“Actually, I don’t.”

  She responded by propping her nose into the air as she did when she was about to come up with a whopper. “I should imagine it has a... troll problem.”

  “A troll problem?” I repeated, frowning.

  “Yes, they really are quite beastly creatures—worse than raccoons. And if you’ve a troll problem at that humble little estate you’re considering, they will hardly be done away with easily.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” I answered, not really in the mood for any of her shrewd opinions or ridiculous ideas. This was a new adventure, and I was planning on finding myself again in a different country. Not that I’d necessarily lost myself, but sometimes relationships begin to define you (especially the long ones) and pretty soon, you find yourself sans relationship and sans a sense of self. I had a feeling I’d find that self again in Morley-on-Avon. “You’ll see, there’s nothing wrong with it—no trolls and no raccoons.”

  Petra shook her head. “When you reach my age, you’ll be more circumspect.”

  “You’re twenty years younger than I am.”

  She waved me away with an unconcerned hand. “Only in the physical sense. And since I have no physical presence any longer, that hardly counts, Gwendolyn, dear.”

  In Morley-on-Avon we were shown around the houses by an agent, who pointed out each house’s good points and smiled a lot, but my mind wasn’t sold on any of these places.

  I wanted the cottage.

  The cottage was called Bluebells and looking around it, I found it even more perfect than it had appeared online. Yes, this was where I wanted to live. This was where I wanted to write, and my mind was crowded with the possibilities of the sorts of stories I could dream up in such a place.

  “Tell me you don’t like it,” I whispered to Petra as we looked around. I was careful to talk to Petra only when the agent wasn’t within hearing distance. In my long association with her, I’d learned how to avoid appearing as if I were speaking to the air. After all, people get very uncomfortable when you speak to others they can’t see.

  “I never said I did not like it, though it is rather small,” Petra answered and she glanced around herself with what appeared to be distaste. “Such accommodations would have been quite substantial for the servants back in my day, but alas... times have certainly changed.” That was a common rejoinder for Petra whenever she was comparing the Victorian age with the modern one and finding the modern lacking. “Do I get my own room?”

  “No,” I responded. “You have your own plane of reality.”

  Over the years, Petra had become more of a visitor than an actual house guest. As children, we’d lived and played together, but as I got older (as we both got older) that became less comfortable, particularly after Ian and I moved in together. Petra was nothing if not accommodating and always made herself scarce during dates, romantic dinners, and what she primly referred to as ‘amorous congress’. I think it was more along the lines that she was extremely uncomfortable with anything that was ‘taboo’ and simply couldn’t handle displays of affection and certainly not ‘convivial society’ (another of her terms for the horizontal mambo).

  Limbo was only ever a footstep away, so she always had somewhere to go and read a book or whatever it was they did in Limbo—it was a subject on which she was cagey for contractual reasons.

  “All I said was that there was something wrong with the place,” she insisted, propping her hands on her hips as she glared at me. “A reason it should be so inexpensive,” she repeated.

  “Don’t be silly.” I shook my head and hoped she was wrong.

  Chapter Two

  Morley-on-Avon

  “Now,” said the agent, with a certain tone in his voice, “cards on the table...”

  “Of course!” Petra answered, throwing her hands into the air. “Did I or did I not tell you there was something wrong with it?” I did my best to ignore her, keeping my attention firmly on the young man and his mop of carrot-orange hair.

  “Something... wrong?” I asked.

  “There’s a reason this place is going so cheap,” the agent went on and I could feel Petra’s expression of ‘told you so’ even though I still refused to look at her. “The last owner passed away... in the house.”

  “Oh,” I shrugged, thinking a death in the house was certainly preferable to a troll infestation.

  “Does that... lessen your interest?”

  I shrugged again. “I mean... I guess that happens.”

  “Violently,” the agent added, nodding as the mop of hair landed in his eyes and he had to push it out of the way again. I was fairly sure he’d introduced himself as Harry, and it was quite a fitting name.

  “Murdered?” I asked, suddenly a little anxious.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no,” Harry reassured me as he laughed and shook his head as if my imagination had run away with me. “Nothing like that, I can assure you.”

  “And what about trolls?” Petra asked the man, even though he couldn’t see or hear her. Of course, she knew as much, but this was just her way of letting me know she expected me to ask him the same question. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

  “What happened then?” I asked him.

  “Well.” He scratched the back of his head. “Unfortunately, the last owner tripped, fell down the stairs, and broke her neck.”

  “Oh!” I couldn’t help but cringe.

  “I told you so!” Petra called out from beside me, but I continued to ignore her. “I just knew there was more to this... shack!”

  The agent nodded. “They found her just about where you’re standing now.”

  Suddenly I recalled the tour guide from all those years ago, talking about the place where Petra had landed and broken her own neck.

  “Freak accident,” Harry continued, hurriedly. “But it has given the place a bit of a reputation with the locals. You know what country folk are like.”

  “Not really.”

  “No, I suppose coming from New York, you wouldn’t.”

  “Right,” I answered. “Was this a while ago?”

  “Last month,” admitted the agent. “They wanted to move the cottage on quick.”

