I try not to simper… well, not much. “I wasn’t sure they could supply all this until yesterday afternoon. So as you can see, I’ve sectioned the land. Since the original design seems to have been a sequence of curves, I’ve drawn curves in the land and we’ll have swirls of different wildflowers alternating with grass orclover. You remember the blue wall below the terrace? The one that looks like a comma?”
He leans further down to see the mosaic wall I discovered in my first week here. “Yes, of course. Don’t tell me.” He looks up at me. “You’re creating commas of grass and flowers.”
His excitement feeds mine and I almost clasp my hands together against my chest and dance around. “It goes with the trees. You see how they’re planted in ones and twos?”
His eyes narrow. “Tell me. Tell me.”
“I can do better than tell you, I can show you. But we’ll need to go downstairs on the terrace.”
“The terrace is perfect. Leonie opens in an hour, and she can make us breakfast. I’m craving her bacon sandwiches.”
At the mention of food, my stomach makes a loud whizzing noise that curls like a corkscrew.
Osian laughs. “My thoughts exactly! Give me fifteen minutes to get decent.”
Chapter Thirty-two
It’s not even six o’clock but when I get downstairs, Leonie is opening the doors to the terrace.
“Crikey, when did you get up?”
Not only is she open, but I can already smell bread baking and bacon grilling.
“Yeah.” She sounds resigned. Unusual for the normally positive Leonie. “I didn’t sleep.” She starts taking out the tables and chairs she normally puts on the terrace.
I grab a couple of chairs to help her. Since Osian and I are going to sit here, I line them up closer to the edge and drag a small table over. “Don’t tell me you heard Llewellyn and Nora shouting.”
“Don’t ask.” She pushes fingers through her hair, loosening it from its usual ponytail. “Tea and bacon?”
“For two, please.” Then because of the dark circles under her eyes, I do ask: “What is it?”
“Nora knocked on our door around midnight, in floods of tears.”
My heart falls. “No. She stayed with you overnight.”
“Well, where was she going to sleep? She couldn’t drive in the middle of the night, and there’s no way she could stay with Llewellyn.”
“And she kept you talking all night?”
“Not all night, but several hours. Me and Raff. I left them alone in the end and tried to sleep, but…” She notices my expression and adds, “You wouldn’t have turned her away, not distraught as she was.”
Oh, yes I would, after the things she said.
“Bora da.” The professor ambles in a little later, carrying his usual laptop. “I woke up early and was going for my meditation, but I couldn’t resist the smell of breakfast.”
Leonie helps him get set up and plugs in his computer charger for him because he struggles to bend low. I leave her to take his order and go outside to wait.
Llewellyn comes in a few minutes later, looking as ropey as Leonie. He too must have had a difficult night. I wonder if he knows his ex is still in the building, sleeping on Leonie’s sofa.
He waves a good morning to me, then joins the professor. I angle my chair away slightly so he doesn’t feel ‘watched’ by me. After yesterday, he must feel a little exposed. There’s nothing worse than being the object of other people’s gossip. At Styler, after it all came out about my fiancé’s marathon cheating, I could feel people’s eyes like pins in the back of my head.
So for now, I take out my phone and keep my eyes on it while I wait for Osian.
He takes more than the promised fifteen minutes. Eventually, he arrives looking showered, shaved and wearing faded denims that hug his hips.
Barely a moment later, Nora arrives in the café.
Is she psychic or does she have a satellite tracker on him?
