Chapter Eleven
Chapter
Eleven
It’s one of those perfect summer evenings and the garden is still sun warmed and fragrant as I grab five minutes to myself before dinner.
“Shouldn’t you be in there on your hot date by now?”
I look up and find Britannia coming toward me along the garden path.
“It’s not a date,” I say, distracted because I hadn’t noticed her and wished I’d taken more notice of what she was up to. “What were you doing out here?”
She glances over her shoulder quickly, a reflex check almost, then shrugs. “Pretending I could still feel the sunshine and smell the flowers.”
I feel momentarily guilty, because I’d just been idly enjoying both of those things.
“You seem to spend quite a lot of your time in the garden,” I say.
Her face softens. “It’s one of my favorite places.”
She’s such a difficult one to get a handle on. A sophisticated siren and then a lonesome waif wandering the gardens. What draws her out here so constantly? My gut instinct burbles again, telling me to tread carefully, but that there’s a piece of the puzzle here somewhere.
“Looks like you’re late.” She nods toward the house and I spy Fletch through the open French doors of the dining room. When I turn back, she’s gone.
I sneak back in through the kitchen to the dining room, and inside I find Fletch lounging by the open doors with a glass of white wine in his hand.
He’s staring out over the lush gardens and he hasn’t noticed me yet, and I fight the urge to back out of the door again and run up to the relative safety of my bedroom.
On the table, a couple of bottles of wine rest in a chiller and a silver candelabra flickers.
I’m not sure what to make of that; it feels a bit dateish rather than dinner-at-the-same-table-ish, and that isn’t the plan we agreed on.
I consider blowing the candles out, but I don’t because it’d look a bit over dramatic, wouldn’t it?
I plan on making a quiet entrance, but thanks to the clatter of my heels he realizes I’m there and turns around as soon I make a move.
“Ghostbus…” His word trails off and he stares at me intently.
I freeze, awkward. “What?”
“You dressed for dinner,” he says quietly.
“Did you expect me not to?” I quip.
He takes a sip of his wine and recovers. “A guy can hope.”
My legs remember how to move again, so I head toward the end of the table that has been prettily laid for dinner for two.
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I say lightly, noticing the small jug of freshly picked garden flowers.
Fletch lifts the open wine bottle from the ice bucket and pours me a glass. “I didn’t say that you’d disappointed me. I meant the opposite, actually,” he says. “You look…” He pauses to choose his word carefully.
If he says different, I’m going upstairs to put on my Converse and Little Miss Predictable T-shirt.
“You look foxy as fuck.”
And he just pressed that button again. Shit. I take the wine from him, down half of it in panic, and say the first thing I can think of.
“I’m wearing a dead woman’s shoes.”
A smile forms on his lips as he shakes his head. “You really need to learn how to take a compliment, Ghostbuster.”
Resenting the suggestion that I’m gauche, I sip my wine and attempt to stand with one hip cocked, the way Marina naturally does, and I fidget awkwardly with the sloppy neck of my sweater like a teenager.
“I can take a compliment just fine.”
“Good,” he says. “Then you won’t mind if I tell you that I like the fact that your sweater stops me from having to wonder what color your bra is and that you’ve got a killer ass in those jeans.”
“I’m not sure knowing the color of my underwear is a compliment; it’s more of a letchy observation.” I frown. “And as for my ass…” I look down. “It’s the dead woman’s shoes. They make my legs look longer.”
Fletch pulls a chair out for me, watching me all of the time with amused eyes. “For future reference, it’s probably easier to just smile and say thank you when someone says something nice.”
I smile as advised. “I’m not sure foxy as fuck counts as something nice but thank you for the life advice.”
“You’re welcome. It’s probably appropriate for you to say something nice back to me now too.”
“Don’t push your luck,” I say, although in truth I’ve already registered the effort he’s made this evening.
His dark charcoal shirt looks expensive and fits him in a way that accentuates his body, which we both know I think is as firm as a racehorse and as hot as morning bedsheets.
God alive, I can feel my cheeks starting to burn.
For a nondate, all of this foxy-as-fuck chat about the color of my bra and thoughts about his hot body are highly inappropriate.
“Did you see what happened on social media just now with the creepy twins?” I ask, changing the subject.
Reaching into his pocket, Fletch pulls out a lurid pink cellphone and lays it on the table.
