Page 44 of Sunset at Embthwaite Farm
“Oh, James.” Anna gazed at him, his head bowed, with an ache in her heart that felt like a physical pain. Maybe she had been right yesterday, she reflected. You couldn’t keep from disappointing your children, it was just a question of how…and how much.
“Anyway.” He turned around, forcing a smile although his eyes still looked sad, drooping at the corners. “It was an important lesson to learn. I cut back on my work hours, I stopped trying to strive, all the time, for everything. It didn’t happen overnight, and in some ways, it made things even harder, because I could have lost myself in work. Instead, I had to face up to my grief.”
“That’s not easy,” Anna acknowledged, and he gave her a surprisingly shrewd look.
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
“I don’t think you can get to our age without having some experience of grief,” she replied. “I lost both my parents—my father when I was in my twenties, my mother when I was in my late thirties. But I also had a kind of grieving to do, with my marriage. I know it’s not the same as a death,” she added quickly, “but it felt like it, in a certain way. It was its own loss.”
He nodded. “I can understand that.”
Could he? Could he understand even more—how she’d fallen apart, had to be in a psychiatric hospital, and had lost contact with her daughters for years? Would he be able to accept all that—or would that be a bridge too far? Several bridges, even, way past where either of them wanted to be.
And yet if she didn’t tell him now, when? And how?
“So,” James asked, and the moment for honesty, for better or worse, passed. “Will you head back to the farm this morning?”
“Yes, soon, I think,” Anna replied. She thought of her car, still full of her things from Stroud, and her head, still full of all the conversations she’d had. “I might head back home first, unpack my car and change my clothes.” She glanced down at her wrinkled jumper and jeans. “I feel as if I haven’t been in my house properly for a few days.” And, she realised, she needed to contact Ruth Hatch. She’d taken Peter’s address book from his bureau, but she hadn’t got any further than that.
“Sounds wise.” He hesitated, and then said, “Look, Anna, about what I said last night…”
Anna tensed even as she smiled. “Which part?”
A sudden acrid smell of smoke reached them both and swearing softly under his breath, James turned around to rescue the burned omelette from on top of the Aga. He gave Anna a wry grimace before he scraped it into the bin.
“So much for that,” he remarked. “And unfortunately, I’m now all out of eggs.”
“I’ve always been partial to toast,” Anna told him. “Or cereal. Or yoghurt. Or just coffee.” She held up her half-drunk mug. “Honestly, this is fine.”
He let out a wry laugh as he put the smoking pan in the sink. “And here I was, trying to impress you.”
Anna was touched—as well as tickled. “James,” she told him, “you’ve already impressed me in a thousand different ways since I’ve first come to know you.”
He looked so surprised, she almost laughed. “Have I?”
“Yes, you have. You’re…” She paused as she cast about for all the ways she’d thought of him. “Thoughtful and kind and emotionally astute. Honest and caring and with a great taste in décor and mugs.” She held her mug aloft. “I really like this one.”
He laughed and shook his head.
“Sometimes,” Anna continued, emboldened into an unusual recklessness, “I wonder what you see in me. Why would you even want to impress me?”
He glanced at her thoughtfully, the smile sliding from his face as he considered his response. “Anna,” he finally said, his voice wonderfully gentle, “you’ve taken the hard knocks of life for a long time, so you might have forgotten—or maybe you never realised—just how special you are. Strong and resilient but also thoughtful and kind. Always thinking of others. And,” he added with a devilish gleam in his eye, “incredibly beautiful, to boot.”
Anna pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Now I’m blushing.” And so, she was. No one had ever said such nice things about her…and so clearly meant them, as well.
“I’m only stating the truth.” James held her gaze, a certain heat simmering in his eyes that he made no attempt to hide. The very air between them seemed to tauten with expectation, withdesire. Anna had the sudden, mad urge to scramble right over the countertop, grab him by his well-starched shirt, and kiss him.Kiss him.
She couldn’t evenrememberthe last time she’d been kissed. Go that long without being kissed, and you basically forgot you had lips. Or a libido.
Yet she was feeling the fact of them both now, very much. They were positively roaring to life…and that was a little scary.
“Well, it seems we’ve formed our own mutual admiration society,” she remarked lightly, knowing she needed to break the intensity of the moment, calm the intensity of her own feelings. She wasn’t ready for them, not yet. “How about some toast?”
For a split second, James’s face fell, and Anna feared she’d hurt him by backing away the way she had…and yet what else could she have done? Then he smiled and nodded. “Toast it is.”
*
Forty-five minutes later,after two slices of toast and another cup of coffee, Anna decided she’d better get a move on. They’d both backed away from that intense moment—well, she had, and James had kindly followed suit—and kept the rest of their conversation both practical and light. As much as she knew she needed to sort out her car, her house, her life, Anna was reluctant to leave the comforting cosiness of James’s house—as well as the man himself. She almost wished shehadscrambled over the countertop, as ridiculous as that would have been.
