Chapter 55
Chapter
Fifty-Five
Haven’t I always been good at quick exits? It’s part of my skillset. Once my mind is made up, I’m packed and gone very fast.
The only exception this time is that I don’t pack.
Osian packs for me. We’ve had a short sleep – yes just sleep – side by side with his arm around me.
He says I deserve better than a borrowed bed, and our first time should be somewhere special.
So he’s packing for me to save time while I spend the morning handing over to Sue Baker.
She and her husband are genuinely excited to continue the workshops and potting days that I started. But they’re also worried.
“We’ll have to pull long hours the two of us.” Mr Baker can’t hide his concern as he flips through my handover notes.
“Offer internships,” I suggest. “Contact any college with a horticulture course. Some fresh graduates would jump at the chance, and you’d have an affordable but knowledgeable person to help out.”
“Are you sure you want to leave it all to us?,” Sue asks as she walks out with me to where I parked my car. “This is your business, your idea.”
“But your wonderful garden centre.” I stop on the pavement and look up at the sign above their door. “I know you’ll make a huge success.”
Sue gives me a last hug “I can never thank you enough. We’d never have even thought about doing this. The conservatory was stood empty for years until you came along.”
And then it’s all done.
By Ipm, Osian and I are on the A14.
Of course, he insists on taking all my luggage in his car. According to him, my red Mini is a ‘girly car’ that will have trouble enough keeping up with his Land Rover on the motorway without the added weight of two suitcases and a box of gardening gear.
Yet it’s him who keeps stopping. Once just outside Oxford for lunch, and again in Stroud because, as he puts it, “A shame to drive through the Cotswolds and not stop for a good look.” Except he doesn’t look at the town as we sit side by side in the café.
He keeps an arm around me and every couple of minutes he drops a kiss on my forehead, my cheek, and when no one is looking, on my mouth.
Now we’re openly and officially in love, he doesn’t seem able to go two hours without touching me. Not that I mind. It’s such a thrill to feel the warm length of his body pressed to my side.
The unscheduled stops add an extra couple of hours on the journey so it’s nearly 7:15pm when we finally crest the hill and look down on Kendric House. In the sunset it does indeed looks pink. A faded echo of the pink wash it used to have. A beautiful butterfly, wings outstretched like an embrace.
We pull into the carpark at the front, and my car slots into its old spot as if it’s been kept vacant for me. Everything feels so natural, so familiar, as if I never left.
With one exception, I don’t have keys because I’d left mine in Evan’s office so many months ago.
“Go in,” Osian gives me his keys. “I’ll deal with the luggage.”
I’m barely through the door where there’s a scream. Ashe, crossing the entrance hall with a stack of books, “EVIE” she drops everything on the floor and flies to throw her arms around me. “Oh my God Evie!”
So much for slipping in and going upstairs unnoticed.
Others come: Shirley leaning on her walking frame, Ricky who also shouts my name, a growing crowd of surprise and cheering.
I’m passed from one hug to another. Alex lifts me up in the air and twirls me around.
Even the professor, normally reserved, takes my hand in both of his with a delighted, “Oh my dear, my very dear. Wonderful to see you.”
There are various calls of “Oh thank God!” and even a “Thank fuck she’s back.”
Raff pumps Osian’s hand. “Good job, great job. Thank you.”
Haneen cries, Leonie cries, I cry. And laugh, wiping my face with the back of my wrist.
“How did you find her” Someone asks.
Osian puts my suitcases down on the floor. “Haneen stole the address from Evan’s paperwork.”
Evan and Haneen exchange a look and she shrugs. “It’s not easy to say no to Osian.”
Don’t I know it.
“Just this once I’ll forgive you,” Evan tells her l before striding towards me. “I knew you’ll be back sooner or later.” He grins but his voice is hoarse with emotion. “Welcome home. Evie.”
Home? Yes, I’m home.
“Dinner in ten minutes,” Haneen says.
“Dinner?” I ask surprised. “Is it a partner’s meeting?”
She shakes her head. The professor explains, “we mostly eat together these days.”
“Economies of scale.” Alex’s smile doesn’t quite hide the reality. There are big problems here and everyone is having to watch the pennies.
Osian quickly changes the subject. “Do you want to see your garden before we eat?” and he leads me through the house and out on to the terrace.
I’ve seen the pictures, of course. That time Sue showed me the review on her tablet. Pictures taken at the hight of summer when the flowers were at their best. But picture don’t do justice to the scale of Hope Gardens.
Even from the terrace, even with the fading sun, my garden offers me the best welcome of all.
It’s a delightful swathe of green, sprinkled with wildflowers.
The patches of colour in the distance tell me the fans are still in bloom, just as I had designed them.
Late flowering plants for the autumn: blue and white hydrangea, pink Guernsey lilies, yellow and red gladioli, blue salvia sagittate, orange sunflowers.
.. The names come back to me like names of my family, my best friends.
And behind them? The long serpentine arcade of roses is heart stopping.
