Jake
How could he stay mad when she was such good company?
As they sat at his kitchen table, a little drunk off sharing the second bottle of red, and with the candles flickering softly between them, he’d spent the meal laughing like he couldn’t remember laughing in a long time.
‘Okay, are you sure you’re ready for this one,’ she asked, grabbing a spoon off the table and stashing it in her jeans pocket. ‘This was my all-time favourite audition. I have to get up, hang on a sec.’ Pushing back her chair, she turned so that she was facing away from him and as she widened her stance she seemed to get taller and sexier so that anticipation shot through him. ‘Ready?’ she checked, looking over her shoulder.
‘Hit me with it,’ he said, taking a sip of his drink and then nearly choked on it as she turned around, her face deadly serious, her hands pulling the spoon from her pocket and brandishing it like it was a gun or a phaser or, well, something that put her instantly in charge.
Holding the spoon out towards him like she handled a gun every day of her life, her voice was a hundred-and-ten-per cent commitment as she said, ‘Drop your weapon and don’t even think of doing anything different, or I will end you, dead.’ Her gaze slid to the empty space beside him and her expression changed to concern then dread. ‘Commander Dixon? Commander Dixon you get up, you hear me? Your crew needs you. I need you, damn it. If we don’t fix the engines this ship is going to hit the horizon. We’ll burn up on impact and I’ll never get the chance to tell you—’
He wanted to hear the declarative lines that were so hammy they could form a whole side of bacon when her face suddenly transformed into a giant grin and she was turning the spoon around and breaking off a piece of pumpkin pie and shoving it into her mouth.
‘Commander Dixon?’ Jake laughed. ‘What was your character’s name?’
‘Lt. Vixen.’
‘Dixon and Vixen, are you serious?’
She nodded and finished her mouthful. ‘Star Hike: The Dixon and Vixen Voyages. I can’t believe you haven’t seen it over here.’
‘Baffling to have seen Sharknado 1–4, yet missed this masterpiece! You were beyond awesome though. I don’t know who they ended up going with for Vixen but the way you handled that spoon just then? Very … foxy.’
She batted her eyelashes, pursed her lips, fluffed out her hair.
Their eyes met across the table for a heartbeat and then they were both laughing again.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t get the part.’
‘I know, right?’ She looked down and then shoved her hair back behind her ears and couldn’t quite meet his eyes as she picked up her wineglass and finished the contents. ‘That was so delicious. Thank you,’ she said graciously and back in complete control, it only taking seconds to completely wipe every shred of hurt she might have felt at not getting the part. ‘So am I going to get a tour of the house too?’
‘Maybe the library,’ he conceded, pushing to his feet, wanting to give her something to salve the ache she was hiding.
‘You don’t want to clear up in here first?’
‘Later,’ he said, with a smile. Right now she needed something she could distract herself with so he gestured for her to follow him out of the kitchen and down the length of the corridor where he turned right into the oldest wing of the house.
Inside the dark room at the end of the hallway, his hand went automatically to the light switch. The central Tiffany ceiling pendant cast a cosy glow and he crossed the ancient Axminster carpet that left a foot wide strip of oak floorboard around each of its edges, and stopped in front of the large regency style rosewood and leather library desk in the centre of the room. Leaning across the round table he switched on the matching Tiffany lamps so she could see the room in all its glory and then turned around to watch for her reaction.
He’d known she’d love the room.
Didn’t she love everything new?
Or in this case old?
Soaking up every experience she came across, he swore so that she could summon it for a role later on, but even suspecting that, it still gave him a kick of excitement to see the pleasure on her face.
‘If I lived here I might never leave this room,’ she whispered, her gaze bouncing off every non-matching chair, card table, footstool, and mini-electric heater.
If he was being honest it was his favourite room in the house too. The heavy mahogany floor to ceiling bookshelves with the ladder fixed to the rail for access to the shelves higher up. The window seat that ran along the width of the window. The armchairs in front of the fire.
He watched her as she walked the room’s perimeter, a hand outstretched so that her fingers could trail over the spines of books.
