Chapter 14 #2
Closer to the house, motion-sensitive floodlights illuminated their work, flicking on to light the way and then thrusting them back into darkness when the timers ran down.
The chickens had waddled gratefully into the henhouse, clearly glad to be out of the cold, but Clara and Mildred were nowhere to be seen.
Casey and Ajay tramped down to the courtyard where they’d last been seen with Ellory and Jared, but it was empty now; only the glowing embers in the pizza oven remained.
Through the kitchen window they could see pizzas being shared, and her stomach growled.
She watched Conner laughing as a long piece of stringy mozzarella refused to give up its hold on his pizza.
Nigel and Vern had strung festive paper garlands from the ceiling beams and fairy lights around the window.
Everyone was smiling, even Jared, and though she knew that she’d soon be in there with them all, the scene struck her as a metaphor for her life.
Ever since that godforsaken meme, she’d felt detached, like someone always on the outside looking in.
By her own instigation she had become a spectator of life rather than a participant.
She ought to do something about that. Maybe with Ajay.
But then she remembered her deal with Margo; she had already put in motion an event that would put her back in control of her own life.
All she had to do was wait until Christmas night.
“You okay?” Ajay asked, coming to stand beside her.
“Yeah.”
He joined her in looking through the window. “They look like a Christmas card.”
She smiled. “They do.” She turned to Ajay, his lovely face gently illuminated by the lights inside the house.
“It was a good idea to get Jared helping out here.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Let’s hope Jared thinks so; he didn’t exactly look pleased at the prospect.”
Ajay chucked. “He’s a teenager—looking put-out is his standard expression. I was the same when I was his age.”
“Really? I can’t imagine that.” She couldn’t. He was so warm and amiable it was hard to imagine him sullen.
“Oh, I had attitude for miles!” he said, grinning. “Didn’t you?”
She screwed up her face, thinking. “I don’t think I did. I was always too busy trying to please my parents.”
“Were they pushy? My mum was a stickler for good grades.”
“No, nothing like that. It was more that they were unhappy, and I thought that if I was the perfect daughter, it might change things, you know? Give them something to feel positive about. Stupid,” she added. “Like fourteen-year-old me could cure my parents’ misery.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “Not stupid. Just the misguided hope of youth.” He grinned, clearly pleased with his statement.
“Sure,” she said, laughing. “Let’s call it that rather than hopeless people-pleaser.”
“You try to make things better for people, that’s a nice trait to have.” The jokiness was gone, and he was looking at her with an earnest expression that made her heart beat faster.
She had long viewed her innate desire to “fix things” as a personal failing, a belief that she was unlovable unless she earned it.
But where she saw an incurable weakness of character, Ajay saw niceness, and it occurred to her that perhaps she had lumped two of her traits together when they were in fact quite different.
The desire to make things better for someone simply because it was in her power to do so was indeed a nice thing.
She held his gaze. The warm light cast by the kitchen windows gave his kind eyes an almost ethereal glow.
She felt the invisible magnetic pull begin to fill up the space between them, the heady temptation that so deliciously urged two people to press together.
Oh, how long had it been since she’d felt this?
And then the doubts crept in. What if he wasn’t feeling it?
She was so romantically rusty that she could be reading this all wrong.
And there was a very good reason that she’d been celibate for three years…
. “I’ll bet those goats are in the kitchen garden,” she said breathlessly, breaking the tension.
“Oh,” said Ajay, blinking as though waking from a dream. “Okay.” He smiled at her. “Lead the way.”
They found Clara and Mildred snuffling around the vegetable patch, trying to get gnashers around the netting protecting the Christmas sprout trees from creepy-crawlies and greedy pygmy goats.
“How did you know they’d be here?” Ajay asked.
“Women’s intuition. Also, for tiny creatures they’re greedy little bastards. You take Clara, and I’ll take Mildred.”
“What? Pick them up?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to be trying to herd these two in the dark. Here, hold out your arms, and I’ll give her to you.”
Ajay held his arms out like Frankenstein’s monster to receive Clara, but he soon relaxed into the hold when the pygmy goat snuggled her head into his armpit.
