“Excellent. Well, then, I’ll be off.” She navigated the stones that lined the flowerbed and swiftly disappeared around a thick tree trunk.
Esme really was a ride—and a wild one at that.
• • •
The way the sun rose behind Greygarth Lodge was the thing of dreams. Lazy rays of sun cast a hazy golden sheen over the furthest edges of the lake, and even though it was cold in the shade, it didn’t stop me curling up on a bench with a blanket around my shoulders and a cup of tea to experience it.
Living in a city centre didn’t offer much in the way of experiences like this. The only sunrise I was used to seeing was one that glinted off windows of high-rise buildings and cast tall shadows across the ground.
I wasn’t even sure why I lived in London. Perhaps it was the ease of things for meetings with my agent and my publisher. Maybe it was because it was what was expected of a successful writer, despite all the ideas that authors lived in huge country houses and danced around with bluebirds like a freaking Disney princess.
I’d grown up in the countryside—although in a terraced cottage rather than an expansive estate like this one—and it wasn’t much of a coincidence that my struggle for inspiration had started when I’d moved to the city.
It was hard to be inspired by dullness.
That was how I felt about London. When you moved away from the touristy areas rich in history, it was just… dull. Skyscrapers and sirens and honking car horns weren’t nearly as inspiring as rolling green fields and a horizon that allowed a sunset to shine.
At least that was how I felt. Others would disagree with me, and that was fine. We were all inspired by different things, and for me, today, right now, it was the sun rising and casting its beautiful golden glow over the lake.
It crept across the still water at a glacial pace, yet the actual rising of the sun took no more than ten minutes for the sky to move from the hazy shade of dawn to the brighter blue of the early morning.
After heading back inside to escape the chill of the morning, I pushed one of the old windows open and secured it on the latch. Winston was too chunky to get through the tiny gap it left—he’d already attempted it more than once since we’d arrived—so I was fine with leaving it open.
For now, I just wanted to listen to the sounds of the morning.
Birdsong was the most prevalent. It was a wave of titters and chirps and louder, longer calls of the song thrush. Various sizes of birds flittered across the sky from tree to tree, from shrub to shrub, swooping down to sometimes brush the surface of the lake and send gentle ripples along the otherwise perfectly still water.
Ducks quacked from somewhere, and I turned in just enough time to see a pure black duck waddle out from some shrubbery and hop into the lake. She was swiftly followed by a string of nine fluffy, black ducklings that hesitated at the edge of the bank. Mummy duck turned and quacked as they shuffled side to side, and she quacked again, shaking her tail feathers.
One took the leap, and the others all followed in a way that was almost co-ordinated. The way they all immediately swarmed around her brought a smile to my face, and within a second, the mum took off swimming, and there was a long string of her little ducklings chugging along behind her.
I took a deep breath and sighed, resting my head on the window frame. I wished there was a way I could write all this into a romance novel, but I did somewhat fear sounding like a script for a David Attenborough documentary.
Although, words were words, and when they were hard to come by, it didn’t much matter what they were.
I finished the last of my tea and pushed up off the window seat, shrugging off the blanket as I did. Sitting here and watching the wildlife wasn’t getting my book written. It was procrastination for the sake of procrastination.
Something I was excellent at, if I did say so myself.
I set my mug in the sink and went upstairs to shower. With my basic hygiene needs taken care of, I headed back downstairs to scoop a serving of cat kibble into Winston’s bowl in the kitchen before he started screaming about a lack of food.
That happened even if there was food in the bowl.
He really was a complete drama queen.
It was probably why he was my cat. I could be one myself sometimes.
But not today.
No. Today, I was choosing optimism. I was choosing to be the bright, bubbly person I usually was when I wasn’t being tortured by my own creativity.
I was going to write the crap out of this book, and I was going to write it bloody well.
I sat down, opened my laptop, and fired up my document.
And was interrupted by four savagely loud knocks at the front door.
It was really hard to be optimistic in these conditions.
I pushed away from the desk and walked down the hall to the door, then pulled it open to see Max standing on the other side.
With my bloody cat in his arms.
I was going to murder him.
The cat, just to be clear.
Not Max.
The Duke?
His Grace?
How was I supposed to refer to him?
Bugger it, that didn’t matter. What did matter was that he was holding my stupid frigging cat.
I should have known he’d made an escape when he didn’t run to his food bowl. All I had to do was sniff in the direction of a food bag and he was there like a bad rash.
I pressed my lips together, staring at Winston. “I… am so sorry.”
Max grunted. “He is definitely your cat, then?”
“Unfortunately,” I replied, relieving the man of the wayward feline. “I swear, I have no idea how he got out.”
“You promised you wouldn’t let him out. Aside from the wild birds, we have our own personal ones.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and glared at me. “Like the ducks on the lake. They all belong to us, and so do their ducklings.”
That explained why I’d never seen a wild duck like the pure black one this morning.
“I really am sorry. I have absolutely no idea how he got out—I make sure to latch all the windows securely if I open them, and he was definitely here when I woke up because he was the arsehole who woke me up by trodding on my head.”
Max sniffed, glancing at Winston with what could only be described as unbridled annoyance. “The living room window is wide open.”
“No, it’s latched.”
“I can assure you that it most certainly is not.”
I tightened my grip on the wriggling cat and stepped aside to peek at the window seat in the living room.
It was wide open.
Shit.
Had my arsehole of a cat figured out how to unlatch the hooks?
“It was latched,” I corrected myself, returning to the hallway. “He has apparently figured out how to undo the hooks.”
“He’s a cat.”
“Yes, and these windows are about nine hundred years old. They’re hardly the most secure things in the world, are they? Have you seen a double-glazed window? Those latches are literally child-safe things. Yours aren’t even cat safe.”
Granted, my cat was an escape artist, but that wasn’t the point. When had he learnt to unhook the bastard windows?
Max’s eyes darkened with annoyance that was directed at me. “Perhaps you should ensure that you close the windows before the reincarnated spirit of Harry Houdini over here makes his grand escape. Better yet, leave them shut.”