Christmas Is All Around

Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The next morning, Charlotte was awoken by the sound of… carolers?

“What the fuck?” she mumbled, summoning enough strength to tug the extra pillow that she’d apparently been spooning over her head.

“Good morning,” said a deep, amused voice, and Charlotte suddenly went still. Nestled in her cozy little twin bed, she’d forgotten where she was and, more important, who she was with. She lifted the pillow to find Graham fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, sipping a mug of tea and reading a newspaper.

“How long have you been awake?” she asked indignantly, tossing aside her insufficiently noise-stifling pillow and sitting up. She tugged the duvet up to her chin, shivering slightly as the cooler air of the room hit her bare skin.

“A while,” he said, glancing up at her and taking a sip of his tea. “I was going to wake you in a bit.”

“What time is it?” she demanded, reaching for her phone on the bedside table. It was hard to gauge how much daylight there was with the thick curtains drawn. Had she overslept horribly? Had she slipped into some sort of sex coma?

It was… 7:22.

She groaned and slumped back against the pillows.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she mumbled. “This is inhumane. It’s still dark outside. Why on earth are people caroling before sunrise?”

“To be fair,” he said, setting down his newspaper, “?‘before sunrise’ is a relative statement, this time of year.”

“It’s not!” she protested. “This isn’t Iceland! The sun comes up at eight! I don’t think asking people to hold off on caroling until at least eight is unreasonable!”

“Well, I met our intrepid carolers when I went downstairs to see about tea,” he said. “And I don’t think you would have much luck telling these people that there are appropriate times for caroling.”

“Ideally never,” she clarified. “ Never would be my preferred time for caroling.”

“I wouldn’t recommend telling them that, either,” he said, a devilish grin flickering across his face.

“Why do you look so happy?” she asked suspiciously. “I don’t like it.”

“Get dressed,” he said cheerfully. “Breakfast starts at eight, and you’ll find out for yourself.”

“I liked you better before I learned you were a morning person,” she informed him coldly as she pushed the covers back and prepared to race for the bathroom. Gratifyingly, his eyes went a bit glazed at the sight of all the bare skin she’d just revealed. She would have taken a moment to revel in this, but it was cold, and she didn’t want to delay getting warm for even a second longer.

By the time she’d made it to the bathroom door, however, he’d recovered sufficiently to toss a would-be casual reply at her back:

“You seemed to like me fine last night.”

Charlotte shut the bathroom door firmly behind her in lieu of a comeback—because honestly, it wasn’t like she could argue with that .

There were so, so many carolers.

“No wonder there was only one room left,” Charlotte hissed to Graham as they walked into the breakfast room downstairs half an hour later. Despite the fact that breakfast officially began being served at eight, and it was currently 8:03, the room was already buzzing, nearly every table filled. Admittedly, this was a bit relative—there were only six tables total—but each table had three to four carolers seated at it, all looking positively delighted to be sitting down to breakfast at a wholesome country inn on a chilly December morning.

But they weren’t just carolers (which would be bad enough)—no, these were carolers in period costumes . There were shawls. There were top hats. There were bonnets .

Charlotte suddenly wished it were socially acceptable to drink this early.

“Good morning!” said a cheerful woman who looked to be in her early sixties. She seemed positively delighted to spot Graham and Charlotte, and was seated directly next to the one remaining empty table. Charlotte and Graham exchanged the world-weary looks of soldiers about to go into battle, and made their way across the room to their seats.

“Hello,” Charlotte said politely as she settled herself at the table.

“Sleep well last night?” asked the improbably cheerful woman; she was wearing a lot of plaid, Charlotte realized now. A plaid shawl over a plaid floor-length dress, with the ribbons of a plaid bonnet tied securely beneath her chin. And none of it was the same plaid, despite all being in Christmassy colors—no doubt if she showed up in Scotland in this ensemble, she’d spark some sort of interclan warfare. She was clutching a cup of coffee eagerly, though Charlotte personally didn’t think this woman needed any supplementary caffeine.

“We did,” Graham said, in response to the woman’s question. He smiled politely at her, and, predictably, Charlotte could see the woman melting at the sight. She couldn’t be too judgmental about this, since it seemed that she, too, had a weakness for his smiles.

“Until the wake-up call, at least,” Charlotte muttered under her breath. “Sounded strangely like carol singing.” She frowned, as if deeply puzzled.

