Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
“G ive me your phone number,” Teddy whispered in my ear as carnage ensued all around and I finally let go of his leg.
“W-w-what?”
“Give me your number so I can call you and pretend to be a client and we can get away from this car crash. That’s if you want to…?”
Teddy’s lips were so close to my ear that I could feel his softly spoken words on my neck as well as hear them, their teasing caress and promise of rescue nearly my undoing.
Shakily, I rattled off the digits out of the side of my mouth and he replied with, “Got it.” And then, more loudly, addressing the whole table, he said, “I’ll ask Bob to come and clear this up and order another bottle.”
Getting to his feet and striding off across the pub, Teddy disappeared from sight, and this loss of his comforting presence left me feeling exposed and surprisingly vulnerable, an unpleasant jolt to my system which I tried desperately not to notice.
Moments later, Bob appeared with a large roll of blue paper towel from the kitchen and another bottle of wine, much to my father’s unrestrained delight. He started to mop up in earnest just as my phone began to vibrate on the table, an unknown number coming through on the screen.
“I should take this.”
“Really? Can’t you let it go to voicemail?” my mother asked, so irritated it was rippling off her body like an army of poisonous ants.
“No, I absolutely cannot,” I said, swiping to accept. “Hello, Chipping-on-the-Water Vets, Hannah speaking.”
“All right there, Haaaannaaaah, it’s Farmer MacDonald here and I have a right poorly cow,” Teddy’s voice came through the speaker into my ear, his attempt at a West Country accent the worst I’d ever heard. The way he was elongating the vowels of my name to fairly epic proportions made him sound more like a deranged pirate then any farmer I’d ever met, and it took all my willpower not to burst out laughing.
“Mr MacDonald, what seems to be the matter with your cow?”
“Oh, erm…” Teddy seemed flummoxed for a moment. “He’s got a verra poorly leg?”
“Is it an emergency?”
“Yes! Definitely an emergency. He can’t walk on it, my lover,” he replied in a strangled voice, trying not to laugh. I could hear his voice echo from the toilet cubicle he was in and sincerely hoped that he was the only one in there. I snorted and tried to cover this with a cough as I heard Teddy continuing to snigger down the line.
“I see. Is she weight-bearing, Mr MacDonald?”
“Yes! I mean no, I don’t think so.”
“Is she down?”
“Down?”
“Unable to get up?”
“Oh! Yes, definitely not able to get up.”
“Ooh, that does sound worrying. Do you need me to come and take a look?”
I glanced up and the whole party on our table had gone quiet, even Bob who was still mopping the spillage up had slowed his actions and was watching, everybody clearly listening to my side of the conversation with a mixture of expressions. Henry and Clara seemed fascinated, Jim impressed, and Fiona a bit misty-eyed, if I was honest. Probably best not to dwell on that. My dad looked proud, and was mouthing “She’s a vet,” to anyone who’d look at him. My mother’s face was pinched and angry. No real change there then.
“That’d be grand if you would,” Teddy’s accent had slipped a little further north, to the Yorkshire Dales, if I wasn’t mistaken.
“Ok, I’ll see you in about half an hour then,” I replied.
“That you will. I cannae wait.” Old MacDonald’s native Scottish ancestry was now shining through. Badly.
I hung up the phone and cleared my throat. “I’m so sorry. It’s an emergency call-out to a cow with an injured leg. I really have to go.”
At that moment, Teddy sauntered back in, trying to act nonchalant, but his grin was something to behold.
Bloody hell, Teddy, play it cool or you’ll give the game away , I urged him silently.
Henry was looking at us both suspiciously, and gave Teddy a pointed eyebrow lift, which he dutifully ignored as he slid into the seat beside me.
“I’m so sorry, Teddy, but I’m going to have to go. I’ve been called out to a verra poorly cow,” I murmured into my glass as I took a sip of lemonade.
“Have you indeed?” he replied, sounding overly surprised and really hamming up his part.
“Yes, I’m so sorry to cancel dinner.” I couldn’t look him in the eye now because I knew I’d start laughing. The giggles were already starting to bubble in my chest, and I could feel them threatening to spill over, my face hurting from the effort of not smiling. This was a jubilant feeling, carefree and uplifting, so that a lightness seemed to seep into my soul, something I couldn’t remember feeling for a very long time.
“Right, well, we should go then. Best not to keep this poorly bovine waiting.” Teddy quickly finished his pint and made to get up as well.
