Free In The Garden Of Stones by Lucy Pepperdine Page B

Such
beauty is wasted if it can’t be shared.” Pause. “Goodbye
then.”
    “ Goodbye.”
    She
takes a step backward, turns and starts to walk away. When she is
within a few steps of the gate, he calls to her.
    “ Miss! Wait! Please!”
    She
turns to see him snipping a bloom from the rose bush with a small
knife with a curved blade, striding purposefully towards her,
adopting an awkward hop and skip gait. She suspects he couldn’t run
if he tried.
    He holds
the rose out for her to take. “To make up for … for what I did, for
what I said. It was gey rude. I was rude. Please … take the
rose.”
    She
accepts the perfect flower and lifts it to her nose, closes her
eyes and inhales deeply of its delightful, heady
fragrance.
    “ It’s beautiful. Thank you, Mr McLeod.”
    “ Colin.”
    There’s
that twitch of a smile again and the nervous bob of the head. He
looks as if he wants to say something, but can’t form the words.
After a struggle he blurts out, “If ye want ta come again … ye
can.”
    “ Really?”
    “ Aye. Like you said, beauty is wasted if it canna be
shared.”
    “ I’d love to come again, Colin. Thank you. Now, you may
escort me to the gate.”
    “ Pleasure, Miss … Grace.”
    He walks
with her to the gate and holds it open for her to pass through. The
squeak from the hinges is dreadful and makes her cringe.
    “ You want to get some oil on that,” she says. “It’s fair put
my teeth on edge.”
    He
smiles, properly this time, and it lights up his whole face,
creasing the small lines around his eyes, which seem to have lost
some of their terror.
    Handsome, in an unconventional sort of
way .
    “ May I come again soon?” she says. “Tomorrow,
perhaps?”
    His
mouth is moving, and he’s saying something, perhaps telling her
yes, please, do come tomorrow, yet the voice coming from him is not
his and not making much sense. He sounds just like the weatherman
on Radio 4 putting the chances of rain in the north east at about
fifty percent with a maximum of twenty degrees centigrade, and it
takes her a moment to realise it is her six o’clock wake-up
alarm.
    There is
no gate, no garden, no Colin McLeod. There is, however, a dull
throbbing sensation in the middle finger of her right hand and she
raises it to her lips to suck it away.

Chapter 10
     
     
    Grace
has nothing particular to do the next day apart from giving Alec’s
flat a thorough clean, do some shopping, make a cake for their tea,
and tackle a mountain of laundry.
    “ This must be what being a full time housewife is like,” she
muses as she closes the oven door on the boeuf bourguignon they
will have for dinner. “No wonder they are knackered all the
time.”
    Everything done, she has an hour to spare before Alec and
Denny come home from work. Just time to have a glass of wine and
relax. Maybe let her mind wander a little …
     
     
    The man,
Colin, is outside his ramshackle hut, hard at work running a
sharpening stone over the blade of what looks like an old fashioned
scythe, honing it to a razor’s edge. If it were real, it could be
classed as a deadly weapon.
    “ Hello,” she says brightly.
    A blur
of movement, a whoosh of air, and the only thing preventing her
innards from spilling out over her shoes are fresh air and a pair
of small hands pressed flat against her stomach.
    She
staggers, stares at him goggle eyed and breathless. He gapes back,
an expression of slack jawed shock on his face.
    “ Oh … f-uck!” He throws down the scythe as if it is red hot
and puts his hands on hers. “Let me see!”
    “ No!” she squeals. “My insides will come out. You’ve killed
me!”
    “ Let-me-see!”
    He
prises her hands apart. There is a second of silence before he lets
out a small, nervous laugh. “It’s okay. Ye’re fine. See fer
yerself.”
    Grace
keeps her eyes squeezed tight shut. “I don’t want to.”
    “ There’s nothing there. Look.”
    She
eases open her eyes and looks down. There is no blood, no