I swallow. “That’s a bold color choice for a man like you.”
“It’s not mine. It’s theirs. It was like taking candy from a baby. Two babies.”
I frown, not following.
“It wasn’t just you who looked bad in that photograph,” he says. “I’ve dealt with it.”
I don’t even want to ask him how he distracted the twins for long enough to steal the cell.
Clicking my own phone on, I see that the image has indeed been taken down and there’s a new one up now, one of Leo passed out on the castle sofa in a dead faint after his first encounter with Goliath. It’s accompanied with a #sleepingonthejob hashtag and a #pretentiousknob one for good measure.
I don’t know whether to be impressed, amused, or even more pissed off. Between Marina and Fletch, the creepy twins will have at least learned that if you poke a stick in a hornets’ nest, you should expect to get stung.
“So, dinner,” I say nervously, getting up again fast although I’ve only just sat down. “Let’s see what there is.”
An old-fashioned hostess cart sits close by and I slide the top open to reveal what appears to be a chicken casserole and a side dish of little herby roasted potatoes tossed with green beans.
“Mediterranean chicken and chorizo stew,” Fletch says, reading from a little handwritten menu card on the table.
God, it smells delicious. I hadn’t realized quite how hungry I was until now. Reaching for a couple of warm plates and taking them from the cart, I spoon some food onto one and place it down in front of Fletch.
“Thank you,” he says, waiting for me to join him with my own plate before picking up his cutlery.
I steal a glance at him as I reach for my fork and catch my breath.
The candlelight casts golden shadows across his face and I’m jittery because, all of a sudden, he looks like a sophisticated, grown-up, worldly man.
I mean, I know I’m a proper grown-up woman too, but I feel about sixteen most of the time, and I try very hard not to think of Fletch as anything but the smart-arse hack who gets under my skin.
He glances up and catches me looking, so he raises his glass. “To your foxy ass and your dead woman’s shoes.”
I touch my glass to his without comment. Under different circumstances, this could be wildly romantic. We’re sharing a delicious candlelight dinner alone in a gorgeous castle and there is undeniable sexual chemistry between us.
“We should talk about what I’m hoping will happen here over the next couple of days,” I say, because I’m keen to steer the conversation toward work.
“That’s refreshingly forward of you.” He grins. “I’m a fan of girl on top.”
A butterfly unfurls its wings in my gut and takes flight behind my ribs.
“Can you just stop with the innuendoes, please?” I lay my cutlery down and look at him steadily, valiantly keeping all sex images out of my head.
“I didn’t expect the paper to respond to the email about shadowing me so quickly, I didn’t necessarily think it would be you, and I certainly didn’t imagine in a million years we’d end up spending a couple of nights together alone here like this. ”
He eats slowly as he listens to me, taking a sip of his wine as he waits for me to go on. His expression is completely unreadable and I feel a fresh flush of panic scuttle beneath my skin.
“What I’m trying to say is just because we’re two people sharing a delicious candlelight dinner alone in a gorgeous castle and there is undeniable sexual chemistry between us…
” I pause for air and to wish that my inner monologue had not just become my outer monologue.
“It doesn’t follow that we have to have sex, girl on top or girl on bottom.
” I almost hum with panic because I think I might have accidentally just offered him anal sex.
“One plus one does not always equal two, Fletcher.”
He frowns. “It does.”
I shake my head. “Nope. One plus one can still be one. Or three. Or sometimes it can even be five.” I don’t have a clue what I’m jabbering on about.
“In the context of sex, Melody, one is masturbation, three is a ménage à trois, and five is edging toward an orgy.”
Christ, now he’s saying lots of sex words and I’ve gone so hot that I might need to take my sweater off before I pass out.
This is going very badly and we’ve been in the same room for only five minutes.
“You shouldn’t have lit the candles,” I say, accusatory, looking to blame him for getting the evening off on the wrong footing. “You know this isn’t a date.”
“I didn’t light them. I thought you did.”
“Funny,” I say.
“He didn’t light them. I did.” Britannia appears through the nearest wall.
I should have known. “Did you pick the flowers from the garden too?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Yes,” she says.
“You shouldn’t have. This isn’t a date.”
“Will you stop saying that? I know it isn’t, and I didn’t try to turn it into one. You’re the one who brought up sex, not me,” he says, exasperated.