Page 40 of The Allotment on Willow Tree Lane

Whilst Damon popped back indoors, Ceri prepared the base of the incinerator, rooting around underneath the bushes for dry twigs, and arranging them in a lattice at the bottom.

When he returned with a handful of paper, she instructed him to scrunch it up and put it in the gaps between the twigs, and when he only had a few sheets left, she passed him the lighter and said, ‘Roll a piece of paper into a taper, then light it, wait for it to catch and drop it in.’

Damon rolled the sheet of paper lengthways and flicked the lighter. The paper caught immediately, and after a second or two he popped it into the incinerator. Then the pair of them leant forward and peered inside, their heads almost touching.

Ceri was so close she could smell the deodorant he used and the mildly intoxicating aroma that was his own personal scent. She was also acutely conscious that his face was a hair’s breadth from hers, and that if she turned her head, her lips would caress the stubbled skin on his cheek. His hair was tied back, but some strands had escaped to tickle her ear, and she itched to run her hands through his long curls.

Her pulse leapt and she bit her lip as she sneaked a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. She would dearly like to find out where that tattoo ended…

To Ceri’s relief, before she could do something she might regret, the slowly burning paper ignited a scrunched-up piece underneath, and a small flame erupted, swiftly growing as it latched onto the dry wood.

‘Can I start putting stuff on?’ he asked, eagerly.

‘Give it a minute and add some more kindling first,’ she advised. ‘That bindweed is very green and contains a lot of moisture in its leaves and stems. We’ll need to make sure the fire is well established before we go dumping loads of leaves on it, otherwise we might smother it and it’ll go out. And be warned, it’s going to smoke like the devil.’

After supervising Damon as he put the first few bindweed stems onto the fire, she stepped back. She wasn’t a fan of getting smoke in her eyes, but Damon didn’t seem to mind, and she studied his face as he fed the flames. It shimmered in the heat, partly obscured by smoke, and with the grand old house behind him, he could be auditioning to play Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Heat rushed into her cheeks that had nothing to do with the warmth of the fire, and she swallowed hard as a bolt of desire hit her in the solar plexus.

‘I can’t remember my gran doing this,’ he said, his eyes alight as he shoved another handful in.

‘I don’t expect she did it very often,’ Ceri said, her voice sounding strange. She cleared her throat. ‘I guess she only ever burned the weeds. Everything else would probably have gone on the compost heap.’

‘Strewth, it gives out a fair amount of heat, doesn’t it?’ he said. Then he took his T-shirt off.

Ceri uttered a strangled yelp, which she hastily muffled. Oh. My. God.

Her eyes roamed over his chest and flat stomach, and her breath caught in her throat. Toned, muscled, inked – he was gorgeous. She imagined how it would feel to stroke his chest, to trace her fingers over that stomach, to let her hand drop lower to the waistband of his jeans…

She drew in a deep breath.

Unfortunately, he caught her staring, but thankfully he must have thought she was looking at his tattoos, because he said, ‘Misspent youth.’

He raised his hand, the one that was still holding his T-shirt, and she guessed he might be regretting taking it off and was considering putting it back on. He didn’t. Instead, he tossed it to the side and bent down to pick up some more bindweed.

Ooh! What was he doing to her? This was torture!

Realising she had to say something, she forced out a laugh. ‘We’ve all been there. I’ve got a sprig of lavender here.’ She touched her left hip. Not wanting to get into a comparing tattoos discussion in case she let slip that she had a vine of ivy curling down her back and he asked to see it, she grabbed the shears and went back to work.

But no amount of savage snipping could erase the thought of his hands on her skin, as they followed that trail of ivy leaves…

‘That’s the last of it,’ Ceri announced, as Damion upended the wheelbarrow and tipped the final load of compost onto the heap they had created in Willow Tree Field – orWillow Tree Allotmentas she was now starting to think of it.

She had chosen the corner nearest the gate leading to Damon’s garden as a suitable spot – it was both out of the way and meant they hadn’t had to barrow it too far. She already knew that her plot would be situated on this part of the allotment (and not just because it would have sun all day long), so the heap of ready-to-use compost would be convenient for her, too.

Ceri eased the kinks out of her back and watched Damon do the same. They had taken it in turns to shovel and barrow, Ceri insisting on doing her fair share; she was no drooping wallflower who didn’t have the strength to wield a spade. Actually she had a sneaking suspicion she was in better shape than Damon when it came to gardening. Even if he went to the gym every day or ran a marathon every month, the kind of activity they had done today used different sets of muscles – and she had been using hers since she was big enough to hold a trowel.

Once again, she wondered what he did for a living, and assumed he must be a desk-jockey of some kind. He certainly wasn’t used to manual work, not with hands like those.

Dragging her eyes away from him, she instructed, ‘You put the barrow away and I’ll go check on the incinerator. The fire should have gone out by now, but the metal will still be hot, and it probably won’t be cool enough to move until the morning. You can throw the ashes on your new compost pile,’ she added over her shoulder as she trotted along the path, heading for the side gate.

She was right; the fire in the bin was out, but enough heat radiated from it to make her double-check that nothing was smouldering in the depths of those ashes. Reaching for a stick, she poked and prodded them, releasing a cloud of fine ash, residual smoke and tiny bits of charred paper into the air, making her cough. When it settled, she peered inside again and, satisfied that the fire was definitely out, she popped the funnel-shaped lid back on.

A fragment of paper floated serenely to the ground, landing at her feet, and she bent to pick it up. But before she returned it to the metal bin, she casually glanced at it.

Expecting it to be a shopping list or an old invoice or something similar, she was surprised to discover that it was a piece of sheet music, the kind she had written on herself in school when her music teacher had been trying to get the class to notate what they heard. It had been an impossible task as far as Ceri was concerned, and she had nothing but admiration for those people who could write music, because she couldn’t read a single note.

Hearing footsteps behind her, she dropped the fragment of paper into the incinerator and glanced around to see Damon walking towards her.

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