Plain English, page 1
For Susie who continues to move and shift and grow alongside me.
This, and so many other things, are all your fault.
Chapter One
Pip rolled over, her head sinking into a cooler spot on the pillow and something softer. The smell of jasmine seeped into her sleep-shrouded senses. She inhaled more deeply, and a little tickle fluttered against the end of her nose. She didn’t want to be awake yet, but her mind struggled to process the discordant details, and doing so caused the haze of slumber to burn away, leaving her more vulnerable to awareness.
Light shone a yellowish orange through closed eyelids, suggesting morning had made its assault. Her lips parted on a sigh, and something shifted across her outstretched arm, suggesting that wherever she found herself when she opened her eyes, she wouldn’t find herself alone. The thought didn’t disturb her so much as the realization that she would indeed need to wake up fully to process the where and the who, or perhaps how she’d gotten into this position.
Opening one eyelid a sliver, she waited for the light of the room and the fog of sleep to counterbalance, but as her surroundings came into focus, a few more details slipped into place: stone walls, a lush duvet, high arcing windows of leaded glass, the morning rays across a Persian rug.
Castle.
That narrowed her location down significantly. The bed wasn’t her own, as the canopy overhead was maroon instead of emerald, which meant probably not her castle. While the realization assured her she wasn’t someplace terribly unusual, it didn’t offer enough details to whittle anything to a fine point. She opened her other eye, searching for clues. A chaise lounge stretched along one window, next to a washstand with an ornate gilded mirror. Decorative swirls rose to a crest containing the outline of a lion, mouth open, mane flowing.
The Penchant Lion.
Her memory returned in a rush. Vic’s party—no, her premiere. They’d shown her cousin’s movie on a giant screen hung from the great stone walls of the outer bailey. People had come from all over. There’d been speeches and dancing in the gardens, but Pip had attended a more intimate gathering for the family, cast, and crew where everyone toasted her cousin’s success and that of her beautiful bride. Champagne had flowed right into gin o’clock by the time she found herself in conversation with an American actress.
She inhaled another deep pull of jasmine as her mind shifted from how and where to whose head lay heavy on her arm. There’d been many Americans last night, all brash and beautiful, such an enthralling breed with their intriguing mix of awe at their surroundings and their confidence in themselves. Images flickered through Pip’s mind the way the movie had played across the screen. So many witty conversations, so many flawless faces. She smiled at the mental replay of getting close enough to the film’s star, to have her singer wife shoot daggers from her eyes and lips. That one had diva written all over her, and because there should only be one diva in any given bed, Pip had turned toward something softer.
The same softness brushing against her now.
The young up-and-coming starlet with green eyes and strawberry blond hair curling over exposed shoulders. The details returned in full now as Pip distinctly remembered this woman declaring there’d been so many lesbians on the set of the film she’d started to wonder what all the fuss was about; so Pip offered to clear that question up for her.
She suffered a fleeting pang of temptation to linger long enough to see whether she’d settled the woman’s query, but given the way the starlet had clung to her into the morning hours, she suspected she knew the answer. With the final mystery solved, the story no longer held her interest.
Pip had never been one for a long denouement, but even if she were prone to lassitude, the longer she lazed about, the more likely her chance of meeting her aunt at breakfast. The thought was enough to turn even the warmest body cool against her bare skin. Every minute that ticked by only worsened her odds of escaping without some exchange requiring pleasantries or protocol. She shivered lightly. Even though she remained under the comfort of the duvet physically, mentally she’d already gone.
She slipped from under the covers with little more than a backward glance, then lifted her rucksack off the settee before padding naked into the spacious bathroom. She splashed some water on her face, then went about her morning routine as quickly and quietly as possible. Within minutes she stood before the mirror in her trusty travel outfit of olive-green cargo pants and a brown Henley. By the time she slipped on her helmet, she’d be absolutely unrecognizable to anyone who’d seen her the night before.
Then reaching into the rucksack one more time she pulled out two cards. One she inked for the starlet still asleep in her bed, telling her, tongue in cheek, that if she ever wanted to go south from there she should give her a call. Then she added the number to her formal residence, but not her personal mobile phone. The other note she addressed to her “Most Favourite Cousin Ever,” asking Vic to please stow the rest of her things until she passed back through, whenever that may be.
With that, Pip exited the other side of the washroom, without any further thought to the things she left behind.
With a cursory glance down toward the staterooms, she slunk along the wall, her footsteps light and quick until she found the door handle inlaid in the wood panelling. She gave a twist and pushed with her shoulder until she eased backward into a narrow servants’ corridor running parallel to the one used by anyone even remotely related to her. Closing the door softly, she took one more step backward and tripped over something or, rather, someone.
Stumbling back, she caught hold of the person, gripping them tightly in an attempt to keep her backside from hitting the hardwood.
Only when certain she could remain upright did she register the stunning beauty in her arms. She flashed her most disarming smile on pure reflex before recognition filtered in that the waist she currently clutched belonged to Sophia LeBlanc, famous actress, director, and wife to one of the few relatives she actually cared for.
