Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
SASHA
November slips by in a daze of Christmas-themed dates.
The weekend after the tree lighting ceremony, I join Sebastian, Edith, and Charlotte for a festive-themed afternoon tea at Blenheim Palace, followed by a walk around the Christmas market and the after-dark festive light trail. Charlotte insists on pictures with Santa, something I haven’t done since I was a kid, and it actually gives me a buzz seeing Christmas through her excited eyes.
Maybe Sebastian was right.
A couple of days later, he and I share a two-course Christmas Tudor Feast at Honeybourne Castle in the neighbouring village, and a few days after that we drive to Woodstock for the Festive Fayre. The market there is nothing new, but I spend the afternoon drinking beers in their pop-up pub and looking at Charlotte’s baby pictures saved on Sebastian’s phone.
I’ve ignored my begrudging attraction to this man quite successfully for two years now, but the way he loves his daughter sends that attraction skyrocketing. The more time we spend together, the more visible it becomes.
As much as I hate to admit, I’m starting to see why everyone thinks Sebastian is such a catch, and it’s another complication I neither want or need.
By the last week of November, the streets are scattered with crunchy brown leaves and business is picking up. We’re in the thick of the holiday season now, so it’s not surprising, but I can’t afford to be complacent.
I already spent most of the day rearranging the stock and changing up the displays, and while I’ve had twice as many customers today, it’s too early to call it a success by any means.
Bopping a pen against my forehead, I peer down at the notepad filled with potential shop-saving ideas.
1. Gift-wrapping service
2. New window display every week
3. Website?
4. Free mince pie with every purchase???
I cringe and whine.
This is so lame.
I’m tempted to throw the whole thing away in a childish tantrum, but I need to start somewhere. I only wish I had some kind of sign this whole thing is worth it, that maybe all hope isn’t lost.
The bell chimes above the shop door. Even though it’s time to close, I glance up with my best customer service smile, and I’m a little unsettled by the uptick in my pulse at Sebastian filling the doorway. If it was daytime, the sheer breadth of his shoulders would’ve blocked out the light.
He doesn’t come inside, probably too nervous to knock something over, and nods in greeting from the pavement.
“I have a surprise for you,” he says.
“I don’t like surprises.”
“Huh. You don’t like Christmas. Now surprises. Are you sure you’re not the grump in this relationship?”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
He grins at that and, annoyingly, I do too.
“I promise you’ll like this surprise. It’s a good one. Will you please come with me?”
There’s something different about him tonight. A softness, like someone’s rubbed away a few of his harsh edges somehow. Or maybe I’m just seeing those edges in a new light. Either way, he seems so earnest that I find myself saying, “Okay. Give me five minutes.”
I finish closing out the register, locking the safe, and setting the alarms for the night. Scanning the shop one last time, I grab my keys, and make my way outside.
“Where’s your coat?” Sebastian demands, glaring at me like I’ve committed the most gravest of sins. “It’s going to snow tonight.”
“It’s not cold enough to snow. There wasn’t even a snow sky earlier.”
“Well, there’s one now, and trust me, it’s freezing out here.”
“I guess you’ll just have to let me go home then.”
“Nope. No can do.” He frowns a moment longer, then sighs like I’m the world’s biggest inconvenience, and unzips his coat. A second later, he drapes his quilted navy coat over my shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“Giving you my coat, woman. What does it look like?”
His body heat lingers inside, and instinctively I follow the warmth, threading my arms through the sleeves, even though the length surpasses my hands by a good eight inches. I gesture at him with both floppy sleeves, and Sebastian laughs, shaking his head as he starts to fold the material over until my hands reappear.
“You’re a tiny thing, aren’t you?”
My spluttered laugh gets tangled up between a snort and a scoff.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ve never been called tiny in my life. Have you seen the size of my ass?”
His eyes flare with heat. “Yes. It’s perfect. What’s the issue?”
My ass has been called a lot of things over the years. Perfect isn’t one of them, even though I’ve grown to appreciate the way I fill out my favourite jeans. Twenty-two-year-old Sasha would not have said the same, which is one of the reasons I’m glad I’m not twenty-two anymore.
I love my body as it is now, but it’s taken me a long time to reach this level of self-acceptance. I should feel lucky for that. It makes me sad to think some people never get there.
“No issue,” I say. “But I’m not tiny so you don’t have to say things like that. There’s no need to lie.”
“I’m not lying. Look at the size of me. You’re tiny to me. Everyone is. Would you like me to throw you over my shoulder to prove it?”
Yes please.
