Chapter Fourteen
‘You have bewitched me body and soul’. Forgive me for using another’s words, but sometimes only Austen will do.
H
SEBASTIAN
A warm, muted light presses against my closed lids and I open them, for a moment content to do nothing but lie, warm and sated, in sheets that smell of . . . sex. Of . . . vanilla. Of . . . her.
I blink. And turn my head.
There she is, lying next to me, her hair golden on the pillow and all spread out. She has her hands tucked beneath her chin like a child, and her golden eyelashes rest softly on her satiny cheeks.
She’s beautiful.
She’s fast asleep and I must leave her.
I don’t want to. Even now, I can feel my body hardening, wanting more of her heat, of the feeling of being inside her. Of her breath in my ear and the sound of my name in her mouth as she comes.
I had no idea that pretty Miss Jones, with her fluffy golden hair and her pretty little dresses, hides the most passionate of souls. She’s as fierce in bed as she is stubborn out of it, and I was right about what I’d thought the night before. It was a cataclysm and she wrecked me.
She’s changed me and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I should leave, slip out before she wakes up, but . . . I can’t bring myself to do so. That would be a coward’s way out and she deserves better than that, especially after last night.
So I lie there and watch her and, eventually, her golden lashes flutter and they open, her grey eyes meeting mine.
There’s no shock in her face, no surprise. She smiles slowly, like the sun coming up, as if finding me beside her is the best thing that’s ever happened to her.
My chest aches for reasons I can’t explain, yet despite that, I find myself smiling back. It feels like we’re sharing a wonderful secret.
‘Did you read the book I gave you?’ Her voice is soft and husky with sleep.
I turn on my side to face her. ‘Yes. I read it in one sitting. I stayed up until three a.m., thank you very much.’
Her eyes sparkle. ‘I knew you’d like it. I’d never have picked you for a science fiction reader, though.’
It feels easy to talk to her like this, without the relentless tension of physical chemistry between us. Though the chemistry hasn’t gone. I can still feel it crackling in the air. It doesn’t bother me now, though, not like it did before. Not when every muscle in my body is relaxed and I feel sated and lazy with the after-effects of magnificent sex. Not when I can reach out and pull her close if it gets too much.
‘I’ve always read it. Since I was a kid.’
‘Don’t tell me, you were a space geek.’
I don’t deny it. ‘I also liked the ideas, and the escapism factor.’
‘So, what was your favourite book as a kid?’
‘ The Hobbit ,’ I say, without hesitation. ‘And The Lord of the Rings .’
‘Oh my God, you were an LOTR nerd too.’ She looks delighted, her face glowing, and I feel insufferably smug for having so delighted her.
‘Guilty,’ I say. ‘What about you? What was your favourite childhood read?’
‘ I Capture the Castle . Dodie Smith.’
I haven’t read it, but I know the title. ‘About the girl who lives in the castle with her disaster of a family?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘That’s an old book.’
‘I know.’ The sparkle in her eyes fades. ‘It was my mother’s favourite.’
Her mother, whom she lost two years ago. I know how that feels.
I reach out and tuck a curl behind her ear, touching her gently. ‘You were close?’
‘Yeah. She brought me up on her own. We had no money, so she used to take me to the library for some free entertainment. Then there was that one birthday where she took me into a bookshop and told me I could choose any book I wanted.’
I can see how much that meant to her. ‘What book did you choose?’
‘I can’t remember the title now. But I was a little girl, so it had fairies in it.’
I smile, thinking of her as that little girl, walking wide-eyed into a bookshop. ‘Is that where your dream of being a bookshop owner came from?’
She nods. ‘We used to live next door to one when I was ten. Mum was out a lot, working, and she knew the bookseller and would ask her to keep an eye on me. She never minded. She’d let me sit there for hours, reading.’
Another feeling I know all too well, that escape from reality into another one. A better one.
‘But you got a job in publishing first?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Mum lived paycheque to paycheque, and she didn’t like owning things or having “stuff”. She was kind of a free spirit, which is fine when you don’t have kids. But when you do . . .’
I don’t miss the bitter note in her voice. ‘Was your childhood difficult?’
‘In some ways. I was alone a lot, and moving around constantly was tough. But I did love the bookshops and libraries I went to. Anyway, I wanted something more stable and secure for myself, so I went to uni, then finally managed to get an editorial assistant job at a publishing house.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘I did.’ She smiles at what is obviously a pleasant memory. ‘It was great. But . . .’
She’s reeling me in with these little glimpses into her past, and I’m helpless to resist. I want to know. I want to know everything. ‘But?’ I prompt.
Her smile vanishes, the sun going down. ‘But then Mum died, and a couple of years after that, my relationship broke up, and then I didn’t want to be in London.’
‘And so you came here.’
