‘Just a kiss,’ she said. ‘Because we have all the time in the world, right?’
He nodded, feeling every atom in his body responding to her with love.
She lowered her mouth to his in a soft, slow coming together. It only lasted a second and she pulled back to watch his response.
He didn’t care that he’d glazed over, that his lips were parted and he was stunned and silent. He let her warmth bloom right out of her body and into his, her fingertips at his cheekbones and in his hair, her eyes drifting over his face. He suddenly had no idea how to breathe. He didn’t mind suffocating one bit.
She kissed him again, slower this time, letting her eyes close, everything unhurried and exquisite.
He’d kissed her in the castle library but it hadn’t felt like this. This was how two people kissed when they were set on leaving ‘friends’ behind and searching for deeper feelings, closer connection.
He brought his hands to her face too and they held each other smilingly.
‘Is it sunny in Amarillo this time of year?’ he said, his voice barely there. She kissed him. ‘I’ll need some factor fifty, right?’ Another slow kiss, languorous. He moaned, but pulled a millimetre away. ‘Are there really snakes in Texas?’
She nodded and smiled and opened his mouth with the tip of her tongue. Another slow, aching kiss.
Still, after a moment, he pulled away. ‘Is your dad going to murder me?’
They both laughed, already near to forgetting what they were laughing about, then they were kissing again until the formation of actual words and coherent thoughts was a thing beyond their abilities, missing every second of the movie, stopping only when best friends Harry Burns and Sally Albright were finally happily in love, all of their reservations obliterated and their old pain forgotten.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Moving Day
Seven twenty-six in the morning and they stumbled out of the stacks in the Borrow-A-Bookshop, hair tousled, lips bee stung, eyes sleepy, and both smiling dopily having kissed the whole night away.
While the movie credits rolled, they’d sneaked away from the gardens, beating the crowds and the gossips, running laughing and stumbling all the way down the dark slope, stopping under the Victorian lamps and kissing hard, drinking straight from the Champagne bottle, then slipping and sliding further Down-along, pulling one another into doorways and turnings to kiss some more until they arrived back at the door of the bookshop where they couldn’t pull themselves apart to retrieve the keycard from Annie’s bag, only stopping when they were both shivering with cold and excitement, when they’d at last fallen in through the door.
Annie had lured a helpless Harri with a crooked finger into the stacks where they’d stayed all night, hands roving over clothes, outer layers dropped to the floor, breathing raggedly, kissing for hours.
The winter dawn’s light bled into the shop now.
They stood side by side in the middle of the bookshop, looking around them.
‘Did it always look like this?’ Annie said. ‘Everything seems different.’
‘It’s like I have new eyes,’ Harri said. He laughed and shook his head at how silly it sounded, but everything was new this morning. ‘I know what we need,’ he said.
‘Coffee,’ Annie said, ‘and hangover buns.’
‘Coming right up.’ He walked away, only dropping her hand when their arms were fully extended.
Annie stayed where she was. Her eyes fell over their suitcases and bags, which they’d left by the shop counter yesterday before setting off for the movie. She shook her head at the thought of how she’d felt then, bent out of shape and regretful.
Now here she was at dawn with Harri ready to fly all the way to Texas so he could see more of her. Everything had worked out in ways she couldn’t have imagined. Her eyes fell on the last box from the castle. It was already opened but only half unpacked.Almosteverything had worked out. She’d made lots of new friends in Clove Lore, and all of them were happy, except one.
‘We should finish that box, before we get our cab to the airport,’ she said, just as Harri reappeared with the mugs on a tray and with a glass of water for the red rose that had laid on the counter all night.
He glanced at the shop clock. ‘We have time.’
Together they sat on the floor, nothing hurried, everything calm. They tasted their coffees, cortados to wake them up. Annie told him this was her favourite so far and delighted, he’d noted that down in his app.
They lifted books and papers from the box and spread them on the floor. There were some old architectural sketches in faded ink, an engraved stamp which, on closer inspection, they found bore the Courtenay coat of arms, mirror-reversed for sealing letters in wax. There were some receipts for books, yellowed and useless, an expired TV licence, aYellow Pagesdated 1983, its dog-eared pages stuffed with pencilled quotes for restoration works on the stable block, which presumably never happened. Harri handed Annie the book that had languished at the bottom of the box.
‘In Memoriam,’ she read from the inside leaf. ‘Published in eighteen-fifty.’
‘Looks important,’ said Harri.
