“The bathroom’s through there,” he said. “I converted one of the bedrooms.”

“I take it this isn’t authentic to period?” she teased as she took in the marble shower enclosure, the huge tub, and the gleaming sinks.

She walked back into the bedroom, losing herself in imagining, as she’d done since she was a child.

“Tell me you’re not picturing a grisly murder in my bedroom,” he said, watching her in some amusement.

“No.” She shook her head. “I was picturing this house with the vicar and his wife and several children reading, or sewing. Taking tea in that lovely room downstairs. You know, I get the feeling that this house has held a great deal of happiness, don’t you?”

He didn’t look at her as though she were crazy, but as though he finally had found someone who got it. “First time I walked into this house it felt…content. I bought it soon after.”

It was too big a house for one guy. She felt that it must be waiting for him to settle down and have some kids so the sounds of laughter and young voices would fill the house once again.

But, long before that, she suspected the walls were going to echo the sounds of their passion when she saw him advance on her with that look in his eyes she was beginning to know well.

His predatory look.

She’d already had two orgasms tonight, and now she was firing up like a woman who hadn’t seen action in months. How did he do that to her?

Then he put his mouth on hers and she knew exactly how he did it.

When they woke the next morning, the sun was shining. In the daylight, the old parsonage was as perfect as it had been the night before. The gardens needed work. He kept the lawn mowed and the hedges trimmed, but she could see that the rosebushes needed pruning and the beds were empty of color.

She’d put a wrought-iron table and chairs right there, she thought, looking at a flat patch of grass that would make a perfect place for a stone patio. Mentally, she added a rose arbor, a small stone fountain, or maybe a birdbath in that corner under the mock orange.

Whoa. What was she doing? Inserting herself into the scene?

Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad. This wasn’t her house, even her country, and this man certainly wasn’t hers. Well, not in the long term.

With regret, she turned away from the window to find him watching her with an odd expression on his face.

“What?”

“You look good in my house. Right.”

How bizarre that they should both be thinking the same thing at the same time. On such a subject.

She smiled and tried to lighten the mood. “I was planting a flower garden in my head.”

“That’s another thing I haven’t had much time for.”

He came up and touched her shoulder. He was always doing that, dropping little touches as he passed. It was like this second conversation going on between them on a much deeper and unspoken level that had nothing to do with the superficial words.

It felt like he was saying, You’re special, I care, as though he needed that briefest physical connection between the major ones.

If she’d thought about it before, she’d have said that some guy touching her all the time would irritate the hell out of her; but it wasn’t true, and she found she was starting to do it, too. For such a new relationship, they already had patterns of behavior that were astonishingly intimate.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Mmm. Please.” He poured a cup and added a drop of skim milk and half a spoonful of sugar into the china mug before handing it to her. She stared at him. “You know how I like my coffee?”

“Bartender’s trick. Memorize your best customers’ drinks. Brings them back.”

“Am I one of your best customers?”

“The best.”

“You make good coffee.”

“Thanks. I’m also handy with a fry-up. I can make you breakfast or I can let you scamper back to Stag Cottage to get to work. Which is it?”

She blinked at him, comprehension dawning. “Is that why you rushed out of my place yesterday morning? So I could work?”

“Of course. You made such a bloody production about not having the time for a bloke that I reckoned my only hope of another shag was to make myself scarce.”

“Oh.” She felt foolish, and was fairly certain her cheeks were pinkening. “I thought you were racing off out of there to keep things casual.”

He came up to her, up and up until they were pressed hip to hip, and he glared down into her eyes. “Then you are a very silly woman.”

She’d been called a few things in her life, but silly, in that utterly endearing way, had never been one of them.

She felt silly. Deliciously so. “Well,” she said, nudging him with her hips until she got a gratifyingly firm response, “I’m not so silly that I’d turn down breakfast.”

On top of her earlier surprises, she discovered that the man could cook. No bangers and beans and chips this morning, but an omelet with spinach and feta cheese. She squeezed oranges for juice, and they ate at the round table by the window.

Of course, the sailcloth table mats would have to go. The round table begged for a linen cloth, in a pink toile, perhaps.

She could see them sitting here, sharing the paper years from now. But she could also see him in her modern West Coast house. He’d never been there, but she could see him as clearly as though in memory. It was the spookiest damn thing she’d ever experienced.

After breakfast, she wasn’t ready to leave him. She said, “I need to drive into town to the Internet café. Could I beg a ride?”

“Absolutely. It’s my day off. I’m at your service.”

When they got to town she felt good walking by his side. He told her a few stories about the shopkeepers and some of the people they passed, nearly all of whom knew him and then glanced at her curiously.

She had an e-mail from her agent, which she’d half thought might be there. She clicked on it. No matter how many books she wrote, she worried over each one. She thought this book was good, but what if she’d been fooling herself? What if her writer’s block had become so bad she’d completely lost her judgment?

Before she could come up with any more what-ifs, she opened the damn thing.

Hi Meg, This is the best thing you’ve ever written. The villain is delicious. Much love, Herbert.

Relief washed over her. And a sense of absolute satisfaction took its place. Herbert had no idea. Oh, yeah. The villain is very delicious, she thought to herself. Her great fear, that somehow she’d lost her own judgment, that after her uncharacteristic dry spell, she was writing dreck and unable to distinguish it, was relieved.

She even had the secret satisfaction of knowing that her sneaking suspicion that this was her strongest book yet was shared by someone whose opinion she trusted.

Today was a very good day.

“What’s put that smile on your face?” Arthur asked her when they met outside once more. “Apart from me, of course.”

“My villain is delicious,” she informed him.

“I hope that means he’s less terrifying than the awful bugger in the book I’m reading.”

She chuckled in delight. “No, it means he’s much, much worse.”

“How can someone so young and full of light write such evil?”

She shrugged. “I have my nightmares on the page.”

“I’d best get you home so you can get a few more written down.”

And so their days fell into a pattern. They slept together every night, either at Stag Cottage or at the parsonage, though increasingly, it seemed, she found herself in the parsonage. The place comforted her almost as much as Arthur’s arms wrapped around her in sleep comforted her.

She went to the darts nights, and improved enough that she could usually hit the board, or not stray too far, though after that first one, the bull’s-eye continued to elude her. She and Maxine had lunch or coffee, or simply walked the estate. The days grew cooler, more rain fell. Fall progressed and an early frost reminded her that winter, and the end of her time here, was approaching.