I’m sorry I left you. Please forgive me.
Osian takes me in his arms and lets me sob and sob against his shoulder. Happy tears, but when I want to go down the steps into the garden, he doesn’t let me.
“It’s about to get dark and you don’t want to trample anything.”
“O ye of little faith.” I give his chest a jokey shove. “Am I ever likely to forget where everything is and put my foot in the wrong place?”
“Tomorrow morning. I promise. We can go down in the morning. After coffee on the balcony.”
So I let him take me back inside to dinner.
In the ballroom, the reality of what’s happened to my partners is clear in the menu on a shoe string. “Only mash and gravy,” Haneen says apologetically.
Only she can create so much flavour out of mashed potato, carrot and butternut squash or rich onion gravy. The joy around the table makes it taste even better.
No wine though. Or dessert.
Tonight, we only get buttered bread with honey. “From the beehives in the Channel Islands,” she explains when I’ve tasted it. “My brother and his wife own a honey business and they sent us a crate of the stuff.”
It is gorgeous, I lean to whisper to her, “I love it.”
“As far as donated honey on toast goes,” she says in her usual kind voice.
“Are things really this bad? I’ll need you to bring me up to date on the full scale of the threat hanging over Kendric House?”
She waves this away with an easy smile. “Tomorrow is soon enough. Wait until you’ve settled in and unpacked.”
I glance around the table at my fellow profit participants, my partners. There’s not shortage of talent and drive here. Surely together we will find a way out of danger.
A warm hand squeezes my shoulder making me look up. Osian, who’d disappeared for a bit, has comes back. “If you’ve finished dinner, shall we say good night,” he says quietly, offering me a hand.
“Where are you taking her?” Shirley pretends to be shocked. “Her apartment is let to tourists.”
“You can stay with me.” Gethin calls out from his wheelchair. “I have a spare bed.”
“In your dreams,” Vanessa rolls her eyes.
“Come on, Evan, you must have vacant rooms to offer her,” Someone shouts.
I can’t see who it is because I’m looking down at my feet letting my hair screen my red cheeks. There’s no way in hell I’m walking up the curving stairs, hand in hand with Osian while everyone watches.
“Stand down all of you.” He says, drawing me closer. Then he makes it all worse by pressing a lingering kiss on the side of my head.
Cheers and whistles explode everywhere, and exclamations of “At long bloody last” and “you kept us all waiting long enough.”
My face burns
“This is even worse than being caught on camera back in Styler’s green room.” I whisper to Osian.
He clearly doesn’t feel the same, his grin is wide enough to span the room. He just laughs. “Quiet, you lot. Stop embarrassing her or she’ll run back to Suffolk.”
“Let me go upstairs ahead of you.” I beg him in an under tone.
“Your wish is my—” he begins.
“—your silent obedience.” I tell him hurrying to the stairs.
In a moment I’m upstairs and a couple of seconds later he takes the stairs two at a time and catches up with me. We hurry out of sight along the corridor into the west wing, past several doors, past more restored mosaic panels and eventually past my old door.
I can’t help a glance up at the stained glass panel of the blue lady. I send her a silent greeting.
At last, we reach his apartment, and he unlocks the door but doesn’t let me go in. Instead, he puts an arm around my waist and another behind me knees and lifts me up to carry me over the threshold.
“Oh my. Aren’t you the romantic, suddenly.”
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he says putting on an American accent. “After long years without romance, I have so much to make up for.”
His sitting room looks the same as always; the place where so much happened between us. The day he rescued me from the thorns and tended to my wounds. The microwave dinner we had at his table. And of course, the sofa where we…
“I know you don’t like my leather furniture. You won’t have to put up with it after tonight.”
“It’s not that bad.” I say quickly. “And we don’t have money to spend on new furniture.”
“No but I had a quick word with Evan earlier. We’ll swap apartments and move into yours tomorrow after the current guests leave. This, here, will become the holiday rental.”
It’s the perfect solution. I didn’t want to say that earlier, but I miss my beautiful white and turquois home, my coffee machine and all the rest of it. “Are you sure you don’t mind.”
“What I mind is standing here talking instead of going to bed.” he strokes my hair, but his touch is now harder, more urgent, more demanding. It sends tingles all over me.
“Can I at least have ten minutes for a quick shower?” I must smell like car and road and luggage.
“If you want.” He breathes. “I’ll put fresh sheets on the bed.”
“That’s a bit presumptive, Mr James.” Then because my heart is thumping hard and my breathing in fast and light. “Presumptive and take-charge but very romantic. I never saw this side of you before.”
A slow smile widens on his beautiful mouth. “I’m so happy to finally introduce you to the real Osian.” He kisses me then whispers. “Go have your shower, my Evangeline. I’ll be waiting.”
The end
If you enjoyed Evie and Osian’s story and want to know how they help the Kendric House community fight back, the story continues in the next book, Forget Me Not This Christmas. The emotional and beautiful love story between Llewellyn and Ashe, two strangers with a surprising experience in common.