The mental image has my thighs clenching, the heat of it cresting through me. It’s like he read my mind and the cringe reddens the tips of my ears. I hope I’m not that obvious.
“Um. No. That’s not necessary. Some other time maybe.”
Why did I say that?
“I look forward to it.”
His grin is a touch too smug for my liking and has me rolling my eyes.
“Have I told you how annoying you are lately?”
“It’s been a while actually,” he jests. “You want to do that now or…”
He laughs when I give him a solid shove, and then again when I can’t hide my irritation over the fact that he didn’t move an inch, despite my best efforts.
“You know, they didn’t call me ‘The Wall’ for nothing,” he says.
“‘The Wall’?”
“My rugby nickname. Nothing could get past me. But it’s cute of you to try.”
“My foot will give you cute in a minute.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” He clasps my elbow to hurry me along. “Now, can we go please? We still need to have dinner afterwards and all this foreplay is making me hungry.”
“If you think that was foreplay, I feel sad for you. And what do you mean after? What’s going on?”
“I already told you, it’s a surprise. Let’s go.”
A blast of bitter cold hits us both, and I scowl, annoyed Sebastian was right. He chuckles and huddles closer, using his body as a wind shield while I lock the shop for the night.
I offer him a grateful, if reluctant smile, unable to hide the shiver rolling through me. “Thank you, and thanks for the coat.”
“You’re welcome. I’d like to say I told you so but I’m feeling generous tonight.”
My smile bleeds into another scowl. “Why’d you have to open your mouth and ruin it?”
He laughs.
The village shops are in closing mode, which means we have an unexpected audience as we make our way through the square.
“Evening, lovebirds,” Nia calls out, broom in hand as she sweeps the mix of leaves and fallen petals from the outdoor flower display.
“Evening,” Sebastian returns, snatching my hand after I’ve waved back.
“I feel like I’m being watched,” I grumble.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Was it like this when you used to play rugby?”
“Worse. I dread to think how bad it would’ve been if I’d been really famous.”
“You don’t consider yourself famous?”
“If I was a footballer, maybe. Rugby players don’t have the same notoriety. Thank god.”
I can’t help but think about all those paparazzi photographs on google search, but I keep quiet. If Sebastian finds out I googled him one time, I’ll never hear the end of it.
We walk side by side until the pavement narrows and then it’s single file all the way down a narrow cobblestone lane to where Sebastian parked his dark green Land Rover, the wheels flecked with mud.
He holds open the passenger door and bows slightly, making me grin as I climb inside. He jumps in the driver’s side a second later, and fiddles with the heat settings, directing the blast of warmer air my way as soon as he turns the ignition.
“Sebastian, I’m fine. Stop fussing.”
“Since when is caring called fussing?”
I’m not entirely sure what to say to that. “You’re right, but there’s no one around to see you. You can drop the act when we’re alone.”
“Who said it was an act?” He sounds offended, although that doesn’t seem possible.
Who said it was an act?
Well, you did, I want to say. That was the whole point of this.
The words play on repeat as Sebastian drives away from the village. He says he has a surprise so I’m a little confused when he turns onto the lane leading to the manor. He doesn’t take the main entrance though, instead turning onto a bumpy off-road lane so narrow the bare hedgerows scrape along the side of the car.
Eventually, Sebastian parks outside a bunch of sheds and outbuildings and grabs a torch from the car boot, along with a dark green farmer jacket he must keep just in case.
The world is pitch black this far away from any light pollution, and I can barely see a hand in front of my face.
A shiver skates down my spine.
“What are we doing out here, Sebastian?”
“You’ll see,” he says, pointing the torch at the ground and tugging on my hand.
A snarky comment about the necessity of holding hands pops into my brain, but I find myself staying silent. It’s unsettling out here, swallowed by a darkness as thick as soup, but the tension bleeds out of me the second our fingers entwine. The way his massive hand envelopes mine makes me feel safe and warm. Not alone.
I try not to think about that while he leads me into one of the sheds, and I scrunch my eyes closed, taking a moment to let them adjust when the room floods with brightness.
Something tall stands in the middle of the room, covered with a blue tarpaulin, and Sebastian gives me an excited, almost child-like grin before wrenching it off.
My gasp rings sharp and breathy in the air.
“Is this… Is this what I think it is?”
“That depends. What do you think it is?”
I whack his chest. Sometimes he’s such a cheeky little shit. “This looks like the Nutcracker my nan used to have outside her shop. The original. Is this Bert?”
Sebastian grins slowly.
My pulse skyrockets.
No way!
It can’t be.
That thing was stolen a lifetime ago.