“Oh, goodness, that was us!” the woman said, cackling. “Did you hear that?” she asked, turning to her breakfast companions, who nodded eagerly. “I’m Nadine,” she added, turning back to Charlotte and Graham. “And we’re the Jingle Janglers.”

“The what now?” Charlotte asked, pretty sure that she didn’t actually want the amount of information that Nadine was going to provide, but curious nonetheless.

“The Jingle Janglers!” Nadine repeated brightly. “We travel around England providing carols in the most heartwarming settings.”

“Wales, too, this year!” put in one of Nadine’s tablemates. “Our first year branching out that far! Perhaps one day we’ll make it to Scotland!”

“Go on! And the moon, too?” Nadine said, chortling, as the three immediately surrounding tables laughed heartily, as though this were a hilarious joke.

“English distance-based humor,” Graham said in an undertone to Charlotte. “Doesn’t tend to land with Americans.”

“I think I am in hell,” Charlotte muttered back to him, and he pressed his lips together, clearly trying not to smile.

“We’re all amateurs, you see,” Nadine said, leaning toward Graham and Charlotte confidingly. “We do it simply for the love of the carol.”

“How noble,” Graham said, nodding seriously. Charlotte cast him a narrow glance.

Nadine, meanwhile, was now frowning slightly at Charlotte in an intent way that made Charlotte vaguely nervous. She’d been on the receiving end of a frown like this before, and it usually meant…

“Tallulah!” Nadine snapped her fingers; Charlotte resisted the impulse to fling herself under the table. “Oh, good heavens! You look like Tallulah from Christmas, Truly !”

Graham—bless him—was a quick thinker. “Ha! What’s that—the third time this week?” He elbowed Charlotte jovially, and she gave him a sharp look; he smiled at her in a sort of bossy way that managed to convey general please play along so I can salvage this situation, you idiot vibes, and she managed a belated chortle.

“Ha! Ha! Yes! Wow. What are the odds?”

The look Graham was giving her implied that he thought the filmmakers of Christmas, Truly must have been absolute lunatics to cast her, and she felt like reminding him that back then, no one had required her to improvise.

Graham gave an easy chuckle, and turned to Nadine, shaking his head ruefully. “It’s so odd—she’s been getting it constantly, lately. It’s funnier because my Lucy has never even seen the film. Have you, Lucy?”

Charlotte, now Lucy, shook her head gravely. “I was raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Never allowed to celebrate the holidays.”

Graham seemed to be suppressing an eye roll with some effort. “Yes, well, she’s escaped now, clearly ,” he added pointedly, “but her Christmas film education is a bit lacking.”

“Oh, goodness!” Nadine clapped a hand to her mouth. “I could have sworn—but heavens, you simply must watch it. It’s brilliant! It’s about these two extended families—one in England, one in America, because there were two sisters, and one was sent to Canada during the war, while her older sister stayed in England to work with the Wrens—”

“I’ll be sure to watch it, thank you,” Charlotte said, before Nadine could recount the entire plot of Christmas, Truly .

“—and there’s a series of interconnected romances with both the Americans and the Brits,” Nadine continued, undeterred, “and it all ties together in the end, of course, and they wear the loveliest jumpers!” She nodded significantly.

“I do love a good sweater,” Charlotte offered, a bit weakly.

“Just as well you’re not Tallulah, I suppose,” Nadine said, shaking her head. “Do you know, I saw the most horrible story in the Daily Mail ”—Charlotte didn’t know much about the British press, but she already knew that nothing good had ever followed that opening to a sentence—“about how the actress who plays Tallulah is a Wiccan who hates Christmas so much that she derailed an entire sequel film!” She looked scandalized.

“Shocking,” Graham agreed with a somber shake of the head.

At that moment, a lifeline in the form of the inn owner appeared. “Morning, loves,” she said to Graham and Charlotte. “Tea or coffee? And do you know what you’d like for breakfast?”

In the time it took Charlotte and Graham to order a full English and a veggie breakfast, Nadine had been sucked into a discussion with her companions, and Charlotte briefly experienced a moment of hope that she had escaped further conversation. She had not accounted, however, for the fact that chattiness seemed to be a common trait among amateur touring Christmas carolers, because the man sitting at the table to their right leaned toward them now.

“What brings you to town, if it isn’t to see us perform?” he asked curiously.

“Do you have many groupies?” Charlotte asked, the notion that she and Graham would have traveled to a tiny hamlet in Buckinghamshire specifically to see a troupe of carol singers frankly astonishing to her.

