mystery.
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Alastair demanded.
‘I don’t think I dare.’ She was eyeing it as if it might bite. ‘It looks like it could be a rhinoceros.’
He grinned. ‘Damn, you guessed.’
She smiled, but her smile was troubled. ‘Alastair, you needn’t have done this. It makes it seem…’
‘Makes it seem what?’
‘It makes it seem almost a proper wedding,’ she whispered, and her words felt good to Alastair.
He might only have her for a year, but a year was better than nothing.
The current had caught him unawares, and he was being swept along without realising it. Which was ridiculous, he thought savagely, hauling himself back to some sort of common sense. Hadn’t he made himself a vow when Lissa died? Had Lissa’s death taught him nothing?
This was a marriage of convenience. Nothing more.
As was this gift to his wife. It wasn’t a proper gift. It was only…
‘Open it,’ he said, and she cast him an uncertain glance. Something had changed.
‘Open it,’ he growled, and she took a deep breath. OK. Keep it formal. Concentrate on the parcel.
And what a parcel! She had to tug the vast ribbon until it floated free, and after that she had to pull aside the parchment. And inside were…
‘Bert said one of the reasons he employed you was that you were a copestone perfectionist,’ Alastair said, trying not to sound
‘But otherwise they don’t look good.’ Penny-Rose was lifting a single stone and staring at it in disbelief. Copestones were the stones used to top and weight her wall. Chosen and chipped well, they made the wall look great-the icing on the cake! But it could take her almost half an hour to chip a stone to this shape, and on this job Bert had refused to give her the time.
‘There’s too much to do. We can’t afford your standards here,’ he’d told her. ‘This is farmwork. We have a job to do and we need to be economical.’
She’d agreed, but she made them perfect anyway, working into her lunch-hours and evenings to get them right so her stones would still look magnificent in hundreds of years.
But they took so much effort, and here they were, already cut.
‘How…?’ She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. ‘How…?’
‘I employed men off site,’ Alastair explained. ‘Bert showed them what you’ve been doing and said we wanted more of the same. They delivered them this morning.’ As she replaced her stone, he lifted her hands and fingered her rough skin. ‘So, for the next year you can go on stone-walling all you like, but the hardest bit’s done.’
‘Oh, Alastair…’
‘It was Bert’s idea.’
‘It was no such thing.’ She knew that much at least. Alastair must have thought of this all by himself. She thought back to the day a couple of weeks ago when he’d discovered her swearing over a gashed hand and a copestone that wouldn’t cut as she’d wanted it. ‘Bert wouldn’t have thought of this as a gift.’ She managed a wavering smile. ‘Not in a million years. As a matter of fact, I think one of our toasters is his.’
‘It would be.’
Silence. She carefully disengaged his hand. For some reason it was suddenly important that she do so.
A thousand copestones…
She couldn’t have thought of a better wedding gift if she’d tried.
Damn, there was a tear trickling down her nose-and then another one. She wiped them fiercely away with the back of her hand, and gave a very unromantic sniff.
Which suddenly made Alastair feel very romantic indeed.
This was unreal. Standing in the dawn light, beside a mound of stones, with a woman in bridal attire… A woman who sniffed and tried to look fierce when he knew she wanted to burst into tears. And the reason for those tears? Because here was a woman who thought a pile of copestones was the greatest present…
He put a hand out to touch her, but she backed away as if she were scared of being scorched. ‘No!’
‘No, what?’ His eyes were on hers. ‘Don’t you like my gift?’
‘I…I do.’ But Penny-Rose knew what she’d stepped back from. She knew what was close to happening. And she didn’t want this man to kiss her.
Not yet. It wasn’t right.
She didn’t want to seduce him, she thought frantically. Nor did she want him to make love to her because she was convenient.
She wanted him to fall in love with her. As she loved him. So intensely that she ached…
‘I…I have a gift for you, too,’ she murmured softly, and it brought him up short. A gift…
‘You don’t have any money,’ he said before he could stop himself, and she glared.
‘Yeah, well, there are some things that can be gained without money. Like Leo.’
‘Like our aristocratic dog,’ he agreed. ‘A gift without price.’ And then his brow creased and he grinned in mock dismay. ‘Oh, hell. Don’t tell me. Another dog?’
‘It’s nothing of the kind,’ she said with dignity. ‘Though if I find one with just the right pedigree…’
‘To match Leo’s.’
‘That’s right.’ She was relaxing again now. The moment of tension had passed. ‘So…do you want to see my gift?’
‘Of course I do.’ He was fascinated.
‘It doesn’t come in a velvet box either,’ she told him. ‘And it’s not gift-wrapped. It’s no toaster.’
‘Rose, there’s no need to give me anything.’
‘You brought the kids over for the wedding,’ she said simply. ‘You’ve given me the earth. So of course there’s a need for a gift. It took me a while to figure out what, but I finally did.’
‘What-?’
‘Come and see.’
Once again they walked around the castle, but this time south, where pastures gave way to woodland. Here there was a small rise, looking back over the castle to the cliffs and river plains beyond. It was a place of absolute beauty. Penny-Rose had found it one day when she’d sought a quiet place to eat her lunch, and she’d been back again and again ever since.
And finally she’d asked Marguerite about it.
‘My husband loved the castle,’ Marguerite had said. ‘In a way, he felt it was his ancestral home. And Lissa’s family couldn’t bear for her to be buried alone. There’s a crypt for the royal family underneath the chapel, but we thought…it’d be lovely if they were buried here.’
So there were two simple gravestones, nestled among the woodland. And surrounded by flowers…
‘Alastair planted them,’ Marguerite had told her. ‘All the flowers we both love. Wildflowers and roses and daffodils and tulips and honeysuckle and wisteria… So it’ll be a mass of flowers all year round.’
The only jarring note, to Penny-Rose’s mind, was the fence. They’d erected a simple wire fence around the graves to keep the cattle out, and it looked discordant in such a lovely place.
So she’d fixed it.
Alastair hadn’t been here for weeks. He’d had so much on his plate he hadn’t had time.
But now… He saw what she’d done before he reached the graves. His steps slowed. He walked up to the fence and he stopped and took it in.
It was the most beautiful fence he’d seen in his life. Made of simple sandstone, every stone was perfect. The fence formed a tiny fold about ten feet square, a croft where the graves were protected against the weather and against the cattle.
And the fence was built with such care and craftsmanship that the graves would be protected for a thousand
