Water, Stone, Heart - By Will North Page 0,83

was jammed, and Flora and the manager, Alan, were working at full tilt taking people's orders.

Andrew had been standing to one side, talking with the new volunteers but also enjoying the spectacle of his mentor, Jamie, courting Flora in his sweet if awkward way.

He envied Jamie. He would have liked nothing better than to have the kind of warmly affectionate relationship with Nicola that Jamie and Flora seemed to have, one in which intimacy had grown, like a hedge, stone by stone, upon a foundation of history and mutual acceptance. Andrew had no such history with Nicola. And as for mutual acceptance, well, that seemed to come and go like the tide in the harbor. What Andrew knew with certainty was that whenever he was with Nicola, his heart felt like it was about to become airborne, to lift, as if winged, from his chest. And yet whenever he tried to really reach her, whenever he tried to offer her some part of himself, share some part of his mind or heart, it backfired. She could be so warm and playful and, on occasion—like that moment by the waterfall the day before when she'd pressed against him to cover his eyes—downright sexy. And then, as if someone had thrown a switch, she could turn distant, withdrawn, even icy. He felt perpetually off balance, and none of the crutches he'd relied upon in the past—rational thinking, walling himself off from feeling too much, being an observer rather than a participant—worked. He wasn't rational when he was with her; he was flooded with emotions he hardly comprehended—awe, excitement, affection, need, protectiveness, tenderness. The sturdy stockade he'd always been able to depend upon to shield him from uncertainty, cupidity, dissatisfaction, and anger from Katerina was gone. When Nicola flared, it was as if his heart were made of dry tinder and she was intent on immolating it. Try as he might, he could not maintain a safe distance; there did not seem to be a distance that was safe. She flashed so quickly between warm affection and blowtorch anger—or fear, or something else he didn't yet fully understand but thought was connected to her dead brother—that it was dizzying.

And yet despite all this, despite the damnable and persistent prickliness of the woman, he was more sure every day that he'd finally found the woman he was meant to be with, the woman who was both his match and his counterbalance, the woman with whom anything was possible.

If only he could stop screwing up.

The rain stopped entirely at about 12:45, and the sun came out a few minutes later. Jamie's gang returned to their labors. Jamie had given Andrew the task of overseeing the hedge builders, while he and two assistants found and laid big grounders ahead of the crew. It was so humid that everyone was soaked with sweat. Quick, sometimes fierce, sun showers swept over the valley from time to time over the course of the next hour and a half, but the hedgers were grateful for the cool rain, and afterward their shirts steamed in the sun as they worked. The hedge progressed at a pace that seemed glacial, and yet when Andrew stopped to check their progress, he was amazed to see that they'd advanced several feet.

Lee was getting cranky. All morning, acting on advice from Elizabeth at the Visitor Centre, she'd been hunting newts in the boggy spots higher up in the Valency valley, without success. Among the lush, violet-strewn water meadows far upriver, she'd seen legions of pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies and, every once in a while, a dive-bombing dipper flying right into the water to seize aquatic insects. In the oak copses there were flashes of color from electric-purple hairstreak butterflies, too. And hovering just above the surface of the river, she'd seen two linked golden-ringed dragonflies, whose wings fluttered so fast they seemed invisible. It wasn't until she began returning downstream again, to the shadier parts of the valley, that she began to find the newts, along with creepy slow worms—a bronze-colored kind of legless lizard. Apart from the on-again, off-again bursts of rain, she'd had a lovely time. The showers were more an annoyance than anything else; they came and went so quickly it was hardly worth one's while to look for shelter. But she felt sticky and dirty as she poked around under rocks beside the river.

She'd been having a streamside lunch just below the little cluster of cottages called Newmills when she heard the