Chapter 19 #3
No. She was not going to do that, not to him.
She would accept him for the full package that he was for the time she had him, not try to mix and match.
“I like this plan,” she said, her own chewing drowning out his.
It was the smoothest, creamiest, most heavenly chocolate she’d ever tasted.
“It feels safe. I feel safe—relatively. Cold, but safe.”
He pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed her cheekbone. “We can stay here until the wreckers arrive, if we need to. Though then we’d better exit in a hurry. And I would like to find Duncan first.”
A groan rumbled through the floor underneath them.
“Just Miss Havisham,” Tom said. “Rolling over in her sleep.”
“I can’t get my head around this entire building vanishing,” Amelia said, shamelessly speaking with her mouth full. “This little hole alone—it’s a part of history.”
“But that’s exactly it, yeah? It’s history.
We can’t keep everything, or the entire world would be a shrine to the past and we’d have no room for new things.
Just like if there were ghosts everywhere, there’d be no room for the living.
You can only preserve so much. This space will still exist, the history will exist. There will just no longer be walls around it. ”
“I suppose history still exists even if it’s forgotten.”
“I guarantee you that when they folded the old abbey into this house centuries ago, people decried the rampant pace of modernism. And who knows? Maybe in centuries to come, people will tour the billionaire’s mansion, declaring it a classic example of twenty-first century architecture.
” He took a bite of chocolate. “Bugger, I just did it again, didn’t I? ”
“You don’t have to do this ‘keeping up appearances, stiff upper lip’ thing with me. I know a little something about how it feels when your home is no longer your sanctuary, stately house or not.”
“I suppose you do. Was it only yesterday you fell into my world? I was about to drown my sorrows, but then I forgot what they were. And here we are now, having a lovely time, when by rights we should be scared shitless.”
“Maybe you should have taken that moment to process losing the estate, as messy as it might have got. Well, I mean, it still did get messy, but in a whole other way.”
“I’m very glad you did stay. I mean, for my sake, being completely selfish. Sometimes you just need something to tide you over until the feeling passes. You were my Jane Austen. Of course, for your sake, in hindsight, I wish you’d stuck to that tour and never met me.”
“I don’t,” she murmured, without thinking.
“I mean, yes, it would be lovely to be safe right now.” She paused, and then said “safe” again, with air quotes.
“But who’s to say the risk wouldn’t be greater on the highway today?
Maybe this would have been the day that someone flipped their car right in front of me.
Maybe I’d be dead by now, if I hadn’t crashed into that tree. ”
“Amelia Bennett with two Ts… Is this you putting things into perspective?”
“Oh no, it’s catching!”
He laughed quietly. But it was true that it hadn’t been terror from beginning to end.
Look at them right now: an oasis in the desert.
Or perhaps just the eye of the storm. Either way, it was a reprieve, and she was grateful for it.
No matter what came next, she would allow herself to remember this moment as a good one. Untainted. Assuming they got out alive.
And why not assume that? Why let fear dictate everything from buying cushions to finding a home to falling in love?
Suddenly, she could see with utter clarity…
All the control measures she’d put in over the last year—losing herself in work, getting rid of her cushions.
It wasn’t her regaining control of her life.
It was her letting fear take control. All because of the actions of two asshole robbers she’d allowed to take up residence in her head.
She should make a point of loading up on the good memories, create enough that their sheer weight crushed the bad ones.
She had a hankering to jump Tom again, so she could fix the experience into her brain.
A souvenir to take home, along with the porcelain miniature of Jane Austen’s red-brick house in Chawton, the cameo from the Irish stately home where the Lady Susan adaptation was filmed, and the teacup from Lyme Regis—if they hadn’t all smashed in the car crash. She had a strong hankering…
She had a very strong hankering.
“Besides,” Tom said, running a fingertip down the side of her face, which gave her very good shivers, “imagine if I’d drunk the magic potion and had no one to wear off its effects with? That would have been so sad.”
“Tom, are you still feeling the effects?”
His finger came to rest just under her jaw. “Uh, it’s a little hard to tell.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what’s the salamander juice and what’s just … you.” His voice had gone deliciously husky.
She rolled over onto hands and knees. “Tom?”
“Mmm?”
“This would be a completely inappropriate place for us to reconvene.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”
She laid a fingertip on his lips, and he fell silent.
She could just make out the general geography of him, and detect a smile.
She leaned in and kissed him. “I mean, we’d have to be very…
” She kissed him again, and his hands slipped under her coat and found her waist. “Very quiet. But we did say that we should have sex again for, you know, the memories. I mean, in case it brings back memories.”
“We did say that. Well, you did, but I concur.”
“Plus, if we’re about to die—”
“Which is not in my plan.”
“But, either way, we get to choose if we spend that last night talking about mummified cats, or making history as the last two people to have sex in this house.”
He stroked the sides of her waist, and even through her various layers, his touch seemed to reach right into her—a sensation she remembered from the night before. “Because it’s all about putting things into perspective,” he teased. “Looking at the wider picture.”
“No,” she corrected, lightly nipping his lower lip. “Forget what I said about history. There doesn’t need to be any context. No past, no future, no promises, no regrets. This can be just you and me, very quietly making the most of right here, right now. Because that’s all we ever have.”
“Zooming in,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Escaping, one might say.”
“Precisely, one might reply.”