“A fair few,” said the woman next to him proudly; she, like her companion, was middle-aged, and was wearing a bright red dress that had enough boning in the bodice to make Charlotte wince in sympathy. “There was a lady last season who became obsessed with Rajesh,” she said, nodding at her breakfast companion. “She came to three separate villages in a row, she did, and was always chatting with him after the performances—I finally had to put my foot down, tell her that we’d been married for fifteen years and if she thought that just because it was Christmas, he’d be susceptible to her vixen charms, well, she had another thing coming.”

Graham’s eyebrows were somewhere in the vicinity of his hairline by this point, while Charlotte was suddenly feeling that this breakfast situation had taken a turn for the better.

“Do you find that men are particularly susceptible to vixen charms at Christmastime?” she asked earnestly, leaning across Graham to address the woman directly.

The woman nodded solemnly. “Why do you think they make all those romances set at Christmas?” she asked. “It’s the most lustful time of year.”

Graham coughed on his tea, and Charlotte thumped him on the back.

“Anjali and I met at Christmas!” Rajesh added, smiling fondly at his wife. “I took one look at her, glowing in the lights of the skating rink at the Natural History Museum—”

“May she rest in peace,” Anjali added sadly.

“The skating rink,” Graham clarified, seeing Charlotte’s confused look, having evidently cleared all the tea out of his windpipe. “They stopped doing it for environmental reasons.”

“The very notion!” Anjali said, indignant now. “As if we should be thinking about global warming at Christmas , of all things!”

“It’s true,” Rajesh said seriously. “There’s a time and a place for everything, you know.”

“I… see,” Charlotte said, before mercifully being rescued by the sight of her breakfast materializing. She and Graham occupied themselves for some time by shoveling massive quantities of toast and beans and eggs and mushrooms and tomatoes and—god, she got tired even trying to list them all; this country did not joke around with their fried breakfasts—anyway, the point was, by the time they were capable of speech, the carolers had already finished their own breakfasts and were preparing to depart for their first caroling stop.

“We pick several locations, you see,” Nadine confided as she tied her bonnet more securely beneath her chin. “Wouldn’t want anyone in the village to miss out!”

“How thoughtful,” Charlotte managed, and waved them off while sipping her coffee. As soon as the room was empty, she turned to Graham.

“Fifty pounds says they are outside this fucking cottage I need to draw.”

“Not taking that bet,” he said, polishing off his final piece of toast.

Sure enough, an hour later, once they’d checked out of the inn, moved the car to a different parking spot, and set off on foot, they found themselves being…

Well, serenaded.

“Didn’t think we’d see you two again so soon!” Anjali said cheerfully once she saw Graham and Charlotte materialize, just as the troupe was finishing a stirring rendition of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” They were assembled on the high street, a short walk down the road from the inn and the assortment of shops, directly outside the cottage that was Charlotte and Graham’s destination; the cottage in question was predictably adorable, with a thatched roof and an ivy-covered trellis and a garden that, in the summer, was probably overflowing with roses. Despite its position directly on the main road, the village was so small that it had the feel of a peaceful retreat, with a view of lush green fields rising behind it. There was a fully dressed Christmas tree in the front yard, too, a feature that Charlotte understood was key to the cottage’s appeal in the film. With a resigned sigh, she pulled her sketchbook from her bag, noting with amusement the small sign that had been affixed to the front gate, which read, PRIVATE RESIDENCE—TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! As she retrieved her supplies, she entertained herself with the soothing thought of megafans of The Christmas Cottage being hauled away in handcuffs after attempting to sneak onto the property.

“Lucy’s an artist,” Graham said, with a nod in her direction. “She loves Christmas so much that she’s determined to do watercolors for every iconic English Christmas film spot, as we catch her up on all the classics.”

“Excuse me?” she asked, freezing in the act of rummaging for her pouch of drawing pencils.

“You know,” he said, smiling innocently at her as he slung an arm around her shoulders, “I’ve been trying to tell you that this might be too much—surely you can’t be that passionate about Christmas films, of all things—but you’ve been undeterred.”

“Isn’t that lovely!” said Anjali, misty-eyed.

“Which Christmas film is your favorite?” Nadine asked eagerly. “I personally love the one about the girl who inherits that mansion in Sloane Square! Just imagine!”

“ Christmas, Truly is my favorite,” Rajesh confided. “The best bit is when the sweethearts from secondary school who had been separated by the war spend their last Christmas together in the same nursing home!” He blinked back tears.

“I will murder you in your sleep,” Charlotte informed Graham.