“But surely Hannah doesn’t need your help with this cow with the broken leg, does she, Ted?” Henry asked, scepticism in his voice. “You almost fainted at a cat with an infection so I’m not entirely sure you’d be any actual use in this case, would you?”
Teddy glowered at Henry but didn’t sit back down. I got to my feet, grabbing my jacket from the back of my chair. “I drove so I should probably drop you home on the way.”
“We can take Ted home after dinner,” Henry persisted.
Clara leant towards him and with a mischievous smile whispered something in his ear. He went a little pink and coughed a few times. She looked to us with a subtle wink and said, “But you’re going to make sure Hannah gets back safely, right, Ted?”
“Right!” Teddy beamed gratefully at Clara, before turning back to me. “Plus I still owe you dinner, so I can do this after you’ve sorted the cow out, can’t I?”
I nodded as Teddy helped me into my jacket. “I’m so sorry to bail. It was really nice to meet you all. Sorry about the wine,” I said feebly, giving everyone a small wave, and going over to kiss my parents on the cheek.
“Come on, Hannah, we’ve got a cow to cure. Bye, everyone,” Teddy said, his hand on the small of my back. He guided me towards the exit, accompanied by an obvious and disapproving tut from my mother as we left the devastation that I had caused in our wake and headed for the door.
“Let’s hope you’re a better architect than you are an actor,” I said when we were outside, and I started to snort-laugh as I thought about his performance. “That was the worst collection of accents I’ve ever heard.”
Teddy squeezed my waist lightly before letting me go and chuckling.
“I don’t know what you mean. That was a flawless execution of a series of regional dialects. Shall we get some fish and chips and go to Coatley Park to eat them?”
Coatley Park was a tucked-away tourist hotspot with panoramic Cotswolds views and scenic leisurely walks. It was also known locally as Dogger’s Drive, for, well, obvious reasons, and it was best avoided after dark unless you wanted to see something that you maybe weren’t quite ready to see. It had been an eye-opener for sure when I’d pulled in there to take a call after a late-night check on a colicky horse last week. It had left me wanting to burn my eyeballs with a blowtorch.
“All right, but we leave before it gets dark.”
Teddy laughed. “Spoilsport.”
I dropped him at the fish and chip shop to put our orders in, while I parked up in a side street opposite. Through the window, I could see him leaning against the counter. He seemed relaxed and was smiling at the woman in a hairnet and white hat who was scooping chips into cardboard trays. She seemed familiar, and as I pushed the door open and she glanced up, I suddenly found myself staring into the surly face of my teenage nemesis, Mandy Shaw.
Urgh! Would this bollocks of a trip down memory lane never end?
“There you are, Hannah,” Teddy said pleasantly, “I was just telling Mandy how we’d run into each other again.”
“Were you, now,” I muttered.
“Wow, it’s so good to see you, Hannah! How are you?” Mandy asked, her voice falsely cheery and bright, but she couldn’t disguise the undercurrent of meanness that I recalled from our schooldays.
So, she hadn’t changed much then. How lovely.
“I’m fine, thanks, Mandy. You?”
“Better now I’ve seen Teddy again,” she said gustily, batting her eyelashes at him, and he grinned in reply.
It was a stark reminder that he was the biggest flirt known to man (or woman), seemingly able to schmooze his way around anyone he chose. It was a fact I needed to remind myself of whenever he levelled the full force of that charisma at me. I was definitely not going to let myself fall for that, because another overtly charming but adulterous man was definitely not what I needed in my life. I needed to remember once bitten, twice shy, and likely to commit murder, in my case.
“Ted says you’re the new vet at the practice down the road?”
“Yep.”
Teddy shot me a puzzled expression at my clipped answers, clearly picking up on my reluctance to speak.
“Wow, that’s cool,” she said in a tone that indicated she thought it was anything but cool.
“But Ted is an architect, and that really is cool,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh yeah, that really is cool,” she breathed and gazed back over at him, but he was scowling at me, clearly trying to work out what on earth was going on here.
“And you work in a fish and chip shop, Mandy, so that’s really , really cool.” Ooh, horrible Hannah had rocked up today, and both Teddy and Mandy gawped at me, open-mouthed. This was monumentally petty and nasty, not really like me at all, and I was suddenly ashamed of myself for being such a cow. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
Mandy finished wrapping up the food with a flourish, placing the packages into a bag and handing them to Teddy, her fingers accidentally (on purpose) brushing against his. “It’s been so lovely to catch up again, Ted. Why don’t we go out for a drink sometime?”
Teddy smiled and gave her some cash. “Sure. I’ll let you know.”
