Page 21 of You Had Me At Pumpkin Patch

Thank goodness for a quiet evening in the log cabin, writing by the soft glimmer from her carved Magic Lanterns.

She needed it, after her stressful morning holding ladders for Zain and listening to him turn the air blue over being kept in the dark about Agnes’s roof fiasco.

After that, she’d spent the afternoon dodging him, conscious that she still had more truths to spill, but desperate to give them both time to cool off.

Curiously, the robot cat tech company were soon on the phone to Agnes, upping their offer by an amount that had made Agnes’s dispirited eyes bulge.

The suspicious part of Rosie wondered if they’d sabotaged those tiles themselves.

Unluckily for them, Rosie was done with being beaten by the likes of technology and idiots.

But first, there were words to write. Wood crackled lightly in the burner, its smoky scent teasing the air. Rosie was cosied up in her Snoopy pyjamas, a cup of tea at her side. She stretched her fingers over the old typewriter keys, closed her eyes, and breathed in all that peace – at last.

If nothing else, it had been a good day for inspiration.

As real-life dramas unfolded, she felt moved to weave them into her fiction.

Hot farmers brandishing tools. A heroine with sizzling secrets.

Coming together to defeat the bad guys. With a few embellishments and some wishful thinking, life was ready to become art on the typewriter paper in front of her.

‘Ahhhh, yes.’ Rosie breathed out gently. Everything was perfect and quiet and still, if only for this moment. ‘Whoa!’ She jumped up, nearly spilling tea over her manuscript. What on earth was that noise?

There was a loud, fast-paced clacking sound coming from outside in the darkness, as if a small army of castanet players was having a fiesta.

It was interspersed with high-pitched quacky-squawking.

Had the castanet players brought a dolphin?

Rosie clambered to one of the windows overlooking the lake and twitched her curtains.

‘What the actual...?’

From the gentle glow of the solar string lights outside her cabin, she could just make out the dark figure of Zain, crouching by the water, with a screen.

She knew from his previous grunts that he didn’t bother with smartphones or devices out here.

Presumably there wasn’t much point without reception, and he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who had friends.

So what was he up to? The curious noises sounded like they were coming from the semi-lit screen.

She pursed her lips. If he was a secret tech geek, his days as a muse were over.

An image of a bare-bottomed lady robot popped into her head.

Urgh. Zain’s past was a mystery, but he surely wasn’t that weird.

Her sensible head wanted to keep her distance. Yet Zain’s unexplained magnetism had Rosie pulling on her wellies and a hoodie and creeping out into the night.

‘It’s just novel research,’ she muttered to herself, for the eleventy-billionth time.

And perhaps she could build on her brave morning and broach some more touchy subjects.

Anyway, it was surely her duty to check he wasn’t out there disturbing the water voles with images of robot porn.

Maybe he’d found a secret Wi-Fi hotspot by the lake and was watching something dodgy.

Click clack click click clickkkkk...

It certainly sounded dodgy. Rosie drew back her shoulders as she paced towards him.

His head shot up as she approached, one finger moving crossly to his pursed mouth. From the dim light of the screen that was illuminating his face she could see he didn’t like being disturbed, which meant he must be up to trouble. She put her hands on her hips.

‘Bats,’ he whispered, his full lips pressing against his finger as he spoke.

They really were nice...

‘ What ?’ The word finally computed at the same time as another round of quaketty-clacking. Rosie ducked, her arms shooting over her head. Her feet lost grip in the slippiness of the mud, her wellies sliding. She felt the thwack as her bum hit the earth, a traitorous whimper escaping her.

‘They’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ Zain whisper-hissed.

He looked like he wanted to stay cross with her but was struggling to stifle his laugh.

‘Bat detector.’ He nodded at the screen.

And perhaps he was also too enamoured with his flying Halloween creatures to keep up his best Zain fury.

‘Their calls are usually too high-pitched for us to hear, but with this...’ His eyes lit up, as if he’d discovered the very best kind of secret.

‘With this we can get a little closer to nature, without disturbing it.’

She pondered his words, knowing that was exactly what they needed for the retreats. Maybe out here, where he was more at peace and less likely to start yelling, was the best place to raise it. Because if she could just get Zain on board...

She flinched again as the bat clacking restarted.

To her surprise, Zain moved his crouched body towards her.

She almost felt herself moulding to his warmth, like ice cream around particularly hunky jelly.

Hmm. She’d have to work on that description before it got anywhere near her novel.

Zain showed her the screen, which was displaying the noises, almost like a heart monitor.

‘They’re here to eat the insects over the lake, not you.

They’ll hibernate soon. Nice to get a last look at them. ’

Rosie shuddered. She didn’t know much about bats, other than their association with eerie darkness and vampires, neither of which were on her nice list.

‘Fear of the unknown,’ said Zain, as though he was somehow in tune with her tremors. Which he obviously wasn’t. ‘Like the spiders, you’ll get used to them. You might even grow to...’ He looked up at her, his walnut-brown eyes seeming to consider something.

‘Like them?’ she asked.

He frowned and looked back at the screen.

The contours of his face really were something, and it wasn’t her fault if she often found herself studying them because he didn’t say a lot, outside of his specialist subjects.

What else did she have to go on, besides those angular lines that tried to radiate annoyance but gave occasional glimpses of the passions beneath?

