’t spent every night in two straight weeks with a woman that he could recall. With Jane, it felt completely natural.

  This time she let him distract her and he did his best to brush all of her questions away. Maybe even her ability to think.

  Maybe even his ability to think. Because if this wasn’t sex, were they “making love”?

  Why couldn’t she say the words?

  Her body shuddered to life. It amazed her each time Aaron achieved that Herculean task—she’d long since been convinced by former lovers that any problems with sex were all hers and not theirs until the belief was rooted deep inside her. And Aaron brushed that aside every time with such ease.

  She arched against his palm and worried at it. If sex with Aaron wasn’t making love, then what was it?

  Jane decided that she didn’t need to label it as she pulled him tight against her breast.

  But—oh, god, that was good—she needed to understand it.

  She recalled the long-suffering look in his eyes as he did his half hour of PT twice a day. It had pulled at her until she’d resurrected her old yoga routines and joined his workouts. It was funny. No matter how clumsy and out of training she was, he constantly lost count of his reps while watching her and had to start over.

  Aaron was so…besotted with her. It felt as if she was lying somehow.

  This isn’t the real me, she wanted to shout.

  “Please, god, don’t stop,” is what escaped on a hoarse whisper as he nuzzled the inside of her thigh with his soft tongue and an evening hint of whiskers.

  If Aaron was “besotted,” what was she?

  Over the moon?

  Besotted herself?

  When he finally settled his mouth over her, all she knew was that no man had ever done what Aaron did. Not one man of her past had thought of her pleasure before his own.

  Lucky.

  That’s what she was. As she bucked and writhed against him, dug her fingers into his hair to encourage him to do even more, luck was what she felt.

  Maybe that was what came between “sex” and “making love.” Between “like” and “love.” The third L-word.

  “Lucky,” she managed on a gasp as he poised his body over hers before sliding into her and finally washing all the words away.

  Chapter 10

  “What are your plans today?” Aaron needed a distraction so that he didn’t just tear the Lycra bodysuit off Jane and plunder all that he could.

  He’d finally learned to keep count of his PT reps by matching her yoga counts. New exquisite position—admire it for a count of ten—then watch her lips silently counting each positional hold for twenty, thirty, whatever.

  He was fast discovering that he didn’t mind PT nearly as much as he thought he would. As a bonus, the knee brace had already gone back into the closet.

  “I was going to patch and sand the main bedroom wall the way you showed me in the guest bedroom.” Jane didn’t reveal the least strain as she balanced on her belly and reached behind to grab her ankles for something called the bow. Her stretch raised her torso and knees off the floor until she formed a nearly perfect donut shape. He’d tried it and could only flop about like a drowning fish.

  “Let’s play hooky.”

  “Won’t Trent mind?”

  “No. It turns out the whole Moreton thing was about a wall someone bashed in with a lorry because the trucker took a turn too tightly. That’s why he’s been so angry about having to work on it. Should have lasted another century before I had to be touching it.” He’d been working on his Trent imitation.

  It earned him enough of a laugh that Jane lost her bow.

  “Fixing it up now means I don’t have me an excuse to be living forever. I was right attached to that wall since I built it during the Roman Conquest,” Aaron added an extra layer of grouch that had her giggling as she rolled onto her side to look up at him. He had thoughts of…but she started a series of sideways leg lifts and he matched his reps to her motion.

  “What about the stone wall here at the cottage?”

  “I’m told I have an in with the new owner.”

  “Maybe,” she acknowledged with a smile. Then she rolled away from him and began her leg lifts on her other side. “But if you stop doing your exercises to admire my ass, you’re going to lose that privilege.”

  Aaron started doing his squats, but continued admiring.

  “Besides, I’m not the new owner yet.”

  “You will be,” he didn’t like the worry in her voice. “But we both need a day away. So let’s just forget about it and play hooky.”

  “I never missed a day of school. Did you?” Up into a kneeling position to do arching backbends with her hair nearly sweeping the floor beyond her feet.

  That was too much and he had to look away to keep any blood in his brain.

  “I’m gu
essing by your silence the answer is, ‘all too often’.”

