But the full horror was still to come. Did…did…did she really declare her love for him?
No, please no. She pulled the covers over her head trying to hide.
Why didn’t the ground open up and swallow you when you needed it to?
Well, she certainly didn’t do things by half. What had her old boss called her, a lion? Yep, a lion who only does things on a grand scale. It wasn’t enough what Nicole had done to humiliate her, oh no. Laura could do so much better.
The words “I fell for you” echoed round her head as the rest of her rant came back to her.
She clutched her head and waited for it to stop pounding.
It didn’t.
Dragging her sorry self out of bed, she moved in the direction of the bathroom. Hot shower. Caffeine. And Nurofen. A lot of Nurofen.
It was just after six when she went down to the kitchen. Only Cook was up; she took one look at Laura and wordlessly poured her a giant cup of coffee.
She also buttered two large slices of bread, still hot from the oven, and slathered them generously with honey.
“Thanks,” Laura muttered as she swallowed some Nurofen.
It helped reduce the number of bricks in her head, but that only made her think more clearly. And the painkiller to ease her mortification had yet to be invented.
“Morning!” Emmett called cheerfully as he walked in, then seeing Laura, quickly dropped his voice. “Do I smell coffee?” he asked very quietly with a sympathetic look at Laura.
“You look as bad as I feel.” He sat down opposite. He didn’t look good himself; she hoped she didn’t look as bad as that.
“What’s wrong withyou?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t sleep much.” He accepted a coffee mug from Cook into which he stirred a generous amount of cream and sugar.
Cook, who seemed to instinctively know what people needed to eat, served him a plate of scrambled eggs and grilled sausages.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said as he gratefully tucked into the food.
Laura had the distinct impression there was more to his woes than a sleepless night. Whatever, she had no time and no spare headspace for his problems today. She had quite enough of her own.
Had she really promised to weave a new silk underskirt?
Yes. She’d instructed Rovena to weave her flower and herb designs. Which was impossible. The weaving itself could be done fast enough; after all that, was what a modern industrial loom was supposed to do. The hard part was threading the different colours in the right order to produce the pattern. She’d seen them work the loom for a simple two colour repeating stripe, and it took an hour to fix all the different spools in the right positions.
Her design required eight or nine colours in a complex pattern. That was more than a hundred spool arrangements. It could take days to set up.
She poured herself another mug of coffee. “Can I take this with me?” She stood up. “I need to get to the Casemate as soon as possible before…”
Before Rovena and the other woman came to work and started trying to do the impossible.
Also, best to leave now, before Adam woke up and came down for breakfast. If she could avoid him for the next forty-eight hours, it would save them both the embarrassment of talking about what she had said last night. After the wedding, she would quietly pack her things and leave the island and never have to see him again.
“Just make sure you bring it back tonight,” Cook said, nodding at the cup in Laura’s hand. “Everyone does this, taking their drinks away from the kitchen and I have to go round the house and garden collecting them or we’ll have nothing left in the cupboards.”
Nodding, Laura went out through the kitchen doors and circled round the west part of the garden. The magnolia trees were in full bloom, very pretty. She should have thought about painting them. Too late now. Anyway, she sipped a little more coffee, she’d better hurry before Rovena turned up. A shudder ran through her and nudged her headache up a notch. Hopefully, Millie hadn’t taken her seriously last night and would be happy with a plain cream silk skirt.
The walk to the Casemate took about twenty minutes. One thousand and two hundred seconds, and Laura spent every one of them doing her best not to think about Adam.
And for once, God relented and finally came on her side. Because even before she walked into the Casemate, something took her mind right off Adam, and love, and deception and everything.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