With minimal fuss they were able to deposit the goats into their heated shed, and then it was only the geese left to feed.
Casey had left them till last with good reason—they might look like characters in one of Beatrix Potter’s books, but they could be absolute arseholes.
Sure enough, an indignant honking rose up as she and Ajay tried to wrangle the birds into their shed.
Two took a particular dislike to Ajay and began chasing him across the yard, wings flapping and beaks snapping.
“I don’t know what to do!” Ajay shouted as he tried to outrun them. They were pretty speedy when they wanted to be.
Casey tried to give chase, but her laughter slowed her down. Ajay was running backward and forward across the concrete yard, screaming in a pitch so high it would have given any Hollywood damsel in distress a run for her money.
“It’s not funn—yeeeeahh—yaaaahhh!” Ajay screeched, skidding to a turn as one of the geese got close enough to nip the back of his coat.
“Head to the barn,” she called breathlessly. “And climb the ladder.”
Ajay switched directions, catching the geese off guard, and sprinted toward the barn.
Casey followed wide with a bag of oats and chopped fruit and veg tucked under her arm.
As he threw himself at the ladder and climbed frantically, she came in from the side, cutting the geese off, and tossed a handful of chopped apple and broccoli toward them.
Seconds later they were snaffling up their five-a-day while Ajay collapsed gratefully onto a hay bale.
Word had spread along the goosey grapevine that Casey was packing food, and the rest of the gaggle joined their comrades in the barn entrance.
Ajay stayed out of sight in the hayloft, but she could hear his labored breathing.
“You stay there, Dr. Doolittle, I’ve got this,” she called up, and walked slowly away from the barn, dropping a trail of food as she went.
The geese followed respectfully—or as respectfully as such haughtily cantankerous birds can be—and soon she had tempted them all the way into their shed and locked the door behind them.
Ajay was climbing back down the ladder as she reentered the barn.
“I think I just saw my life flash before eyes!” he exclaimed, and she laughed.
“You’ve had a near-nibbled experience.”
“My city roots are showing,” he said, grinning shyly as he tried to brush himself clean of hay.
“Don’t beat yourself up, the goats loved you, and I saw one or two of the sheep giving you the once-over.” She swished at some hay he’d missed on his shoulder and looked him over. “Oh, wait, you’ve got it in your hair,” she said, reaching her hand up and then stopping. “May I?”
“Please,” he said.
He looked into her eyes, and she felt the air pull taut between them again.
She tried to focus on the task, her fingers trembling slightly as she concentrated on carefully extracting the pale green flecks of hay from his hair.
This close, she could smell his cologne, something woodsy and fresh that made her want to breathe him in.
She could feel his gaze on her face, and heat rushed to her cheeks.
Surely, she couldn’t be imagining the tension between them.
“There,” she said, her voice a little hoarse as the last piece of hay fluttered to the ground. “You are a scarecrow no more.”
“Thanks.” His voice was low. Something had shifted between them. She watched the pulse in his neck quicken and was suffused with the desire to put her mouth to it, to feel the beating against her lips.
“No problem at all.” Her voice was a whisper, and she forced herself to take a step back.
Ajay’s expression registered the movement, and he stayed where he was, respectful of her boundaries.
The chilly breeze zipped through the space she’d created, but if she’d been hoping it would bring clarity, she was mistaken.
Instead, it only made her body ache to close the gap again.
“I hope you know how much I appreciate what you did for Jared,” he said, his voice serious.
Now he was the one changing the unspoken subject of their attraction, each of them stepping gingerly.
She shrugged. “It would serve no purpose to have turned him in. We all make mistakes.”
He reached his hand out, then let it drop. “But still. Thank you. It means a lot.” He looked away. “Not everyone would have done that.” His voice was sad and sincere, and she swallowed hard.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” she managed to scratch out, wondering if she wasn’t only talking about Jared. Maybe it was time she gave herself a second chance. She wanted to kiss him. Good grief, she wanted to kiss him so much! What would be the harm in one small kiss?