Harlequin Historical: August 2022 Box Set 2 of 2 by Liz Tyner

Author:Liz Tyner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jules Howell, singer, painter, kisser of innocents and rule-breaker, leaf-raker, apple-gatherer. Becca added the last to the growing list of who was Jules Howell. These days, she seemed to know him better than she knew herself. She would never have guessed that her head could be turned by a few kisses, but then she’d never imagined kisses like these, kisses that sent her wits to the four winds and her reason with them. She never should have allowed him to steal that second kiss outside the workshop, never should have allowed him to talk her into the mad idea that it could be different for them, that they would be careful, that somehow they could be business partners and friends, man and woman and friends, where so many others had failed.

Perhaps it was the inventor in her that tipped the scales of reason in Jules’s favour, that part of her that loved taking the known rules and twisting them into a new semblance of application. She might not break the rules, the inventor in her argued, but she certainly bent them into new things. That was what an invention was, after all. It was the taking of old technologies and turning them to new uses. Why should the rules of a relationship be any different than the rules of physics?

That argument had carried the day and the weeks beyond. It was all the proof she needed that she was changing because of him. Not for him, to be clear. She wouldn’t change for any man. But she was changing because of him the way rocks change the flow of water, displacing it from its usual beds and sending its currents in new directions. Even her surroundings were affected by him.

Her cottage workshop bore the stamp of him and their changing relationship as well, despite their best efforts at being careful to not let their new roles cross. The workshop was no longer her space entirely, but theirs. Jules had his space now, a table brought down from the Hall’s attics to sit before the fire. Jules wrote to his brother from that table, read reports from Manchester at that table. She had made a habit of watching over the rims of her glasses as she drew her plans, fascinated by the way his eyes moved as he scanned letters, the way his hand held a pen when he wrote, the way his brow furrowed when he was thinking, the way his mouth pursed when he drank tea from the chipped mug that had officially become ‘his’.

He’d put his stamp on the place in other ways: the way he moved through the space, casually looking through cupboards as he hunted for tins of shortbread to munch alongside his tea, the way his spicy winter scent hung in the air, mixing with the smells of the fire and the workshop. His waterfall painting hung in pride of place over the mantel, a constant reminder of their day together.

They’d gone back to the falls several times since that first visit.

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