For a Rainy Afternoon (2 page)

“Story of my life.”

“E
XCUSE
ME
,”
a voice came from behind, and I pivoted to face the owner of it.

Pretty. That was all I could think in my superstartled what-the-fuck-is-someone-like-that-doing-here shock. Taller and broader than me, he had the curliest near-black hair. The man stood uncertainly by the drive to the house and shifted the weight of a flight bag from one shoulder to the other. He appeared tired, and I caught him glancing behind at a retreating car, which I assumed was a taxi. Who would dump tall, dark, and sexy in my driveway?

Courtesy won over curiosity. “Can I help you?”

“I’m trying to locate Apple Tree Cottage,” the man said, an American from the way he kind of drawled the words he was reading from a piece of paper. He placed his flight bag down next to the rest of his luggage and rolled his shoulders while staring at me expectantly. The name of Maggie’s place was enough to perk my interest. Should I just do the polite thing and point him in the right direction? That is what I normally did. When people got lost, they would come in and ask at the post office.
Am I on the right road for Northampton?
Which way is London?
That kind of thing.

“It’s empty,” I blurted out. Then I realized I shouldn’t have said a thing. Maybe this guy was just some kind of salesman and the last thing that he should know was that the house was empty.

“I know,” he said with a hesitant smile. Then he held out his hand. “Jason Young,” he introduced himself.

“Robbie MacIntyre,” I said in response while shaking his hand firmly. He had the most incredible clear gray eyes and at least a few days of stubble darkening his face. His grip was sure and strong, and I felt bereft when he released the handshake.

“Can you point me in the right direction? The cab driver said he had no idea and that all the cottages were called the same thing around here.” I really wanted to hear him talk again because he had one hell of a sexy voice.

I pointed away and up the incline of the village to the green. “Keep going this way and you can’t miss it. The front lawn butts up to the duck pond.”

“Thank you,” Jason said before picking up his bags and attempting to grab at two suitcases on wheels all at the same time. I could stand there just watching, or I could get with the plan and help the guy. He really did seem dead on his feet.

“Let me help,” I said in my most helpful nonstalkery tone. I took one of the heavy bags and a suitcase and waited for him to gather himself to follow me. We started out on the path, but paths in this village aren’t exactly straight or wide enough and we both ended up by silent agreement walking on the road. I wanted to ask him why he needed to find Apple Tree Cottage and how he knew it was empty, but my damn reserve was making it difficult to form questions.

“I only found out last week,” Jason interrupted my thoughts. He sounded almost apologetic.

“What about?”

“About Maggie. She’s my great-gran’s sister, but we weren’t close.” Again with the apology. “Then I got the letter.”

“Someone in the village wrote to you and told you Maggie had passed away?”

“My Uncle Bill did.”

Like that explained everything. Who the hell was Bill? I wracked my brains for any Bill in the village, and despite the fact it was a common name, I was coming up empty.

Jason let out a hollow laugh. “You don’t know him,” he apologized. “Bill is my uncle, and he knows quite a bit about when my great-grandfather was stationed near here in the Second World War.”

I stumbled in one of the cursed potholes left after a pretty dramatic winter of snow and rain. The council had promised to fix them, but I imagine a village was low on the list of road prioritizing. Still, I should have remembered that one was there. Jason reached a hand to steady me, and I flashed him a grateful smile.

“At RAF Chelveston?” I hazarded a guess. There was nothing left of the once-large airbase that housed a small part of the US Air Force in the nineteen forties. Given that Jason was American, I made the assumption that his great-great-whatever was also American.

“Hmmm.” Jason skirted another hole as we bumped over the green and toward the cottage. “Came over for two years, went back after the war, and we didn’t know anything except he lost his twin brother in a bombing raid over Germany. My great-grandfather received a medal of honor. It’s a long story, and I still don’t understand all the connections, but the upshot of it is that the cottage is mine.” I think he was a little embarrassed he had shared even that, and I didn’t press for more. Considering I was English and therefore didn’t by nature share a lot with strangers, it was odd that I had even been told this much. Seemed to me that unspoken was the question from Jason as to why he was the one to inherit, almost like he was justifying even being here.

