Stranded by Amberly Woodruff Read Free Book Online Page B

immediately.
    Jed made no mention of his nocturnal activities when they
woke later. He leapt out of bed clothed in boxers and T-shirt, cheerful and
filled with good will, fetching her coffee, then getting busy with a breakfast
of fried eggs and fried bread, which he brought in on plates awash with tinned
tomatoes.
    Tamsin still felt a little odd about sharing a bed with a
stranger, but on another level it was becoming the norm. And it wasn’t as if
he’d made any sort of move on her. He’d been a perfect gentleman, keeping to
the other side of the wide couch, sleeping turned away from her, wrapped in his
own blanket so that there was no disturbance, no intimacy. She supposed it was
not much different to sharing a dorm in a youth hostel - which she’d done a lot
of when she was travelling in her gap year. And on her own part, even though
she was increasingly attracted to him, something about the air on the island,
or the lack of stress, or maybe even the remains of reaction to the dramatic
circumstances that had brought her here, meant that she slept deeply and
soundly, not even aware of her dreams.
    This morning she offered to feed the animals and found
herself out in the mild air, scattering leftover crusts and handfuls of grain
to the chickens and dispensing some sort of meal to the goats: Jed had given
her a scoopful, extracted from a sack in the porch. Then he showed her how to
milk the goats, tying them up in turn, tugging at their teats till a steady
stream of milk pattered into the plastic bucket kept for the purpose.
    ‘You try,’ he said, getting her to kneel, guiding her hand
to the teat, showing her the movement and pressure that would get the milk
flowing. She was acutely aware of his hand on hers, his body pressing against
hers, side on side, as she fumbled, tugged and, at last, managed to extract a
few drop from the goat’s udder. The animal tried to kick, but Jed spoke sharply
and firmly and it settled again. Then, to her delight, she found her rhythm and
the milk began to spurt in a regular stream.
    After that, they collected eggs together, searching around
the grass and under the little lean-to round the back of the Hermitage, where
the chickens could roost at night if they wished, sheltered from the elements.
    When they’d finished those small tasks and had gone back
inside for coffee, Jed told her: ‘I have to do more cliff climbing this morning. You can have a swim if you want. The water in the cove
is perfectly safe, even when the tide’s going out; it’s not very deep, you
wouldn’t be out of your depth at any point, and the water’s already warm
because it’s so shallow. Then, this afternoon, we’ll take a look at the Viking
settlement.’
    So mid morning found her naked, slipping through water that
was warm as a bath and smooth as silk, its colour fawnish -gold,
blending into turquoise further out. She had had to wade some considerable
distance from the shore for it to be deep enough to swim, even though the tide almost
was in. It was now clear why Jed had used a boat to go to the middle of the cove.
A strip of wet, gleaming sand bordering the beach was criss-crossed with the
runic footmarks of wading birds, whose long legs and curved beaks marked them out
from the gulls. And, as she’d splashed through the shallows, little fish had
swarmed away from her and tiny yellow crabs had scuttled to safety. The last
few inches of rock still to be submerged by the incoming waves were festooned
with bladderwrack and encrusted with whelks and limpets, whose serrated shells
glistened wetly.
    Beyond the entrance to the cove, she could see the arms of
an encircling bay that sheltered this peaceful spot. She guessed her boat must
have been driven into the bay and onto the outer wall of the cove itself. A few
feet either way, and she would have been either driven
further out to sea or smashed on the rocks of the bay. That she should have
survived at all seemed a chance in a million and more than a