Eve Devon - Christmas at the Little Clock House on the Green - An enchanting and warm-hearted romance full of Christmas cheer

‘Hey, you? Mr Moo? Please shoo,’ she tried again a little louder, totally wishing she was eating Moo Shu pork, or doing anything that felt in any way familiar to her old life in LA.

She wasn’t sure this really fulfilled the ‘adventure’ brief she’d sold herself on when packing her case to make the move back to the UK, although, she’d only been here one whole night and one whole day so perhaps she should give it more time.

Or maybe the jet lag was screwing with her reasoning?

She blinked again in case it really was jet lag that had her imagining a cow had come to visit the tiny cottage Kate had helped her settle into when she’d arrived in Whispers Wood.

No. It wasn’t her imagination.

The cow was still there. Filling up her entire view because, as it turned out, cows were genuinely fear-for-your-life enormous close-up.

As an antidote to not getting her dream role, not being able to get out of the wrought-iron starting gate wasn’t quite the look she’d been going for.

Wisps of frosty fog wrapped themselves around her, and as the damp air seeped deep into her bones she was closer to admitting she may have misjudged this opportunity. What would Rudy think if he could see her now?

She’d thought this would all be so very quaint, hadn’t she?

How could you have been this wrong, Ems? This, So. Completely. Wrong.

All it was, was freezing, she thought, wondering if she could get out of the back garden of the cottage and find her way to The Clock House, thus avoiding the cow-staring scary start to her rural adventure.

Emma looked around helplessly and then, leaning closer, risked cricking her neck permanently to check out the pair of feet she could see approaching.

‘Is someone there?’ she asked.

‘Whack it on its arse,’ said a male voice.

‘What it on what?’ Emma asked.

There was a sigh, and then, ‘Give it a good slap on its hind rear and it’ll move right on by.’

Emma stared suspiciously at the cow’s rear-end. The instruction sounded a bit Fifty Shades Darker .

‘Thank you but I’m not into that,’ she said, not quite under-her-breath enough.

‘Look, do you want it to move, or not?’

She did. She really did. It was time to swap out her What Would Bridget Jones Do for a more kick-ass What Would JLaw Do? She licked her lips and stared again at the cow. ‘So … just sort of … hit it?’

‘Sometime today would be appreciated.’

‘And you know to hit it because?’

‘It’s Gertrude.’

‘Well.’ Emma folded her arms. ‘I have to tell you that I am none the wiser.’

‘But you are getting older. And so am I.’

A head popped around the rear of the cow and to Emma’s surprise it had a face belonging to it that stopped the breath in her lungs.

Maybe it was the fact that she faced imminent death by cow, but Emma’s powers of observation all narrowed down to one impressive: Valhalla-lujah.

The man was all dark and dangerous with Viking hair and beard and eyes the colour of the pints of Guinness that Bar Brand served up on Paddy’s night.

Eyes that, despite being framed by lashes that could compete with Gertrude’s, she could see were now drawn into a deep scowl.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said. ‘Hold these will you and I’ll move her on.’

Without thinking, Emma held open her arms and allowed Mr Heart-Wrecking Handsome to deposit a weighty pile of magazines, what looked like rolled-up plans, a laptop and a tape-measure the size of a dinner plate in them.

The next thing she knew she was staggering against the sudden weight, her feet sliding across the ice in opposite and modesty-mocking directions.

She hit the ground with an audible bump.

Oh, my, God.

Years of yoga, Pilates and dance and who knew all it was going to take for her to finally be able to do the splits was a British country lane, a cow, and a Viking!

She blew a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes and looked up just in time to watch Gertrude walking off down the road, bovine hips swinging like Jessica Rabbit.

‘Sorry. Are you all right? Here, let me help you up.’

Emma righted her beanie so that she could get an even better look at the Viking. ‘Oh, I think you’ve done more than enough under the circumstances,’ she harrumphed and then thought that on the bright side at least the heat in her face was bound to trickle down to her toes.

‘It’s not often these days that a man gets to rescue a woman from the perils of nature.’

Was he kidding?

‘It’s not often these days that a man expects a woman to hold his papers for him while he wades into danger,’ she muttered.

‘Quite. Well,’ he muttered all very Mark Darcy. ‘As it happens they’re important papers and I didn’t see you getting it done.’

Emma felt her bottom lip protrude. ‘So I did a little cow -ering. Excuse me for being surprised to find I was trapped in my own home by the bovine beast of Whispers Wood. I’m sure I’d have worked out how to get her to move—’

‘Eventually,’ he replied with a slight twitch of his lips.

Her gaze stalled on his lips. Until she saw him notice. Then, with another rush of red to her head, she glanced at her watch and stammered, ‘Oh. Help me up will you, I need to get to The Clock House.’

‘The Clock House? Really?’ He hauled her to her feet as if she was as light as a leaf floating in the breeze and she tried unsuccessfully not to be impressed.

‘Yes. Really.’

‘That’s where I’m off to. We might as well walk together, I suppose.’

Don’t do me any favours, she thought and then tried to remember how to get to the village green. As compasses went, she had an excellent moral one. As for working out which direction to take to get, well, anywhere … not so much.

‘So you must be the famous Holly Wood,’ came the rich dark-roasted coffee voice.

‘Huh? Oh. No, my name is Emma Danes.’

‘Not Holly Wood? I could have sworn—’

‘No. I’m over from Hollywood, and I’m definitely not famous,’ she replied feeling a little funny that she might have been talked about before she had even landed. ‘I’m here to help Kate open Cocktails & Chai @ The Clock House. And you must be… ?’ Apart from a rural Viking God with super-sexy British accent, appearing out of nowhere to save me from cows named, Gertrude, that was.

For one awkie mo she worried she’d said rural Viking God with super-sexy British accent out loud because there was another quirk of his lips into a smile that made her heart sort of descend into her stomach like someone had snapped its strings.

And then he was introducing himself Bond-style, with a, ‘My name is Knightley. Jake Knightley.’

Emma

‘So if your name’s Knightley, have you come from Knightley Hall, then?’ Emma said, as she set off down the country lane beside him.

When he didn’t answer she thought he hadn’t heard her all the way up there where the tall people hung out, so she said a little louder, ‘That huge black and white building surrounded by all that precision-cut hedging on the other side of the village?’

‘Topiary,’ he murmured.

‘Huh?’

‘The hedging you’re referring to is called topiary,’ he corrected helpfully.

Ignoring the dictionary lesson, she said, ‘I thought it said it was called Knightley Hall when I passed it yesterday on my walk. That’s where you live?’

‘I do.’ He increased his speed as if he hoped she wouldn’t have enough breath left to chat.

Which bugged her because it was him who’d invited her along on the journey, not the other way around. ‘And your name is Knightley?’ she asked, trying to keep pace with him in boots that were at least two sizes too big for her.