We stopped at the low iron gate emblazoned with the name Apple Tree Cottage, and I felt immediate guilt that I hadn’t come up here and at least mowed the lawn in the last few weeks.

Maggie had always used a gardener, but clearly he’d not been called in to work on the beautiful garden since she’d died. Anyway, who would have called him? All I knew was that he was someone from Steeple Aniston or somewhere else close by. It should have been me up here because Maggie loved this garden, and I abruptly felt like I had abandoned Maggie in some way by not keeping it nice.

“Jeez,” Jason said with a whistle. “This is like everything England all wrapped up in one tidy package. How old is this place, three hundred years old?”

“Seventeen eleven. That is when it was built,” I said. I knew because at the rear of the cottage, the part facing the main through road, the numbers 1, 7, 1, and 1 were built into the brickwork. And I only remembered it because the school bus stop was right by the cottage and I stared at the numbers for years while I was waiting for the bus.

“That’s old.”

We stood in silence for a brief moment, and he watched me expectantly. I didn’t quite understand my role in this conversation, but habit had me talking. “I guess you have a key?” That was my not-so-subtle way of checking that he was actually somehow allowed inside Maggie’s house.

He dropped his bag and fumbled in the side pocket before pulling out a silver house key. “From the executor,” he said by way of explanation. For a second he held it out to me, and I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do. Did he want me to open the door? Or was he just asking me to acknowledge he had a key?

“Good,” I said. That seemed to be enough because he closed his fist around the small item. I could see the white of his knuckles at the pressure he was exerting.

I wanted to ask why he was here. Why now? Was he going to be the one responsible for emptying the cottage, then putting it on the market? I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to be impolite or come across as weird. What I wanted was to find out how his uncle knew Maggie and what Jason was going to do with the cottage. I helped him to the door, then stepped back out of his way and watched him try to turn the key. I’d watched Maggie do this so many times. She would wait until I closed the post office and ask me to walk her home. I’d learned a lot about Maggie, all except how in the hell she was connected to the man cursing under his breath as he attempted to turn the key.

“Let me.” I took the key from him. “You need to push it in, wiggle it a bit until you hear that click. Did you hear that?” I could clearly make out the little click that indicated the worn key and lock had connected. Evidently he hadn’t, and as he leaned in to listen, I got a much closer look at those gray eyes that were actually tinged green in this light. They were really beautiful eyes, and I could write lines in songs about them and Jason’s lips, which were soft and full and oh so inviting. I pulled the key out and repeated the exercise. This time he must have realized what he needed to know, and he nodded with a very serious expression on his face. “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen Maggie do this,” I added. Then realized I had my tenses all mixed up. I
had
seen her. I wouldn’t see her again because she wasn’t there anymore.

“Were you close?” Jason asked me. He looked stricken, and I wanted to do my best to reassure him, but no words actually formed in my head. Instead I nodded wordlessly. Jason patted my arm in the same way Mrs. Patterson had patted my hand, concerned and reassuring at the same time.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” His words were so gentle, and that accent with the melting gray eyes had me unable to push the grief down where I had it trapped. I blinked, the feelings tumbling inside me causing me to become a hundred types of upset, and instead focused on the damn key in my damn hand.

“Just turn it once all the way around to release the deadlock, then half again and the door will open.” I coughed back the emotion and waited for the door to swing open. A rush of air from inside hit me, a combination of lavender and polish, but no stale air. None at all. The house might have been empty and locked, but it had never been completely airtight. It was too old to keep in the warm and keep out the cold. The inside was dark, and instinctively I reached for the light switch, but there was no response. For a few moments I found myself troubleshooting the problem, but then it hit me. “The cottage will have been cut off.”

“Yeah, I know. My dad is talking it all through with them, getting everything back on for the interim, but I couldn’t wait, I had to get here.”

Why? I really wanted to know. The mystery in this gorgeous man was enough for any armchair Sherlock to want to solve.