Without waiting for the change, he firmly ushered me out of the shop and towards my parked car.
“What was that about?” he asked when we were driving out of town and up towards Coatley Park.
“What?”
“Why were you so rude to Mandy when she was being nice?”
It still amazed me that he had never picked up on her inherent nastiness. Were boys really so unaware of the digs and bullying that girls – and she in particular – had subjected me to every single day that we had been in school? Clearly he was still oblivious.
“I apologised, not that she’d care.”
I could feel Teddy’s scrutiny across the car. “You don’t like her much, do you?”
I laughed bitterly. “Whatever gave you that idea, Ted?”
“Call it a sixth sense.” He shrugged. “Why though? What did she do?”
Speckly skin. Mole face. Freckly freak. Blot on the landscape. Those were just a few of the names she’d called me. Then there was the day she’d held me down in the girls’ toilets with her gang of cronies, and forcibly applied concealer to my whole face in an attempt to make my freckles “less offensive to look at”. Or the time on our cross-country run when she’d pushed me head-first into a muddy puddle to give me a helping hand at “evening out my skin tone”. These were just a few instances that had stuck in my mind, but there had been a lot more. So many more that I had eventually stopped crying, and stopped reacting to her attacks. I had remained mute and sullen as she rained down insult after insult on me, shutting down to try and survive the abuse and get through another day in the seventh circle of hell.
But no matter how hard I have tried to forget it, or how many times I told myself that looks aren’t important or that there are people worse off than me, it never really helped. All I ever see in the mirror, even now, is that repulsive teenager, the ugly duckling, who never became the beautiful swan.
“Because she’s a mean girl, Teddy.”
“Mandy? Mean? Is she?”
He was genuinely perplexed.
“She is if you don’t happen to look like a film star,” I replied, gesturing at him, glossing over the true depth of my issues with Mandy Shaw – and with myself.
“You think I look like a film star? Which one?”
I parked up and turned to him with a frown. “Oh, I don’t know. How about that guy they kept in the cellar in The Goonies ?”
Teddy laughed delightedly.
“I really thought you’d compare me to Danny DeVito.”
“Nah, he’s way better looking than you.”
Teddy continued laughing and handed me a warm package of food from the bag on his knee.
“When are you going to take her out for a drink and continue your wooing, anyway?” I asked, trying to push away the totally ridiculous hurt feeling that was skimming under my skin at the thought of them hooking up together. It’s not like they hadn’t done it before. Probably.
“I’m not.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “And I wasn’t wooing her – which is a ridiculous term, by the way.”
“But you told her you would?”
“I was letting her down gently.”
“By telling her you’d go out with her and then not actually going out with her? How is that ‘letting her down gently’?”
Teddy glanced over at me as he ate, the little wooden fork hilariously small in his large hands. “I wouldn’t want her to read anything into it if we went for a drink and, if I’m honest, she’s not really that interesting to hang out with. I used to avoid her like the plague when we were at school. She’s a bit vacuous.”
Curious.
I thought they’d been best buddies as she’d always been trailing along in his wake. “Didn’t you two go out in school?”
Teddy almost choked on the chip he had just swallowed. “No!”
Oh. A smug bloom of pleasure warmed behind my ribcage.
“So why did you not just tell her that you weren’t interested back there?”
“I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“I see. So you just employed advanced level flirting to lead her on instead.”
“I don’t know what you’re on about. I was just making small talk, being nice. Perhaps you should try it?”
He was right; perhaps I should. Not that I’d ever tell him that.
“Not with Mandy Shaw I won’t.”
We ate in silence for a while, gazing out at the view from the car park. When he’d finished and wrapped the chip paper up into a ball, Teddy took a sip of water, and turned his body slightly to face me. He stared intently at me for a moment.
“Urgh. This feels like you’re going to say something important, Teddy,” I said discouragingly. He faltered a little, just briefly, before his composure returned, and I raised an eyebrow at him. “What piece of devastatingly vital information are you about to impart?”
He gave a slight laugh and leant back against the head rest.
“Do you like me, Hannah?”
I paused with a chip midway to my mouth, lips parted in surprise.
“Like you?”
“Yeah. Do you like me?”
Teddy tilted his head, his smile a little unsure. His demeanour was a touch subdued compared to his normal swagger.
“I like you more since you fed me,” I said non-committedly. Where was he going with this?
“I see. So, am I on a sliding scale of your approval then?”
I nodded, thoughtfully.
“You started quite a long way off the bottom of the scale, just so you know.”
“Right, but I’m actually in with a chance of you eventually not wanting to emasculate me?”