“Back to London tonight!” he said easily, dropping his arm and taking a few steps back as a precautionary measure. “Won’t have much opportunity!”

“I know where you live,” she reminded him. “And Ava knows how to pick locks.”

“Dare I ask why your sister has such a charmingly criminal hobby?”

“I don’t ask too many questions.”

“You would have done well under a totalitarian regime. Shouldn’t you be sketching?”

“I’m too busy trying to defend my reputation from slander,” she told him through gritted teeth.

“We don’t want to interrupt, of course,” Rajesh said, looking impressed as he watched her extract her preferred pencil and turn her attention to the cottage before her. “Only, I’ve never seen an artist at work before, and it does seem awfully fascinating.”

He paused, and an expectant silence fell, as if the entire caroling troupe expected her to narrate her creative process to them as she worked. She cast Graham a pleading look, and, mercifully, he took the hint.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to see her at work now, either, if we don’t give her some space. A watched kettle and all that.”

There was some impressed murmuring—clearly the carolers now viewed Charlotte as some sort of eccentric creative genius whose methods they could not understand, an impression she was not going to dispute if it meant that they would leave her alone so that she could actually get some work done.

“We’ll just be down the road,” Nadine said brightly. “We’ve found that the acoustics of the intersection back there lend themselves particularly well to ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.’ Makes us sound especially angelic, you see.”

“Must take advantage,” Graham agreed. “I look forward to listening to your angelic offerings from a distance.”

This, apparently, was a suitably rapturous response to permit Graham and Charlotte to now be left in peace, and Charlotte sagged slightly against the stone wall she was resting her hip upon.

“This village is terrifying,” she murmured, her eyes on the sketch slowly forming beneath her pencil. They were, admittedly, currently standing in front of a row of stone cottages with charmingly rustic little wooden signs on their gates, all proclaiming the cottages’ names to be things like Honeysuckle Cottage and Our Evergreen Nook , but still: terrifying.

“I do sort of feel like I’ve wandered into the pages of Cold Comfort Farm ,” Graham agreed. “I cannot express to you enough how abnormal this is. I grew up in a small village, and nothing quirky or charming happened there. We just bought snacks at the corner shop and rode our bicycles around a lot.”

“I could do with about 75 percent less quirk and charm,” Charlotte said darkly, before lapsing into silence. She hastily created a series of thumbnail sketches, done from slightly different angles, before deciding on the best option and flipping to a new page in her sketchbook. She spent a while working on a sketch of the exterior, then created a few more sketches of some of the details of the window frames and features in the garden, and finally took a series of photographs of the cottage and the surrounding village lane that she could refer to later.

Once again, Graham was quiet while she worked; she glanced over at him at one point to find that he was replying to an email on his phone, his brow furrowed as he tapped away. A weak winter sun had crept above the roofs of the village at some point, and he’d replaced his usual glasses with a pair of sunglasses; these, combined with the second-day stubble and the vaguely tousled hair, created an overall look that was a bit rougher around the edges than his usual oxford-shirt-and-well-tailored-trousers vibe. She didn’t hate it.

At last, she was done, and she replaced her pencil pouch and sketchbook in her bag with some relief. “Let’s go,” she said to Graham, and he glanced up at her, slipping his phone back into the pocket of his jeans. “If we walk fast, we might be able to slip past the carolers without them noticing us.”

This turned out to be wishful thinking on Charlotte’s part—they almost made it, but Nadine (of course it was Nadine) spotted them as they scurried past, and called out, “Don’t tell us you’re leaving so soon! Stay for a carol or two!”

And, of course, her pleas were immediately joined by Anjali, and Rajesh, and half of the caroling troupe, which meant that Charlotte and Graham had little choice but to stand politely among a crowd of delighted schoolchildren while “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was sung three times in a row (because the children kept screeching, “Again! Again!” and Nadine, who seemed to be in charge of the troupe’s song selection, was incapable of standing up to a bunch of seven-year-olds).

Eventually, however, they were free—though not without having received a flyer advertising the troupe’s upcoming tour stops (Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, this coming weekend), with copious use of some sort of deliberately old-fashioned-looking font and the overly liberal deployment of clip-art Christmas trees. (“A fascinating historical text,” Graham had deemed it, rescuing it when Charlotte was about to throw it in a trash can next to their parking spot. “You’re just worried Nadine will see us tossing it,” Charlotte shot back.)