Unless…
I rush forward, blindly tracing the grooves at the back. Years before I was born, my granddad had tussled with a shoplifter, or so the story goes, and the pair of them had careened into the display outside, knocking the Nutcracker to the pavement. There had been some easily fixable paint damage, but the only real sign anything had happened was a missing chunk from the grooved edge of the Nutcracker’s belt where it had hit the kerb.
“I don’t believe it,” I breathe out, surprised by the roughened wood chip beneath my fingertips. “Are you kidding me?”
Sebastian laughs. “You know me. I never kid.”
“Oh my god! Where did you find it? How?”
“I can’t tell you.” He winces the second my mouth drops. “I’m sworn to secrecy. Just know it was a silly prank and then someone forgot they committed the prank in the first place, and when they remembered they felt guilty and kept it under a tarpaulin for twenty years.”
“I—”
“True story. They do want you to know how sorry they are though, and they would’ve returned it sooner, but they forgot about it. It was kind of out of sight, out of mind.”
Wow.
I take a moment, trying to absorb the enormity of this surprise.
Sebastian was right yet again. It was a good one.
“You know what? I don’t care who stole it. I’m just happy to have it back. I never imagined this.” The sting of emotion has me losing my speech. “You… I?—”
“Hey. What’s with the tears?” Sebastian rubs my back in slow, soft circles. “I thought this was a good thing.”
“It is. But earlier I asked for a sign that the shop and everything I’m doing is still worth it, and then this happens. I can’t believe it. It’s like they heard me somehow.”
“Maybe they did.”
I glance away, unable to stand the gentle stretch of Sebastian’s smile, and the thought that maybe my grandparents really are watching me, if that’s at all possible.
The line between the dead and the living already feels translucent some days working in Mistletoe & Mine , surrounded by things my grandparents touched, existing in a vision they made reality. The idea that they’re there with me, rooting for me, is almost too much to bear.
“Did you know my granddad made this?” I say, trying to lift the mood. “He carved the whole thing himself.”
“Really? Old Bill made this?”
I nod. “It took him a couple of years and he did the whole thing in his little garden shed. Apparently, it was so heavy they needed four of them to get it from the shed to the shop and they ended up using a wheelbarrow. It was front-page news in the Walmsley Observer.”
“I can understand why it was left for twenty years,” Sebastian says. “I don’t know how anyone could put something so heavy back unnoticed. I nearly broke my back getting this here.”
“Well, thank you. It means a lot to me. I can’t even tell you how much.”
“You don’t have to. I know.”
I stare at the Nutcracker again, this little piece of my grandparents’ history, and trace the dips and curves into the wood. The nostalgia, the memories it holds, the way I asked for a sign… The weight of it all is near overwhelming.
“I feel like…” I shake my head, feeling silly and sentimental all of a sudden.
“Like what?”
“Like I got a little bit of them back,” I murmur, blinking against the fresh prickle of tears. “Nan and Granddad, that is. Like they came home to me somehow. How silly is that?”
“It’s not silly at all.”
Sebastian steps close enough to smell the peppermint gum on his breath, and I’m forced to tilt my head all the way back. He stares at me for a long moment, gaze more direct than ever before, and reaches for me, not quite touching. His hand hovers a few inches from mine, so close I can feel the heat of his skin, but after a few moments of hesitation his arm drops.
Inexplicably, disappointment tugs in my chest, and I’m not sure why. This man annoys me and our relationship isn’t real. I shouldn’t want to feel the warmth of his body or the comfort of his embrace.
Except, right now, it’s all I want.
“Sasha,” he says quietly, disturbing my train of thought. “In about twenty seconds I’m going to hug you, okay?”
“Why are you telling me that?”
“Well, not everyone likes hugs. I’m preparing you so you don’t fight me and kick me in the balls.”
“I’d never do that. I’ve only imagined cutting them off, not kicking them. Remember?”
Amusement dances in his eyes. “Is that okay, that I’m going to hug you?”
“I suppose it would be okay.”
He shifts into my space again, and this time there’s nothing hesitant about the way he wraps me in his arms. His chin comes to rest on top of my head, even if he crouches to make it happen, and he smells like the outside, like fresh air and grass.
It takes me a moment to band my own arms around his waist and let him take a bit of my weight, a bit of the emotion pressing down on my chest and blistering the back of my throat.
Sebastian has touched me before now. He’s saved me from wobbling stepladders, held my hand and kissed my cheek, but this hug is weighted differently. It’s not remotely sexual but it’s deeply intimate, and nothing I wanted, but somehow, impossibly, everything I need.