  Fine. Let her think that. His aunt had been the high school principal. He’d never dared to miss a day, be any less than an A-student, or fail to letter in track and field and soccer. He stole a peek as Jane arched back again—the blood was not going to be returning to his brain any time soon. There wasn’t even blood to his vocal cords.

  “What’s British for playing hooky?” Jane finally flopped back on the floor into “corpse pose,” spread-eagled on her back. As if that was supposed to help him any.

  “Skive. Skiving off,” he managed as he finished his own workout.

  “Oh, I like the sound of that. I won’t play hooky, but I will ‘skive off’ for a day. You take the first shower.”

  Aaron staggered up the stairs and glared at the tiny, English-style shower. Definitely not big enough for two. As he stripped down, he rearranged the bathroom renovation in his head so that it would fit a bigger stall. Then he stepped in and set the water to dead cold.

  Aaron said he’d drive.

  Jane was going to protest, even though the English roads still freaked her out, until she saw him sitting in the driver’s side. The sides of English cars might be switched, but the pedals were in the same order: gas to the right, clutch to the left, and the brake in the middle. So the work of the clutch was under his good leg.

  After that, she decided to just let go of her worries.

  Top down, hair back in a ponytail, sunglasses on: she did feel like the Faerie Queen being whisked away by her handsome knight in a bronze chariot. Or at least a Faerie Princess.

  “Where are we off to, Sir Knight?”

  “Breakfast.” The car snarled happily as it climbed through the gears once they cleared Fosse and then Stow. The road up to Moreton she’d seen a dozen times. She realized with a start that was pretty much all she’d seen of the Cotswolds. Here she was living in a government-sanctioned AONB, Area of Natural Beauty, a future property owner of a historic cottage, and had seen almost none of the area. Just as they entered the all too familiar stretch of Moreton, Aaron turned aside, headed west out of town.

  Within a half mile they were back in the rolling fields that never ceased to amaze her. But something was different. “Cows and calves. Where are the sheep?”

  “Varies by where you are. They seem to clump together. Out toward Donnington it’s horses. A lot of the big-race winners come from there. The earl is considered a bit of an upstart because he lives almost three miles to the south but is running with better than average success.”

  “Three miles? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’ve never lived in a small town before,” Aaron didn’t make it a question.

  “How did you know?”

  “Little towns always look so quiet to folks raised in cities. There’s a massive undercurrent in them. Always things happening. Take this one, for instance.”

  The terrain changed abruptly as they plunged past a sign declaring they were entering Bourton-on-the-Hill. Suddenly they were climbing a steep road between two- and three-story buildings crowded so close to either side that it was barely wide enough for the MINI. Or so she thought until a red-and-tan bus descended toward them. Aaron squeezed tight enough against a stone wall that Jane could brush her fingers over the small clump of violets growing in a crack as the bus somehow slipped by with only an inch to spare. Her heart had burst and been left on the road, but Aaron didn’t even blink.

  “That pub there, the Horse and Groom,” Aaron continued as if they hadn’t just nearly been squished. “They win Pub of the Year in a local guidebook almost every year. A couple of very successful painters live here as well. You can bet that the locals know exactly where and wouldn’t tell you if you got down on your knees and begged. Well, not me anyway. You might be able to magic it out of them. Small towns protect their own.”

  “It sounds nice.”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind having no privacy.”

  “What do you mean?” With a final twist, they burst out of the high end of the town. She turned to look back and the whole town appeared to be that single, climbing street wide.

  “How many people of the four hundred and fifty-eight in Fosse do you think are aware that we’re practically living together?”

  Practically living together. She hadn’t done that since she’d thrown Larry Jenkins’ clothes out the door after him. At the time, Jane had promised herself it would never happen again without a ring and a wedding.

  Yet she and Aaron practically were. His toothbrush and a change of clothes had definitely already made the transition. Of course she’d planted a toothbrush as an outpost in his room at the pub as well, for the nights they didn’t feel like walking home through the rain after dinner.

  She swallowed hard, “Hal, Bridget, Trent, the earl, maybe the—”

  “Everybody.”

  Jane waited for the joke as they descended briefly through a set of oaks, then began to climb again. Cattle had turned back into sheep on the other side of the wood as if transformed from one species to the other by magic rather than any farmer’s plan. She wanted to go back and double-check if they were all standing in mirror image position to either side of Bourton Wood.