‘Have you read all these books?’ she asked, pausing every few steps to pull out a title, look at it, and then slot it neatly back in.
‘Yes.’
She turned her head to look at him and then the smile he worried he might be getting addicted to seeing graced her face again. ‘You’ve read about ten per cent of them, right?’
‘Yes,’ he admitted with his own smile.
‘Can I tell you my favourite part?’ she finally said, clutching her hands together in front of her.
He nodded.
‘It’s that you’ve mixed fiction with non-fiction, modern classics with old classics. It’s all jumbled up so you can stumble upon a book you might not necessarily have given a second glance.’
‘We had to sell some of the rarer books and it was going to be too hard to move them all around to cover up the gaps so I tend to shove in books where there are spaces.’
‘Well, I love seeing Child next to Wordsworth and Rowling next to Dickens but what do you think the photographer will think?’
‘I really don’t care.’
‘No.’ She glanced at him curiously. ‘You really don’t, do you?’
He watched her and after a second or two she started searching the bookshelves again, but this time it was with a more determined look in her eyes.
‘Yes,’ he said taking pity, ‘there are Austens amongst the shelves.’
She laughed. ‘She probably dropped a few copies off when she stayed. Probably made sure they were all facing forward, so that whoever popped in for a book saw hers first.’
He groaned.
‘What are those?’ she asked, pointing to the table covered in dozens of leather-bound books he’d taken from the shelves to search through.
‘They’re the family journals.’
‘Do you keep one?’
‘I have gardening journals and my design portfolios. I keep those up to date.’
‘But why not write about other things as well?’
‘Because I’m too busy doing the gardens. The journals stop sometime in the 1970s. I think it got too depressing when they became lists of what went for what at auction.’
‘But generations before took such time to write in them.’
‘Probably didn’t have anything else to do,’ he said.
‘You could write about why you’re turning this place back into a family home.’
‘But that’s not what I’m doing,’ he said, wondering why he felt the need to keep rapping her romantic streak on its knuckles.
It wasn’t like she was going to be staying in Whispers Wood.
Wasn’t like either of them should be getting any ideas…
‘Of course that’s what you’re doing,’ she insisted. ‘You’re breathing new life back into Knightley Hall starting with the gardens. Restoring them back to what George was creating.’
He folded his arms. Leant his hips against the edge of the table. ‘And what, exactly, is it you think George was trying to create?’ he asked.
‘A marriage of house and garden, maybe? A way of preparing it all over again.’
A sense of foreboding settled like a dead weight in the pit of his belly. ‘Preparing it for what?’
‘For new generations.’
‘And that’s what you think I’m trying to do here?’
She stared back at him one perfectly arched eyebrow raised in question, ‘Aren’t you?’
Why did he find it so hard to admit? Was it because he didn’t want to jinx it or was it because he didn’t know if he could pull it off? How would he ever be sure his parents hadn’t given him Knightley Hall simply because they’d run out of options? How would he ever know if they believed he could combine artistic talent with good business sense?
His parents were lovely, affable, educated people, but both had floundered as the money started running out. Neither had been able to shoulder the burden fully, try new things and find a way through.
‘I guess all that I really am,’ he said, slowly, ‘is the current caretaker.’ A role that surely even she would find unappealing.
Her gaze slid briefly to the journals beside him, then back to study him. ‘I think people who get to own homes like this are only ever just the caretaker for a while. But,’ her eyes came alive, ‘what a great job: to be able to create and take care of something that offers the next generation that sense of stability – of belonging. That’s pretty hard to find these days.’
Suspicion flared beneath his skin, because, damn it, she wasn’t the one who was supposed to understand.
Or was it all an act?
Alice had said she understood. The long hours he was going to have to work. The sacrifices they’d both have to make. Every single penny being ploughed back into the Hall. Never having anything left for them.
She’d assured him she was looking forward to it.
Couldn’t wait to share their lives together.
Until, it turned out, she could.
So of course he’d be stupid to trust Emma, the actress, the one whose very job was to help people escape reality and enjoy fantasy.