  I wasn’t sure who ‘they’ were, but I supposed it didn’t matter. A death inside the house certainly wasn’t something that was on my checklist of desirable features in a property, but on the other hand, every property had some sort of a history—especially in a country as old as this one. The point was: you took the rough with the smooth.

  “I’ll take it.”

  ***

  Things moved fast, which is what happens when you buy the cursed house no one else wants. Soon enough, I was moving my stuff in, deciding which was my bedroom and which my office, where furniture went, which pictures went where. In between the moving, I took long walks around the village and the country in which it was set, feeling very pleased with my decision to move here.

  Morley-on-Avon was everything I remembered and everything I’d treasured as a little girl. While I’d gotten older, it seemed as if Morley had been frozen in time—that everything I remembered as a child was exactly the same now. And that suited me just fine.

  I introduced myself at the local shops, spoke to my neighbors, and found everyone friendly and very welcoming of the colonial commoner making her home here. At the end of my first week, I decided to get out of the house and spend an evening in the local pub.

  “Do you wish for me to chaperone you to that awful place?” asked Petra. As a proper Victorian woman, she didn’t think highly of alcohol. “I do hope you don’t swizzle yourself until you’re blootered.”

  “Up to you.”

  “That’s a ‘yes’ then.”

  She knew me better than anyone, and she was right—I definitely wanted company, mostly because I didn’t want to drink alone. Of course, I basically was drinking alone because no one else could see or hear Petra, but the point still stood.

  ***

  The local pub was called ‘The Swan’ and had a beer garden out back that stretched down to the river. Inside was noisily convivial and pleasingly absent of the English cliches that Americans abroad expect; no Morris dancers, abusive football fans, or men in smocks with strings around their pant legs and straw sticking out of their sleeves. One of my closer neighbors (I wanted to say their names were Maisie, and her husband, Keith) recognized me and waved which I tentatively returned as I made my way to the bar where I almost collided with a big man who was carrying two pints of cider.

  “Whoa! Sorry!” He deftly executed an arabesque of his arms, somehow managing to avoid spilling any of the drinks. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “My fault.” I looked up into a pair of blazingly blue eyes set in a rugged, yet desperately apologetic, face. His skin was tan and revealed a spattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheeks, no doubt from spending too much time in the sun. His hair was dark brown and had a certain wave to it, or maybe it was just unbrushed. It was hard to tell. His jaw was square and broad and his forearms were the girth of my thighs. I felt like I’d suddenly walked into the Beauty and the Beast cartoon and nearly collided with Gaston.

  “No. The fault is all mine,” Gaston insisted and shook his head, color rising into his cheeks. “I’m clumsy as hell.”

  Now it’s a general rule that I like tall men. Ian was over six-foot-two, but this man was taller and thicker set with muscles that seemed simultaneously shy of announcing their presence but too prominent to hide beneath his plaid shirt which looked like it was one bicep curl away from splitting.

  I grinned. “No harm done.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” murmured Petra to my side, shaking her head, because she knew my type as well as I did.

  “Let me buy you a drink to say I’m sorry,” suggested the big man with a slight grin. “And to welcome you to Morley?”

  “How did you know I’m new?”

  He laughed at that. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Oh.”

  “A drink?” he asked again.

  I shook my head. “There’s no need.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He obviously didn’t want to push himself on a woman he didn’t know, but I probably would have acquiesced if he’d asked again. “I’m Leo, by the way. Pleased to meet you, Miss?”

  He started to reach out to shake my hand, but then seemed to realize there was still a pint of cider in his and so settled for an elbow bump—as in the times of Covid. Even though Covid was now a thing of the not-so-distant-past.

  “Gwen. Gwen Dance.”

  “Was I right and you are new in town?”

  “I am.”

  “To live or just traveling through?”

  “I just moved here.”

  He nodded and even though he was asking me a ton of questions, there was still something shy in his eyes. Something that said conversation didn’t come easily to him, but he was trying on my account.

  “And did you happen to move into Vic’s old place, yes?”

  “Bluebells? The cottage?” I suggested. I wasn’t sure what ‘Vic’s old place’ was.

  “Yes—Vic as in Victoria.” Leo’s features (handsome features if you liked men who looked like they were hewn from oak—and, I had to admit, I did) creased. “And you must be the mystery novelist?”

  I felt my eyebrows rise of their own volition. “Apparently, news travels fast.”

  Leo chuckled. “Around Morley? Yes, yes, it does.”

  “Well, yes, I am the mystery novelist who now lives in Victoria’s cottage.”

  “Then I’m sure you probably know the sad story.”

  “Yes.” The story about how Victoria and the stairs had been up close and personal. “She was a friend of yours?”

  Leo shrugged, managing to spill the cider he’d so dexterously preserved earlier. “Damn,” he said as he frowned down at it. “But yeah. Morley—you know? It’s a town even small towns would call small.” I laughed at that. “Everyone’s a friend. Or at least—I suppose—everyone knows each other. Not necessarily the same thing. But mostly friends.”

