Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 126850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
We’d only just managed to get the story of how we met straightened out, for fuck’s sake.
I was never going to hear the end of this.
In hindsight, it really was all my fault. I was the one who’d invited Grace to come along, and I should have known we’d end up in some weird situation like this. Someone in my family was bound to assume we were more than friends, but I hadn’t expected it to be my grandmother in the very first seconds of Grace being here.
Not that I thought it would be hard to convince my mother, of course. She’d go along with it if only just to get through the next few days without too much drama from my grandparents. I fully expected her to raise her concerns about Grace not being someone my grandfather would accept, but Mum wouldn’t do that in front of her.
Thank God.
We didn’t need to go over that conversation again.
“You look like you’re regretting all your life choices right now,” Grace said, bumping me with her elbow.
I peered over at her, a wry smile curving my lips. “Is it that obvious?”
She laughed, tucking her red hair behind her ears. “Little bit. You do look rather grumpy.”
My smile turned a little less wry and a little more amused. “Really? I look grumpy?”
“Well, not grumpy, per se.” She smacked her lips together. “Contemplative.”
“So grumpy.”
“Yes. I was trying to be nice.”
I chuckled, nudging her back. “It’s been a while since I introduced someone to my parents,” I said slowly, eyeing her. “They’re usually already familiar with people I’m seeing.”
“Oh.” Understanding swept across her features, and Grace raised her eyebrows. “Now it makes sense. And I suppose I kind of came out of nowhere, didn’t I?”
“Just a little bit.” I rubbed my hand over my mouth and sighed as the cottage Mum and Dad were staying in came into view on the other side of the hill. “That’s the cottage.”
Grace turned her attention from me to the small, stone building and drew in a breath. “Holy crap. It’s beautiful here.”
“It’s just a cottage.”
Her cheeks flushed a light pink, and she wrapped her arms around her waist, stopping on the gravel path at the top of the hill we’d just slowly walked up. “I know, but everything here seems to be beautiful. Is there anything at all wrong with this place?”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets, falling still alongside her. “Um… there are rats in the barn,” I said, thinking carefully. “Deer sometimes break into the shed.”
Slowly, Grace twisted her head around to look at me. “Deer break into the shed?”
“Yep. I was about…” I blew out a breath. “I don’t know, sixteen? I used to spend all my summers here, and when I reached twelve, Grandpa would put me to work on the estate with various groundskeepers and gardeners. Said I needed to know how it worked if it was going to be mine one day.”
Her lips twitched into a tiny smile.
“I remember this one day I was set to work with the groundskeepers—I think the head guy at the time was called Conch.”
“Conch? Like the shell?”
“It was a nickname.”
“I would like to think so.”
I laughed. “Anyway, Conch was an absolute bastard. Great man, absolute pig to work for.”
Grace grinned.
“He’d make me haul his crap around all the time,” I said as we started walking, this time down the hill towards the cottage. “He’d handed me this list of tools to fetch from his shed, and when I got there, the door was smashed in, and there was this giant fucking stag inside with the biggest antlers I’d ever seen in my life.”
She buried her chin and mouth into her scarf, but I caught how her shoulders shook with a quiet laugh. “What did you do?”
“Screamed, almost shit myself, and sprinted a mile to where Conch was trying to clear some overgrown brambles.” I rubbed my hand down my face slowly while she laughed, not even bothering to hide it this time. “To this day, I have never been so scared in my entire life.”
“What happened to it?” she asked through her giggles.
“Conch and a couple of the other guys on the groundskeeping team managed to usher it back towards the woods, but I was never able to live it down.”
“Does he still work here?”
“What? So you can pump him for stories?”
“Perhaps.”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, he retired a few years later. Thank God. Although, by that time, I wasn’t spending quite as long up here every summer. The time I did spend was with my grandparents.”
“Did you spend all summer up here? Every year?”
“Most years,” I answered. “Sometimes we’d delay the start if we were having a family holiday or something, but at least four weeks out of the summer break would result in my parents leaving me and Freya here. Freya didn’t always last the entire four weeks, but I didn’t have much of a choice.”