“I suppose so, although we do have some emasculators back at the surgery for bullock castrations, if ever I change my mind.”
Teddy turned a slightly funny colour, and whispered in a hoarse voice, “Duly noted.”
As he continued to watch me quietly, he blew out a long and mournfully loud sigh.
“What now?” I asked, finishing my food, grabbing all the rubbish, and putting it into the bag.
“I was hoping not to have to do this, but, well, you’re forcing my hand, Hannah,” Teddy replied seriously, and he took the rubbish bag from my lap. “I’m just going to have to go ahead and woo you.”
On that bombshell he got out of the car and took the bag to the bin across the car park, sauntering with his usual air of self-confidence. It left me totally speechless and staring after him (and not at all fixing my gaze on his tight denim-clad backside. Honest.).
Walking back towards the car, he had a very cocky grin on his face as he slid into his seat.
“Ready to go?”
“Woo me?” I snorted.
I really needed to spend less time with Pluto. I was beginning to sound more and more like my equine companion.
“Yep.”
“I thought it was a ridiculous term?”
“It is.”
“Why?”
“Well, it sounds as though you’re an eighty-year-old grandmother from the Victorian era and?—”
“No, Teddy, I mean why would you even want to woo me?” I cut him off with a shake of my head, exasperated and slightly alarmed at where this conversation might go.
“Because you’re clearly resistant to my obvious charms and I would like to rectify that,” he said casually, amusement dancing across his features.
“Why?” I felt like a three-year-old who’d just discovered this word.
“Don’t you think we should try to get along better?” His expression was mischievous, reeling me in. Hook, line and sinker. Once again.
“Why?” Again.
Teddy shrugged. “It’s the neighbourly thing to do.”
“Is it?” I was breathless, confused, but somehow eager that he should go on.
“It is. And maybe I can even help you to loosen up a bit. Have some fun.”
“Fun?”
My voice was now barely a whisper. It was croaky and didn’t really sound like me at all.
“Yep.” He swallowed slowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His tone had changed and he was staring intently at my mouth. “Oh, I know lots of ways we could have some fun.”
With fascination I watched his face crease into a smile, so seductive and enticing, that a faint tingle of anticipation lit up my insides. It was a buzzy, shimmering feeling, a thrilling hum of expectation, like that wonderous, frightening sensation of looking down over a precipice to a yawning abyss below. In my brain a warning alarm was sounding, but it seemed very far away, drowned out by the heady cry of excitement that was, in that moment, all-encompassing.
Opposite me, Teddy’s pure magnetism was drawing me to him like a moth to a flame. And it was as though time stood still, electricity arcing between us. I began to lean in, an unspoken intention in the air. A repeat performance of our one and only kiss surely imminent. I licked my lips and his pupils enlarged to impossibly dark pools in response, his body shifting over the gear stick towards me. Repositioning myself in the seat, ready for action, I turned and my arm brushed the steering wheel, catching the volume control for the radio and sending it into sonic boom mode. The car’s speakers rattled and filled the car with the sonorous notes of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. And thankfully the very wise words of Taylor Swift gave my good sense a proper kicking at the very last minute.
I switched off the radio and sat back in my seat, putting as much distance as possible between us again. What had I been thinking? Well, it was pretty clear that I’d been led astray by my sex-starved hypothalamus and reproductive system, rather than listening to the logical musings of my frontal lobe.
Let’s not make that mistake again, Hannah, ok?
Teddy remained in place, frozen, silent. A muscle ticked in his jaw, his hand on the handbrake lever, white-knuckled as he clenched his fist around it. He stared at me until I looked away first, fixing my gaze on the setting sun on the horizon.
“What does wooing entail exactly anyway?” I asked eventually, suspiciously, not really sure I wanted to know. But also, desperately wanting to know. Because in the last couple of minutes, I’d apparently developed an embarrassing crush on Teddy Fraser, and was acting like a needy teenager despite being in my mid-thirties, even though it was dangerous and ridiculous, and likely to be an emotional car crash. Because he surely did not have any feelings for me, not beyond some weird, misplaced lustiness that had clouded his judgement a moment ago.
I should stop this. I should move away, and put some distance between us to save my sanity. But I didn’t seem able to.
“Ah, you’ll have to wait and see,” Teddy whispered after a beat, before leaning right over the gear stick and adding seductively in my ear, “But I think we’re both going to enjoy it immensely.”
Using his thumb and index finger under my chin, he turned my head to look at him and gently closed my gaping mouth so that I no longer resembled a gawking codfish.