“Okay, so, if you… okay.” I faltered over the words. I was going to offer him my help, but the whole mystery of Jason being here was wrapped up in losing Maggie, and the strangeness of the whole thing made me wary.

“Thank you…” Jason began.

“Robbie,” I reminded him. After all, considering how exhausted he was, I wasn’t expecting him to recall my name.

He half smiled in the hallway, with the light of the late evening casting an eerie glow like a halo around him. “I remember your name, Robbie MacIntyre.”

I backed out then and half ran down the hill to my car before I said or did something stupid. Hell, I really needed a drink.

“A
ND
HE
legitimately had a reason to go inside the cottage?” Jack asked again. He reworded it each time, like I would answer differently, and he spoke slowly as if I was a small child who didn’t really understand what I had done.

The soft beer buzz I had going on was enough to make the repeated questions funny rather than irritating. I’d agreed to leave my car at Jack’s and get a taxi the twenty miles back to the village, and even though I had work the next day, I was going to use my car-free time well. Four beers and I was still second-guessing just why I had shown Jason how to get in the house.

“He had a key,” I explained. “What else could I do?”

“He’s probably some homeless guy,” Jack pointed out.

Well, I guess that was a step up from his last comment where Jason was actually an international terrorist using Burton Hartshorn as his base of operations. Seemed to me that Jack was making more sense the drunker he became.

“He had posh suitcases and carry bags, and he was smart but tired.” Smooth and gorgeous, and for a second I stared into the distance recalling the small frisson of excitement at seeing Jason. Something of my thoughts must have been telegraphed on my face, and Jack interrupted them with a snort.

“Which one you checking out now?” He gestured at the guys in the bar. This was the Queen’s Head, one of the quieter bars in this town and one where all kinds of mixed groups clustered on mild evenings. The back of the pub opened wide on grass that banked gently down to the riverside, and people spilled outside in small gatherings. Jack clearly thought he’d caught me eyeing up one of the many gay guys we had both spotted. Jack was straight, but he loved picking out men for me—the more overtly gay the better. He had known me twenty years, and he still didn’t get it. I preferred quiet, clever, someone who appreciated art and reading and good tea, and evidently I had now added American to the list.

Thinking about Jason had to be because of the connection, whatever that was, to Maggie. But if I was really honest, it was because he had the appearance of a damn movie star and we didn’t get many of those in Burton Hartshorn.

“None of them,” I said as one of the guys in the group separated from the herd and began to wend his way over to our table. I immediately shifted in my chair to make it obvious I wasn’t wanting to talk and that I was with Jack. Evidently Jack appeared completely straight, and therefore young goth-gay must have felt I was vulnerable, like a wounded gazelle at a drinking hole surrounded by lions.

“I love your hair,” goth-gay said. He pouted at me and waved a hand at my head.

“Thank you,” I answered politely before taking another swig of my beer. Why did nearly all of the conversations with me always start with some comment about my hair? Why not my tattoos or my eyes? Or the fact I kept myself in shape? Parts of my tattoos were obvious in the short T-shirt, the tail of one dragon, anyway, and a few musical notes rendered in black. And my eyes were pretty cool, kind of a brown but dark and velvety if you cared to look close enough.

But no, my hair. Always my hair. Dark auburn, reddish-gold, ginger—all kinds of red shades had been ascribed to my hair. My dad was a Welsh brunet, which explained the dragon on my left arm, my mum a willowy pale blonde, hence the rose on my right arm with its trail of thorns up my bicep. I liked to think I was a mix of strength and passion; but add in the love of music and red hair from my gran, I was uniquely me.

It seemed, though, that inheriting red hair from my gran meant I was destined to be defined by my hair color. I’d heard all the jokes about being a ginger and easily rationalized them as “things could be worse.” At least Prince Harry had the same color hair, if a bit brighter, which made it cool. Of course, unlike Harry, I was cursed with accompanying freckles, but at least I wasn’t an entire stereotype as my eyes refused to adhere to the expected green.