  No signature-Aaron laugh appeared along with the sheep.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, some may not know our names yet, but they all know about the American couple who are shacking up in the cottage they’re buying down Springs Lane. The butcher, the waiter at the Indian place, the news agent you bought stamps from, all of them. I’ve definitely gotten the evil eye a few times in the shops that I couldn’t account for until I overheard that you’re buying it on your own. Apparently I’m now a gold digger at best, a freeloader at worst.”

  “Who told them all that?”

  “Welcome to a small town.”

  Through a narrow S-turn, bounded by ancient stone walls to either side that couldn’t possibly let a bus through even without anyone trying to pass, they burst out into the open.

  She felt dizzy, as if she was still twisting through the turns. With her parents gone, there wasn’t anyone who cared about her personal life. Not a single person—except maybe Debbie, who would want to sabotage it for spite. Jane would get the polite questions from someone she was working with on a project, but it was with the comfortable assurance that all such details would be forgotten before her answer was even complete.

  She wanted to deny it, but… Gwyneth the butcher had asked if her man was especially hungry when she bought her first roast—only to discover that she’d gotten one big enough to feed a family of ten (that took forever to cook). Buying shampoo, she’d been offered a second bottle of men’s shampoo. At the—

  “Everybody knows?” Jane still couldn’t believe it.

  “Uh-huh.” Aaron slowed the car as one of the prettiest towns she’d seen other than Fosse-on-the-Wold came into view.

  “This is Blockley.” Aaron eased past a school and what she at first thought was a soccer field, but turned out to be a lawn-bowling green.

  She could see that the town split here. They were entering it midway up the hill: newer buildings were ranged up the slope, the old town spread out down the hill below them. At a bus shelter that looked as ancient and stout in yellow limestone as the houses, he turned down toward the older section and parallel parked neatly despite it being the wrong side of the street. Aaron had all sorts of surprising skills.

  “The Aunt Dimity cozy mysteries are set in a fictitious town that just happens to look exactly like Blockley, but there’s a dirty secret,” he leaned close and whispered the last.

  “What?”

  He came around the car, opened her door, and offered her a hand out. “The author is…” he looked up and down the street making sure they were unobserved, “…an American. Worse, she lives in the States. Utterly scandalous.”

  “Horrors,” she agreed. Jane was starting to get the feel for this. “How could such a state of affairs be allowed t
o come to pass?”

  “That,” Aaron laughed as he led her down the hill, “is a topic of constant debate among the locals.”

  “It feels as if we’re on a date,” Jane sounded happy about it.

  If buying a pastry and a pot of tea in the tiny cafe (that was also general store and post office), then going for a walk along High Street was all it took, Aaron was all for it. Actually, it did feel like a date, something he didn’t have much experience with.

  “I suppose that it is time we started dating,” she double-squeezed his hand in one of her silent laughs.

  “I’m trying to remember the last time I’ve been on one.” Aaron really had to learn to think before speaking. It didn’t count as a date when you bought a bar-babe a couple of drinks and went back to her place. There were always Spec Ops groupies around Fort Bragg trying to raise their score and it was hard to complain. But they didn’t count as dates. “Been a while.”

  “Me too.”

  He hoped for her sake that it was for very different reasons. He knew he was shallow, but he hoped that he was the only one in this relationship who was that shallow.

  “This is the main street?”

  “Back when horses were cars.”

  “You mean the other way around.”

  He tried it both ways in his head and wasn’t sure. At the moment he was thinking about a different kind of issue, and not very clearly.

  Relationship?

  From having awesome sex and helping her out on fixing up her house, they were suddenly dating and in a relationship? The world really needed to slow down for…a long freaking time, or there was no way he was going to catch up with it.

  They strolled through the town. A few people waved from their gardens where the daffodils had departed but the tulips were gladly claiming reign. Winding rose bushes with stalks as big around as Jane’s elegant arms were dusted green with new leaves just unfolding. Grass was rare, at least on the High Street side, as there was so little setback to the houses. There were occasional cars parked along the street, but little activity.