  “Good to know.” I gave him a smile and tried not to notice how large his hands were, and such long fingers...

  “Try not to be so obvious,” Petra chided, as she appeared right beside me. “And even though you’re quite the tart, could you at least pretend to be a lady?”

  I ignored her as I was wont to do when other, living, people were around.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to…” Leo looked around at a table where some other similarly large men (though none quite on Leo’s scale) sat watching and waiting for their drinks. “But it was nice meeting you, Gwen.”

  “Nice meeting you too, Leo.”

  “I’m at the smith’s. If you need anything—railings, gates, horseshoes—come by.” Then he chuckled, and it was a deep, baritone sort of sound. One I liked.

  I frowned. “Smiths?”

  “Blacksmiths?”

  “Oh,” I nodded.

  Leo smiled, and it was a lopsided smile full of large, white, and straight teeth. It was a smile that was suddenly boyish and shy, yet naughty, all the same. I swallowed hard.

  “Blacksmithing—that’s what I do.”

  My taste in literature had never leaned towards the crinolined romances in which ladies from the upper crust of polite society developed a socially frowned upon crush on farm hands, chimney sweeps, and blacksmiths, but right now I could see the appeal. An honest to goodness blacksmith. This was a love story that was writing itself and for a moment, it was nice to write it in my mind.

  “I’ve never met a blacksmith before.”

  Leo shrugged again, spilling again. “I’ve never met a Gwen before.”

  I gave him a smile as Petra shook her head. “He’s aiming to go smithing up the valley between your thighs.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I said chidingly out of the side of my mouth.

  “What was that?” Leo asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I answered, shaking my head as I remembered myself. “A real blacksmith, huh?”

  He nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d have met one before. America—not so many to be found there, I presume. Although iron is iron. There must be a few.”

  “Leo!” A call from the table behind him and a waving of empty glasses and Leo smiled a goodbye, his apparent shyness an appealing contrast to his hulking presence.

  “That didn’t take long,” said Petra, as I ordered a drink from a friendly woman behind the bar.

  “What?”

  She gave me that reprimanding look. “You know what.”

  I did know what, and I was okay with it. Romance had been missing from my life for too long and with it some of the more fun aspects of being in a relationship. Though we’d parted company recently, Ian and I had been running on fumes for a while. Our sex life hadn’t ground to a complete halt, but it was definitely stuck in traffic.

  We’d been reduced to going through the motions on a monthly basis and… damn it, I missed that passion you feel when you’re with someone who’s right there with you, in the moment; the intimacy, the fun, the blind ecstasy when it seems like the world might implode around you. It had been a long time since I’d felt passion, since I’d had a ‘good shagging’ to use an especially British term. And if the person administering that good shagging was sweet and shy and built along the lines of an English castle, all the better. And, who knew—maybe it could be more than much-needed-between-the-sheets action, maybe it could evolve into something with substance, which would be good too.

  My new life in England wasn’t limited to a new home and a new book, I was open to new love too. New love at forty-two. And as forty-two-year-olds went, I wasn’t half bad. I still had the same charms I had in my twenties, only now I knew what I wanted and I knew how to go about getting it.

  I’d by now found a place to sit and while I had Petra for company, to the rest of the room I was just that woman sitting on her own who seemingly makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable with her aloneness.

  “Good evening.”

  I looked up to see a man standing over me. And smiling. His hair was as black as a moonless night, his eyes large and dark brown. His symmetry of features was near perfect and he looked like he belonged on the cover of GQ magazine, not in a tiny pub in a tiny town.

  “Hi,” I said and figured maybe he was a bartender coming to see if I needed another drink. But, no, mine was still full.

  “I heard your American accent and figured you were a stranger in a strange place, so I thought I might see if you wanted company.”

  The man was handsome—shockingly so—the kind of handsome you can’t help but notice in the first few seconds of your acquaintance. It wasn’t the sort of handsomeness that grew on you—it was the kind that knocked you over the head. It was a handsomeness that was very different to Leo’s. This man was, for starters, younger—I would have guessed a lot younger than Leo, which in turn meant he was also a lot younger than me—maybe ten or fifteen years younger, even. He had boyish good looks, like the pretty one in a boyband, and was dressed in the sort of casual attire that radiates expense: it costs money to look so matter of fact. He was probably around six-foot-one, considerably shorter than Leo, and he was fit and trim rather than large and hulking like Leo.

  I noted all these things because, while this guy looked around twenty-seven (at the most thirty) that meant that surely he wasn’t hitting on forty-two-year-old me. Yet everything about his posture, his smile, and his tone said he was hitting on me. Hmm.

  “You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

  I’m also old enough to be... your aunt or your older sister. I definitely wasn’t going to go anywhere near the mother category.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I just moved into Bluebells.”

  “Oh, no,” Petra commented from where she was floating beside me. “The wolf has come calling.”

  “Lovely cottage,” the man answered and smiled with teeth—broad, straight, and white ones. His smile was beautiful. “I’m Bastian.”

  “Gwen.”

  “What a beautiful name,” he glanced down and motioned to the empty chair beside me. “May I?”