Running a place like this was about as romantic as sheep-shearing and as far away from Sunday night cosy TV drama as you could get. But how did you convince the very person who was apt to star in those programmes?
‘You make it sound so easy,’ he murmured. ‘So idyllic. I’m afraid that wasn’t to be the case for George when instead of marrying his Anna-Rose, he married a second-generation American heiress called Lillian. She was looking for a husband and by then he was looking for money to save the estate. You only have to read these journals to get the full, extremely unromantic, but mutually convenient picture.’
And he only had to over-hear his own parents to understand how love had had very little to do with keeping the house in the Knightley family.
‘Were you engaged to Alice for her money, then?’ Emma’s voice was stilted and the tilt of her chin suggested she was secretly appalled by the idea.
‘No. I wasn’t,’ he answered steadily, biting back the anger because it was what everyone had assumed.
Relief flashed in her eyes. ‘So you’re trying to change the pattern?’
‘I’m not trying to do anything other than prove I can run this place on my own.’
‘Because you’re so terrible at love?’ she scoffed. ‘Why is it so shocking to you to believe you could marry for love and run this place together?’
‘Trust me, the reality of running a place like this is a tough sell.’
‘Maybe you’ve been selling it to the wrong women?’
No.
He wasn’t having her steal into his soul so that he could begin imagining her in his garden tending the roses, or in the kitchen teasing him with a ladle full of food, or in his bedroom…
‘I haven’t come across a woman yet who could fall in love with me and,’ he looked up to indicate the roof over their heads, ‘everything that comes with me.’
She contemplated him for a moment and then asked, ‘You don’t think you could make a woman fall in love with you?’
He grimaced. ‘Make a woman fall in love with me? Sounds a bit contrived.’ A copy of Persuasion winked at him from a shelf behind her. ‘What do you think Jane Austen was really trying to say in her books? You find it all so sigh-worthy and romantic but wasn’t she saying over and over how ridiculous, how unfair, and how unjust it was that women had to play these games so that they weren’t left alone and penniless? The times have changed but not the houses they took place in. And the people who live in these places still need fortunes to run them.’
She grinned and took a step towards him, her hands sliding into her tight jeans pockets. ‘While I applaud your feminism, I think Jane Austen was actually trying to say that true love can conquer circumstance and that that is eminently worth striving for.’
‘A convenient message in order to sell books,’ he replied, refusing to get sucked in by her rosy conviction.
Instead of looking insulted, she looked amused as she walked up to the table and took one hand out of her pocket to stroke over one of the journal covers. ‘I know you don’t believe that. You couldn’t design and tend and nurture these gardens if you really believed that.’
‘Why couldn’t I? Plants don’t say one thing but actually want another. They don’t feel disappointment. They don’t change their mind.’
‘You’d be more believable as a cynic if you hadn’t flirted with me this evening.’
He wanted to stand up to dispel the energy pulsing between them but he stayed where he was leaning against the table. ‘You really think I’ve been flirting with you?’
Her nod was easy and relaxed. ‘I’ve enjoyed the back and forth. The exchange of ideas. Discovering where we look at the world in the same way and where we differ?’
‘That’s just pleasant conversation.’
‘Could be. So let me ask you, then? Why did you really invite me here tonight, Jake? You didn’t enjoy cooking for me? Decorating for me?’ her voice wrapped itself around him. ‘You haven’t enjoyed the way I hold your gaze a second too long?’ She closed the distance between them. ‘The catch in my breath when you step in closer to me?’
‘Technically you’re the one stepping closer to me, but okay, yes, I can’t say I’m averse to that catch in your voice. And I didn’t say women weren’t attracted to me. I said to make someone fall in love with you is contrived.’
‘So you’re definitely not trying to make me fall in love with you?’
‘Scout’s honour,’ he whispered, holding her gaze.
‘So this,’ she waved a hand between them, ‘this is not something to worry about.’
‘Oh, it’s definitely something – it’s just not falling in love.’
‘Phew, because I definitely don’t have time for falling in love at the moment.’
