“I might be homeless soon,” said Nina, looking around the lovely little barn, tears plopping onto the expensive sheets. “Kate’s probably awesome. I’m probably just a local distraction. Convenient, that’s all. Maybe I’ve just rushed stuff.”
“It’s not your fault. If he’s a dick, you need to deal with that. If he’s a nice guy going through a hard time, well. Maybe he’s worth hanging on for.”
“I think he’s ruined me,” said Nina in a small voice. She expected Surinder to tell her to stop being so melodramatic. But she didn’t.
Chapter Thirty-three
Do you want to go for a walk?”
Lennox looked at her strangely. “A what?”
It was five thirty on a clear, windy Sunday morning. Lennox was getting dressed. Nina was lying exhausted, happily weary, in bed.
“A walk. You know. Enjoy nature and the countryside?”
He blinked. “By walking up and down it?”
“Uh-huh!”
“But that’s what I do all day.”
Nina sat up. “Well, let me come! It’ll be, like, an outing.”
Lennox frowned. They hadn’t, Nina was more than aware, been anywhere. Not to the pub, not to the bakery to get delicious sausage rolls and sit outside kicking their heels against the wall like the teenagers did, pastry flaking down for Parsley to grab. They hadn’t jumped in the Land Rover and gone for a romantic picnic, or walked hand in hand along the beach . . .
She looked at Lennox shrugging into a clean twill shirt. It had to be, she had figured out, several degrees below freezing before he added a jacket. At the door, he leaned down to lace himself into his heavy work boots. He poured coffee from the pot on the stove into an insulated cup; he’d eat breakfast later. Nina watched him as he prepared to leave in silence.
“Not coming then?” he grunted eventually.
Nina leaped up. “Yes!” she said, piling her clothes on enthusiastically. She grabbed her coat from the peg and chased him outside.
Dawn was breaking, and it was bitterly cold outside. Parsley galloped cheerfully out of his kennel and Nina made a big fuss over him. Lennox disappeared back inside and reappeared with a second cup of hot, sweet black coffee that he passed to her wordlessly.
The waking birds chirruped in the hedges as they passed by. Early morning mist hovered over the fields. Wrapped up snugly, with a steaming coffee cup warming her hands, Nina scampered to keep up with Lennox’s long strides as he marched ahead, popping his head into the cows’ barn to make sure milking was going ahead properly—Ruaridh nodded quickly when he saw him—then on up to the high fields to check on the sheep’s grass and feed. The sun was rising pink in the mist over the far hills, and Nina gasped to see it, but Lennox was simply moving on through his morning: checking that one of the stone walls wasn’t crumbling too much, examining a fence for deer damage. As he did so, Nina saw, a few meters away, a fawn, brown spotted, its head lifting and nose twitching in excitement. It gazed at her for a second, its huge brown eyes luminous, then turned and bounded away.
“Whoa!” she said. “Did you see that?”
“A deer?” said Lennox incredulously. “Can’t get rid of the buggers.”
“But did you see how lovely it was?”
“Bloody protected species,” said Lennox.
“You have no romantic soul,” said Nina, rather despairingly, watching as he carefully fixed a tiny hole in the fence with a spare piece of wire and some pliers he’d pulled out of a Swiss army knife in his pocket. He looked at her, and she realized she had made a mistake, that she might not have been the first person to say that to him.
“Mmm,” he said.
“I don’t mean that,” said Nina. “I just thought the deer was beautiful.”
Lennox crossly extended his arm. “You know, the trees from here all the way up to Sutherland . . . they’re centuries old. Go back to Mary, queen of Scots, and even earlier. And they used to house grouse and hedgehogs and golden eagles and millions of midges and bugs. But oh no, the deer were the prettiest. Everyone watched the film and thought deer were cute and they were the ones that had to stay. So now they overrun everything. They eat the tree roots and they eat the seeds and they eat pretty much everything, which means there are fewer and fewer of those ancient forests left, because the deer destroy all the ancient habitats. So there are no robins and no cuckoos and no adders and no woodlice. But they’re not as pretty as Bambi, right?”
Nina looked at him. “I didn’t realize,” she said.
“Didn’t read it in one of those books o’ yours?”
They headed back to the farm in silence, Nina desperately worried.
“I’m sorry,” she said, back at the farmyard gates.
“What about?” he said.
“Saying you weren’t romantic.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m not. You coming in?”
“Yes,” Nina said. “Yes. I want to . . . Can we talk?”
Lennox sighed as she followed him into the pretty sitting room. “You wouldn’t rather . . .”
“What don’t you want to talk about?” said Nina. “Is it . . . is it your ex?”
Lennox looked weary. “Nina, must we have this conversation?”
Nina looked at him for a long time. Then she shook her head.
“Obviously not,” she said. “Sorry. I thought this meant something. But clearly it doesn’t. When you still can’t even say if I’m going to get my marching orders any minute.” She stood up to leave.
“Oh Lord, Nina. I’m not even a single man yet. You must know it’s out of my hands.”
“So this isn’t anything to you? Fine.”
He looked at her, shaking his head in amazement that she would even talk like this.
“Me neither,” said Nina, regretting the words before they were out of her mouth.
There was a very long pause. Lennox stood up slowly, went to the door and put his boots back on.
“Don’t . . . don’t go,” said Nina, looking at his broad back in consternation. If there was one thing she knew about him, one tiny thing he’d let slip about himself, it was how vulnerable he’d been after Kate had left him. And what had she done but go straight for the heart of that vulnerability, take what he had offered her and reject it for not being enough, just like Kate had.