Sophia eyed her suspiciously. “Good morning, Lady Mulgrave.”
She grimaced and stepped back. “Please don’t call me that before 7 a.m.”
“It’s 8:45.”
“Then please don’t call me that ever,” she said. “In fact, I’m aware you don’t know me well, but would you mind not calling me anything right now, or even maybe not telling anyone you saw me this morning?”
“That depends.” Sophia drew out the phrase in her distinctly American accent. “Who are you running from?”
“Is there an answer that gets me out of here more quickly than the others?”
Sophia snorted. “Seeing as how I’m currently avoiding my mother-in-law, I certainly have sympathies to share.”
“Ah yes, my aunt is very much the reason I learned to use this particular passageway many years ago.”
Sophia nodded agreeably. “Seeing as I’m prone to support family avoidance, can I safely assume that’s your valid excuse and you’re not sneaking out on the up-and-coming actress I saw you leave the party with last night?”
Pip rubbed the back of her neck. “Does it have to be an either/or proposition? I’m more of a both/and kind of queer.”
The corners of Sophia’s mouth quirked up. “I did sort of get that sense even in my limited knowledge of your escapades.”
Pip didn’t question or defend herself against whatever hung behind that comment. “So, you never saw me?”
Sophia glanced over her shoulder, then shrugged. “So long as if you get caught, you never saw me.”
She nodded solemnly. “On my honour.”
Sophia rolled her eyes. “I’m not sure what that’s worth, but go ahead and make your escape.”
Pip dropped her chin to her chest, clicked her heels, then took off again, thinking she already liked her cousin’s new wife a great deal more than she liked most of her other extended family members.
Hopping lightly down a flight of wooden stairs, she exited the residence and slipped on her aviator sunglasses, now relatively secure in her ability to blend in with the staff cleaning up from the festivities the night before. She weaved between gardeners already patching the grounds and beefy boys loading tables into a lorry until she reached the garage and roused a young redheaded man staring dreamily at the array of luxury vehicles filling the former stables.
He snapped to attention, but she held up a hand and shook her head, not wanting to draw attention to herself this close to freedom. “No worries. I’m here for the bike, the Triumph if there’s more than one.”
He grinned. “No ma’am, and honestly I’ve been sitting here wondering where that one came from.”
“It probably comes from some deep-seated desire to unnerve my parents.”
“Wow.”
“It’s more fun than therapy, mate.” She slapped him on the shoulder. “And better for picking up women, too, which is why I must be off.”
“Right.” He nodded. Then his eyes lit up. “It’s in the last stall on the right. Would you like me to fetch it?”
“I’d be more likely to let you take a spin with my date than my ride.”
“Well, anytime you want to arrange that, let me know.” He seemed to remember himself and added an awkward, “Ma’am.”
“Stranger things have happened.” She laughed lightly as she ambled through the old stone barn and wondered how the Penchants managed to find such amiable people when her own parents ke
As she reached the back stall, all other thoughts fell away when her gaze landed on her baby. The motorcycle stood gleaming, a polished military olive-green with a smooth brown saddle-leather seat. Its large tires had tread for rough road, and the low handlebars shone silver into a newly regripped throttle.
“Good morning, gorgeous.” Pip mumbled the greeting she hadn’t managed to afford last night’s lover.
She grabbed her black half-shell helmet off a side hook and swung her leg over the seat, settling against the subtle grooves her thighs had worn in the leather. Then with a light leap she kicked down and relished the engine rumble purring underneath her.
Rolling her head from side to side, the tension slipped from her shoulders. In all her trips to various spas, she’d never had a massage that shook the knots from her muscles the way 650 cc’s could.
She revved the engine, listening for any notes out of tune, then eased the bike forward and down the main line of the stable. She offered a little salute to the attendant when he stared lustily at the ride and not at her before turning toward the main gate. It swung wide to accommodate her, and she felt the whole of Great Britain open to her as well.
• • •
Pip rode down the long military road, enjoying the rattle of her wheels across the cobblestones until she reached a fork. She chose at random, turning right toward the old city walls and between long row houses, until she reached the Bondgate and rolled right out into the small market town and then into the countryside.
At some point she had it in the back of her mind to head north. The last week in August the Fringe Festival would be in its final throes throughout Edinburgh, but no one she cared to see would be out this early on a Sunday morning. While she loved the city more than any other, she ceded its middays to the families as they flooded the streets with balloons and prams queuing up to see magicians, jugglers, and bagpipers. She’d wait until night to search out the storytellers, radical queers, and belly dancers, with the occasional fire-eater thrown in for effect. In general, Pip preferred Edinburgh after dark, when the crooked streets and cobblestones cast in low light lent an equalizing mystique to everyone. No one down those back alleys ever called her “ma’am” or “Lady” anything, but dark came late and disappeared early this far up the coast, so she surrendered instead to the pull of the sea.
