Page 96 of A Christmas Celebration
I had been about to say that I was going to ask for the polar opposite of what had just happened, but stopped.
‘In fact,’ I said, collecting myself, ‘I hadn’t had time to make my wish before you appeared.’
‘And I didn’t even know what the tree was,’ he laughed again. ‘So, you can’t blame me. Where did that wind even come from?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, looking around as if I might be able to spot the source of it.
It was a perfectly calm end to the day. Correction, it was a perfectly calm end to the day in the woods, but inside my head and heart, a storm was brewing. I wondered if Brodie’s thoughts and insides were as churned up as mine?
‘Molly said everyone would end up kissing today, didn’t she?’ he self-consciously said. ‘But where’s the mistletoe?’
I squinted up into the hawthorn’s uppermost branches.
‘There,’ I pointed. ‘Right at the top.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded.
‘And in that case,’ I said, ‘I think we should put what just happened down to…’
I didn’t get to finish the sentence because Brodie’s phone started loudly ringing.
‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling it out of his pocket. ‘This is the last place I’d expect to find a mobile signal.’
‘You’d better answer it,’ I told him.
He turned away and I wondered which direction I could slope off in.
‘Angus,’ he then said and I decided to stay put. ‘All right,’ he finished up after my godfather had concluded relaying whatever he’d called to say. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’
Brodie ended the call and turned back to face me.
‘Angus wants to talk to me,’ he said, following me out of the clearing. ‘He says he’s got something of interest to tell me.’
‘I’m intrigued,’ I said, grasping the nettle. ‘I didn’t realize the two of you knew each other so well.’
‘Between you and me,’ he said, perhaps assuming that now we’d kissed he could share a confidence, ‘I’m doing something for him, but I’m not allowed to say what.’
‘I see.’ I swallowed, my emotions all over the place. ‘That sounds a bit cloak and dagger.’
‘Well, it is a secret,’ he admitted and my heart thumped. ‘You won’t mention it to anyone, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ I promised.
Surely, if he was so willing to admit that he was doing something secretive for Angus, it couldn’t be anything too risky, could it?
‘We’ve known each other a while,’ he then further added. ‘We first met in London a few months ago.’
But then, on the other hand…
Chapter 23
Brodie hadn’t elaborated further and I managed to avoid everyone back at the hall, grab some snacks and head upstairs to hunker down and process in the Rose Room. The day had dawned with such promise and excitement but it had ended in a right old muddle.
The truth was, I liked Brodie. I liked him so much, in fact, that even when he had revealed to me what his job was and who he had worked for and I had abandoned the romantic fantasy I’d woven around him, I had still clung to a tiny fraction of hope that I’d somehow got the revised version of him wrong.
That hope, shored up by Brodie’s reaction to Albert’s studio, had been the reason I hadn’t yet made a concerted effort to find out what he and Angus were conspiring about. It was also the reason why I had left my heart dangerously close to the line that our kiss in the woods had sent it leaping across. However, now that Brodie had revealed where and when he and Angus had met, I knew that speck ofhope had to be swept aside. Allowing it to exist had been a grave mistake.
It was time to get to the bottom of whatever was going on and I was going to have to orchestrate an opportunity to expose the truth and risk upsetting Angus. If he deemed my interference unforgivable then I would forgo Christmas at the hall and leave.