‘And so I came here,’ she echoes. ‘It took me a while to decide what I wanted to do with the property, but once I realised I wanted to get away from the big city, it seemed like fate was trying to tell me something. Then I got here and took one look at the building and it just . . . was a bookshop to me. That’s how it started.’
I can’t help staring at her. She has lost a lot and that must have been difficult. Her mother, her relationship, her job. Her life in London. It takes strength and resilience to come back from that, to create a new life in a different place, yet that’s exactly what she’s done.
She is remarkable.
‘That must have been very hard,’ I say, my fingertips brushing her cheek.
She turns her face against my hand, her eyelashes lowering, veiling her gaze. ‘It was. I loved the job, but Mum got sick very suddenly. She hadn’t told me about the cancer, so that was a shock. She only lasted a couple of months, which was a blessing, really. I hated to see her in pain.’
I know that thought. I know it intimately. My father kept most of my own mother’s last weeks from me, but even as a kid I knew that lingering on, in pain, was in no one’s best interests.
I stroke her skin, the weight of everything that I want to say all at once too much for me. Words aren’t enough, sometimes.
‘I am very sorry about your mother,’ I say at last, the emptiest of empty statements. ‘Cancer is a terrible disease.’
‘It is. Sometimes, though, you have to take what you can from an awful situation. You know, find the silver lining. And I suppose my silver lining was realising that, if I didn’t open my own bookshop now, I never would. I needed to come back to my roots, too, even though I knew nothing about those roots.’ She fixes me with a direct look all at once. ‘I think I want to find out. Those letters of your great-grandfather’s make me want to know more about my own family.’ A shadow flickers through her eyes. ‘Because, now, I’m the only one left.’
The Blackwoods have always been here in Wychtree and I have always known where I come from. Sometimes that’s a millstone and sometimes it’s reassuring. Either way, I can understand why she would want to know about her origins too.
‘I could help you,’ I say. ‘There are bound to be people around who knew your grandmother, and maybe even your mother, too. I don’t remember them, but someone else must do.’
Her smile this time makes my chest ache. ‘Would you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I promise, even though there are doubts inside me at the wisdom of such a promise. ‘You helped me with Lisa Underwood, so it’s the least I can do.’
‘We don’t know if she’s coming yet, though.’
‘No, that’s true.’ She’s too far away, I realise, and I want her nearer. I reach out and pull her close, the warmth of her naked body sliding over mine making me instantly hard. ‘I’ll help you regardless.’
She folds her hands on my chest. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘You’re not half bad, really, are you?’
I sift my fingers through her hair. It feels like raw silk. ‘I can be all bad if you prefer.’
‘You know I do.’ She studies me as if she’s looking for something, but I can’t tell what it is. ‘What about you? Tell me about the Blackwoods.’
I’m relaxed and the uncoiling desire inside me is lazy, and with the softness of her hair between my fingers, I don’t mind telling her. ‘Not much to say. My great-grandfather, as you know, was a bookseller. He married after coming back from the war and they had my grandfather. His wife left him when my grandfather was little so he had to bring him up by himself. He died when my grandfather was eighteen.’
‘He died young, then.’
‘Comparatively, yes. It’s thought that he drowned. His clothes were discovered on the riverbank near Wychtree, but his body was never found. My grandfather once said that he drowned himself because he never got over my great-grandmother leaving, but now . . . I’m not so sure.’
‘How awful.’ There’s sympathy in her eyes. ‘Do you think it might have something to do with C?’
‘Judging from those notes, possibly. Anyway, my grandfather took over the bookshop afterwards, but his successful running of it was stymied by a gambling addiction that only got worse after my grandmother left him.’
Her brow creases. ‘Oh dear. How did that happen? Your grandmother leaving, I mean?’
‘Oh, she met my grandfather when they were both very young. Too young. She was one of those sixties hippies who lived an itinerant lifestyle. There was some music festival happening near Wychtree and she was staying in the village, and wandered into the bookshop one day. Love at first sight, apparently. Anyway, she was a free spirit, and didn’t like the village any more than my great-grandmother did. My grandfather had to marry her because she got pregnant, and that was what you did back then. Not long after having Dad, she left my grandfather and went back to London.’ I sift yet more strands of her hair through my fingers, relishing the feel of it. ‘I don’t remember her – she didn’t have much contact with Dad after she left, or so Dad said – but it broke my grandfather’s heart. He gambled a lot afterwards and my father had to take steps to protect the bookshop as he got older and could take over. My grandfather then died about nine years ago of a stroke.’
The crease between her brows deepens. ‘Oh, that’s tragic.’
‘The Blackwoods are famous for falling for and marrying unsuitable women far too young,’ I say. ‘My father was the same.’
She puts her chin on her folded hands. ‘How?’
