The Country Escape (25 page)

Despite heavy leafleting at the point-to-point, the Animal Magnetism ‘benefit’ gig at the Eardisford Arms that evening drew no more than the usual suspects, a hardened core of fans largely made up of friends and family, plus the usual
pub regulars and a couple of tourists staying in Miriam’s holiday cottage. They had mistakenly thought it was a folk evening and were soon visibly wincing as they tried to bolt huge Herefordshire beef rib-eye steaks in order to pay up and leave. Relocated to a makeshift stage in the public bar due to a leaking pipe in the skittle alley, the band had failed to adjust their volume to suit the smaller
space and were ear-splittingly loud.

Still in his badger outfit and far from sober, Russ was putting in an energetic performance as he pogoed around on stage, adding shrieking guitar riffs to the band’s repertoire of Clash covers. The band members were all talented musicians, but the gimmicky costumes, authentic indie-punk playlist and deafening volume didn’t work in their favour in the
cramped confines.

Kat longed to be at home chatting to Dawn about her day, but she knew that she would only have wound herself up more about the fixed race and Dougie Everett’s smugness. Here she could smile and shrug it off, as well as wolfing down a portion of Jed’s rabbit hotpot in exchange for offloading another glut of Lake Farm eggs on the pub kitchens.

Sitting with the Hedges
sisters and the girl grooms from the local livery yard, she endured a lot of good-natured teasing about the slowest-run five-furlong race in history, along with the inevitable excited gossip about Eardisford’s new huntsman. The consensus was that he was Hot, although the mysterious girlfriend was Not. Even when Kat indiscreetly described the buttocks in the horsebox window, it seemed only to add
to his sex appeal.

‘He is going to be
such
fun to have around,’ sighed one of the grooms.

Just as Mags was murdering ‘London Calling’, another of the girls let out a shriek of excitement. ‘
OhmyGod
, DON’T look, but he’s
just walked in
.’

They all immediately turned to look. Only Kat carried on munching her lemon meringue tart, watching Russ hip-thrusting his guitar neck suggestively
towards Mags as the band moved from Clash to Cure and launched into ‘The Lovecats’. Her eyes narrowed as Mags hip-thrust back, letting out a stream of feline yowls. The platonic friendship was always tested to the limit on stage, where Mags flirted outrageously with all her band members. Watching her practically mounting the keyboard player from behind, Kat wondered how the notoriously hot-tempered
Calum put up with it.

But when she looked, Calum was distracted at the bar, where Dougie Everett had parted the earthmen faster than a plough through soft loam, the object of intense fascination. Kat’s excited tablemates kept up a running commentary as he ordered a drink – ‘A pint… cola by the look of it. Probably driving.’ They then reported that the few-toothed ones had edged closer and
were laughing raucously as he talked to them all, flashing that famous smile.

‘He is
so
hot.’

‘I can’t believe I’m wearing no makeup!’

‘I’m getting the next round in.’

‘It’s my turn!’

‘No, I’ll get these.’

‘Wait, he’s coming over!’

The girls licked their lips, all rising several inches like meerkats as they held in tummies and tightened their buttocks.

Kat licked her dessert spoon, still eyeing Russ and Mags, who appeared to be simulating sex with an amplifier and a mic stand respectively.

A throat was cleared overhead. ‘If I promise not to put your fire out, Kat, can I buy you a drink as a peace offering – and your friends too, of course?’ The clipped, husky voice was pure big-screen, feel-good Brit-pack idol, although he had to
project it to be heard over the band, like a stage actor in a hearing-assisted Shakespeare matinée.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ She didn’t turn round, her words drowned by a flurry of requests for vodka Coke.

‘Kat will have a pint of cider,’ the girls insisted. ‘She can drink five back to back without passing out. It’s a ladies’ pub record.’

‘Another tremendous talent.’ He headed
to the bar.

‘What did you say that for?’ muttered Kat.

‘Okay, so you passed out and were a tiny bit sick last time,’ the groom gazed at the bar, ‘but he is
so
ripped you have to let him buy us all a drink.’

When Dougie returned with a fully loaded tray, Kat noticed that the regulars were now watching her table, not the stage, although the badger was riffing so loudly his plectrum
broke. There was something about Dougie that drew the eye, like a fire flickering merrily in a grate: people couldn’t resist inching closer to feel the warmth, but were nonetheless wary of being burned.

