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‘It’s a new one on me too,’ Elliot replied, placing an arm around Jude’s back to help power her up the slope. ‘But Minty’s a liability, never happy unless she’s getting her own way.’
‘Och, she’s not that bad, once you’re used to her, and she’s ever so lonely.’
‘Is she?’
‘Think about it. Massive house, all alone up there, nobody to talk to…’
‘That’s the problem,’ snorted Elliot. ‘She keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes and resurrecting mad old traditions when she could be kept out of trouble with a partner to do normal stuff with.’
‘You sound like Mrs Crocombe,’ Jude laughed.
‘You take that back!’ Elliot said with an exaggerated gasp, stopping Jude and threatening to kiss her – which, with a wicked smile, she surrendered herself to immediately.
Elliot’s kiss was just as deep and delicious as the first one they’d shared when they were bookseller holidaymakers and getting to know one another back in the summer.
She pulled him closer, lifting onto her tiptoes to make up the height difference, and for a moment they forgot all about Minty and trying to figure out how on earth Elliot was going to encourage Moira – the smartest, most contrary donkey ever to have lived, and a terrible influence upon the younger ones in the stables – out of her warm bed on a winter’s night to listen to tuneless carols played on recorders and the vicar droning on in the estate chapel.
‘Let’s get home,’ Jude said eventually, dazed and breathless and remembering their warm bed waiting for them and Elliot’s even warmer body.
‘And quick, too,’ Elliot agreed.
As they neared the turning for the bookshop, they wordlessly walked along the little passageway and into the square where the white shop sat beneath its conical roof, crooked like a witch’s hat in a children’s book.
It was almost completely in darkness, except for the fireside glow inside. Jude broke from the nook beneath Elliot’s arm to ascend the steps and peered through the door, her hand raised as though she would knock. It was only six o’clock, after all, and the Icelander hadn’t had much of a welcoming committee so far.
Yet the sight of Magnús, slumped motionless in the low armchair in front of the fire, staring into the flames, all the lights turned off, gave her pause. She could only see his face in profile but he looked solemn and set-jawed. Turning, she tiptoed back down the steps.
As she and Elliot left the new bookseller to his contemplation, she whispered, ‘He’ll take some work, that one. He doesn’t know yet.’
Elliot didn’t say a word, only dropping a kiss on the top of Jude’s bobble hat, fully understanding her meaning. That bookseller didn’t yet understand what a stint in Clove Lore could do for a lost and brooding man.
Magnús would have to find out in his own time, as Elliot had done, that Clove Lore was no ordinary Devonshire village and that the shop, with its cramped bedroom, its window seat overlooking the Atlantic breakers in the distance, the café with its faded lace curtains, and the creaking shelves crammed to the rafters with a treasure-trove of books,certainlywasn’t any ordinary old bookshop.
Passing beneath the strands of bright Christmas bulbs lighting their way up the hill, Jude smiled up at Elliot, thinking as she often did these days how lucky she was to live in this place, and the pair made their way home to their house out along the main road with its little Garden of Eden backyard and her gorgeous kitchen, where the couple fully intended to live out their lives together, weathering every storm life brought to them.
