hated being late. Stupid jet lag. Now she was going to feel on the back-foot all day as well as feeling nauseous from the butterflies hurling hand-grenades at the walls of her insides.
Quickly she bent down and shoved her feet into the pair of boots sat outside the front door.
Holy moley, they were beyond freezing. Why in God’s name did people in this country leave perfectly good footwear outside? It was barbaric.
Honestly, mid-November in Whispers Wood could not be more different to mid-November in LA.
That was it, she thought, her toes curling and clenching inside the boots. When she got in tonight she was bringing these puppies inside and shoving them by the fire – once she’d plucked up the courage to ask again how to switch the fire on, that was.
Quite sure her toes were going to drop off if she didn’t get moving, she half-shlepped, half-slid along the icy path and came to an abrupt halt at the front gate.
‘Wow. Cow.’
Master of the understatement. That was her all over. Because, excuse me, but what the hell was an actual four-legged, real-life, black and white, farm animal doing standing in front of her, plain as day?
Emma closed her eyes and then opened them again.
It was still there.
And it wasn’t moving.
Oh God. Why wasn’t it moving?
Was it dead? Did cows die standing up?
And why was it staring at her, with those … cow eyes?
Slowly, Emma reached out and unlatched the little wrought-iron gate separating her from the cow and tugging it over the frosted tufts of grass, pulled it open enough to slip through.
The cow looked at her as if to say, ‘Hi there, it’s all good. Wanna chew the cud with me?’
Emma shook her head because, you know, Day! As in, she had one. Had places to be and people to meet and she really didn’t fancy her first phone call to Kate to be along the lines of a sickie that went, ‘I’m sorry I can’t come to work today, I’m trapped in my house by a cow.’
‘Shoo,’ she whispered, watching her breath turn misty as it left her mouth. When nothing happened she mustered her courage and, feeling brave, flung a hand out from under her shawl to make a shooing motion.
Her actions had zero effect.
‘Hey, you? Mr Moo? Please shoo,’ she tried again a little louder, totally wishing she was eating Moo Shu pork, or doing anything that felt in any way familiar to her old life in LA.
She wasn’t sure this really fulfilled the ‘adventure’ brief she’d sold herself on when packing her case to make the move back to the UK, although, she’d only been here one whole night and one whole day so perhaps she should give it more time.
Or maybe the jet lag was screwing with her reasoning?
She blinked again in case it really was jet lag that had her imagining a cow had come to visit the tiny cottage Kate had helped her settle into when she’d arrived in Whispers Wood.
No. It wasn’t her imagination.
The cow was still there. Filling up her entire view because, as it turned out, cows were genuinely fear-for-your-life enormous close-up.
As an antidote to not getting her dream role, not being able to get out of the wrought-iron starting gate wasn’t quite the look she’d been going for.
Wisps of frosty fog wrapped themselves around her, and as the damp air seeped deep into her bones she was closer to admitting she may have misjudged this opportunity. What would Rudy think if he could see her now?
She’d thought this would all be so very quaint, hadn’t she?
How could you have been this wrong, Ems? This, So. Completely. Wrong.
All it was, was freezing, she thought, wondering if she could get out of the back garden of the cottage and find her way to The Clock House, thus avoiding the cow-staring scary start to her rural adventure.
Emma looked around helplessly and then, leaning closer, risked cricking her neck permanently to check out the pair of feet she could see approaching.
‘Is someone there?’ she asked.
‘Whack it on its arse,’ said a male voice.
‘What it on what?’ Emma asked.
There was a sigh, and then, ‘Give it a good slap on its hind rear and it’ll move right on by.’
Emma stared suspiciously at the cow’s rear-end. The instruction sounded a bit Fifty Shades Darker.
‘Thank you but I’m not into that,’ she said, not quite under-her-breath enough.
‘Look, do you want it to move, or not?’
She did. She really did. It was time to swap out her What Would Bridget Jones Do for a more kick-ass What Would JLaw Do? She licked her lips and stared again at the cow. ‘So … just sort of … hit it?’
‘Sometime today would be appreciated.’
‘And you know to hit it because?’
‘It’s Gertrude.’
‘Well.’ Emma folded her arms. ‘I have to tell you that I am none the wiser.’
‘But you are getting older. And so am I.’
A head popped around the rear of the cow and to Emma’s surprise it had a face belonging to it that stopped the breath in her lungs.
Maybe it was the fact that she faced imminent death by cow, but Emma’s powers of observation all narrowed down to one impressive: Valhalla-lujah.
The man was all dark and dangerous with Viking hair and beard and eyes the colour of the pints of Guinness that Bar Brand served up on Paddy’s night.
Eyes that, despite being framed by lashes that could compete with Gertrude’s, she could see were now drawn into a deep scowl.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘Hold these will you and I’ll move her on.’
Without thinking, Emma held open her arms and allowed Mr Heart-Wrecking Handsome to deposit a weighty pile of magazines, what looked like rolled-up plans, a laptop and a tape-measure the size of a dinner plate in them.
The next thing she knew she was staggering against the sudden weight, her feet sliding across the ice in opposite and modesty-mocking directions.
She hit the ground with an audible bump.
Oh, my, God.
Years of yoga, Pilates and dance and who knew all it was going to take for her to finally be able to do the splits was a British country lane, a cow, and a Viking!
She