An old grief grips me, but I’m the one who’s introduced the subject, so I go on. ‘Dad met Mum in a café when he was in London for a book fair. She was studying law, was bright and ambitious, and they hit it off talking about books.’ Memories play through my head, of sitting in the garden with Mum as she tells me about the day she met Dad. How she loved his intelligence and his quick wit. I remember her smiling and shooting me a glance. ‘ And his blue eyes ,’ she added. ‘She loved the bookshop, unlike the other Blackwood wives. And she loved the village. She studied law through the Open University and wanted to start her own practice here. But . . . my father preferred the bottle to her. She was actually going to leave him, I think, but then she found out she had cancer.’
An old anger twists in my gut. At Dad and how he let his addiction get in the way of being a good husband. How he let it control him and eventually how he disappeared into it and into his grief. How he stopped being a husband to my mother and a father to me.
But I don’t want to talk about Dad. We’re talking about my mother and she’s more important.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Kate says. ‘That must have been really awful.’
‘It was,’ I say simply. Because that’s exactly what it was. Awful. ‘It was a long time ago, but I was very close to her.’ I hesitate a moment, then add, ‘I started reading fantasy books and science fiction when she was sick. Because it was an escape. I could lose myself for a few hours in a totally different world.’
She nods. ‘That makes sense. But . . . why did you never expand what you carry in the bookshop? You don’t include genre fiction at all and I can’t help but wonder, if you like it, why you don’t?’
It’s a fair question and one I’ve never put much thought into, because I’ve never had to. Not until she came along. ‘Because that’s the way it’s always been done,’ I say, thinking. ‘My grandfather didn’t want to stock what he thought were “cheap” books, so we never did. And Dad . . . lost interest in the bookshop after Mum died.’ I wind one of her curls around my finger. ‘A good thing, since if I had, your bookshop may not have got off the ground.’
She smiles. ‘Oh, you think so?’
I’m only partly teasing her. ‘Of course. I am a very good bookseller, Miss Jones.’
She shifts on me, the press of her body against mine rousing me, and the lazy desire coursing through my veins becomes less lazy. ‘You are, Sebastian. But you could have some amazing events at Blackwood Books. Different from mine, but along the same lines.’ There’s excitement in her eyes now. ‘You could have talks on art history or architecture or photography or something.’ Her face is beautifully flushed. ‘Oh, what about a chess evening? Or a poetry reading? Do you have a book club?’ She gives me a sudden and very direct stare. ‘Why do you not have a book club, Sebastian?’
I let go of her hair and shift, turning us both over and pinning her beneath me. ‘Because I never knew I needed one,’ I say, as I settle myself between her thighs.
She puts her palms flat to my chest, stroking my skin with her thumbs. It feels good. More than good. It feels fantastic. ‘Well, you do. As much as we’d like them to, books don’t just sell themselves these days. You have to get out there and sell them. Tell people why they should be reading instead of watching Netflix or playing World of Warcraft or whatever else they’re doing. Ask people what they like to read, tell them about new releases . . . There’s lots you can be doing.’ She reaches one hand to my face, touching my cheekbone. Her fingers are gentle and it’s been so long since I’ve been touched this way, I can hardly stand it. ‘You have so much experience and so much knowledge about what you do, Sebastian. But more than that, you have passion. And I think there are a lot of people who’d love to share that with you.’
I lean into her hand the way she leaned into mine, then I turn and press a kiss to her palm. ‘I don’t take kindly to people telling me how to do my job. But I’ll make an exception for you.’ Again, I’m only partly teasing.
‘It’s a good idea,’ she says earnestly. ‘You know I’m right.’
I move on her, pressing myself against the sensitive place between her thighs, making her gasp. ‘You are. You’re an incredibly intelligent woman, Kate Jones. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you’re brilliant.’
Colour flushes her face, her hair spread and tangled on the pillow like sea-drenched kelp. A mermaid I’ve caught and am taking my pleasure with. ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ she says, smiling. ‘If you help me with my history, I could help you with getting events started at Blackwood Books, or even a newsletter.’
I shouldn’t agree, not when being in her company constantly is such a test. Then again, I’ve already agreed to too much and what she’s suggested will help the bookshop. As to having her around all the time . . . well, that will be the future’s problem. Right now, there’s only one issue that’s concerning me.
‘I would love your help,’ I say. ‘And I could also use your help with this other little problem of mine.’ I shift again, making her groan. ‘It appears some beautiful witch has got me hard and I really don’t know what to do about it.’
She’s breathing faster now. ‘You really don’t? Do you need some instruction?’
I take her wrists in my hands and press them down on the pillow beside her head. ‘Oh, I think I can work it out.’
I bend and kiss her.
And lose us both in the never-ending moment.