I pulled out my phone to check.
Dropped it, obviously, because I was an absolute lad.
Cursing, I crouched to retrieve it. A low chuckle sounded behind me, and heat flooded me before I registered it was Fen, as if there was a deeper part of me that recognised him as something special.
As if I needed the reminder.
I rose and turned to face him. He was closer than I anticipated. More gorgeous too, if such a thing was possible. As I watched the slow smile cross his face, I decided it was. Also, that the lumberjack beard was a look he could keep forever, not that I’d been on the fence about it before.And not that you’ll be around to appreciate it forever, either. You don’t live here, remember?
Semantics.
Fen tilted his head, eyes sparkling. “You came.”
“I did. Thought you’d gone without me when I couldn’t see the car, though.”
“Your car or mine?”
Damn. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten my car existed. “Um. Yours? I think?”
Fen laughed. “You didn’t notice yours wasn’t there, did you?”
“Nope. Where’s it gone? Did it get eaten by wolves?”
“Towed, actually. Up to the barn. One of my blokes is a mechanic. He reckons he can fix it in a day once the part arrives.”
“Works for me.”
“Good. Because I put the part on Paddy’s account.”
“Lord. Really?”
“No. We got it cheap off eBay.”
“Even better. You think it’ll be done by Sunday?”
“Maybe.” Something flickered in Fen’s bright gaze. “You have somewhere to be?”
“Home,” I said around a sigh. “I have to get back to work.”
“What about Charlie?”
“What about him?”
Fen opened his mouth, then seemed to change his mind. “You know what? We don’t need to have this conversation right now, out here, in the cold. Let me get the car and we can forget all about it for a while.”
It was the best offer I’d had all year. The only thing I couldn’t stomach was being separated from Fen for the three minutes it was going to take him to walk to the other side of his property to fetch his Land Rover.
So I went with him, taking in more of the landscape that I hadn’t seen while I’d been holed up in his house. “You’ve got your own Narnia.”
Fen tracked my stare as it swept around the picturesque woodland, complete with a quaint rope swing. “Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s definitely a nicer place to wake up than where I was before.”
“I’ll bet. I can see a petrol station from my window back home.”
“You don’t ever get out of the city?”
“Not for fun. Closest I get is visiting Dante Pope at that stately home in Wilburn.”
Fen’s gaze flickered again. “He’s still there?”