Dormant Heart by Lane Swift

Author:Lane Swift [Swift, Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-63476-845-0
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2016-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

TUESDAY MORNING, my alarm woke me. I didn’t drink much alcohol but knew what it felt like to be hungover, and that it would have been infinitely preferable to this morning’s grinding headache.

I found an out-of-date bottle of paracetamol in the back of a drawer and took three. I washed at the sink as I usually did, but without the addition of hot water from the kettle to the cold I drew from the tap. The comb eluded me, and I had to use my fingers to tease out the worst of the tangles.

The walk to the manor got rid of the last of my lethargy. I thought of Josh, sleeping on a sofa every night, working his last week in Petersfield, and pulled myself together. I shouldn’t have had to remind myself how lucky I was.

I did the bookkeeping for Hartley Manor from a desk in the staffroom. A coffee and a flick through my in tray, and my brain engaged.

Running the estate racked up a lot of bills. I wrote checks and filled in the ledger. I filed and folded and sealed envelopes.

The events of the last two days took on a surreal quality, remembered like something that had happened to someone else, or something I’d seen on television. (I did watch the box, every now and again, up here in the big house.)

Joshua Thornton, with his honesty and his endearing charms, had drawn me into the tail end of one episode of his life, then the beginning of another. He’d left me spinning and dizzy. I was addicted and crazy-hungry for more.

“Late night?” Heather strolled in with a fistful of receipts.

I shook my head.

“You and Josh didn’t burn the midnight oil?”

I signed that he left at nine, leaving it at that, and rubbed my eyeballs with my fingertips. This wasn’t the first time a restless night had brought me in bleary-eyed.

Heather didn’t push me. Evidently more pressing issues were at hand. She slammed the receipts down onto the space I’d just cleared on the desk. “You’re not going to be happy about this. I found these wedged down the back of the armchair in Daddy’s study.”

I flicked through. They were bills, not receipts. Several thousand pounds’ worth, some of them going back months. I grimaced. Heather too. We looked at the offending articles, but no amount of staring or wishing would preclude them from the Grangers’ mounting debt.

Gerry needed a talking to. Heather’s complaints fell on deaf ears, as did the intermittent attempts made by Teddy and Ralph to reason with their father. So it was left to me, the mute, to go and have a word with the deaf man. There had to be a joke in there somewhere, but at the moment I wasn’t seeing it.

I signed to Heather I’d do my best. Gerry might or might not have been suffering from the early stages of dementia. More likely grief still overwhelmed him. Two years of being a widower was no time at all when you’d been married for nearly forty.

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