The girls all shuffled up to make space and a stream of introductions followed that Dougie couldn’t have hoped to hear as he settled beside Kat on the long bench seat. But his smile was
so charming and his expression so sexily intense that all the girls thought he’d committed their name to memory above the others. They raised their drinks in a toast and watched him eagerly, smiles fading as he turned to Kat, his intense blue gaze exclusively on her, and mouthed, ‘Truce?’

For a puzzled moment she thought he was asking, ‘Truth?’ then grasped what he meant and shrugged a
reluctant consent, annoyed at being cornered, grateful at least that the music was so loud there was no point in answering. When it was succeeded by Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Dear Prudence’, which was quieter, he tilted his head in front of hers again.

‘It really was unforgivable to mob you up like that! Pre-race nerves!’ He apologized with a lot of head-ducking and blue-eyed charm, albeit
still shouting as loudly as a father from the touchline. ‘I had no idea we’re neighbours, and I really did mean it when I offered to help! I’m pretty hopeless at most things, but I know my horses and I gather you have a few at the sanctuary.’ He looked at her through his thick lashes and, mistaking Kat’s fixed expression for inability to hear him, shouted even louder directly into her ear, ‘Can
we get away from this God-awful racket?’

Kat tried hard to look offended. ‘I’m enjoying it!’ she insisted stubbornly. ‘It’s a vintage performance.’

The vintage performance paused as Mags, adopting a throatily intimate microphone rasp that was part Janis Joplin, part Hilary Devey, coaxed, ‘Join me, ladies. Let’s sing along! Here’s one for Prudence…’

Pru and Cyn, sitting at
their usual corner table with the most ancient earthmen, raised their glasses as the younger girls in the room started to serenade them, adding a quick ‘and Cyn’ to the refrain.

Deciding she’d been unfriendly enough – she hadn’t even looked Dougie in the eye properly yet – Kat turned to him to explain what was going on. ‘They always sing theme tunes for regulars with their names in – Mags
started it with her last band. They offered to learn something with “Sin” in the title for Pru’s sister Cyn, but she says that would be unChristian.’

His eyes didn’t leave her face. ‘What do they play for you?’

‘“Lovecats”,’ she scoffed, ‘although “Bitch” might be more fitting.’ She waited for a reaction, but his smile was pasted on like a daytime television interviewer’s. ‘I’m more
of a dog person.’

‘Me too. Good point. Don’t go away.’ He leaped up, muttered an apologetic oath and abandoned his pint to dash outside.

‘What did you say to him?’ One of Russ’s cousins sidled across the gap to reclaim a handbag from behind a cushion.

‘That it’s a vintage performance.’ Kat shrugged.

‘Pushing it a bit. He was
seriously
flirting with you.’

‘Why
would he do that?’

‘Duh? He has a terrible reputation.’ She looked thrilled. ‘You can’t deny he is Sex. On. Legs.’

Kat thought about the buttocks in the window. ‘I prefer to keep my feet on the ground.’

‘In that case, I’m going to redo my face, after which it’s every woman for herself. Prepare to step aside, Kat Mason.’ With a grin, she got up to hurry to the loo, followed
by most of the girls at the table, the Eardisford Arms’ ladies’ lavatory being the local unofficial social-media hub in the absence of a phone signal.

Dougie’s phone was still on the table, Kat noticed – not that it would do him any good around here. She picked it up and examined the custom case, a much-scuffed shell covered with Ds fashioned from bows and arrows.

‘It has no reception,’
Dougie told her, as he sat down, slightly out of breath.

She dropped it hurriedly. ‘Nothing has round here.’

She wondered what he could have had time to do so urgently outside. He hadn’t been gone long enough to smoke a fag or use the phone-box.

‘I was wishing on a star.’ He leaned closer, that husky, drawling voice intimate, but still clearly audible above the band’s rollicking
medley finale.

Caught off-guard, Kat gulped as the blue eyes drank her in and her vital organs did their lurching thing. Without thinking, she brought out the big self-defence smile, a thousand watts of unexpected light blinding him across the table. He looked delighted, smiling right back until Kat’s heart, lungs, liver and kidneys threw themselves into action. Nobody fought back against
the Mason smile that fast. She was up against a pro.

‘What did you wish for?’ She took the cue a split-second before seeing the trap she’d walked into, his eyes smouldering on hers, the word ‘you’ on his lips.

