when the door crashed open. Didn’t have to act that reaction one bit.
And then I turned round and saw him.
‘Breathless,’ Sam had said to me. ‘That’s all I want from you, Laura. Breathless.’
And breathless I was.
I’d seen him before, of course, on a cinema screen like everyone else. I knew he was good-looking, with that sandy thick hair and those startling blue eyes. I always thought it was something about the colouring process that made them look that way, but they really are that blue. And he came striding across the room to confront me … I mean, Charity … and I found I literally had to suck the oxygen into my lungs. I seemed to have forgotten how to do it automatically.
What was worse was that at first I could tell he was just in character, ready to put a flea in the ear of someone he thought was a trespasser, but the then he reached the door to the balcony and he just … stopped. Stopped dead. I couldn’t tell if he was still acting at first, or if he’d forgotten his lines. I’d certainly forgotten mine.
And then I realised that he felt it too—the thing I’d hardly realised I’d been feeling myself. It was the strangest thing …
I knew I wasn’t Charity any more, and he wasn’t Richard. I was me and he was Dominic, and yet something just … fell into place. Instant connection. The only words I have to describe it are Sam’s. How ironic. And it still seems like a poor reflection of what it felt like.
I knew.
Knew I loved him. Right from that moment.
So now I’m not just a sentimental, romantic fool; I’m obviously ready for the nuthouse too. And possibly the divorce courts.
I also knew that he was married, as I am. But, unlike me, he loves his wife. He’s one of the few film actors who has a good reputation in that department. Another man might act on whatever weird ‘electricity’ of Sam’s passed between us, but I know Dominic won’t. Even if he felt what I felt.
But now, alone in my hotel room away from Whitehaven, the more I recall the moment, the more I think I was maybe kidding myself. He’s an actor, after all. A very good one. Much better than me.
He’s probably not worrying about the upcoming scenes, the ones when he’ll have to take me in his arms and kiss me. But I can hardly sleep for thinking about it. I haven’t resorted to marking the calendar with big red crosses yet, but I’m close.
I can’t wait. But I also know it’ll be just a few, snatched moments of perfection and then they’ll never come again. Which would be worse: to kiss or not to kiss?
And it might mean nothing at all to him. Like shaking hands with a stranger …
And, even if it did, it can only mean something for two glorious months, and then only when the cameras are rolling and Sam is barking his orders at us. Maybe that would be worse.
Come to think of it, Sam was very quiet today. The last couple of days, when I’ve been shooting scenes involving Charity and her parents, he’s been interrupting all the time, making us do things over and over again. But today I hardly heard a squeak out of him. He watched Dominic and me play the scene, his arms folded, and when Dominic had left and I was just staring at the open door, finally able to heave in a breath, Sam just said, very quietly, ‘Cut’.
One take, that was all, and then he packed up and said he was done for the day. Most unusual.
CHAPTER FIVE
Louise had been staring so long at the field of sheep on the other side of the river that the little white dots had blurred and melted together. She refused to unlock her gaze until the dark smudge on the river in her peripheral vision motored out of sight.
Eventually, when it didn’t seem like defeat, she sighed and turned to rest her bottom on the railing of the balcony and stared back into the boathouse.
He couldn’t have known who he’d looked like standing there below her on the steps as he offered her the long, black key. It had been one of her favourite scenes in A Summer Affair—when Richard came to meet Charity secretly in the boathouse. Not that anything really happened between them. It was the undercurrents, the unspoken passion that had made it one of the most romantic scenes in any film she’d ever seen.
The trespasser had looked at her with his warm brown eyes and, somehow, had offered her more than a key as he stood there. For the first time in years, she’d blushed, then hurried to hide the evidence with her hair.
And then he’d had to go and spoil that delicious feeling—the feeling that, maybe, not all men were utter rats—by reminding her of who she was.
Louise stood up, brushed the dirt off of her bottom and walked back into the little sitting room. Of course, she wasn’t interested in getting involved with anyone just now—despite what Tara said about the therapeutic nature of a hot and heavy fling—so she didn’t know why she’d got so upset with the gardener. Slowly, she closed and fastened the balcony doors, then exited the boathouse, locking the door and returning the key to its hiding place.
The light was starting to fade and she hurried back up the steep hill, careful to retrace her steps and not get lost, mulling things over as she went. No, it wasn’t that she was developing a fancy for slightly scruffy men in waxy overcoats; it was just that, for a moment, she’d believed there was a possibility of something more in her future. Something she’d always yearned for, and now believed was only real between the covers of a novel or in the darkness of a cinema.
She shook her hair out of her face to shoo away the sense of disappointment. The gardener had done her a favour. He’d reminded her that her life wasn’t a fairy tale.
She snorted out loud at the very thought, scaring a small bird out of a bush. She was probably just feeling emotional because she wouldn’t see Jack for two weeks. Toby had kicked up a stink, but had finally agreed that, once she was settled at Whitehaven, their son could live with her and go to the local school. She and Jack would be together again at last.
Toby had been difficult every step of the way about the divorce. Surprising that he would lavish so much time and energy on her, really. If he’d paid her that much attention in the last five years, they might not be in the mess they were in at present. But that was Toby all over.
She pulled her coat tighter around her as she reached the clearing just in front of the house. The river seemed grey and troubled at the foot of the hill and dark, woolly clouds were lying in ambush to the west. She ignored the dark speck travelling upstream, even though the noise of an outboard motor hummed on the fringes of her consciousness.
Not one stick of furniture occupied the pale, grand entrance hall to Whitehaven, but, as Louise crossed the threshold, she smiled. Only two rooms on the ground floor, two bedrooms and one bathroom had been in a liveable state when she’d bought the house. All they needed was a lick of paint and a good scrub so she could move into them. The furniture would arrive on Wednesday
