'Good morning, Julia,' he said.
Twenty-One
To his credit, he could not hold the innocent expression long. Grinning, he took another pull from his cigarette and straightened away from his work, turning to face me fully. 'My kingdom for a camera,' he said, his gray eyes crinkling in amusement. 'You ought to see your face.'
I closed my gaping mouth and shook my head, amazed.
'How on earth did you know I was there?' I asked him.
Iain braced both fists in the small of his back and stretched. 'I'm no clairvoyant,' he assured me. 'I saw you hopping the fence. Thought you were taking a devil of a time getting here. Besides,' he added, pointing at the clear outline of our shadows on the shed wall, 'if you've a mind to sneak up on a Scotsman, you'd best do it when the sun's not at your back.' He narrowed his eyes a little and looked me up and down. 'You've had a ducking,' he remarked.
I was surprised that I had not noticed the fact myself. Perhaps I had grown accustomed to the feel of Mariana's dripping-wet gown against my skin, to the point where my mind no longer registered discomfort. Faintly curious, I looked down at myself, suddenly aware of the clinging dampness of my heavy denim jeans and oversize shirt. I ran 2o an experimental hand through my hair and was relieved to find it dry, if slightly windblown and unruly. I must have looked a sight.
'I fell in the river,' I told him. 'I'm nearly dry, I think.'
Iain looked at my bare feet and scrubbed face, and raised a russet eyebrow. 'You'll catch cold if you stay like that,' he warned me. 'Come inside and dry off. You can have the loan of some of my clothes, if you like.'
'Well,' I wavered, 'if it wouldn't be any trouble ...'
'No trouble at all,' he said. 'I'm glad of the company at breakfast time.'
Good heavens, I thought, was it only time for breakfast? It seemed incredible, before I reminded myself that I had left the house at five o'clock that morning. A wall clock in Iain's kitchen chimed eight times as we came into the cottage through the back door, confirming the earliness of the hour.
'I'll have to wash,' he said, holding up his hands in evidence, 'but you can go on ahead and change out of those wet things. You'll find the bedroom down the hall on your right, and there's plenty to wear in the closet.'
It was odd, I thought as I stood barefoot in Iain Sumner's bedroom a few minutes later, how a man's wardrobe somehow defined him. Iain's closet boasted hanger after hanger of smartly pressed shirts, plain cotton and flannel plaid, flanked by several pairs of trousers and an oddly incongruous dinner jacket. I peeled the wet clothes from my body—leaving my underthings on for the sake of decency— and selected a pair of jeans and a blue plaid shirt from the assortment before me.
The jeans were ridiculously long on me, and stood up stiffly round my waist like a clown suit, but by rolling up the legs several times and leaving the shirttails hanging loose I managed to produce a rather fashionably frumpy effect that might have graced the cover of a teenage magazine.
Iain, ever the gentleman, made no comment on my appearance when I rejoined him in the kitchen. The cottage had a very simple and practical design, one large room split evenly into kitchen and lounge, divided along the line of the narrow hallway that led to the bedrooms and bath. You could have shot an arrow in the front door and out the back again without hitting so much as a stick of furniture, so open and free of clutter was the room's decor.
'Where shall I hang these?' I asked him, holding aloft my bundle of sodden clothes.
'I've a clothes dryer in the back shed,' he said, jerking his head toward the back door. 'It's a bit of a relic, but it works all right if you let it know who's boss. You have to be forceful.'
I found out what he meant when I located the dryer beneath a pile of tools in the brightly lit shed. It took four tries and a swift kick to start the machine running, but I returned to the kitchen with a feeling of decided accomplishment.
'Everything okay?' Iain looked up inquiringly, and when I nodded he returned his attention to a sizzling pan on the stove. I noticed he was automatically cooking for two, and a steaming cup of coffee waited for me on the table beside him. 'It's liable to be a bit stewed,' he warned me, when I reached to pick up the coffee mug. 'I made it a few hours ago. You like eggs and sausage?'
I took a cautious sip of coffee. 'Yes, I do.'
'Academic, really,' he said, lifting the pan from the stove and dividing its contents between two plates. 'It's all I can cook. Toast?'
'Yes, please.'
He placed a thick slice of buttered toast on the edge of my plate and set it on the table in front of me, slinging himself into the seat opposite.
'So.' He sent me a questioning look. 'What brings you out this way at this time of the morning?'
I shrugged. 'I just felt like a walk, that's all. I hadn't been down to the river before, and I wanted to see where it went.'
'So now you know.' 2o 'Yes.' I smiled back at him, scooping up another forkful of hearty breakfast.
'You've walked about three miles, you know, if you've come the whole way along the river. It's less than a mile to your place from here by the road. Shorter still if you cut across the fields.'
'Then that is Exbury I saw, over there?' I indicated the general direction, and he nodded.
'Aye. Did you think you were lost?'