Page 28 of Love At First Fright
As she carried her salt out onto the landing, Rosemary heard a woman crying. This time she was sure it wasn’t in her head. It was coming from the living room where Lance had held his soiree a few hours ago. Carefully, Rosemary edged around the half-open door. Inside, sitting in the silver moonlight, was one of the Regency ghost women, the brunette. She was holding a letter, ghostly teardrops falling onto the paper, leaving no mark. A sadness speared Rosemary, out of the blue. For an uncanny second, she felt what the ghost felt, that deep, unending heartache. The pulsing sense of loss. And then the feeling fled. Had the feeling come from the ghost? Was that even possible? Rosemary gripped her salt jar, and when she drew a line of it over her bedroom threshold, she made it extra thick.
11
Despite desperately wanting to remainin bed, with Fig curled into the crook of his arm, Ellis dragged himself into the dawn cold. It was quarter to seven in the morning, and daylight was beginning to filter through the oak and hawthorn trees that lined the edges of Hallowvale manor. He hated running, loathed it with a passion, but he needed something to get his blood pumping and a brisk walk wouldn’t cut it. And despite the fact that Fig was not a morning dog, if there could be such a thing, he needed to wear her out a little before handing her over to Eva to mind for the day while he filmed.
The grass crunched under his feet, and the chill of the air in his lungs broke apart any remaining tiredness. The paths through the woodlands of the estate weren’t well trodden, but hard enough in the morning cold that he wouldn’t slip. Ellis kept stopping every now and again for Fig to sniff interesting spots, or to collect the largest stick she could carry in her mouth. He felt himself waking up alongside the wood, his mind slowly clearing from last night. When he’d heaved open the pantry door, seeing Rosemary in her sinful little pyjama shorts, hisbrain had gone straight to the gutter. He’d nearly come clean to her then about Brody’s whole fake-dating scheme, just so that he could…what? Kiss her? Take her to bed? Somehow neither of those things felt like enough when it came to Rosemary. If he ever got the chance, which didn’t seem at all likely given that they were only colleagues, he would need an entire weekend with Rosemary to even begin to cover all the ways he would see to her pleasure.
He’d almost considered taking himself in hand, but when he’d walked past the living room on his way to the stairs, he’d been momentarily gripped by an aching sadness. The feeling came and went in a split second, but it took with it all sense of lust. When his rational brain returned, Ellis realised that he’d been straying too far into unprofessional territory with Rosemary, and needed to wind it back. He could recognise that something about her called to that part of him that he so often tried to dampen and hide, but that didn’t matter. There were too many reasons it couldn’t happen. The first, and probably most important, was that he was at least ten years older than her. Ellis wasn’t about to become the Hollywood middle-aged-man statistic that he despised in others.
Ellis wove in and out of the trees, Fig keeping pace, as he went over his lines for today’s scenes. The first day of filming always filled Ellis with mild dread, it didn’t matter that he’d been doing this for years and years. This wasn’t like his action franchises, where he’d been playing the same character in every movie. No, here he needed to impress Vincent and the studio and most of all Rosemary.
Ellis heard a crunch, followed by a flapping of wings, and a woman’s voice muttering, “Fuck.”
He stopped in his tracks. It couldn’t be paparazzi, not all the way out here. Surely not. Was there nowhere he wasfucking safe from them? He immediately leashed Fig, even though they were in the middle of the woods and there were no cars nearby. He’d never take that chance again.
“Who’s there?” Ellis called out, surveying the fern bushes and glade of oaks before him.
A head popped up from behind a bush. A very ginger head.
“Rosemary?”
“Hi.”
“You’re covered in leaves.”
She looked down at herself, picking a couple of dried leaves off her jumper. He noticed a pair of binoculars hanging around her neck.
“The hazards of hiding in a bush.” She smiled. The morning light made her hair shine like copper, and a mix of desire and guilt flooded his senses.
“Do I want to know why you were hiding in a bush with a pair of binoculars at dawn?”
“I suppose this does look rather nefarious, but I promise it’s nothing weird. I’m an amateur ornithologist,” she said, in that Southern twang of hers.
“That’s adorable,” Ellis said, before he could catch himself. He shouldn’t have said it, but still, he relished the way the blush rose all peachy on her cheeks.
“What kind of bird were you looking for? Sparrowhawk? Pied wagtail? Wren? Dunnock?”
She tilted her head and offered him an amused expression. “Are you listing all the bird species you know?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, as lovely as it would be to see all of those birds, no. I was after a meadow pipit. They’re real pretty little things. At least I think so, I haven’t actually spotted one yet since you came clomping past,” she said, hands on hips.
“Excuse me, I do notclomp.I’m a very graceful runner. Some might even say agile.”
Rosemary rolled her eyes.
“I am sorry I made it tricky for you to see the meadow pipip, though.”
“Pipit. It’s alright, it would be pretty rare to spot one here anyway, but I thought I would try my luck, since we won’t have many mornings to enjoy out here with all the night shoots coming.”
A high-pitched trill came through the forest and Rosemary’s head darted to the right, gaze roving over the sun-drenched trees.
“Come here,” she whispered. “Quietly.”
Ellis tried his best not to crunch too many leaves, absurdly grateful that Fig wasn’t a barker. He ducked under the bulk of the bush, into the miniature opening that Rosemary had made for herself. It was just large enough to fit two people and one small dog. Ellis was extra glad he’d brushed his teeth and put on deodorant before coming out on his run.
Rosemary held the binoculars to her face, and he heard her excited intake of breath as she spotted the bird she was after.
