Page 14 of The Clockmaker's Cottage
He squinted at her, his entire body frozen in shock. ‘No. No. No. It can’t be… you.’
‘And yet it is.’ Her voice cracked with equal parts incredulity and exasperation as she flashed him the fakest sweetest smile.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Theo?’ she demanded.
For a moment he was speechless, then he somehow managed to compose himself. ‘Considering I’m a doctor of horology and there’s a clockmakers’ convention going on, I have every reason to be here. As for you… Are you actually real, Pippa, or am I hallucinating?’
‘All too real, unfortunately. But you aren’t meant to be here. This ismyescape. My new chapter. My post-wedding-implosion recovery weekend. You’re not supposed to play any kind of role in it!’
‘Trust me,’ he muttered, adjusting the towel, ‘you’re not supposed to be in mine either.’
They stared at each other, one in a dripping wedding dress and the other in a towel that seemed ready to slip off with the slightest movement. The property show on the TV inserted unasked-for commentary into the silence.‘Sometimes, a clash of styles can lead to unexpected beauty.’Pippa made a noise that could have been laughter or sheer exasperation as the absurdity of the situation fully registered.
She looked down at her dress, then back at Theo’s bare chest. ‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ she said finally, ‘the fact you saw me like this, or the fact that you were singing Cher with… conviction.’
Theo raised a single eyebrow. ‘At least I’m not wearing miles of crushed and stained tulle that suggests I’ve made some very bad life choices recently.’
‘Because nothing says stability like a man in a towel fresh off his home cabaret act,’ she muttered, crossing her arms and rolling her eyes.
He smirked, the action small but entirely infuriating, and muttered, ‘Did you win the competition?’
‘I did,’ she said, her voice flat and her eyes slightly narrowed. ‘I’m assuming you did too, which means?—’
‘You get to enjoy my company for the whole weekend,’ Theo interrupted.
‘You mean we’re stuck here.Together.’
Theo’s expression didn’t lighten. ‘Yeah. Fun, right? What could possibly go wrong?’
‘I started today running away from a wedding,’ she blurted out, ‘and somehow I’m now ending up being trapped with my university nemesis. Can my life get any worse?’
‘I was thinking exactly the same,’ he said dryly.
They stood in tense silence for a moment, simply glaring at each other as every clock face in the cottage bore witness to their shared humiliation. Pippa couldn’t help but notice the way his towel clung to him, and the stiff line of his– very muscled– shoulders. She wanted to roll her eyes and show him how unbothered she was by his nakedness, but instead she felt a reluctant flicker of something else; a feeling she’d tried to bury since week one of university. Yet here it was resurfacing. She tried to push it down by reminding herself exactly why she didn’t like him.
Theo sighed and muttered, ‘So… I suppose we need to… you know… survive the weekend without killing each other?’
She snorted. ‘That’s optimistic.’
‘Practical,’ he corrected. ‘Not optimistic.’
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Pippa registered the absurdity of it all: two people who had spent years trying to outsmart each other academically were now stranded together in a cottage, rain cascading down the windows like a waterfall in a scene that could be straight out of a romance book.
Pippa stepped into the living room and flopped onto the nearest sofa, while towel-draped Theo awkwardly hovered in the doorway. Resting her head and briefly closing her eyes, she groaned. They might be enemies, but they needed to prepare to coexist for at least the weekend. Somehow. The only thing certain was that this weekend might be far more… interesting than she’d ever imagined it could be.
ChapterThree
Pippa stood at the sink and poured herself a glass of water while Theo locked himself back in the bathroom. She still couldn’t quite believe that, out of all the humans in the known universe, and out of every horologist, it had to beTheo Blakewho was her fellow competition winner.
Several years had passed since their final year at Cambridge University, when Theo had walked away triumphant, taking the top prize at the British Horological Society’s Student Symposium. Pippa had forced a polite smile that barely hid her frustration as his paper, an insightful study of the Vale Brothers and their contributions to twentieth-century horology, was hailed as groundbreaking– a reminder of both his brilliance and her own quietly stifled ambition.
Determined to distract herself, Pippa wandered around the cottage. The living room held clocks everywhere she looked, yet none of them were going. Dozens of faces stared back at her, frozen at different times of day, as if each one had simply stopped mid-moment.
She counted twenty-five clocks in the living room alone, all crafted by Walter and Horace Vale. A cuckoo clock with a hand-painted chalet hung proudly above the fireplace, its small door open where a bird had probably once popped out, the hands stuck at 6.43. A tall grandfather clock stood regal inthe corner, its pendulum motionless and its chime silenced. On the windowsill rested a delicate carriage clock, golden and gleaming, paused at 10.18. The whole room felt like a ticking museum that had forgotten to tick.
Pippa wandered through to the snug where a small desk sat tucked into the corner. There were only a few clocks in here, but as she stood beside the desk, she suddenly heard it– a faint ticking sound.
Baffled, she looked around, but none of the clocks were moving. Then she glanced down at the pocket watch still pinned to her dress. Her breath caught. The hands were moving. It was actually working. Her father had said it had never worked, yet here it was ticking away as if nothing had ever been wrong with it. She decided to take it as a good omen that things might soon start looking up for her. Because life couldn’t get much worse at the moment.