Kat watched his mouth form the letter Y as if in slow motion, and – like one of those movies where the woman watches a car crash and shouts, ‘Noooooooo,’ while bits of car
and broken glass fly through the air in time delay – she recoiled. In real time, this reaction was the briefest of flinches, lasting barely a millisecond, then rewinding as Dougie hung on Y, failed to add the car crash OU, and instead steered expertly out of the swerve.

‘Usefulness,’ he said. ‘I want to be useful, Kat. Use me in any way you need.’

She regarded him cynically. ‘And
you just wished for this usefulness on a star?’

‘Aries. The agrarian worker. My sign.’ He pointed up, eyes not leaving hers, playful as a lion cub again now. ‘What’s —’

‘
Don’t
ask what my sign is,’ she interrupted, really wishing he’d lay off the flirtation (and the eye-contact thing, which was pulverizing her innards). But she was quietly impressed he knew his astronomy. For all
his star-gazing, Russ’s constellation identification started and finished with the Great Bear.

‘The sanctuary sounds an extraordinary venture,’ Dougie was saying, edging closer all the time. ‘Constance Mytton-Gough was clearly an amazing visionary and passionate about her horses – my father knew her and Ronnie. I would
love
to help you out. Looking after it all must be a hell of a burden
for someone not used to animals. I gather you’re a city girl. Watford, isn’t it?’

‘I live here now. And I’m very used to animals, thanks.’

‘Stringhalt aside,’ he teased, eyes now so flirtatious they were almost Eskimo-kissing hers.

Kat resented his glibness, the confident public-schoolboy charm that insinuated he could blaze in and rescue her with his superior knowledge, the
smooth machismo that would make most men come across as smarmy gits, but somehow worked brilliantly for him, as sexy as it was charming. No wonder he was famous for seducing co-stars. The smile was growing wider now, the voice huskier, the eyes hypnotic through their veil of lashes. ‘Tell me what I can help with. Anything. You name it.’

About to joke that he could lay off the Casanova charm,
Kat realized that his offer had its practical uses. She certainly didn’t need rescuing, but she was more than happy to delegate a few unwanted role.

‘You can take over the pony ring at the village show, if you like.’ She’d been trying to wriggle out of it for weeks. ‘They’ve asked for rides and then a little gymkhana afterwards.’

‘Happy to. I did the Prince Philip Cup as a kid.’

‘Isn’t that backpacking around Dartmoor?’

‘That’s the Duke of Edinburgh Award.’ He laughed, giving her a see-how-much-you-need-me look. ‘It’s mounted games – racing around on ponies, basically.’

She felt foolish, sharpening her edge. ‘You’re a stuntman, aren’t you? Maybe you can do a trick-riding display for the village at the show.’

Just for a moment the big smile wavered.
‘I have no trick-trained horses here.’

‘Could you jump off the church tower in a ball of flames instead? It’d be more exciting than the usual morris dancers.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He brought the flirty eyes into play again. ‘I could shoot a few flaming arrows.’

‘Isn’t archery a bit dull?’

‘Not the way I do it.’ He moved closer to speak into her ear as the stage
shook with Animal Magnetism’s final riffs. ‘Can I help with something more personal? Something closer to your heart?’

Kat saw Russ watching her from the stage, a huge lumbering badger hitting bum notes amid screeches of feedback, both protective and threatened. She knew she just had to raise a finger for the guitar to be cast aside and the vigilante to attack, her fierce bear of a free-range
lover.

‘Cricket,’ she said, without really thinking, knowing it was Russ’s greatest passion after music and wildlife, and sometimes more important than both, especially one occasion each year. ‘There’s an annual match at the end of July, estate workers versus villagers. It’s a hugely important event around here, but nobody knows what to do about it this year. The village pitch belongs to
the estate, you see. If you can square it for the match to go ahead, and field an estate team, that would be great.’

‘I’ll do my best. Anything else I can help you with? Whist drive? Open garden? Climb a mountain? Slay a dragon?’ He angled his face to look at hers, his charm guns blazing, his gaze disconcertingly on her mouth.

Kat engaged the smile again. He returned fire, but if
she concentrated hard she could keep her vital organs in one place. ‘Not unless you’re a mechanic. My car’s got a faulty starter.’

‘Ha-ha,’ he said, glancing at the clock above the bar and grimacing. ‘Excuse me.’ He stood up and hurried away.