‘Ditto.’
In the blink of an eye, her hand came up to rest against his thudding heart and her lips sealed across his.
Even interpreting the signals he was still a step behind. As if he hadn’t quite trusted that she was going to follow through.
And what a follow through it was.
Sweet.
Hot.
And gone before he could respond.
In a second, she was off him and taking a couple of steps backwards, her hand outstretched, a look of embarrassed beseeching that they never, ever speak of this again. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought—’ she stopped, shook her head a little and tried again. ‘I shouldn’t have—’
In an instant he was reaching for her, dragging her into his arms and covering her mouth with his. Letting her know that her thinking was absolutely fine. That she should definitely have. And that he was a first-class idiot for making her think for one second she’d thought wrong and that she shouldn’t have.
Her lips were soft and inviting and when the tip of her tongue touched the tip of his the rush of passion eroded judgement, blanked out rational thinking and had him holding on tightly. His arms wrapping themselves around her slender frame as he turned her to place her gently on the library desk.
This wasn’t novelty.
But just to make sure…
Another touch, he thought, as his fingers brushed gently across her cheekbones, collecting her trembles and savouring them.
Another kiss, he thought, as his mouth sought hers over and over.
He was drowning in sensation and any moment he wasn’t going to make it back up to the surface for air.
‘Jakey? What’s with all the food? I thought you were brassic?’ The library door slammed back against its hinges and Jake and Emma shot apart.
‘What the hell? Seth?’ Jake stared at his brother thinking he could quite easily swing for him.
‘Oops,’ Seth said, as he squinted at the scene before him.
The harder he looked the more he swayed, making Jake swear under his breath at how stinking drunk his brother was.
With an apologetic look at Emma, Jake reached out to gently help her off the table. When he felt her make the move to flee, he took her hand and kept it clasped within his.
None of this was her fault.
Mostly it was his fault for not laying out boundaries when he’d been given the keys to the Hall.
‘Did Sarah send you over here?’ he asked his brother as he walked towards him.
‘God no. The last thing I wanted was another woman getting preachy and telling me what to do.’
‘Don’t be a dick, Seth.’ With another apologetic look at Emma, he let go of her hand and grabbed a hold of his brother to start walking him towards the kitchen, his intention to pour the biggest vat of coffee down his neck imaginable.
In the kitchen, Emma went to fill the kettle with water and switch it on. Turning to him she mouthed, ‘Mugs?’ and he pointed to the cupboard to the right.
‘If Sarah didn’t ask you to come, does Joanne know you’re here?’ he asked Seth.
‘Nope. She told me to leave, Jakey. For proper this time.’
‘I’m not surprised if you were like this.’
‘This came after,’ he said, seeing the wine and reaching for it before Jake could stop him. ‘So you’ve been cooking? Must be serious.’ He looked up as Emma pushed a mug of black coffee in front of him. ‘I’ll tell Mum you’ve found someone to help you run this place. She’ll be pleased.’
Jake caught Emma’s eye. She didn’t look in the least tired, insulted or jaded.
Which was okay, he supposed, because he was feeling enough of all that for the both of them.
Emma was the forever-romantic type, wasn’t she? He’d seen it in the way her eyes lit-up in the library when she’d tried convincing him that Jane Austen was all about true love, not social commentary.
And here was his brother, drunk and about to bitch about his wife, basically doing his best to prove how very unromantic the Knightleys could be.
‘Is there a bedroom made-up that he can sleep it off in, tonight?’ Emma asked, nudging the coffee closer to his brother.
Jake nodded. ‘He can use his old room. He’s stayed here before.’
‘I am here, you know,’ Seth bellowed, reaching for the wine glass instead of the coffee and knocking it over so that the dregs of red wine splashed over the white candle like a special effect in a gothic horror movie. ‘Ouch, damn it.’
It took Jake a couple of seconds to register the red wine on Seth’s hand wasn’t wine but blood.
He stared transfixed. Completely unable to move as the ribbon of red oozed down his brother’s arm to drip onto the table.