The Art of Inheriting Secrets(104)

I caught his face. “Me too,” I whispered. “Greedy for everything about you.”

“The whole time we were in Devon, I wanted to come back here. I thought about just leaving a hundred times.”

“You did?”

He nodded and ran his hands through my hair, under it, through it, pulling it away from my face. I tipped my head back into his hands, luxuriating. “I would rather be here, right now, with you, than anywhere.”

“It’s lucky, then, isn’t it, that we’re here? So greedy.” He unbuttoned my top button, then the next. I kept my hands where they were and let him.

“Our food will be ruined.”

“Does it matter?” He opened the shirt, exposing my chest, ran his fingers over my torso, my belly. Bent down and kissed my throat.

“Well, we don’t really want it to burn.”

“No.” He pushed the shirt off my shoulders. “We could eat naked.”

“I will if you will.”

He tugged off his shirt, shimmied out of his sweats, and stood there with his arms out. “Done.”

I swallowed. “Your body is amazing.”

“You are not naked yet.”

I stepped out of my yoga pants. “Better?”

“You’d better get the toast.”

I gave him a look.

He laughed. “Carefully.”

So I carefully did, and then there wasn’t any talking for a while; there was only our greed, our devouring, hands and limbs and joining. As we lay in a tangle afterward, he said quietly, “I am in love with you, Olivia Shaw. You may as well know it.”

I turned in his arms, skimming up his naked torso to kiss his beautiful mouth and look directly into his dark and starry eyes. I took a breath. “Your mother told me I should let you go because love is unselfish and you need to have children.”

“She said that?”

I lowered my eyes, feeling again the heat of embarrassment and rejection that had washed over me at that moment. “Yes.”

“And what do you think?”

“In a way, she’s right.” I traced the shape of his goatee, then the lower edge of his mouth. “If you want children, I’m getting a bit too old.”

He waited.

“But I am in love with you, too, Samir Malakar.”

“That is the right answer,” he murmured and tumbled me sideways, kissing my mouth. “All the rest . . . will work out.”

As we kissed again, and I breathed him in, I suddenly smelled smoke. “Did you take the chai off the burner?”

He raised his head, frowning. “I did. But that’s definitely smoke.”

We bolted to our feet, scrambling into our clothes. I ran to the kitchen, but it was as serene as when we left it. The smell of smoke was stronger, and I noticed an odd patch of pink light on the floor and went to the window.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s the house.”





Chapter Twenty-Four

By the time we reached the house, feet in whatever we could pull on the fastest, the fire was burning hard enough to make a roaring noise, and it flickered out the back of the kitchen, through the big window I had always admired so much. In the distance, a siren sounded, but there wasn’t time to wait. I ran down the hill to the tenants, knocking on doors, crying for help.

Samir ran around the far end of the house to see if there was any water for the construction workers and found a hose he turned on full. By then, the tenants were gathering, running up the hill with buckets, and in just a few minutes, a bucket brigade was organized. I stood between two people I didn’t know, transferring water forward, buckets back, over and over. Shouts rang out, and orders were issued, and the fire truck attached itself to a water source near the tenant cottages.

The fire roared and cast hellish light over our sweaty faces. It seemed to hardly be dented, and I kept glancing up at the flames in despair as they lasciviously licked the one part of the house that was in decent condition, that kitchen I had come to admire and the rooms above it. My mother’s room.

A bolt of lightning was nearly lost in the chaos, but it was impossible to miss the rain that exploded from the sky just after, rain so cold and heavy that we were all drenched and shivering in moments. We kept working, bucket after bucket after bucket, until my arms ached and felt like noodles, so weak I could barely lift them.

The rain did the work, in the end, splashing out the flames, giving us more water to throw with our buckets and hoses. It was nearly dawn before it was entirely out, a dawn we greeted with sooty faces, drinking tea from paper cups—the efforts of a trio of the tenants—and eating donuts Helen had brought to the scene. Every face looked as shell-shocked as I felt, but I doubted any of them held the ballast of despair that threatened to sink me right through the ground.

Beyond the shelter of the trees, rain continued to pour, making of the grounds a mud field. Firemen crisscrossed the yard, conferring with each other. One by one, the tenants came to me, offered a kind word, touched my arm, drifted back home. “Thank you,” I said to each one. “Thank you.”

Samir brought me a sweater from the flat and a fresh cup of his chai. “You should eat,” he said.

I shook my head. “I want to know what they find out.”

“They’re not going to have answers today.”