He made some sort of noise. A growl? A grunt? She couldn’t tell, but she fisted her hands in her lap and attempted to keep her thoughts inside. Figuring him out required too much work for her comfort. Besides, she’d come to England to save her bookshop, not engage in awkward dialogue with a clearly reticent Englishman.
Just then, the forest fell away and unveiled the mountains, much closer than she’d expected. Not as tall as her Blue Ridges, but familiarly rolling one over the other.
“Oh, they’re getting closer.”
Max’s forehead crinkled with a look of confusion and Clara offered an apologetic smile. “The mountains.” As if that explained things perfectly.
He tilted his head, studying her, before returning his gaze to the road.
“I’ve lived around the Blue Ridge Mountains my whole life, so there’s something comforting in seeing a similar sight in a new place. It makes one feel…”
“Safe.”
She looked over at him, but his attention remained forward. “Yes.” She turned back to the view, examining the landscape. “But yours have more of a brownish-blue tint than mine. I wonder why?”
Quiet responded for a few seconds and then… “There are much fewer trees on mine.”
The way he said the word “mine” caused her to cast him a second glance. He merely raised his brow, sending her an unconvincing look of innocence. She squinted at him. Who was this guy? She reached up to straighten her very straight hat and turned back to the window. Somehow Maxwell Weston suddenly took up more space in the car than he had before.
Clara had barely kept her gasps under control.
The last half hour of the drive proceeded with back-to-back beauties, from white limestone villages tucked at the base of smooth-curved hills to rock-built hamlets nestling along crystal-blue lakes.
The only frightening part of the entire trip so far had been passing other cars on the narrowing road. Any time they neared another vehicle, Clara pasted her body against the door from fear of sideswiping the other car. She closed her eyes completely when they met a truck.
They turned off the main road and a beautiful gatehouse came into view, except it wasn’t like any gatehouse Clara imagined from medieval history. Three stories of gray stone filled with tall windows covered both sides of the gate with miniature spires pointing into the sky at every corner. Her grin bit into her cheeks.
“It’s like a miniature castle.”
“And overgrown like one too,” came Max’s reply. “We opened this entrance back up when we bought the house, but for decades the owners used a back entrance as their main drive.”
“And miss this? What a shame,” Clara whispered.
“Exactly.”
His simple agreement nudged at her grin.
As they passed beneath the gatehouse, a sign reading Camden House welcomed her onto a long, narrow lane lined by trees. Above the tree line one of the mountains rose so close, Clara could make out how the colors shifted from emerald green to pale green and then a brownish-black foliage, which, from a distance, looked like parts of the peak had been scorched.
And then the house came into view and Clara couldn’t catch her ridiculous giggle in time to hide it. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?”
She didn’t expect him to respond, didn’t really care. Whitewashed in a pale cream color, the walls of the country house glowed in the afternoon light. Georgian style, if Clara remembered correctly from her online search. A white portico stretched out from the matching, double-doored entrance as a dozen windows flanked each level of the elegant structure. To the right, a short walk from the house and connected by a stone wall, stood a small cottage of the same pale cream, most likely Gillie’s house, from what Mama had told her. And in the distance, on the other side of what appeared to be a walled garden, an even smaller rock cottage nestled beneath ivy.
To add to the charm with the mountain behind and the forest to one side, a field slanted down from the house to the edge of a lake, also surrounded by those same lovely mountains.
“Do you ever feel as if you’ve stepped into a storybook living here?” The question slipped out and Clara looked away, reaching for her purse as the car came to a stop in front of the portico. “That probably sounds silly.”
“I suppose we’re all part of a story, one way or other. I do prefer the view in this one.” He exited the car, leaving her wondering whether he was teasing or serious or…whatever.
She pinched her eyes closed. It didn’t matter. Maxwell Weston was just the sort of person she didn’t have the energy or time to spend peeling back the deep layers to see if someone more interesting lived under the surface.
Conversations could be hard enough as it was. A reluctant communicator was the last thing she needed to worry about.
She stepped from the car, the deep blue of the nearby lake reflecting the larger snowcapped mountains on the distant side. They rose steeper, with more pronounced edges, than the smoother hills closest to the house. “What are those?”
Max looked from his place at the trunk of the car. “Those are the fels.”
“Fels?”
He closed the trunk, careful to posture his left side away from her. He shrugged a shoulder and averted his gaze as he slung her bag over his shoulder. “Mountains.”
Stifling her groan, she followed him toward the entrance.
“Oh, here you are.” Strolling from beneath the portico, smile in full beam and arms wide, emerged Gillie Weston, her shoulder-length golden hair spun with bits of silver. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”
Lost? Clara looked from Gillie to Max and then checked the time on her phone. Two hours from the airport? She’d measured the distance before leaving
