In their father’s fisherman’s cottage at the top of the slope, Tom and Monty Bickleigh sat by the fire. They’d listened to the clatter of decorative nets, buoys and lobster pots that had, until this morning, been arranged artfully around their front door, scattering themselves across the visitor centre car park fifty yards farther up the slope.
Monty turned a piece of toast on a fork near the flames in relative contentment while Tom, eight minutes his junior and always the more agitated, stared at the flames and brooded about how he’d really thought he’d had a chance with the girl from the ferry.
Their cottage was so close to the entrance to the Clove Lore estate they could hear the donkeys in their stalls braying every time the wind rattled the doors. The stable master, Mr Moke, had been recalled from Christmas at his brother’s in Barnstaple by a flustered Minty. At that moment he was trying to get some sleep on the bales next to his charges. This was not the holiday he’d planned at all.
Nobody stirred abroad. The village was pitch black. The curtains at every window were drawn and barely a fire-glow escaped them as the storm did its worst.
Whilst the clouds rumbled with sounds of rapidly approaching thunder, and jagged electric shards forked across the horizon, Magnús and Alex stood frozen before one another and asked themselves what on earth they were supposed to do now.
Chapter Twenty-Three
By Candlelight at the Borrow-A-Bookshop
‘Bath?’ Magnús said, staring at Alex taking off her sodden slippers on the shop doormat.
‘What?’ She dragged her tired body upright, shaking raindrops from her coat.
‘I said, I should make you a hot bath.’
Alex pushed her hair from her face, bewildered. ‘Should we talk about what happened?’
‘Did you almost leave, then come back here in a hurry, even in the storm?’
‘Uh, well, that’s the long and the short of it, yes.’ She shrugged. ‘I came back because I wasn’t finished spending time with you.’
‘I see,’ he said, eyes growing softer by the second.
‘Can I please stay?’
‘OK.’
‘OK? That’s it? You don’t mind?’
Magnús didn’t mind one bit, but when he realised how much Alex was shivering he found that all he minded was getting her warm again. ‘Quick,’ he told her, ‘bathroom,’ and by the light from his phone he bounded up the spiral staircase to run the hot tap until the last drop of warm water was gone. Alex dragged herself after him, exhausted and elated all at once.
Someone, no doubt Jowan, had had the foresight to furnish the bookshop with enough Price’s white candles to last an entire winter without electricity. Magnús clustered them five at a time in coffee mugs, lit them with long cook’s matches and set them all around the foot of the bath as well as on every table in the bookshop so the whole place glowed a soft orange.
Alex had waited until he’d gone downstairs before undressing and lowering herself into the steaming bath and she listened as he swept out the fire and set it again with kindling. She heard him striking matches and the eventual crackles of the hearth coming to life, then there was the sound of running water in the tiny kitchen at the back of the shop and, a few minutes later, the whistling sound of an old-fashioned kettle boiling on a gas ring.
When he came back upstairs he knocked at the bathroom door. ‘I’ve made hot chocolate. I’ll leave yours here for you.’
Alex laughed at the sight of his hand reaching round the door and Magnús trying to set the mug down on the sink without looking. This shyness between them was new. She supposed running through the rain to be with him again had taken their relationship – could she even call it that? – to a new emotional level, and it was awkward trying to figure out what that meant, especially as they only had another week together.
She had no idea Magnús was bursting with words he wanted to say to her, but was holding off, not wanting to overwhelm her after whatever it was that had happened between her and her family this morning.
‘Just come in,’ she told him.
‘Should I?’ he said, still behind the door.
‘Come on!’
Candlelight and a deep bath was a totally different thing compared to last night by the fire. It had been magical of course, but somehow this all felt much more intimate.
The glow of the flames hid the pink in Magnús’s cheeks. He glanced at Alex, her hair washed and sleek over her shoulders, the ends fanning out across the surface of the water.
‘You can get in,’ she told him.
‘Hm?’ He tried to look casual and not at all alarmed at the suggestion.