Leaning her body into a lazy curve, she zipped down a rural road along a babbling brook. Pip didn’t know the area well, but all rivers in this part of the country wandered their way to the great North Sea, and if she kept on in the same general direction as the stream, they’d both hit salt water soon.
The road rose and fell like the fields on either side of her, but her eyes remained fixed on the baby blue of the horizon until it blended with the deeper azure of water shimmering in the distance. A picturesque estuary appeared amid rushes and reeds. Sailboats dotted the scene, and around the bend a village sprang up like a painting in a storybook. Such subtle, simple, sublime beauty. Pip arced almost all the way through a roundabout before easing upright and straight on toward the quaint scene.
A stone bridge loomed before her, too narrow for two cars, and currently completely filled with a lorry. She eased off the throttle, creating both the time and space for clearance, but when she upshifted again, nothing caught.
The absence of acceleration registered even before the sound came. Only a little whine, but she recognized it with the tuned ear of a parent who could pick out her own child’s whimper in a crowded nursery.
She downshifted again, her toe searching for purchase, but her foot just clicked lower into an empty sort of place, and her stomach dropped right along with it.
“Damn it.”
To her right, the bank of the estuary dropped off at a precarious angle, and dead ahead the road inclined on a gentle rise the bike no longer had enough thrust to crest. The large open sheep field to the left offered her only viable option.
Using the last of her momentum, Pip swerved sharply and hopped the kerb. Landing in the grass, she skidded across rough ground, rattling her teeth and her headlight. A low fence loomed dead ahead, and she had a mere sliver of a second to make the decision as to whether she wanted to test the old unstoppable force, immovable object theorem before deciding to lay the bike, and by extension herself, down in the mud and muck.
Closing her eyes, she tightened her jaw and eased into the slide with about as much grace as Bambi on ice, but when the scraping and the friction and the grind of her body between steel and soil all slowed to a stop, she hopped up, relatively unscathed.
Searching her extremities, she found the lower right leg of her trousers shredded and her jacket well scuffed at the elbow, but none of her limbs hurt nearly as badly as the sight of her bike, battered if not completely broken, in a trail of dirt, oil, and adrenaline.
She stood over the tangled mess, breath heavy, pulse racing, and brain spinning like the back tire. There went her baby. There went her plans. There went her great escape. Throwing back her head, she growled, allowing the sound to rumble into the echo of her engine, growing in both its volume and guttural qualities until she shouted the entirety of her thoughts on the subject.
“Fuck, bugger, wanker, hell, and piss.”
Chapter Two
Claire Bailey stared at the surreal sight mere meters from her garden fence. Everything had happened so quickly she might not even have believed what she’d just seen, if not for the person standing in an open and otherwise utterly unremarkable field hurling profanities at a piece of wreckage.
She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and replayed the last sixty seconds. She’d merely stepped outside the back door of her gallery to check the morning light, but she’d no sooner set her bare feet on the cool stone when a motorcycle had rocketed off the road, launching both itself and its rider into her grandfather’s field before tipping over and skidding to a steaming stop.
She’d held her breath, worried she’d just witnessed a vehicular death statistic in real time, but the rider had popped up with startling speed, stared heavenward for a hot second, then unloaded the most over-the-top, nonsensical string of curse words she’d ever heard.
The rapid succession of surreal events sent a bubble of laughter through her core, and before she could catch herself, it came right out of her lips.
It wasn’t funny, not entirely, but as her heart raced with adrenaline-laced relief Claire couldn’t help herself, and she didn’t manage to keep quiet about her inappropriate amusement either. Her sharp cackle reverberated across the still landscape, and the rider wasn’t nearly far enough away to not notice.
Turning their head at the sound, they stared at Claire with a startled kind of insolence that caused her breath to catch every bit as much as the initial wreck.
“Do you find this humorous?”
She shook her head. She had a second ago, but not anymore. Not in the face of the most dangerously good-looking human she’d ever been this close to. And honestly, they weren’t even that close, but even at a distance of twenty yards, she felt trapped in the tractor beam of the most electric blue eyes she’d ever seen.
The rider took a few steps closer, and Claire fought the urge to back up as more stunning details came into focus. The subtle curve of hips and breasts, the sharp cut of an angular jaw, cheekbones that seemed almost clichéd in their nobility.
“I lost control and crashed.” The voice was richer, smoother than one might expect from someone who’d recently suffered a near-death experience.
“I saw.”
“You saw?” The rider looked around as though silently asking whether this was really happening, and Claire at least identified with that impulse. “Seriously? That’s all you’ve got? I could’ve broken my neck.”
“Seeing as how you hopped up like a little meerkat popping out of a hole, it hadn’t occurred to me that you’d severed your spinal cord.”
“Meerkat?” The rider snorted and strode forward until she reached a small hedge marking the edge of the pasture and the boundary to Claire’s garden. “Some people might have considered it polite to check if I’d been injured before laughing at a stranger who’d come through a harrowing event.”