Now they were once again ensconced within the cozy confines of the Mini Cooper, having made it down all the winding country lanes (sans sheep-induced traffic jams today) while cheerfully abusing the vocal stylings of the Jingle Janglers. It was only now, on the highway, that they’d exhausted this topic and a slightly uncomfortable silence fell.

Charlotte decided to address the elephant in the Mini Cooper.

“So,” she said, would-be casual, “I suppose we should discuss whether we plan to continue having oral sex in showers for the rest of my time in England.”

“You know, when your conversation partner is driving a car at sixty miles an hour might not be the best time to utter that sentence.” Despite this, his grip on the steering wheel was firm, the car’s path steady.

“You’re fine,” Charlotte said dismissively. “If I thought you were the type to crash a car over the mention of cunnilingus, I’d have waited, but I knew you were made of sterner stuff.”

“Your confidence in me is flattering.” His eyes were still on the road, but she could tell, just from watching him in profile, seeing the telltale dimple attempt to make its presence known in his cheek, that he was amused. She loved amusing him, she realized in a rush; this was a somewhat disconcerting realization, because Charlotte had never spent much time going out of her way to make people laugh. The rest of her family loved to entertain, to put on a show for whoever they were with; Charlotte was quieter, steadier than that. But when Graham laughed at something she said, it made her feel like he saw her— knew her—in a way that many people didn’t.

And she liked it.

“Seriously, though,” she said, not willing to drop this. “Obviously I’m leaving at New Year’s, and it sounds like you got out of a pretty long relationship recently—”

“Not recently,” he interrupted, his eyes still on the road. “It was before my dad died.”

Which had been, Charlotte recalled, a couple of years ago. She shouldn’t have cared that this woman, whoever she was, was long in his past… but something within her eased, knowing that he wasn’t hung up on her. That this wasn’t a rebound.

He seemed to sense her curiosity, because he glanced sideways at her, quickly, before looking back at the road. “Her name was Francesca. We dated for…” He paused, clearly doing some rapid mental math. “Six years.”

Charlotte stared out the window, unseeing. That was… so long. As long as Ava and Kit had been together, and they were married. With a baby . Instead of offering this unhelpful observation, though, she asked, “What happened?”

She heard him sigh, even as she continued gazing out the window. “We met through friends, when I’d been working in London for a year or two after uni. I was at a point in my life where it felt like I was… I don’t know. Ticking things off a list. She was getting a law degree, so she was studying all the time, and I was working all the time—and then when she got her degree, she was working all the time too. We moved into a flat in Notting Hill and talked about getting a dog, except that neither of us had time to take care of it. I worked twelve-hour days and I was exhausted, and I never had time to go visit my parents, or to help my dad with upkeep on the house, and would always offer to send checks instead.”

The self-loathing in his voice, on this last, was palpable, and Charlotte unthinkingly reached over to rest a hand on his where it sat on his thigh.

“Why did you break up?”

“We were almost thirty—both so busy with work that we hadn’t really had time to properly think about getting married. It was sort of assumed that we’d do it… someday. Buy a house farther out from central London. Have kids. But it never felt pressing. And then my dad got sick.” He paused, a long, heavy silence that she didn’t want to break. “I was going home a lot more often, obviously—and my dad was in and out of hospital in London, so I was spending time there, whenever I could. I took leave from my job, for a few months, so I could take him to appointments, give my mum a break. He went home, eventually… but he never got well again. And I’d come home, after these long days with my dad, feeling scared, but not knowing how to process it, and just feeling lonely , thinking about what my life would be like, if he died… and when I got home, sometimes she was there waiting for me, and sometimes she wasn’t—but I realized… well, I guess I realized that she didn’t make me feel any less lonely when she was there than when she was away.”

Charlotte swallowed around a lump in her throat at the ache in his voice—and at the bone-deep recognition she felt, at his description of that feeling.

“She was—is—a good person,” he said quietly. “I don’t blame her—I felt like a bastard about the whole thing, to tell the truth. There was nothing wrong . But it just wasn’t right. If my dad hadn’t got sick, I might have never realized—might have married her and thought I was happy. But something like cancer really puts things into perspective, and I realized that if I were in my dad’s shoes, spending days in hospital, going to endless appointments, frightened, tired, feeling like shit… she wasn’t the person I’d want waiting for me at home.”

He laughed then, under his breath—a low, derisive laugh. “This probably makes me sound like a complete ass. I was with her for six years , and then realized that I didn’t love her enough to marry her?”

“It doesn’t,” Charlotte said softly, blinking into the darkness. “It just makes you sound… human.”

