“Of all places on the entire island, you came to watch the sunset from here?”
“I was walking nearby.” He seemed to realize he’d been standing too close and stepped back.
“Or spying on me?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well?” She crossed her arms over her chest and advanced on him.
There was no real reason he should be here, and it would just be like that evil cow Nicole to send a man to do her dirty work. A distant part of her mind tried to tell her she was over-reacting. She quashed it impatiently.
“Why would I spy on you?”
“I don’t know, the same reason you came up to my studio, pretended to be interested in flowers and paintings and then reported me to Lord de-Rottweiler.”
“I didn’t report you. He was worried and I wanted to reassure him that you were doing a great job. I didn’t expect it to backfire so badly.”
“It wouldn’t have backfired so badly if you hadn’t told him so much.”
“It wouldn’t have backfired at all if you had told him at leastsomethingabout your work. He was concerned and you hadn’t bothered to keep him informed of your progress.”
The annoying man was right.
She shrugged. “I’m not used to working under such conditions, dealing with complicated family dynamics.”
“Aren’t you?” His eyes studied her. “I thought weddings were rife with family dynamics.”
“Stop being reasonable. I hate that.”
“You mean I should stop being right?” he said, trying to suppress a smile.
God, she missed the days when he never smiled, or never talked to her at all.
And why was he suddenly is a good mood?
She tried to scowl and failed.
“I know,” he said. “You’re not ready to forgive me yet.” And winked good-naturedly.
Before she could stop herself, she grinned back. Damn him. It would really help if he stopped being so…so…so easy on the eye. It wasn’t fair.
“Why were you really on the roof?”
He glanced up at the parapet over their heads. “In part, the sunset.”
“And the other part?”
“Come and see.” He took a few steps towards a large stone buttress. “Can you climb?”
She could climb, and when he offered her a hand, she refused it. There were advantages to wearing jeans and DMs, and she was no damsel in distress needing a man’s arm to lift her up.
“What the hell is this?” she asked, dusting her hands when she finally stood on the roof and looked around. It wasn’t a flat surface but a series of arched roofs like six large stone beer cans lined up side by side. Grass and weeds grew in cracks and between some of the stones. Each arch top was six or seven meters long and four meters across. Almost the size of a double bedroom.
“You’d never know it from being inside,” he said. “I think they must have installed a false ceiling to hide the vaulted roof of the original casemates.”
“Casemates?” That’s what everyone called the cloth factory; she’d never thought about it.
“They were chambers for the artillery. Built during World War Two to house large guns. The windows in the buildings used to be openings for the cannons to fire.” He walked carefully down the sloping concrete surface of one arch, up on the next, then turned in a semi-circle to look out at the waves. “You can see we’re on a sort of headland jutting out into the sea. A great vantage point from which to watch the English Channel and fire at passing ships.”