Even if it was a touch unusual to get passionate about bats.

‘There they are,’ he whispered with an excited urgency that would have knocked Rosie onto her bum if she wasn’t on it already.

He wrapped one strong arm around her and pulled her back up into a crouching position, and with the other he pointed towards the sky whilst his bat detector went wild with noises.

They huddled by the water, watching the swoop and soar of the tiny, dark-winged creatures as they hunted for flying insects. Zain’s stifled excitement was strangely infectious, and bats were sort of cute when they kept their distance.

‘Some species are at serious risk of extinction, Rosie.’ Had he even used her name before?

It sounded so soothing as it danced across his tongue.

‘Sorry if I was harsh earlier, but I’m not just a dumb guy who obsesses over pumpkins – I’m here for all of it.

Even Agnes, in all her saucepan-wielding ridiculousness.

And I care about this land. These little guys play an important part in the bigger system, and humans are screwing up their habitat.

I’m just trying to do something good. My bat houses are working, even if it’s only a small thing in a messed-up world.

’ He exhaled an almost despairing breath.

‘Oh, they’re bat houses! So you don’t live with a bunch of gnomes.’ That explained those funny wooden boxes she’d seen in his cabin.

His eyebrows twisted. ‘Gnomes?’

‘Please tell me you put the bat houses in trees, and that there aren’t breeding bats lined up near your sock drawer.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ She giggled, and they both looked up to the sky as the bats began another round of clacking and diving through the air.

‘They have their own traffic rules up there.’ His voice was full of wonder, like he was lost in his own thoughts. ‘To avoid crashing. They use echolocation to find their prey, but also so they can follow each other’s flight paths.’

How was he making the least sexy subject ever seem so fascinating?

‘We need them for insect control. More bats, less pesticides,’ he continued, his voice still a barely there whisper. She might have thought he’d forgotten her presence if his arm wasn’t still around her. Maybe he didn’t want her to move and frighten his bats. ‘And more bats, more chocolate.’

‘Really?’ Now she was interested.

‘They play a big role in pollination. Not that we’re growing cacao around here, obviously.

But they take over flower pollination when the butterflies and bees are sleeping.

Kind of like night duty. I grow flowers and herbs around my patches, to help with pollination and pest control. Told you I was a fun guy.’

His serious face relaxed into a smile, and he turned his head towards her, their noses almost touching when she mirrored his turn in.

She sensed herself smiling too and drinking in this moment.

His warm breath against her lips, his eyes slowly moving down towards them.

Watching her so intently. She was overwhelmed with an urgency to kiss him – and it wasn’t just so that she could write about it.

What? She blinked a few times. Where did that thought come from?

‘Sorry.’ He shook his head and moved it back a few inches. ‘Shouldn’t have invaded your space.’

‘Erm. I think I invaded yours. Maybe it was my echolocation.’

‘And now I’ve got you telling bat jokes.’ He clapped a palm against his head. ‘Which is exactly why I should keep myself to myself.’

He stood then, nearly toppling her, but catching her quickly and pulling her up with him.

‘Getting overenthusiastic about nature, like a big kid.’ He pushed his free hand through his long hair. It was as black as the night and not tied back like it usually was. The thick curls lifted and fell like a sigh. ‘Not that I really got to be a kid.’ He said the last part even more quietly.

Was he about to share something about his past? Rosie held her breath, wanting to know more about him. And for once, it wasn’t for the love of a good story.

But he shook his head. ‘Honestly. I should go,’ he said, pointing to his cabin.

‘You were here first.’ She shrugged and looked back at hers.

An extremely errant part of her wanted to grab him and pull him there with her, if the notion wasn’t completely absurd.

They barely knew each other, outside of their constant clashing, and she was still trying to navigate her topsy-turvy new life and bewildered heart.

And she could not go losing her job and home for one shameless night of research.

‘Do you want to come inside?’ Damn. Had she said that out loud?

The moment stretched out, more unsaid words dancing between them, until finally he responded. ‘Yes.’

Something inside her bounced.

‘I mean no.’ He exhaled again.

Then he leaned towards her, his arm outstretched.

And at that last delicious moment when she thought he was going to cup her face and kiss her, and she was getting ready to sink right in and taste him, to grasp at his long waves and feel the silkiness between her fingers, he moved his hand swiftly towards her hair and made a grabbing motion.

‘Leaf in your hair. Sorry.’

She watched his hand pull away. She couldn’t see him drop a leaf, but the night was dark. Had he been going to kiss her, or had she completely imagined that? It was like something from one of her romcom novels. Realising her mouth was still open in readiness, she clamped it shut.

The brief touch of his fingertips against her ear had left every nerve ending tingling. Except, more than anything, she’d wanted his lips on her mouth.

‘Goodnight,’ he said, sounding more flustered than usual, before turning to walk away.

Why was her heart sinking? Kissing him had never been part of her plan. He was meant to be inspiration for her wild and free story. This man belonged safely locked in the confines of her imagination. Yet somehow, her thoughts and feelings were beginning to spill out.

‘Wait,’ she hissed, not wanting to disturb the bats and their bug-shaped dinner. Despite everything reeling around her jumbled head, she didn’t want him to leave yet. ‘Will you... show me your bat houses?’ She tried not to inwardly groan, because that had to be the worst line ever.