“Well, the fact that she met someone six months later, and married him another six months after that, does make me feel a bit less guilty about it,” he added, and Charlotte let out a surprised laugh. “They moved to Hampstead and just had twins and, from all I hear from mutual friends, are blissfully happy, so clearly she’s well shot of me.”

“No,” she said, squeezing his hand, and then removing hers. “It just wasn’t right. And besides…” Here, she hesitated. Felt the words forming in her mouth, considered swallowing them down again. But instead—here in the cozy confines of the car, with no one to hear but him—she said, “I’ve lived in the same city for most of my life—I have friends. A best friend. A whole life . But I’ve been feeling lonely lately, too—and I think that the thing that would make it so much worse, totally unbearable, would be feeling this way even if I was coming home to someone at the end of the day. Almost anything’s better than that, I think.”

It was his turn to glance at her quickly, his eyes unreadable behind his dark sunglasses. All he said, however, after another long silence was a soft “I think you’re right.”

Silence fell within the car, Graham’s eyes on the road and Charlotte watching the rolling hills flash by, church steeples visible in the distant villages. It was a comfortable silence—more comfortable than any silence Charlotte had ever experienced with someone she’d slept with for the first time less than twenty-four hours earlier. This thought reminded her of her original question, which he hadn’t answered.

“So,” she said, “what’s the verdict, then? Is this a thing now? Are we doing this?” She kept her tone light and breezy, as if the emotional revelations of last night—of the past five minutes—meant nothing.

“Preferably not in the shower,” he said with a slight grimace. She glanced at him, grinning. “Not sure my knees can take that again.”

“No one made you get down on your knees.”

“I know. Horniness got in the way of common sense.”

“You’d just told me, like, two minutes before that having sex on a rug was a bad idea, but then you decided that going down on me in a shower was better?”

“Lane. Your point has been noted. I wasn’t thinking with my brain.”

“Listen, Calloway ,” she said, offering his last name in an exaggeratedly posh English accent, “I’m here for three more weeks. Meaning that if you’d like to fuck me somewhere that isn’t going to cause you to need knee replacement surgery later, your days are limited.” She kept her voice light, almost dismissive, as though what they were doing was no different from any of the other casual flings she’d had in recent years—fun, yes. But not something that mattered.

“Is this how you attract all of your men?” he asked. “Lure them in with sexy discussions of their rapidly failing bodies?”

“No,” she said, gleeful at the realization she was about to share. “Because I’ve never slept with someone over thirty before.”

This did nearly make him crash the car.

“Not the Mini Cooper!” she howled dramatically, clutching the dashboard.

“You cannot be serious,” he said, jerking the steering wheel so that the car swerved back into its lane. “You’re twenty-nine —have you been trolling the local secondary schools for dates?”

“Ha. No, it’s been a bit of a dry spell for the past year or so, and then before that…” She shrugged. “It wasn’t intentional, obviously, but I’ve always been a bit wary of older men—my dad is ten years older than my mom, and I think I just instinctively thought that anything that was a feature in their marriage wasn’t something that I wanted to replicate.”

“I’m honored that you aren’t too horrified by my age to be interested.”

“Honestly, the gray hair kind of does it for me. Who knew?” She gazed fondly at the half dozen or so strands of gray that were visible at his temples.

“Christ,” he muttered under his breath, but there was a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

And she realized, in a brief, terrifying moment of realization, that she was happy —happy in the sort of giddy, carefree way that she associated with a first crush, or childhood, or the day she’d made her first sale to someone she didn’t know. Happy in the sort of way that she did not remember ever being, in the years she dated Craig—or with any of the men who had come since. Happy in a way she shouldn’t necessarily be, barreling down an English motorway under a gray winter sky, sitting next to—okay, yes, a very handsome man with a gifted tongue, but still .

She was leaving in three weeks, she reminded herself. She lived in New York—ran a business there, had friends, a life . She couldn’t let herself get attached—not when she’d tried, for so long now, to ensure that she was immune to heartbreak, to needing, really needing , another person.

“Stay at mine tonight?” he asked, sliding a glance toward her a moment later, and she realized that he was, in his own way, answering her question.

And then—despite the fact that she knew that there was absolutely, positively no way this would end well—she couldn’t help but say, “Okay.”

She was twenty-nine, she reminded herself. It had been four years since her last heartbreak—she was older, wiser, and wouldn’t be making those same mistakes again.

Perhaps if she repeated it to herself often enough, she’d start to believe it.